Chapter One

Amidst the whisper of falling leaves and the polite birdsong of the escarpment forest, each note registering weakly below the thundering waves of my feverish sleep, I heard the soft, padded footsteps of an animal approaching me. I could not move. My senses returned to me gradually. I was face down in the muck.

“With a lot of animals you just have to stay still,” Mare had told me once. We had been children. “But where we are most animals will just run away.”

Mare was gone now, and I had never been in the escarpment forest before, and my calf throbbed where Goudre’s bullet had grazed me. At least I couldn’t help but stay still.

The creature hovered over me; I could feel the cold dampness of its nose where it prodded my bare skin, its sickly warm breath as it tested my scent. Clearly it was unafraid. I was beginning to realize I couldn’t breathe.

It ignored my weak struggle to lift myself from the mire. Instead I felt a heavy paw on my shoulder. I gently sank further and further. My legs suddenly clutched strength, thrashing and kicking, a scream desperately bubbling out of the mud around me.

Out of panic, or maybe frustration, the creature raked my back with long, hot claws, from my shoulder down to my hip, then scurried off. The welling of blood made my head swim; the searing pain threatened the edges of my consciousness with blackness, much deeper than my blindness in the mud.

Finally my arms responded. I heaved myself free, gasping wildly, my heart pounding, stinging tears unfelt yet falling freely. I crawled through the forest floor. Early evening sunlight, filtered through amber and ochre leaves, beckoned me forward.

The stiffness in my limbs and the pounding in the back corner of my skull, where my already sore neck neatly fit, told me days had passed since I had fallen. Long days of dead bodies gathering flies at the campsite, some shot, others disemboweled; even longer, hotter days in the smoldering ashes of what used to be home.

Dog Eyes had been put down after three days. The soldiers had seen to her. And they had said something similar about me. I had only been sick a week. I hadn’t died; but I wasn’t altogether unchanged. I grimaced, feeling the phantom blood under my nails, wondering when next they would be wetted in someone else’s guts.

The light was fading. I gathered myself up at the base of a longleaf pine, curiously alone amongst the oaks and sycamores. The bed of soft needles sang sweetly. I had been asleep for so long, carried from one nightmare to the next, over and over, but the pain was too great. My eyelids fluttered. Mare’s confused, disjointed face, his eyes glazing over, his breathing ragged, was all I could see. I curled into myself and drifted into oblivion. My only dream was merciless: just my memories, puppeted back and forth behind my eyes, again and again.

The creature returned as I slept.

The sickness came for me the autumn before my thirtieth year. I had long since proven myself of little use to the rest of our band, tucked away for some years now in a scattering of ramshackle huts and tents beneath some idyllic grassy hills. We lived in the South then, during the dry years, and when we couldn’t grow sorghum and corn for animal feed we foraged pecans, acorns, and pawpaws; we hunted deer and pig and little rat things (my brother Mare once called one of the larger specimens an agouti but I never saw one like that again); we fished and prayed to Mother Gar for her succor. I followed my little old grandmother into the forest across the creek to gather stinging nettle and juniper bark. It was all too beautiful. So I barely got any work done.

I like to think that my mother spoiled me. I’m sure she spoiled me back when we lived in the big clay city with the mud brick walls, baked for thousands of years by the sun; and I’m sure she did her best to spoil me when we took the donkey cart south to the old town my father and his mother came from. My earliest memory is of the ruins of that town and the wild crone who met us there, who from my perspective down below everyone else’s knees seemed a wiry colossus, flailing her arms and cackling before turning her wicked gray gaze and toothless smile on me. That was my grandmother. She definitely spoiled me.

My brother told me often, since I barely remembered that time even back then, that my name had first been a word from that hot clay city, a glottal sound relating to the popular flat bread of the region; and in the throes of a childhood fever I had renamed myself Eio, which in my grandmother’s tongue, the primordial speech of steppe bird hunters and lowland scrub foragers, meant the exact same thing as my own mother’s name: the last bit of sun on the horizon before night falls.

So my family learned quickly I would accept no authority but my own. My father intervened on this behavior frequently and severely. After he had gone, I found myself caught between loyalty to myself and obedience to the world. There was no clear path forward. I settled on doing as little as possible of anything.

Any obvious display of my lack of work ethic as an adult typically meant a visit from Goudre. His long black hair clung sweatily to his shoulders and clumped unevenly all over his chest. He would berate me, taking breaks to stare hard into me, occasionally whipping me in the shin or the fat of my upper arm with his yucca cane. No matter how hard he tried to beat some sense into me I never learned my lesson. His nipples, they’re so small, I would think, as he shouted You imbecile! Didn’t I tell you to fix that net? What, is a fish going to just leap from the creek right into our fire? Lucky us!

It was an odd sight, one adult beating another as if she were still a child. As far as I could tell no one else really minded me. Mare never stood up for me but he knew I was too set in my ways to change. He would just look at me sideways, mending the net I had been tasked with fixing. Our grandmother would make warm, spiced broths for us when the chill came on, and we’d rub her little arthritic bones for her.

“You’re good kids,” she would say. “I’ve got such good kids.”

One particular evening she followed her usual statement up with: “Goudre says there’s folk coming from out East.”

Mare and I swapped looks. He cocked his slit eyebrow.

“Who’s coming?” he asked. “From the swamp?”

Grandmother shrugged.

“Does he mean they’re coming here to visit us?” I asked. “Or are they just passing through?”

“Pssh,” said grandmother, waving us off her like we were flies. “How should I know? Goudre just tells me things, and I don’t want to talk to him more than I have to.”

“You brought it up!”

“Questions, questions, questions,” she carried on. “Always with the questions, these two!”

Mare caught my eye again, an incredulous grin plastered over his big face. “She’s talking about us like we aren’t here again.”

“She’s losing it,” I said. I couldn’t help but smirk back. “It’s sad to see, but you know, it just can’t be helped at her age…”

“Oh, get off my back, you louts,” grandmother scowled. “Go on, get out of here! And go ask Goudre yourselves if you’re so keen on knowing everything, you busybodies.”

“I’ll have you know,” Mare said, laughing as he stood. “If we weren’t such busybodies, as you say, we wouldn’t be able to get you your food on time, you old bat.”

“Right, right, my food, you’re such saints. I’d rather starve. Get out of here, let me starve.”

So Mare and I left our grandmother’s little hut, the aroma of mushroom broth still warm in our noses, jokingly lamenting the lost cause of her addled mind as we went. The afternoon sun reached a lone ray out from behind an autumn cloud and hit my older brother right in the head. He was smiling, his eyes crinkled nearly shut, and he had a bit of some herb stuck in his teeth. I felt a ghost run down my spine, spiderwebbing through my feet and into the supple dirt beneath us. I shivered. Mare never noticed.

“You don’t walk like a kid anymore,” he said. “When did that happen?”

“Why are you just noticing now? I haven’t been a kid in, what, ten years?”

Mare shook his head. The sunlight glinted off a stray white hair caught in the breeze as we crossed the outskirts of the village. A mockingbird trilled away on the edge of the dried-up well.

“You’ve always acted like a kid,” he said, head bobbing as he walked. “We all do everything for you, so you don’t expect to have to do anything. I guess it’s our fault.”

I groaned, displeased, and Mare shot a finger towards me, saying “You see? There’s kid you. She’s still around in there somewhere.”

“You need to decide whether or not kid me is good,” I said, sighing.

Mare just smiled again and clicked his tongue. “You always need someone else to decide it for you, don’t you?”

Our people, my grandmother’s people, unnamed and unlooked for except in dire times, hold true the stories of the Long Before, when they say our planet was blanketed in darkness. Mother Gar and Sister Peccary dozed in the twilight, oblivious to the hardships echoing from desert to sea. Hour after hour, the animals and plants cried out for succor, but the shadows were too deep. Eventually, after many sightless generations, it fell to Grandmother Owl to poke holes in the sky with her talons, creating the stars and moon. Seeing the beauty and terror of her wings under the nascent light, Woman and her children grew jealous, throwing stones at Owl, and she became tangled in the net of the sky. Her panicked thrashing tore open a great rift in the firmament, through which the sun cascaded. Grandmother Owl was blinded, but her sacrifice saved our world.

To honor her spirit, and to atone for our primal sin, we hunted at night.

I crept through the understory silently. Cicadas sang around me. I parted their noise as snakes parted grass. Light from the half moon danced and wavered above me, suspended in the oak canopy, and I was grateful. Gratitude filled me with elation. I suppressed a giggle.

A twig tensed beneath my bare foot. I paused. Shifting my weight, opening myself wider to my surroundings, I sensed movement to my right. Mare was creeping along with me some twelve paces away. He held his stealth in high esteem, would brag about it around the fire to his friends, but I could always find him.

We stopped as one. My mind lagged a step behind my body, its responses automatic. My eyes unfocused and I inhaled. As if in answer, the wind murmured towards me, rustling the young leaves of a sumac bush in my path. I registered an earthy scent, darker than the soil, like uprooted secrets, stale piss, crushed walnuts, nasal whispers. It was probably a tapir, maybe thirty paces away. Mare and I waited in silence for what seemed like hours before we heard it: leaf litter gently rustling, punctuated by a nearly porcine snort.

I didn’t have to hear Mare to know he had advanced, was circling around the animal, carefully planting his feet where the forest couldn’t betray him. He was always better at getting the jump on prey. I held more patience. We were a good team. I thought those exact words then, the wind blowing tapir sign through my black hair, past my crooked nose, through me totally. We are a good team, I thought.

The taut muscles in my thighs began to protest. I had been squatting for too long. I could feel my toes going numb. Somewhere far away a nightjar trilled. The tapir hadn’t moved, engrossed in browsing, eyes and heart open to the hostile curtains of night. I could feel its hooves pawing through the forest floor.

Slowly, with the caution of a climber repositioning herself on a desperately fragile scree, I pulled the spear off the braided cord on my back. My right hand found its home three fingers from the base, my left wrapped delicately around the middle, right at the edge of its balance. My burning squat eroded grain by grain into an explosive crouch, poised to lunge.

Once more the wind breathed in and out. The upper canopy parted. A lone tear of moonlight glanced off the black obsidian blade at the end of my spear. It gleamed hungrily.

From the darkness beyond my quarry I heard a screech owl’s whinny, only lower. Mare’s signal. Then the forest exploded.

Something louder, farther off, haunting, trembling; a lowing of pain from a deep place. Nocturnal animals jettisoned themselves into the sky; the understory shook with falling hooves and paws. I fell backwards. A riotous pain erupted in my neck. I had landed on a stone jutting from the soil like a rogue wave. I had the sense of feathers falling above me.

The great roar continued. Through the searing pain I could see it in my mind’s eye: a colossal wolf with a thorny tree stuck in its paw, or a widowed mountain mourning its lover as it subducted into the sea, so far away.

The tapir sprang out of the bushes before me. A quiet second passed as we locked eyes. I charged forward; the tapir juked right. My right foot landed in solid dirt and pivoted, nearly twisting, and I thrust the spear with my right arm, guiding with my left. I twisted my core towards the animal. We seemed to hang in midair as the obsidian blade gouged through its flank. I whooped with joy despite myself.

It didn’t take long for the tapir to succumb, and I quickly finished it with my knife, thanking it for its meat, hide, bones. Grandmother would be pleased. Mare found me panting over the corpse, a ways back from where we had parted. His eyes were shifty and cold.

“We’ll butcher it back home,” he said.

We waited for the long, sonorous roar again; the forest answered as it usually did, with the percussion of leaves in the breeze and an accompaniment of cicadas. I whistled.

“You outdid yourself with your call this time,” I said, forcing a smile. “Who taught you how to do that?”

Mare sucked in through his teeth.

“I’m getting too old to be running around with a spear. I should get a gun.”

“What? Why? They take all the fun away.” I frowned, touching the tapir’s flank and haunches. We had brought in good eating.

“Come on,” he insisted. “I said we’d butcher it back home.”

“Thank her, first.”

I couldn’t say I wasn’t spooked. Still, I liked the way Mare rolled his eyes; I rolled my eyes that way too. Like a little girl, our father would say.

“Thank you, tapir, for your hide, and for your meat, and for your bones. We will surely feed our grandmother for a long while because of you. Come to our hearth any time.”

“Alright,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “Now let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

We laughed all the way home, the hoarse, easy laughter that finds those who think they’re finally in the best years of their lives, and no more howling troubled us that night; but I will concede it was hard to sleep without the fire burning low, weakly flickering to keep the darkness out.

Butchering the tapir ate up most of the morning. Every half hour or so some neighbor would poke their head in, say Hey, nice one, he’s big, huh, then chatter eagerly about the newcomers, they were expected soon. Mare and I labored with a heavy silence between us. I felt a weight around my waist, a dense fog of dread. It was beyond even my distaste for Goudre. A wrongness was coiled around my spine, slick and wriggling.

The visitors were already gathered around Goudre’s hearth when we arrived well into the afternoon, the light dipping into the forest across the creek. Most of our other neighbors were there as well, along with a small contingent of goats, lingering by the door, not quite curious enough to try a peek at the outsiders. Mare parted the crowd and took a step inside, ever the bold one, and I made to follow, ducking my head under the low threshold; Goudre’s hut had sunk into the earth somewhat just a few months prior.

“Don’t wanna be going in there,” said Turtle, one of the old fishers. “Goudre’s orders.” He wrung his liverspotted hands together, as if trying to dry them.

Mare scoffed. “What, he’s a general or something now? He’s sure got a stick up his ass tonight.”

My eyes met Turtle’s. The old man saw past me, right into the future, then focused on me. He threw me a weak smile. Everything’s fine.

A wave of rancid incense assailed us as we entered. The hut was claustrophobic, makeshift shelves lining the walls, baskets and dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, big ochre jars and adzes and bundles of parchment scattered around the floor. Goudre glared up at us, his jaw writhing like a cliff before a mudslide. The visitors paid us no mind. There were four of them, dressed in the high-waisted breeches, alligator boots, and heavy overcoats of the deep swamp dwellers. All were bald and bearded except for a wiry woman with sticky, oily hair that clung to her thin face. Each of them stared ahead, eyes unseeing, clouded by some storm. They were in front of us in Goudre’s hut, yet none of them were really there.

“You can’t be in here,” Goudre hissed between his teeth. His eyes flashed to me, momentarily locking me in the pain of his presence. There had been a lot of pain. My own eyes found the far wall.

“We heard,” said Mare. “What’s going on? You can’t keep us in the dark forever. Who are they?”

“Get out. Now.”

“We have a right to know.”

A white flash scurried behind Goudre’s eyes, and for a second my heart stopped. If he and Mare came to blows there’d be real trouble. They were both such hotheads. Slowly, as the older man began to tremble, my hot fear grew cold and leaden in my guts. Goudre had the animal fear in him; if he was pressed he’d run, or bite. No one spoke; no one moved.

“They’re travelers,” Goudre finally ventured. He was desperately trying to keep his voice from quaking. “They’ve been a week on the road, come out of the pine marsh.”

“Used to be twelve of us,” one stranger spoke in a toad’s growl. He scratched his mossy beard with filthy fingernails, eyes vacant. “Rest sick, or caught.”

“What do you mean, sick? Caught by who?”

It was then I noticed the fifth stranger.

She was huddled on Goudre’s meager cot, not so much shivering as convulsing, spasming almost constantly. Someone had stripped her down, which seemed a little odd given her distance from the fire, until a wild flame lit the sweat drenching her pale, withered form like stars. I had never seen someone so wretched. I suddenly found myself taking quiet steps towards her, circling around the fire as Mare and Goudre argued. She just kept lying there, curled around herself, nothing but an empty seashell spiraling into itself; a woman turned cavernous, calcified chamber, once a home but now so hollow. I wanted to see her face.

“Eio! Get away!”

I jumped, startled, and stumbled into one of Goudre’s little shelves. A clay dish full of coyote teeth fell and shattered. In a moment longer than my entire life up to that point, the woman on the cot craned her neck up and met my gaze.

Yellow irises, streaked with mesmerizing crimson rivulets; bloodshot sclera, the vessels burst into a cloud in the left eye; sightless black pupils.

“Dog eyes,” I muttered, right before my brother hooked his arms around my chest and wrenched me out of the hut.

He threw me into the dirt at the small crowd’s feet. I could hear their gasps and murmurs. My head was suddenly leaking. My hands fumbled in the dust for my brains.

“Get back,” Mare growled. “All of you, get out of here, go home! Goudre’s orders.”

That sent them packing. Somebody was laughing somewhere. Probably at me and my spinning leaking head.

“Eio, shut up.”

I felt my brother trying to haul me to my feet but I just collapsed again. Something was weighing me down. Something was wrong.

“Mare,” I choked as he turned me over to face him. “Mare, what’s happening?”

“You shouldn’t have gotten that close, I shouldn’t have let you get that close, what were you thinking?”

“I’m not a kid. I’m old. Mare, her eyes—”

“I know. She’s sick, Eio, I mean, really fucking sick. We need to go home.”

Oh, Mother Gar: please keep me hale and hearty in all seasons. Keep my lungs clear and fresh, and cleanse me of my stains. Let me swim after you in the wide, cleanly river.

I must have been praying all the way to our hut; when he dumped me onto the bedroll Mare growled, “Mother Gar’s busy. From now on you listen to me. Don’t move.” Then he stormed through our deerhide door.

Even if I could have left the bed I wouldn’t have tried. My head was swimming and my heart was biting its way out of my chest. Something inside me was gnawing. A cold well opened up in my stomach, and I dug my nails into my abdomen. I couldn’t feel anything but my intestines as they roiled.

Moonlight cautiously crept into the hut, first as a sliver on the dark hearth, growing longer and brighter as one of our big bright aunts climbed into the deep night. I recall a saucer of water held up to my parched lips, a firm hand on my chin, and concerned voices flitting about my pond body on damselfly wings. I sank into the marsh of my sickness and sweat and stayed there, preserved in peat, as eons passed above me. Days had gone by, I suspected, but still all I could see was moonlight.

Through all of my muddled, useless senses, for my entire stay in that bedroll, I could smell something burning. It was unbelievably rancid. To this day I believe it was that stench that finally did me in.

Even from my unreliable perspective the situation seemed to deteriorate from there. Half asleep and trembling, just like Dog Eyes, I would catch portions of shouting outside the hut and hushed whispers inside, though just as frantic. I thought I recognized Mare’s low grumble, even deeper when he was stressed, and little scraps of grandmother’s voice shaking with fear. Others joined the chorus, wholly unfamiliar, sticking to the walls in a thick patina. From where my corpse lay shivering on the bedroll I saw myself running, the hut turning effortlessly into a spiraling world, a grassland inside of a great tube that stretched into the sun. Then, from right behind me, as if he were still pressing his hot weight down onto my shoulders, right in my ear, my father’s voice. “Eio,” he drawled. “You’re sick.” I understood him perfectly.

The middle of the day broke without warning. My eyes focused on Mare standing over me. An unreadable expression was plastered on his face like a mask.

“You look terrible,” I groaned. “Quit looking at me like that.”

Someone else appeared at his side, taller somehow, clad in a thick blue coat and a leather harness. Their face was masked, too, and thick, dark goggles hid their eyes.

“Step back,” they said. “We’ve got it under control.”

“That’s my sister—”

A flash of movement and a thud and Mare fell out of sight, doubled over. Another masked stranger stood where my brother had been. A black club, smooth like ice, gleamed in their gauntlet.

Wordlessly the two interlopers grabbed me, one holding my arms, the other my legs, and hoisted me out of my bed. I groaned as a slimy pain raced up my back, pooling at the base of my skull. Drool congealed around my mouth, slack from fatigue. I might as well have been a cloth sack. I was sure I was going to spill out everywhere.

The sunlight was blinding. It took me another eternity for my eyes to adjust, hanging there between the two soldiers. They had to be soldiers, I thought deliriously, no one else around here dresses so stupid.

A wave of sick heat washed over me. I blinked away the singed air and a great pyre materialized before me, piled atop the old well. The fire was angry, raging; the flames were climbing up and up. I choked on the smoke billowing off the dead meat. Gradually the pyre came into focus. Curled beneath the flames were arms, feet, twisted torsos, eyes mercifully shut, all folded up like desiccated spiders. I knew what was happening, who they were logically, but my brain insisted on swimming in the milky sea of disbelief. Grandmother, I needed to find her, maybe Mare was with her right now…

I wrenched my eyes from the fire. All our old huts were gone, just smoldering ruins. Stalking among the embers were more soldiers, poking at the burnt timbers and ashes with the butt ends of long polearms.

“What’ve you boys got there?”

The two soldiers stiffened to attention and dropped me into the ash. Pain kept my face down and my eyes closed as the fire roared and roared: but still I listened.

“This one was hiding, sir,” said one of the soldiers. “One of the survivors had it tucked away in the last structure.”

“No traces of the usual sickness,” said the other. This was the one who had appeared with Mare, who had—

“It’s nearly dead.”

Ash began filling up my lungs. A weak wheeze escaped me. The tip of a hard boot turned me over. Good meat needs to be roasted on all sides!

“It just looks dead,” said their leader. “These are the ones you really need to watch for. In another three days it’ll be just like that swamp woman, give us a whole load of trouble. We’ll take this one to the coffin camp and send it up north.”

Around this time my memory becomes hazy and indistinct. I’m grateful, really; the whole ordeal was like a dream from then on. I remember some distinct impressions, however: the shock of being loaded onto some sort of cart, my hands and feet bound in cold iron, something else restraining my mouth, bars around my jaw and a leather bit lodged between my teeth; the sudden realization that I could no longer smell the burnt corpses of the old band, the smoke of the conflagration, and instead noticed only fragrant juniper and the hot dust of the road; a seething white pain in the back of my head where my spine began, radiating out into my mouth, down my legs, between my ribs. Moments of lucidity would unearth an itch deep inside of me, one I couldn’t reach even if my hands had been unbound. The pain would wrench a sob out of me, a pitiful, growling, mewling whine that always triggered the nearest guard or soldier or whoever to hit me until I passed out again.

Three days, they had said. Until I turned out like Dog Eyes. A shell of a thing, hollow, frozen. When Mare and I were kids our father had shown us a treasure from the big forest up north, a big orange jewel with the back half of a gecko trapped inside. The blood of a tree, he had explained, eliciting much excitement out of us. It didn’t take long for our father to find his children zealously stabbing at the old post oaks with our little fishing knives in the hopes the sap would catch some incredible beast.

Our father was eager to punish. He especially seemed to hold my actions in greater contempt than my brother’s. He was so unlike my mother I wondered at times if my real father had been spirited away in the night somehow, and this glowering impostor had taken his place.

“I know what you are,” he would sneer. “You’re sick. You don’t know, but I do. You’re just sick.”

Goudre’s ministrations, his lashes, the hair pulling, his rough hand nearly tearing my breast off, none of it seemed so bad, all things considered.

A bump in the road. The cart lumbered to an uneasy stop. Shouting, grumbling, curses, the idea of images, a landscape, actors, but no execution—to me, they were all possibilities on a canvas. I thought I heard Mare’s voice. Grandmother’s frail hands pulling my blanket away, get up, sweet one, it’s time to get up. I whispered something back in my tiny kid voice, something hideous, like Aren’t you all burned up?

Dim sensations in my body, still pulsing with fever, slowly returned as the hazy outlines of soldiers carried my limp carcass from the cart and dropped me. Shallow walls surrounded me and a clear azure sky, hauntingly empty, black towards its zenith, loomed above. It was a beautiful day, now eclipsed by the shadow of a man carrying a long wooden board. Other voices, further away, hummed mindlessly like gnats. The air was crisp and vibrant. My head swam, dizzy, but approaching clarity, stumbling blindly towards the truth.

Mare, I thought. Mare, I think I hear you, but you’re far away. You’re so old, can you even hear me? Do I have to speak up? Which one of us is talking?

The whinny of a screech owl, too deep to really be a screech owl, rang like funerary bells in my heart. The world snapped into focus.

One of the soldiers turned, alert, but too late. The air cracked. A sound like a hornet buzzed through us and the back of the soldier’s head burst open. The rest of us were showered in blood. It burned where it fell on me, searing my face, my neck, my shoulders. I felt myself growing inside of myself. Another me grew. I ripped free of myself. I stood. I snapped the chains around my arms. My muzzle fell away. My shadow fell across my captors.

Their fear as they beheld me surged through my veins. I could have drunk the entire world then. It was all too beautiful. So I got to work.

Someone had replaced my hands with thick paws. Wicked scythes gleamed where my fingers had been. The soldiers stumbled backwards, fumbling with the weapons on their belts, but I was too quick, too happy. Butchering is a skill; one has to know right where to cut, which bones could be pulled away from which tendons the easiest, the weakest vertebrae to snap, sever, sunder. I could see these people in front of me now, and in that instant I knew they were just meat like me.

What if I pull this one’s harness off, a smaller Eio thought. I could see her inside me, putting her finger up to her chin in a way I had never done but wished I had, because it was cute. We can disarm him, she said to me. So, okay.

I reached my claws towards the nearest soldier, faster than I believed I could move, and ripped through his belly quietly. His entrails steamed where they hit the ground. A small, surprised gurgle crawled out of his whole body as he collapsed. The others drew daggers and pistols. There was shouting all around, screaming and gunfire; the blood pounded in my gut. Butterflies swarmed in my stomach.

Another shot, another hornet sting right in front of me, and a third man collapsed over a red blossom just above his hip. The fourth tried to flee. That got me excited.

The world receded. My knowledge, my place in time, my worries about the future; they all slid away like waves after their affair with the shore was done.

People were running all around me, and I chased them. When I caught one I would tear them apart. For all their force and fire they went to pieces easily. I felt like I was floating. I thought I was glowing.

Then I was back, and Mare was crawling away from me. I had never seen him so small before. What remained of his legs were pumping out blood slower and slower. He turned his gaze on me, shuddering and convulsing, and in his eyes swam animal fear. The recognition had gone.

“Eio,” he spat. “Shit, Eio.”

Mare sank into the grass. The stench of blood rose around me like steam. I glanced down at myself.

I was naked. I was taller. An animal’s hands had replaced my own. They were slick with gore. I stood hunched; my legs were strong and muscled. My throat refused any speech, and my hair hung down to my knees. The blood slithered blindly across my new skin, soft now where it wasn’t bristling with fur. With my clawed hands I began to feel the curve of my hips as they rose into my waist. I cupped my breasts, full now, and squeezed. The blood clung to them as I lifted my hands away.

Turning away from my brother’s corpse I found a sea of bodies and limbs scattered around a camp, littered with empty coffins and ruined workbenches, poised on the edge of a cliff. Vast forest loomed beyond. Turkey buzzards wheeled lazily above me.

My head turned at the snap of a twig to my right. Goudre froze in his tracks, a long rifle trained on me. I would have sworn he had aged decades. A trembling hand betrayed him.

“We looked for you,” he said. “We found you.”

Suddenly, for the very first time, and to my complete bewilderment, I realized the depth of my hatred for Goudre. My heart froze over.

“Kin slayer,” he hissed.

I sprang back and away too late. Hot sharp teeth ripped across my calf, followed by a sick crack and the stink of gunpowder. The cliff wasn’t far. By the time Goudre could have prepared another shot I had leapt into the empty air below, and Mare lay cold where I had last stood.

The creature nudged me with its head, pushing me hard into the trunk of the pine and jolting me awake. I backed away and hissed in pain. The gashes across my back had opened across the rough bark. I was cornered. I raised my claws in front of my face.

It was about the size of a black bear, only gray and brown with sickly green spotting across its spine. The front half of its body dipped low. A dimly pleased expression crossed its blunt muzzle, its small, dark eyes apparently unfocused. With a grunt, the creature reared back onto its hind legs, waving its own claws absentmindedly. I flinched; eventually it settled back onto all fours. We stayed still for a long while.

Just a sloth, I thought. Thought you were dead, came back to check. You’re not dead. Sloths will only eat dead things, they won’t kill an alive thing. I’m alive.

“If you come at me I’ll tear you a new one,” I muttered, choking through my dry throat.

The sloth started nosing the roots at my feet.

“No touching. Here, I’ll get out of your way.”

Years ago, the summer after the big flood, Turtle had seen a sloth, bigger than one of our huts, swimming lazily down the creek, paying no heed to the rushing force of the floodwaters or the debris choking the bends. The old man had rushed up the bank to the old well, hollering his news right at the break of dawn. Turtle later went on to embellish his story, weaving a whole retinue of paddlefish attendants and caiman knights around it, a great mossy crown atop its head. We still never ate sloth again after that.

The sloth, now finished with whatever business it had at the base of the tree, stretched its forequarters up against the trunk, squeezing its eyes shut and scratching deep gouges in the bark. Sap curled and bled. Four long, fresh scars peeled their way down the sloth’s back right leg, most likely from a jaguar. My gaze flickered from its wound to its face, now turned towards me, and our eyes locked.

For one insane moment I tried to tell myself its dim little face reminded me of Mare. There was really no resemblance at all.

“You can be Eio from now on,” I sighed. “That can’t be my name anymore. I don’t know what I can call myself. But you’re Eio now.”

The sloth sneezed, which I took as approval, and from somewhere in the forest came a mournful roar, a sound like the flooding of valleys; a second roar answered, this one closer.