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Later Henry would barely remember the walk back from the forest. He could remember every inch of Marian. Every curve, every shade of colour on her. Even her taste lingered on his tongue.

But the walk from hidden glade to his sad, lonely farmhouse was a blur.

If it weren’t for the fact that he would later wake up on his hard, wooden bed covered in dirt and loose leaves he would have thought the glade had been right outside his house, not deep in the forest. As it were he woke anyway, aching and sore all over, his skin felt strangely tight, like it was too small to contain him. Even his fur felt strange when he ran hies hand over it, matted and filthy in a way that he couldn’t possibly have done in his sleep.

He really had, for the briefest of moments, experienced a softness, a joy to life that he had thought impossible; or at least one kept exclusively for him. There he was, in the same hard, cold farm that had been his whole life. A farm, devoid of any life save the few grungy chickens and rocky earth that had been his and his alone since his father died a few years back.

Henry started to cry. It was all too much, the realization of that granted then denied softness along with the pain of his body was all too much. The grief and frustration overwhelmed him. Hot tears bursting from his eyes before he could swallow them down like he normally did. They pulled at the frozen void in his heart; currents of fire surged deep inside his chest, burning through his veins until that heat poured from his eyes as bitter tears.

His body shook with sobs, wracking his chest with that searing pain. The aches and soreness of his body exasperating the pain of the his sadness so that his whole body felt like it was one shuddering cry away from bursting.

He dug his own nails painfully into the red fur of his face as if he could tear away his eyes and rip out the sauce of this own agony. Deeper, nails biting in skin until his face burned with almost as much pain as the cavity in his chest

Almost.

“Marian…” He whispered between sobs, over and over like a benediction, a plea to the goddess of Spring.

He wasn’t sure if it was her he really wanted, those stories of her turning men into trees still lingered in his mind, even if she had mostly denied it. Still, it was her softness, he wanted. The warmth of another’s embrace, the joy that her soft little moans and the chance to please another person in a way he never had before that he wanted.

These thoughts chased the others about how the chance to do that had been denied to him through his head like winter chased down summer ever year. Over and over and over until finally, mercifully, exhaustion claimed him.

Henry woke with a start and a gasp of fear , the last vestige of some terrible nightmares ripping him from sleep. His head pounded from the crying, his mouth and eyes were as dry as sunbaked dirt and the muscles in his chest like he’d been kicked by one of the giant toads that travelers whispered about.

He groaned, rolling over and pulling the threadbare, gray blanket over his eyes. Doing so left his feet exposed to the cold air in his open cabin. He pulled it up tight to his face, keeping only his snout, tall ears and silver furred hand exposed.

Silver Fur?

He sat up, the cold suddenly ignore. He held both of his long fingered hands up in front of them. All his life the fur of his hands had been the brown of wet clay. Now both of them were covered in shimmering silver fur. Not the salt and stone grey of an elder’s fur but true silver, like the colour of dew on a spring morning or the metallic shine of a well honed blade.

He rubbed at his hands, hard enough that it pulled painfully at the furs but nothing changed. He ripped off what remained of his tattered his shirt and saw that the silver traveled halfway up his arms, slowly fading back to the red of a prize apple that covered his back and most of his face. It didn’t stop there through.

His chest, like most FoxKin of his type had been white, now it too was the silver of his hand. There was no mirror in his cabin, he was much too poor for such a luxury but he had no doubt that whatever had been done the fur of his chest extended up to his lower snout and the bottom of his cheeks.

He burst from his bed, tearing off the rest of his clothes. He found they came apart in his hands, seams already weakened as if he had grown too large to hold them. Now he stood naked, surrounded by scraps of filthy fabric. His nakedness exposed his legs, showing that they too, where once black were now silver. Even the tip of his thick tail was silver now.

It was only then as he looked at his now unfamiliar paws that he realized his legs looked wrong.

There was something off about them, something strange about the way when he stepped that felt too fast, his stride too long. It wasn’t until he sat down, suddenly light headed that he realized his legs were thicker, longer than they had been before. Now that he looked his arms were the same, the red and silver fur not quite disguising the thick muscles that lay beneath. Henry had worked hard, physical labor all his life but nothing that should have made him look like this. He looked more like a professional soldier now than a farmer.

Experimentally he laid back down, legs extended so that his feet were in line with the end of the bed. The other end only came up to his shoulders. He was taller, it was only because he’d been curled in pain earlier that he hadn’t realized. No wonder his clothes had torn so easily, they were now, miraculously, too small.

What had Marian’s magics done to him? His entire body had changed, not only his fur but the very muscle and sinew inside him. He stood back up and tried to walk to the rough wooden wardrobe that held his few clothes.

He staggered towards it, not used to the longer strides. His brains creamed that his balance was off, that each longer step would make him overbalance and fall. He sagged into the wardrobe, head still spinning as decade of unconscious action in his brain struggled to adjust.

“Clothes Henry, clothes and then I do…something.” He said to himself. At least his voice still sounded the same.

He rifled through the few clothe she had, his knuckles cracking painfully against the roughly hewn wood a few times when he tried to overreach for his newly longer arms. There were a few clothes left over from when his father was alive, they had always been too large to fit him but he thought they might now.

He only fell over twice as he struggled to pull them on. A simple grey tunic and a a long pair of patched pants that still only barely fit. Even his tail was thicker now, thick enough that the normal clasp on the back of the pants didn’t quite do up around it. Now that he was clothed Henry wasn’t sure what to do. Head into the village? It was an hours walk form his farm and his legs still didn’t feel like his. Besides, who would believe him? “I met the legendary Marian and she granted a boon”? They’d send him to the church alright, but for healing his mind because it was clearly gone.

Would they even recognize him? Even in the hour or so that he had been awake he still panicked a little when he saw his own hands, not quite recognizing them as his own. How would the villagers react to seeing this tall, unnaturally coloured stranger coming sauntering in in a dead person’s clothes?

Was there anything to stop the village from chasing him out? The valley they lived in was safe but all had heard the stories that travelers from outside brought. Stories of bandits on the roads that would slit your throat for a coin, or tales of monsters that would eat you whole just for sport. It wasn’t uncommon for the few merchant caravan that came through to be accompanied by armed guards. Roguish men and women that made the barmaids swoon or inspired ideas of grandeur in the boys that watched them.

Henry had been one of those boys himself once. He had never thought to have an encounter with that unknown Wild himself. Let alone that it might change his body with him still inside.

Eventually, Henry found himself on the road to the village, wrapped in the tattered remains of a an old, mould stained cloak that hid most of the strange changes to his body. It was the desperate desire to try and understand his own unfamiliar body that won out over the fear of rejection by people he had spent his whole life around. If he could get to the wooden church on the other side of town, to speak with the MoonCaller within, maybe they would know.

His farm was a good hours walk from town normally, down the rocky path that led to the small plateau his cabin and fallow fields were on. The footing was treacherous, the rocks as sharp as blades in places. There were times he had had to pull handcarts up here by himself and he was astonished that he had even made it.

Today though the path was different, not just because a recent landslide had forced him to clamber hand over foot across a new patch of mud and rocks that would need to be cleared, but because his footing was still unsure. The methodical action of walking was helping his body to adjust but the disconnect between instinct and memory was still there. Despite that he was astonished to find he was barely winded by the time he reached the town.

He knew he should be amazed, happy even that his normally half starved and over worked body could do such things The strange healthiness of his new form unnerved him even more. Like if a mule that was close to death miraculously stood up and ran away. It wasn’t right, wasn’t natural.

But could it really be so bad if a being as perfect as Marian had given this to him?

It was as he thought of Marian, remembered her curves, her smell, the quiet little moans that she made that he saw Gwen, a young FennecKin. She worked in a tavern near the town’s ‘gates,’ really a single watch tower that stood up the ancient, rotted remains of a simple wooden palisade. Henry had known her all his life, one of the other children of the village that had grown up the same time Herny had. He had even had something of a crush on her once, long ago when the world still seemed to contain things like joy and softness.

He tried not to stare as she walked away, carrying a basket of food. He found himself comparing her to Marian, she was thinner, her waist more slender, her tail long and bushier than Marian. Even her ears were different, long and wide with fur the colour of sand that emerged from her long, blonde hair. Henry found himself wondering what she would like like beneath the white blouse and dark corset she wore. Were all women the same as Marian?

That was impossible, surely? Marian had been the very goddess of beauty. A creature so gorgeous she made the stars weep just to look at her. How could a simple barmaid in a quiet village possibly compare? And yet…

Henry shook his head, astonished at his own thoughts. Was one taste of Marian all it took to become like this? He had seen the quiet folks who lived on the edges of the villages, the vagabonds with no solid homes of themselves who cared too much for mead and spirits. Was this what it was like to be them?

He hurried along, trying to put away the memory of Gwen’s tails swishing behind her long skirts as she walked. The thought of he lingered in his mind, like the smell of good food in a kitchen, long after it’s been cooked. He tried to push it away but this strange new desire inside him wouldn’t let it go. It gnawed inside him, termites burrowing through the foundations of a stout house. He worried what would happen if he left them alone too long.

Was this addiction? Those powerful pull toward Gwen certainly sounded like how his father had described the people who go too deep into their cups. Or something else?

The occasional traveling bard would sing songs of beautiful women and the passion they inspired in men. The stories they told were rife with such things; Great Jonova and his love of the She-wolf on the moon or poor, foolish Koneuc and his wasted journey to find the queen of the Sharks below the waves.

Was that what he was becoming? A love drunk idiot who’s insane devotion would earn him both ridicule and awe in the future?

That couldn’t be it.

Could it?

The troubling thoughts chased him through the town, pursuing him down the wide alleys and dirt roads. A few people called out to him as he headed up the hill on far side of the town, a merchant caravan must have been in town because people from across the lands hawked their wares. A powerfully built eagle, their huge wings folded behind them spoke of fine blades and his prices for sharpening axes. Henry jumped as a rat woman appeared at his side. She only came up to his waist, the top of her rounded ears pierced with colour metals.

“Something for the young sir? A new cloak? Perhaps a special musk to entice the females? Yes, yes?”

How had she known he was thinking of a woman? Henry stopped, turning in place, his new body still felt unfamiliar and he almost fell into the woman. He growled in frustration and just barely managed to push the RatWoman away with a hand on her shoulder.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean too…” He said, pulling away.

“Stupid Foxes, you think just because you’re bigger than us then you can push us around!” The Rat shrieked scoffed and turned away, taking whatever cloaks or musks she had with her to other customers.

Henry ignored her, staring instead at his silver hand that had touched her. It had only been the briefest of moments but he had felt… something. Not a connection but something almost like heat. The warmth you felt when you hold your hands to a fire. He rubbed his hands together, trying to see if the heat lingered or if he was just warm.

It didn’t. Only his left hand, the hand that had touched the Rat had felt anything at all.

Henry shivered, what he had done with Marian had been wonderful, exquisite. The type of thing that many over the centuries had died for.

But had it really been worth it if it had changed his body to…this? Would he ever go back to being how he was? That thought scared him more than anything else had.