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Ripples From My Mane By Gwydion78

Anonymous Commission

Chapter One

"Ryan! Keep up, man, you're laggin'!"

Hunting sucked, there were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. There was nothing manly, he could figure, about walking through the woods carrying about sixty pounds of camping equipment and a rifle hoping some hapless woodland creature would blunder in front of him and kindly wait long enough to be shot. Wasn't the entire point of being outdoors with the guys to sit in a fishing boat, crack jokes, and drink beer? But no, his friends from college thought it'd be cooler to stumble through a national forest, without a permit, and blast away at whatever wasn't human.

This was precisely why he didn't play Call of Duty.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm comin'. If we wanted to shoot guns we could've gone to a range, you know!" Then again, Ryan was comfortable in his role as wet blanket, he wasn't a jock like Greg, or one of those assholes like Brad who could eat anything in sight and still have an optimal build.

"Don't worry, Ry, we're not going to find anything out here." Or Frank, who actually was into all this hunting crap. "Even if we did, you think I'd give either of those idiots live ammo?" He clapped his shoulder as he walked by, taking the gun off Ryan's hands, which made the traverse a bit easier. "Twenty bucks says they'll give up in an hour, we'll find a clearing, have a couple beers, and they'll remember you ain't got a girlfriend."

Frank snickered to himself as he trudged on ahead, not seeing Ryan give him the finger. It was going to make for a long night, so he was already coming up with various conversation starters and enders just in case the subject of relationships did come up. Wasn't like he didn't want one, he just hadn't found a girl that he was into yet, and it wasn't like there was a line of women who wanted a moment of his time either. It was a relief, really, as it let him concentrate on other stuff.

"Frank! Where the hell are we, anyway? The map's in your pack, right?" He struggled to keep up, his T-shirt already dark with sweat.

"Greg's, but we're on a trail, well, a old deer path, looks like." He grinned back at the wheezing Ryan. "Gotta lead somewhere, right?"

"I gotta stop a second, dude, I'm out of breath." All he wanted to do was take off the pack, but it was tough enough getting the damned thing on and secured correctly to make for easier walking. He panted for half a minute, and then looked up to see that the group had already moved on, far ahead of him. "Assholes. Ugh, gotta get- AH!"

It felt like a root, or something that had hooked his foot perfectly to cause him to stumble, the weight on his back making a fall all but certain, and he stumbled forward and off to the left to try to regain his balance, running into a tree, bouncing off the trunk and falling onto his back, grumbling at how hysterical it probably looked to any bystanders, especially that he was practically trapped by the weight of the pack, turtle-like.

Well, he'd wanted to take the damned thing off anyway.

Creeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaak...

"What the hell was that?" He looked around him, but the sound seemed to come from under him. Why would it be coming from under...

"Oh shi-" Creak. Snap. Snap. SNAP!

The earth seemed to give way, the fall taking seconds, hours, weeks, there was only black, no rush of wind, no sound, just the sensation of falling that took hold in his chest and particularly his stomach. What was apparent was that falling this long was going to result in his death, there were no ifs, ands, or buts about it. What an obituary. "Ryan Carver died tripping on a root while hunting illegally in a national forest. Donations to support his burning in hell can be made by way of angry Facebook rants that require no less than three allusions to Nazis."

At least he could laugh about it, at the end. That had to count for something right?

He hit water. Cold. Fucking. Water. Deep enough to break his fall and for his pack to weigh him down, the young man struggling forward, finding a slope upward and following it desperately, scrambling to drag along the pack that was likely going to spell his doom, his mind already updating the obituary to include snarky comments about never learning to swim. He didn't want to die here, not like this, not like...

He gasped as he broke the surface, the air cold and moist, coughing repeatedly, only a vague suggestion of light from above, darkness beyond the lip of the pool he'd just escaped. Exhausted, he freed himself from the pack and caught his breath, digging through the pockets of it to find a flashlight, which clicked to life.

He was in a chamber, an empty one, thankfully, but it was clearly not a natural formation, the walls clearly cut, covered in a strange script he didn't recognize that was comprised of sharp, determined marks. It was all over, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, everywhere, even the lip of the pool was covered in it. Ryan coughed a few more times, which echoed in the chamber, but otherwise there was no sound, not even from above.

"What is this place... If I can get out of here, maybe I could sell the location or something, some college or museum would probably freak about finding a place like this." He stepped further into the chamber which seemed to go on, the dimensions, if he had to guess, twenty yards by forty, all of it still covered in that text, if that's what it was. For a moment he flashed on Indiana Jones and the possibility of booby traps, but considering that he saw nothing in the chamber that could be construed as valuable, there didn't seem to be a point to it.

Near the back of the chamber, though, he found a statue, though the size was too large to cart off with him, and it appeared to be made of stone with no ornamentation, not even text, considering it was several of the text glyphs carved and stacked atop each other. He had no idea what it could mean, but it was probably important. As there was little else to do at the time, he reached toward it, touching the stone, and immediately fall onto his ass as a voice boomed, "TALU'STIN CRU'DANNA AKAI! NU'LAS VUNN! TALU'STIN CRU'DANNA!"

The words echoed loudly, even seeming to shout inside his head with increased urgency, but then faded as quickly as they came.

"Um. Okay." He looked around the chamber, and everything seemed the same. "What the hell is new las vun?"

The chamber shook at his response, prompting him to run like hell back to the pool, hoping the water might protect him somewhat from a possibly cave-in, but other than the rattling, there seemed to be no danger. He dragged his pack along, the stone marked by the steel frame of it, vaguely scratched, but that mattered little to him, as his flashlight found a much better effect of the small quake that had rattled the chamber.

There was an opening behind the statue now.

"Guess it's like one of those Open Sesame things, huh?" He made his way over, keeping the light on the opening, which appeared to be to a passage, but he did his best not to get his hopes up, as it might only lead to another chamber that actually was filled with subterranean horrors that he'd unwittingly unleashed on the world. If that were the case, he'd either be dead, or solely responsible for closing off the hellish portal or whatever it was, but there was no way to know for sure unless he inspected it himself. "Well, no time like the present."

He entered the passage, which was also cut stone, but lacked the text of the previous chamber. It continued on for what felt like another forty yards, and then opened into an impressive antechamber, complete with simple columns, and large open sections of wall where a few colored tiles were scattered, darker marks near them, as if to suggest something had been there as well, but still, outside of the echo of his steps, the chamber was silent. His flashlight shone about, revealing a rather high ceiling as well as well as long stone slabs, most weathered and broken, but all in rows that faced the stairs he descended.

"Maybe it's a temple or something, but what's it doing down here? Any religion that has to meet this far underground can't be good." Ryan didn't know who he was talking to, other than himself, but it helped to diffuse the tension, but there was something at the far end of the "temple" that caught his eye.

Light.

Light in the shape of a door. There was no flicker, to imply fire, just a steady dim patch of illumination that wasn't brought by his flashlight. He made his way toward it, the smell of the woods suddenly brought in by a soft breeze that made him whoop with joy. There was a way out! He wasn't going to die down here! He broke into a run to reach the doorway, his pack bouncing and scratching along the way, and made his way through the opening, pushing aside vines and branches to emerge into...

This didn't look like the national forest. The trees were trees, but the color was slightly off, closer to reddish brown than grayish brown, and the leaves seemed almost too green, if that were possible. The earth was a rich shade of brown, carpeted with nettles and dry leaves, but the leaves were shaped like triangles with serrated edges, thicker than he'd seen before. Not too far away, he heard what sounded like water, and, going by the old adage of rivers leading to civilization, he went toward it, the walk relatively easy though the pack hadn't lightened in the slightest from his ordeal. It was still day, at least, when he found the river, which ran beautifully clear.

He knelt down at the edge and dipped his hands in, washing them, watching the dirt and grime drifting away with the water's flow until they were clean, and lifted some of the water to his lips, tasting it. It was cool, as well as clean, better tasting than the Poland Spring he had in his pack somewhere, but water was supposed to be better when you were out in the...

In the...

Why were there two suns?

It caused a fair bit of cognitive dissonance on his part, full of double-takes and half-started sentences as his eyes continued to tell his brain that yes, there were two definite stars in the sky, no matter how many times he splashed water in his face and looked again. It couldn't be possible, right? There couldn't be two suns, if order for that to happen he'd either have to be crazy, dead, or on another planet. As he had a pulse and could clearly remember simple details that any sane person would agree with, like that cancelling Firefly had been a huge mistake and that the Internet was not the place to have a balanced argument, it only left one possibility, and to hell with that.

He'd come in through that temple-type place, and he would just get back through... uh...

He hadn't remembered to mark his trail or anything, had he? Or remove the vines and branches so it'd be easier to find instead of leaving it in its camouflaged state?

"Shit," Ryan said aloud after over two hours of searching to no avail. The temple's entrance might as well have been invisible. He thought that a place with a huge ceiling would be put in a hill or something, but it was like it never existed, leaving him to face the very real possibility he was stuck there.

This wasn't really how he wanted to get out of a vacation with the guys.

"That's right, Ryan, keep making jokes, don't be serious 'cause it ain't serious until you take it serious." He took a deep breath. "All right, don't panic, you've got the pack that has MREs because Greg had too much money at the surplus store, and a tent that shouldn't be too hard to set up, and uh... Well, there are probably animals or stuff around here to hunt, hopefully which are not any bigger than you. You just have to keep searching, and eventually you will find the temple place and get back home and maybe they'll make a TV-movie about you."

He nodded to himself assuredly and set to making camp.

The first week was much like the first day, searching for the temple, having no luck, and MREs twice a day, and bathing in the cold, cold river when his clothes got a little too nasty. The second week he dropped to one MRE a day and fashioned a fishing pole out of a branch and a roll of spare fishing line. Bait was first some food from the MREs but when that didn't work, he was thankful that there were not only worms in this new world, but also that there were fish in the river. They were similar to the fish back home, but remembering how to clean them largely depended on memories of TV shows were fish were cleaned in front of nerds who passed out at the sight.

By the third week a large portion of his day was devoted solely to finding food, though his campsite was starting to feel "lived in". He'd started to learn where the fish tended to congregate, which berries and fruits were safer to eat, and he'd even trapped a few smaller rodents in his makeshift snares that didn't taste too bad if they were cooked long enough. As a result he could spare maybe an hour to look for the temple, but he was starting to lose hope he'd ever see it again.

In the fourth week he would've traded anything for a shaver, as his beard had grown out a bit, his hair longer giving him a scraggly appearance when he could catch his reflection in stiller parts of the river. He'd figured out a meal plan of fruit in the morning, fishing for lunch, and checking his snares through the afternoon to see if he'd happened on dinner. Searching for the temple was part of his trap-setting at that point, trying new areas and different traps. It was odd that he hadn't seen any larger predators about, though maybe it was a world devoid of intelligent life, he had no way of knowing. Nights were spent in the tent, the weather always pleasant, only one bout of rain, truthfully, since his arrival, and Ryan had found himself thinking more on what needed to be done the next day instead of thinking about home. He didn't love it there, but after a month he was considering the possibility he'd never make it home.

He'd probably be alone for the rest of his life, and admittedly, that didn't seem too exciting a prospect.

In the fifth week he stopped eating and didn't leave his tent.

In the sixth week, the will to live won out, and he resumed his previous routine, trying to keep his spirits up by singing what songs he could remember while he was fishing, not caring if he was scaring the fish away. He started stretching hides from the rodents for rudimentary things, like ties for his hair or wraps for the fishing pole. He took to carving notes into the trees, little thoughts or funny jokes he could remember, or ones he made up about his surroundings, came up with names for the various fish and berries, though since he wasn't the creative type, they weren't much more than "blue fruit", "salt fish", "bitter rat", "sweet berries" and the like.

In the seventh week, everything changed. In the seventh week he learned he wasn't alone in those woods.

It was late morning and he'd been out setting his snares, repairing ones that had been worn down or broken when he found something hunched over his snares, bipedal in appearance, with russet red fur and an animal's head, a tail, and wearing simple leather breeches and a vest apparently made from a patchwork of rodent leather. A stick with a sharpened edge was on the ground by its side. Ryan crept up slowly, and grabbed the stick away, getting the thing's attention as he pointed the stick at it. "Hey! Hands off, buddy, that catch is mine!"

Facing him, the creature appeared to be a cross between a fox and a man, which shook its hands at him, grunting strange sounds, but looking terrified, likely because it had never seen anything like him before, so at least the feeling was mutual. It tried to remain still, trembling, its eyes focused solely on the stick. It was simply that, a stick with a sharp point, some leather cord wrapped around it, but mostly unadorned.

"I'm not going to hurt you." He lowered the stick, point away from the creature. "Okay?" He tried to make his voice soothing, but the weeks hadn't been kind to his vocal chords, his tone gruff as he spoke. "Just relax."

"Grex tahna?" It pointed at the stick, then tapped its chest.

"No." Ryan shook his head. "I'm not going to hurt you." He put the stick down. "Uh... grex tahna."

It nodded, relieved. "Maw lek?" When Ryan looked confused, it pointed at the snare, then at the bitter rat caught in it, then back at Ryan. "Maw lek?"

"I don't understand."

The fox pointed at the rat, then at its mouth, making an exaggerated chewing motion. "Lek?" It pointed at Ryan. "Maw lek?"

"Lek is food?" He furrowed his brow, repeated the same motions as the fox. "Food."

"Food?" The fox looked thoughtful a moment. "Food. Lek." It mimicked a nod. "Food lek." Well, at least it was smart enough to communicate. He moved toward the snare, the fox immediately backing away, even though the stick was on the ground. He hoped the thing's curiosity would be enough to prevent it from attacking him while he retrieved the bitter rat from the snare. He became aware of the fox standing over him, inspecting his trap, and it started speaking again, but much more rapidly, enough that he couldn't even catch the various phonetics that came out of its mouth.

As he had no idea what it was talking about, he dismantled the snare for use in another location, which definitely got the fox's attention, and elicited more words, but from the tone he could guess what it was asking about. "It's a snare." He pointed at it. "Snare."

"Sah nare." It pointed at the sticks and leather cord. "Snare?" It pointed at it then Ryan, then tapped its head a few times.

"You want me to teach you how to make one?" It didn't understand, but he nodded at it, and beckoned it along, gathering up various sticks and the like that would be needed. It was a chatty creature, and unfortunately a fast speaker so he couldn't pick anything up, but at least it was attentive when he built the snare in front of it, though it failed in its own attempts about three dozen times before it could accomplish the task. Once that was done, he showed it where to hide it, how to hide it, the fox having a good enough sense of knowing where to look for the bitter rats. Along the way they exchanged words for basic things like the trees and such, and that the rats were called virtas, until there was only one thing he'd forgotten to exchange with the creature.

"Me." He pointed at himself. "You." He pointed at the fox. "Ryan." He tapped his chest, and then motioned to the fox.

It took it a few seconds to understand, and then it nodded, a gesture it'd gotten better at, and pointed at itself. "Gren." It then pointed at him. "You. Ryan. You-Ryan." It waited until Ryan nodded to it to let it know it had gotten it right. It dropped its voice a moment. "Urion sky'wen cru'danna?"

Me Ryan, you Gren. It was a start at least, and the most important part was that he wasn't alone here. The last word gave him pause though. Wasn't that part of what he'd heard in the temple? He nodded readily as maybe he'd been there too and could lead him back there, so maybe he could find a way home. The fox staggered back, its face suddenly awed, and it yelled a smattering of words as it ran away. He called after Gren several times, but it didn't return. "Something I said?"

The only saving grace to the experience was that if Gren was around, either there were others that had been pulled into this place, or that there was some manner of civilization around. It was obvious he'd have to learn the language, but if it meant not going insane from isolation, he'd go for it. Besides, learning a new language was always a good hobby choice. "That's right, Ryan, don't take it serious that there are other people out here with pointy sticks and if you hadn't had the drop on Gren he might've killed you."

The next few days were largely spent concentrating on hunting, as well as dreaming about it, where he could run down a larger deer-like animal, tackle it, and tear into its flesh with his much larger and sharper teeth and...

And on the sixth day after he met Gren, he realized he wasn't dreaming when he pulled his face back from a carcass. The odd thing was that he wasn't disgusted, because he didn't see anything wrong with eating a fresh kill, and he was still riding the rush of the hunt, the smell of fear in the beast as he tracked it, stalked it, the pounding of his heart in the seconds before he lunged, the almost sexual gratification of bringing it down, knowing he won. He was a hunter, after all, right?

A hunter with... claws on his hands?

Ryan managed to get to the river to wash his face, expecting the meat to come up from his stomach, but his body was having none of that rejection. He found his way to one of the still pools off the river, and gazed on his reflection in shock. His eyes had shifted to a golden yellow, while his face had pushed outward, his nose flattened and pushed forward to line up with his chin, his eyes crossing to behold his, well, snout, really noticing it for the first time. He reached a finger toward his mouth, feeling his lips curling and pulling back to expose his teeth, all sharp and pointed for tearing and cutting.

He ran his tongue along them while he inspected his body, coming aware of other changes that had occurred over the last few days, the first of which was the fur, his skin covered in a tawny coat of short hair, his chest having a darker ruff of mud brown hair that matched the longer, shaggier mane on his head. Mane was accurate, as it didn't take much thought to see what he had turned into, given the rather leonine features on his body, though he certainly couldn't complain about the added muscle.

He did want to complain about suddenly turning into a lionman, though, as that certainly put a damper on returning home, an annoyance that he relieved on several trees and large rocks and bellowing out his irritation at whatever would listen. Losing his humanity was not part of the plan. Maybe it was an effect of the world he was in? The food he'd been eating? Maybe the sweet berries were known to the locals as turnyouintofurryfreakberries?

"At least I can still joke about it." He didn't bother covering his mouth considering how jagged and guttural his voice sounded, considering it matched the rest of his body and would probably sound hoarse after roaring in anger for over an hour. The camp was almost beyond salvaging, the log by the firepit the only thing that had been spared from his wrath, where there was a freshly killed deer-thing...

"I don't remember hunting this..." He stepped to it, sniffed it repeatedly, smelling something that had a similar scent to Gren (and he was curious how he just knew what the fox smelled like), but was different enough. Maybe another fox? It had been trapped in a snare, albeit a bigger one than the ones he'd used for the bitter rats, and just... left there in his camp while he'd been off clawing chunks out of trees and throwing large rocks into the river because he'd found out he had a tail now and his dick was pointy and barbed.

It tasted good, at least, and he'd worked up an appetite during his, well, he had to be honest that it was a tantrum, and while he was concerned about not being human anymore, he couldn't deny how *good* this new body felt. He felt strong, fast, powerful, cunning, stealthy, and he had to admit that in a weird way he felt kinda... sexy, but that was likely his new equipment trying to have a little influence on his brain and distract him from the fact that he was eating raw meat and his face was covered in blood.

At least he wasn't mad anymore.

He spent the next day hunting a larger prey animal that was similar to a moose, only faster, requiring more sneakiness, and when he finally brought it down it was still another half-hour of battling it before it succumbed to him... so he let it go. Sure, he was starving, but the hunting, the tracking, the stalking, the fight itself, it was so much more exhilarating than the prospective meal he wanted to do it all again. He, well, *liked* hunting in a way that was much more fulfilling than anything he'd ever done before, it satisfied urges that he didn't know were in him all along or were just a feature of the new body or-

Someone was in his camp.

He moved like a shadow through the woods, part of him considering that lions were more known for team-based stalking than sliding through the underbrush without a sound, but he'd worry about that later, someone had violated his territory, er, camp.

It was another creature like Gren, only this one was more catlike, thinner, lithe in its build and it was holding several bitter rats and a raccoon-like thing he hadn't come up with a name for yet. It knelt, muttering several things he didn't catch, but it ended with "Urion!" as it placed the dead animals on his sitting log.

Wait, were those offerings? He hadn't thought about the effects of his destruction from before and how he'd likely scared the hell out of anything within earshot. Were they afraid he was going to hurt them? Was this a bribe or a protection payment or something? He emerged from behind one of the larger trees while the cat was looking in another direction, the feline trembling immediately upon seeing him. Ryan had to admit the smell of fear kinda worked for him, even while he tried to remind himself that lions couldn't smell fear.

The cat didn't cower, at least, he had to give it that, but it bowed its head and held up one of the bitter rats to him, which appeared to have been caught through hunting instead of a...

"Sah-nare?" Its tone was hopeful, requesting, and Ryan was starting to understand what it was asking. Like Gren, it wanted to know how to make snares, and it had brought plenty of treats to deserve the lesson. Granted, the lesson was a little harder as he didn't have claws before, just longer fingernails, but the concept was still the same, and given that he was in a good mood from the hunt, he showed the cat a few tricks he'd picked up over the last few days for good measure.

The cat was thankful, at least it sounded thankful, and he caught "Urion" "sky'wen cru'danna" and "lek" in the rapidly spoken words.

He managed to stop the cat before it left. "Hold on, hold on. Stop. I know lek is food. What's sky'wen cru'danna?" He exaggerated a look of confusion to hopefully get across that he wanted the meaning.

Sheepishly, the cat pointed upward, then at Ryan before it took off, bowing three times before it was gone.

"Well, uh... that was weird. Still, free food, maybe it means merchant or something, since I'm pretty much trading trapping techniques for dead animals."

Over the following week, more came, all of them bringing offerings of food, a couple bringing clothing as he'd grown out of his previous T-shirt and jeans and had been using a hide for a loincloth. The final offering though, gave him pause, as Gren had returned without an offering of food, but had brought a rolled hide that had pictures drawn on it. Pictures of a large lion standing in profile, much smaller people beneath him, receiving what looking like snares and fishing poles, a crude halo of light around the lion's head and...

"Oh crap, they think I'm a god."