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Buzzing insects filled Hex's ears along with bird calls, the grunting of nearby pigs, and the rustling of wind in the trees. He had rolled onto his side in the night, so his body nearly covered his small companion. Odd. Fifth was usually a light sleeper and would have left for his people and to start foraging for the day's meals hours ago. Ah.

"How long have you been awake?"

The sharp red ears gave telltale quivers. "Not so long as you think. Longer than is wise."

"You needed time, after yesterday," Hex suggested.

Fifth murmured against his chest, "My people are content with death, I suppose. I prefer this." His fingers gripped in the mountain lion's fur. "I was exhausted from anger," he said slowly, considering what the words meant. It felt strange to think about what he was thinking and feeling.

Hex waited a long time before asking his next question. "Ah. Would you like to meet my tribe?"

"Hm." Fifth didn't tense the way Hex had suspected he might. He became thoughtful. "Yes," he said carefully. "I will bring some pounds of the acorn cakes."

"They are unlikely to accept."

"Are they likely to attack us?"

"Yes. But I do not like inaction any more than you. We should try to change the way things are."

Fifth finally extracted himself from Hex and stood. He stretched. Hex gazed upon his beauty. "Is there still a king?"

"Yes, but his women are still more important."

"I hear that crows hold council. All are equal."

"You hear a lot of things with those ears."

"Squirrels do chatter," Fifth answered with a smirk. In the daylight, he was far more chipper and now that he was standing, more energetic as well. He nodded decisively. "I will go prepare. No one will think it is strange because the women will be away for trading and the men are stupid."

"Will you tell them the truth, if they ask you anyway?"

Fifth thought about this. "Yes. And they will jeer because they are fine with remaining prey."

Hex was quiet for a long time. He was thinking how, if all of Fifth's brothers and fathers were to die, Fifth would need a female to continue his people's line. It made him jealous, so he only stood, stroked the squirrel's decorated ears with a paw larger than his head in farewell, and lumbered back through the trees towards his tribe.

The lions made their home on a flat surface of granite that was daily warmed by the sun outside a cavern. Hex approached to see two of his male cousins lounging lazily. Their fur was blinding in how it reflected the light. They scrambled to their feet when his shadow crossed them and snarled angrily at him.

"Hex! You're quiet as a stalking woman," one said

"You smell of prey and sex. Pervert!" the other jeered.

"I had hoped you had died. Go back to fucking your prey."

"Go back!"

Hex, predictably, sighed. "You cannot cast me out, cousins. I would spill your guts on the stone and learn thereby to cook, if you even had the authority."

"Long words," they spat. "Prey words." They circled him slowly. All three were hunched low with their fingertips on the ground, in a simian imitation of false, feline relaxation. "You're thin like the prey you fuck."

"Is the King inside?" he asked.

"Call us by our names, Hex! We have names. You will know us by them."

Hex leveled a steady gaze at them. "Some tribes don't name their children until they mate. So, you may call me by a name. I will call you weanlings."

One swung at him furiously. Hex cuffed him so quickly and so hard across the side of his head the initial blow that was swung never hit. The other tried to rake open Hex's back while it was turned, but his claws scraped painfully down bone hard as the stone under their feet - bone that swarmed up from Hex's skin. One chipped off with a spray of blood that spun wildly again when Hex swung a backhand that could flatten trees into his ribs. The younger male tumbled to the side of the rocky outcropping, scrabbled at its edge, and fell with a shriek that was swiftly silenced by the sound of snapping branches and bones.

Hex looked down at his other cousin, who was pulling himself in a dizzy circle in an effort to stand. He sighed sadly.

"You've grown fat," he pronounced. It meant many things. He trembled with a blend of emotions.

The Sighing Hex walked to the mouth of the cave. He considered it before going in. His paw came to rest on the stone opening, and he studied the rock. He would live more years than his grandfather had. His great-grandfather had not been able to count years. No one knew what their children would discover. The passage of time, besides simply marking the changing of the sun and stars, was a recent understanding. Grandfather had lived, and then he had died. His body had been eaten by crows and sunk into the earth. Grandfather had once boasted of eating an entire family of speaking river rats, one at a time, outlasting and consuming generations. But the stone surpassed generations of lions.

Hex wondered whether the stone changed.

It did not seem to. Now, as it always had, it cast his voice along hidden lines of perfect resonance from here into its depths. He counted four handspans up from the ground, lowered his lips to the space, and bellowed his unleashed rage into the caves. The yowls of his elders echoed quietly back to him, limited as they were by their comprehension. Some of what Hex did was magic. Some was just knowing.

His aunt answered first. Or was it his step-mother? Were there words for the women who bore his cousins and had borne his half-siblings? Maybe Fifth knew those words. Maybe Fifth would be angry at the question.

Her name was Gold-gray. "You return at last." She sniffed his neck and looked over his shoulder at the cousin who had finally managed to sit up. "I hate what you do, but at least you are strong. I am glad you are home, though your anger is childish." They shared a hug at the level of their necks and she went out to hunt down the cousin who had fallen off the ledge.

His mother next, named Snow Roses. She made the encroaching stiffness of age look elegant in the way she held her crouching posture. Her eyes were pink in a field of white that covered the entirety of her body. It was said in the tribe that if her other children had survived, they would have all been like Hex. She had started that rumor. She met his eyes, then lifted herself up so her arms could reach his shoulders. "You are grown more each time I see you. Will you tend to those boys?"

It was two questions. Hex smiled. Only his mother, in the entire tribe, could double-speak with him. It was hard, but it was a fun game. He embraced her in turn. "Yes, mother."

"A shame that you must," she murmured. "You're lucky this time. All the ones who truly hate you are out hunting."

"Except Uncle."

"Yes. And you had better call him King, or he will beat you again, with or without an audience." He loved her voice and her words. He loved her.

Heavy footsteps sounded beyond her, still a ways away. Hex whispered, "Mother. Do you ever speak with the prey? To learn?"

She made a show of sniffing him. "Not the way you do." She got a sly smile. "I mostly speak with birds. When they fly away after, I have a better excuse for not catching them. The others, I eat." A wavering tension crept into the air between them as he glowered at her with a sense of betrayal. She continued, biting off each word, "And I indulge in it. Welcome home, Hex."

And at last, the King shambled forth from the depths. Hex was enormous. He was lean and hard and sturdy and stood taller than any other male he had met - except for the King. The King, standing, crested eight feet. He was fat, but unlike his lackadaisical sons, Hex's uncle bore the weight with pride and agility. He had flattened Hex during their first public argument. He had done it again in the second, when Hex had used magic. He had done it again in their third, when Hex was fully grown and could summon bone armor and make skeletons sing. The King was an avatar of the power of the physical form. He had killed Hex's father when Hex had been too old to cull but too young to live on his own. Now, the King allowed Hex to stay for only one reason.

The face, criss-crossed with scars and missing an ear, twisted itself into a smile. "You remind me of your father. You are like his ghost. Still a slave. Still weak."

"I almost killed both your sons. By accident."

"I have more. Why have you come back? Only to bow and spit?"

Hex's hackles raised. It was a direct challenge. By all rights, he should not stay. He should leave and either die or find a female and make his own tribe. But Fifth was here, and this was the King's domain. And Fifth would not leave his family, no matter how he hated them. So Hex stayed, and endured his uncle, and tried to change what he could.

"My King, I return with news of other tribes."

"Your words sound like squirrel chatter. You smell of seed and berries. You are an insult that walks."

"The squirrels east of here have learned to make food that stays fresh and nourishing for days after it is made."

The King started another rebuttal, and then something awful moved across his expression. He was conniving. "Nine days you are gone, and just as I fear the ghost of your father has at last grown tired, it returns, like a coward, to pule. Not to fight. You want to speak... again."

"Not alone. I want to bring a. A. Brother-ally." A confused sneer. "Brother-mate." A retch of distaste and a wretched laugh. It was another bird word. He couldn't remember it. It was rare, but it wasn't. Not family. Not rival. "Ah. Friend."

The King looked down at him for a long moment. "Use shorter words when your... brother-mate comes. So we can get to eating him and beating you faster." He shoulder-checked Hex hard enough to make him stumble backwards with his bulk as he moved into the sunlight, like pushing aside a rotten log.

Hex growled low in his throat and insensate rage washed through him, but he caught his aunt's eyes over the body of her son she was dragging. She dropped it on the flat stone and pointed. "Fix it, Hex. Or he'll die and your uncle will make me make another."

Hex let his fury go in a sigh. He walked over, sat over the cousin he had broken, and began stitching bone back to bone. He worked quickly, hoping to be able to disappear to "hunt" when the rest of the tribe returned with the day's kills. Each time he saw them, it became harder to stay and see the slaughter. But he had to stay. For his friend and, he admitted, for his mother. And he worried that soon it would break him, because speaking with the tribe was just speaking to his uncle with an audience. No more successful. Simply more visible.

When the hunt arrived, Hex quietly fled. He knew the silent paths through the woods and could himself be even more silent. He was able to feed himself with a feral rat he surprised from its hole. The bones and sinew snapped between his jaws before he swallowed the small vermin. The coppery blood coated his tongue and throat. A note in his brainstem quivered with predation and satiation. He knew why his people killed to eat. He didn't wholeheartedly disagree. But they had the power to choose, and what they chose was... wretched.