FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

(1)

An anthropomorphic ermine who soon would not be able to say or remember his own name bent over a thinning, tattered tome that would have been dusty had he not read it thirty times before. It was me. I yawned wide, stretching my jaw and tongue to their full extent to try to get some blood flow back in my face.

"Hey, bud," came a gentle voice from a few feet away. I looked up. In the doorway to the study room I'd acquired stood a Malabar ground squirrel anthro with one arm leaning against the door frame and the other arm covering his mouth in a yawn. "Go to bed."

"I can't. Librarian says she's putting this on display tomorrow."

"Just scan it, dude. Come on. I wanna cuddle."

I smirked. "No you don't. Plus, it can't be scanned."

"What do you mean, it can't be scanned? Is that a thing?"

"Yeah, dude." I rubbed my eyes. When I opened them again, to my surprise, Phosphor was sitting at the table with his posture perfectly mimicking mine. Guy was usually as weird and standoffish as I was. Both of us were horny, awkward idiots - intimacy was flagrantly desired, but functionally rare. I must've really been worrying him. "Can't be scanned. Check the ink." I handed over a blue-tinted lens from a pouch of various, harmless magical instruments. It was labeled Disenchant (TM) and had a laser-cut engraving of a company name and "Which enchant? Dis enchant!" on one edge.

"What's this do?"

"It diffracts electromagnetic waves altered by contact with enchantments back into visible li-" He interrupted me with a peck to the lips to shut me up. I smiled. "Um. It lets you see magic. Some magic. Sometimes."

He took it in the pads of his stark, black-brown paws and peered through the palm-sized thing at the text and cooed, "Oooh... pretty." He turned it on me. "Also pretty..."

"What's gotten into you?" I asked, my smile breaking into a grin.

"Not you, recently enough," he teased with a smarmy smile. Then, he set down the lens sheepishly. "You're hot when you're interested, but it makes me worry about you. And," he quipped, his voice getting cynical, "there's nothing more arousing than anxiety and adoration."

I blushed. Neither of us were forward with one another all that often. Maybe it was something about the intimacy of the small space we were in. Coated in old browns from dilapidated vinyl blinds, real wooden desks and shelves, and bland carpeting, the room was a muted, stark contrast to my ever-white coat and his splashes of color. "Heh. Thanks."

"Can I help? What's got you wrapped up in this?"

"I think I've cracked it." I pulled over an oversized sheet of paper I'd been scribbling on to try to keep my research at least half-focused. "The Order of Lilies. A druidic order that vanished for no reason after having been relatively well-known before the Renaissance."

"And why do you care about this order?"

"They were all about union with nature, like the rest, but..." He leaned his head on my shoulder. He cared, but mostly he wanted to be with me. Right. Keep it simple. Get to cuddling. Who knew when we'd both be in the mood at the same time again. "They went a step further. Always wanted to actually fuse with plants. Become a new species."

"Wait... do you... is this because of my gardening?" He peered at me out of those creepy, all-black squirrel eyes.

"No that would be saccharine bullshit yes."

"Awwwww!"

"Also, esoterica like this is always good fodder for theses."

"Aaaaaaaand?" The little nut-gobbler leered at me.

I sighed and my white ear tips reddened faintly, again. Druidic stuff kinda... had a reputation. "And, plants don't have the same sort of... size and growth limitations people do, and yes it was part fertility cult."

"Theeeeere it is!" He nipped my chin impishly. "Y'know, you're not small, now," he hummed as he dropped a hand down to grope between my legs.

"Yeah, but I'm not big, either. Imagine if I were huge. Made that taut belly of yours stretch like a horse would," I teased. It was something we'd talked about before. We'd even considered trying to find black market potions and enchantments for it. Always decided it was too dangerous, though... but fractionally. Both of us were curious beyond safety but mostly didn't want to get booted from the university.

He shuddered as I trailed a few fingers under his shirt, then yawned expressively. "So I take it you're trying to find them, then?"

We both tucked our hands back to ourselves. Getting distracted here would mean not leaving until morning, and we'd made that mistake before. It upset the custodians. "Yeah. I've got it narrowed down to a couple counties around here, but even that's not all that helpful."

"Well, what kind of lilies were they into?"

"Huh?"

"Water lilies, field lilies, specific species? Don't tell me you're that tired."

"I am that tired. Lay some botany on me."

"Lemme see..." Without breaking contact, he dragged over the book I'd been perusing and flipped until he found a diagram. "Mm! Yeah, that's... well that's weird. That's a tropical water species. We're temperate. You're sure it's around here?"

"Call it like a fifty mile radius from that, uh. That big city east of here."

"Ooh, he's interested, interesting, and too tired to function. But yeah, that's... if this is their jam, they'd have to have done some weird... terraforming, or made a biodome several centuries ago."

"Maybe a hot springs...? Isn't there a hot springs nearby?"

"Yeah - yawn - I think so. Dunno if that would be enough, but you're welcome. Please come to bed with me."

"Yes. Yes correct. Okay. Let's clean up here." With a tremendous effort of will, we stashed my various tools and books and the ancient text itself where they needed to be. True to my research interests, instead of a backpack, I had a leather shoulder bag, wore loose, flowing clothing, and preferred not to wear shoes. Phosphor was, in contrast, in neon bright clothing with practically luminescent wrist and ankle bands. We made a cute couple, when we actually spent time outside our dorm together.

Tonight, he was the small spoon. We liked to switch. I liked to try a little of everything, but I hadn't realized how badly I needed to hold someone and just be reassured I wasn't foolish. We were weird and awkward with one another, but the affection was mutually beneficial with so far, no downsides. Happily, the tiny, liberal arts campus we were on was renowned for its openness. Magic-centric places often were. For now, that didn't matter - we were alone, and he was warm, and even though we were both well past too tired for sex, I still gently ground my hips against his dragged my tongue through his nape once to get a shudder from him before we settled down and drifted off.

--

I started planning the next day. Ideas had of course circulated in my head. Sometimes orders disbanded. Sometimes forcibly, though that usually meant they cropped up again a year or two later. Sometimes they would be eradicated for having broken some law or done some horrible misdeed, but that would be in ledgers that I could check. The last was the most intriguing: cults of all disciplines of magic had the common thread that when they disappeared, it was from developing a spell they couldn't contain.

The Order of Lilies was largely composed of beneficent gardeners. They visited villages on a sort of rotation to tend to crops, ensure the soil was fertile, all that wonderful agrarian goodness. They were unique in that they often wore clothing from which seeds sprouted, so that they themselves looked like moving gardens. They were rumored to even plant the seeds under their own skin, but the text I had perused - the only one written with their hand as far as any of the references I had found knew - had only spoken of their experiments making the most fecund and largest fruits to harvest, for the benefits of local people. They refused, of course, to interact with governments, as was the way of Druids, which was another reason for their nomadic nature and the lack of substantial records of them.

So, the best I could imagine was that they had, in fact, either grown something like a fungus that had killed them all, or attempted implanting their bodies with flora to morbid results, or just... had a disagreement and disbanded. And, unhelpfully, my perusal of court records showed no indication that they as a group or as individuals had been tried and hanged for Devil worship or some nonsense like that.

And thus, in my combined quest to publish fabulously, graduate, and get ludicrously well hung, I found myself again deep in the archives. The archives at this university were small, but deep. I was in my senior year, which meant by then I had schmoozed with the right people for access to many of the right places, including the ones reserved for professors. That meant past the modern turnstiles and key cards, past the door most eyes couldn't see, past the blood-drinking circle of silver, and down a flight of stairs that only ended if you had a strong enough will.

I wasn't top of my class, but I was good at sucking up to teachers - what can I say?

This time, I worked my way through tattered, small, leather-bound books no more than fifty pages apiece, with pages often torn or missing entirely or too ruined from neglect to read. It rankled, doing this. I always wondered, whenever I was buried in books about the same peoples and histories and practices, again and again, whether this was me. Whether what I was, as a person, was an academic who pored through pages about long-lost magic practices. Phosphor was a gardener and a botanist. Our closest friends were musicians and chemists. There was an infinity of history to study, and I was drilling deeper into one tiny branch of it. Here, I wasn't practicing sports or learning to make drugs or prosecuting criminals. There were millions of lives to lead. Stuck in the dark with mold that probably had a mind of its own didn't seem like the play.

Finally, coughing from dust, I spotted a book no bigger than my palm with the lily Phosphor had identified delicately inked on the front. It started, "This will be the end of us." Ah. Dramatic. I lit an extra candle and pretended that this deep in the archives, I was the only thing alive.

"This will be the end of us. As it is always the end of mages with hubris. The Cantor has, in his scrying into the nether realms, found a demon who corrupts the boundaries between things. It collects statuaries of men by fusing flesh and stone. It lurks at gateways between worlds to chew on the portals. When it seems something beautiful, it adds that thing to its ever-growing self. It is held in check only because its sense of self has grown so diffuse, it can be easily commanded, as one does to parley or truck at all with demons.

"We will, according to the Cantor, demand that it meet our highest calling - union not just in spirit, but in flesh, with the worlds of animals and plants and fungi. 'Simple!' he declares. It will not be simple. We do not understand the nether, but we comprehend that there live the most vile tempters. And yet.

"We have now gorged for a week on plant matter, to increase our closeness with the green world. I am frightened. The real prospect is strange. Will I become grass, immobile? Will I become moss? Am I to be, indeed, a lily, and simply live in patient bliss and float? I do not know. I know that I doubt we will survive in the way that men believe men live. We will transform and no longer be what we were. I worry that such a transformation is as simple and complete as death. Thus, I have recorded here the demon's name and its current appearance, so that some may some day know why we became what we did."

A pair of eyes blinked out of the darkness at me. At the same time, or maybe before, or maybe just after, the ink from the sketched image of the demon of corroded barriers slipped into my fingers where I had them pressed against the page to guide my reading. The eyes were a deep black, deep beyond the fathoms of space. A figure stepped into the candlelight. It was me... in reverse. Instead of the white fur of an ermine, it was black - sable. Instead of the pale, green eyes I was born with, they were a deep, violent purple. It smiled and spoke in a voice that was disconcertingly normal. It was my voice.

"Most people are too paranoid. You're an adventurer."

"I don't put wards up against cats, either."

We spoke over and past one another. There was a depth of understanding that precluded explanatory phrases or context. I took a step back. This was, without question, a demon. I looked at my fingers where they were stained with ink. Whatever this was, it had taken my likeness from where I'd touched the book, but I refused to drop it. This was the key.

"This is only a fraction of me," it explained, taking another step forward. "An iota, tucked away by a thoughtful doubter centuries past. Like you, a seed of what is and can be."

"Where's the rest of you?"

"You know."

"What did you do?"

"You know," it answered, with more emphasis.

I pressed myself back against a wall as it advanced. I knew wards. I knew basic, simple excommunicating spells. I knew how to encase myself in stone until it left or grew bored or we both died. But it knew I was hungry. Hungry to know more, to do more, to be more. As pure of a soul as I believed myself to be, there was more to this hobbyist infatuation than getting hung. This order had idolized creating and becoming a new kind of life. Forming something that couldn't exist. And people... were always so slow. They always made up reasons you couldn't do this, couldn't try that, couldn't summon these into the mortal realm.

"You just go there," it continued. It soon pressed its body against mine. It was cold and warm. It was hard and incorporeal. It was nude, and I felt nude, like it was passing through my clothing. "I'll show you how to do what they couldn't. They were indolent. Unready." It looped its arms behind my neck, then climbed up my body. It was seeping past my fur, into my skin. I wanted it to stop, but I didn't ever want it to stop. The sensation, the experience... I wanted more. I wanted to feel more, to be more, than what I was born to. It pressed its lips to mine. I embraced it. "You're ready," it murmured, soothing, kind, permissive. Its tongue pushed past my lips. It filled my mouth. I couldn't tell if its lips spread over my muzzle or my jaws widened around its head. It pressed its wet, hot-and-frigid tongue against my throat, then down it. I found myself swallowing. Where its flesh touched mine, it began to sink into me, while inches of its tongue poured, pushed, throbbed down my throat, an unending snake of ink and otherworldly matter. I was erect. I entered it - I don't know when. My hips rolled and my arms tightened, possessive, greedy. As I swallowed and thrust, hunger and lust swirled into a singular sensation. Its tail curled up, under, into me like a prehensile phallus and like its tongue, first penetrated and then never stopped sliding deeper. I moaned around endless, silky, oily tongue, rocked my hips and thighs harder, swallowed more ravenously, and then climax struck and my body dragged it into me from both ends. It soaked into my chest, was sucked under my tail, was engulfed by my maw, was infused by my cum. I found myself snarling as I pushed the back of its head, all that was left of it, past my lips and clicked my teeth after, to gulp and let loose a guttural growl.

Surely it had simply been a fragment of the demon pinned to the page, but my body writhed with its entrance. I felt my hips against my belt. I felt my shoulders tighten my sleeves. My loins throbbed, drenched under my clothes with my output but showing no signs of needing rest. I licked my lips, not admitting that my thoughts were gradually warping, that I was already crafting excuses for Phosphor, that I was layering reasons on reasons to skip classes and pursue the quest that had brought me down into this deep hole in the archives. I was ready to find what the Order had succumbed to - the rest of this thing that had fed itself to me. I was ready to confront it. Defeat it.

Consume it.

I hungered.

--

That night, I made love to Phosphor with absolute ferocity. I practically smelled him coming back to our little apartment-style dorm. I was naked when he walked in, covered him with my body, stripped him bare and entered him while holding him pinned up against the wall. He writhed and his tail twitched in that rhythmic pulsing squirrels do when they get excited. He didn't object - where I touched him, I watched wisps of ink sink and vanish into his black fur. I filled him as he praised my newly expanded size in wordless exultation. I wasn't bulging out his belly, but he was tight like he'd never been before. It was physical confirmation - I was fractionally larger, all over my body, than I had been before. At some point, I was on the bed with him, mounting him, breeding him. I gripped the nape of his neck in my teeth, bit hard, and came into him like a storm.

"Fuck! Dude! Ow, skies almighty."

I lapped up thin rivulets of warm, coppery blood. I didn't know if it was the taste or the feeling of dragging my tongue over his neck, or the sense of enveloping his smaller body with mine even if the difference was minor, but my member instantly stiffened at the combined sensation even though I had just climaxed. I snarled by his ear and let my weight sink onto his back to emphasize my instantly renewed erection within him. "Again?"

He let out a shuddering breath. "Y-yeah. Again. Fuck me again. But turn me over."

I slipped out of him for only long enough to help him onto his back - long enough for my excess seed to glisten on his nut sack, then tail when he rolled - and pressed my way back in. My eyes met his. I tried to control my movements. There was fear, there, but also lust. My hips bucked, and he yipped as four inches jammed into him at once, adding to the three already there.

"Fuck, you're huge. What d-did, you take...?"

I pressed my hands into his slender abdomen, no small part of me wishing I could feel myself inside it. "Nothing. I uh. I found s-something..." My body and mind wouldn't let me go slow. I pushed forward until he was on his shoulders, in a long lunge with my feet tearing holes in the bedsheets behind me. "In the archives..." I pressed my lips to his to try to force my hips to stop hammering and managed to slow. What was happening? I wanted to enjoy this. I wanted him to enjoy this. I didn't want to hurt him - we liked it rough, but we liked walking the next day, too. I felt my lips widen, felt a predatory urge tell me he was prey, and walking the next day wasn't a concern for prey.

He hit me. I realized he'd been struggling. My claws were sunk into the flesh near his ribcage. I snapped my head back, nearly jerked out of him, managed to catch myself, and dismounted more gingerly.

"What the fuck?"

"I don't know."

"What did you take?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

I shook my head. Fuck it all, I was still hard after the man I was reasonably certain I loved had had to punch me to stop me hurting him.

He pressed his hands to his sides. They stained the pink of his paw pads crimson. He looked me in the eyes, hurt in more ways than one. "What did you take? And why didn't you tell me?" He paused, tilted his head, and shrank back from me by inches. "Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm your goddamned dinner. Your eyes are... different." Emotions flashed across his face from sentence to sentence. "Get out of here. Take a water bottle. Take your phone and call me when it wears off. Okay?"

I crammed my eyes shut. I could smell him. I didn't want to tear him apart - it wasn't that kind of murderous violence. It was different. I wanted to use him. I wanted to mark him as mine, but not with scent - indelibly, with claws and teeth, so no one could doubt whose he was. And then I wanted to swallow him whole, like I had the demon in the archives.

"Hey. Hey. I'll be alright. Here." He cupped my cheek and pressed a cool glass into my hand. "I just. I'm scared. These aren't light cuts."

I opened my eyes to ask if I could help bandage them. He flinched, and I had my answer. I closed them again and sipped. The water tasted like an insult. Empty, boring, placid. I drank it anyway, then carefully set it down and started questing around blindly for my clothes.

"Is it something you can tell a professor?"

I shook my head. I loved him for asking. "It's something to do with that Order."

"Is it something you can tell me?" he asked more quietly as he pressed garments one by one into my searching hands.

I paused. "I did something stupid."

"That much is clear, jackass," he cajoled. His voice was harsh. He was still hurt. He softened it with a gentle rub to my arm. "What kind of stupid?"

"Demons stupid. Maybe an incubus." A flurry of violent, screaming thoughts raked at my mind. This thing didn't want me telling Phosphor the truth. It wanted me to eat him.

"If you're not back by three, I'm calling the netherworld hotline."

"... we have a netherworld hotline?"

He squirrel-barked. "Holy shit how are you allowed to study what you study and not know that."

"Don't yell at me."

"I'm so fucking angry with you right now, --!" My own name slipped out of my mind as he said it. "I'll yell if I want! If this isn't the time for an 'I love you, but,' I don't know what is, so I love you, but I felt like you were going to kill me, and it's because you not only fucked a demon, but you didn't tell me. Get out."

I bared my teeth, but didn't open my eyes. I felt my way along the wall to the door.

"Key card. Phone." He pressed them into my hands, alongside a plastic water bottle. "Water."

I opened the door to our apartment. "Sorry. I don't know what's happening. I love you."

"--, wait." Again. I knew it was my name, but I didn't know what it was. It just slipped off my brain the moment it entered my ears. I felt his hand take my wrist and carefully lace with my fingers, then felt his lips on my neck. Our romance was such a strange one. We never acted like this. It was always 'dude' and 'man,' as though we were afraid of admitting we cared. Here, it was clear we did, and so all of that went away. "Get out, but come back safe, okay?"

"Okay. Can I look at you?"

He squeezed my wrist, but it was timid. "I don't think you should. See you soon."

I stepped out into the hallway and opened my eyes. He closed the door behind me. Without thinking about it, I licked my lips, and was using my tongue to clean his blood off my claws when I noticed a neighbor at the end of the hall staring at me. When I locked eyes with them, they flinched. I squeezed my eyes shut again, shook my head, and walked the opposite direction to an exit, trailing a clean finger along the wall as I did. An ink stain followed in its wake as my stomach started roaring for satisfaction.

--

Like many small, liberal arts universities, this one had a plentiful wooded area partially populated by arboreta with little signs and labels. As I walked, ink leeched out of me and into the earth. I stepped off the path, past a ring of mushrooms labeled "do not disturb! experiment in progress" and into the woods. I was ravenous, and since that afternoon, I had been incapable of distinguishing hunger and lust. They were melded into one singular craving, so I disrobed just to accommodate the painful arousal throbbing under my clothes.

I breathed deeply. Night creatures went steadily silent as it became apparent I was a predator. The instincts of mustelids are far different from those of, perhaps, a cat. Whereas felines stalk and wait for the moment to pounce, weasels dance. I swept into a dervish, cracking fists and feet alike against tree branches, stomping heedlessly into brush. I had never felt into this part of myself outside a club, and then, it had been experimental, awkward, uncertain, egged on by peers and by Phosphor. Here it was to hunt.

A mouse hopped suddenly from a burrow. I snatched it mid flight and immobilized it between my jaws, but I didn't crush or break it. This new hunger stifled the animal, primal urge. That was ancient. That was done. This was new and never done. Unseen, inky blackness flowed into my prey the moment it touched my flesh. It calmed in moments. I tilted my head back. I felt something else controlling my urges, but they were still mine. I gripped my cock in one paw and swallowed, slowly, luxuriously, letting the little creature slip down my gullet with a single, long swallow. My body thrummed with the offering. It went somewhere that wasn't my stomach. It was squeezed, pressed within a new organ, and then vanished into my flesh. I felt myself grow by microns. I didn't burn it for calories - I fused it into myself. It was mine. It was me.

But it was a morsel.

I thrashed again, cartwheeled, jumped into trees and out of them, yipped and shouted. Out of the corner of an eye, a badger peeked dangerously from its burrow. I slammed myself to the ground, thrust my arm in after it, crammed my hand so deep between its jaws it couldn't grip properly or escape, and tugged it out, scrabbling at the ground to find purchase and fight the ferocious, dog-sized fellow mustelid from its hole. The moment I could, I dug my fingers and claws deep past its fur. Its struggles ceased - mostly. My heart pounded in my chest as I looked at my caught prey and salivated. Impossible. The body, the mind, the demon in me said to swallow it. It couldn't be done. A mouse was one thing - this would tear me apart from the inside.

Even so, I licked my lips. It was mine. It belonged to me. It WAS me - just not yet. Bewildered at my own actions, but thrilled through my entire being at them, exulting in them, I put my hands under its forelegs and lifted it to my lips. My cock throbbed, leaked, ached at what I was about to do. I yawned my jaws open around its long, striped muzzle and head. My tongue guided its chin to the back of my throat. It squirmed, but without strength or intent. I swallowed and felt my jaws open further, stretching to take in its shoulders as my throat gulped unstoppably, with awful power. My neck bulged out with its shape as my body stretched to contain a meal made of twenty pounds of stubborn muscle and bone. Breathing didn't feel like a priority. Only swallowing. Only pushing it deeper into me, claiming it, inch by lusty, luscious inch until I sucked down its tail and clicked my teeth behind it with a satisfied gulp.

"Mine," I grunted under my breath. I looked at the bulge of badger in my belly, felt it squirm as it adjusted to its new quarters. And then, as with the mouse, I began to absorb it into me. This time, tissue flowed through my body. This was no mere morsel, and appropriately, I felt my flesh burning away my meal's mass to fuel my transformation. Shoulders bulked and back rippled with new definition. And while I felt myself grow, I stroked my raging erection and watched the outline of the creature disappear, gradually becoming nothing. Not nothing. More me. Something bigger, stronger, more beautiful. More perfect. My skin stretched and grew to contain me. Even my skull and teeth took part. I wasn't to simply bulk up and become a disproportionate monster. I was bigger, in every way. When the last shadow of what had been the badger vanished, I came, hard, spattering the foliage around me. I snarled in climactic bliss, reveled in my expansion. When the pulses were done, I wasn't aware of how much time had passed. I was vaguely aware of a distant, gnawing hunger. And I heard a wolf howl in the distance.

My heart raced. My vision narrowed. My body prepared to hunt a wolf. A wolf PACK. I was unstoppable. Monstrous. Godly. I -

A few hundred feet away, my cell phone started ringing. Phosphor. I had sworn to him I'd call him. The demon in me tore at my mind. It wanted to eat a wolf pack. It was...

It was a demon. It was to be fought. I mentally forced it down and away.

"Phosphor."

"--"

My name slipped past my brain again. But I could make out the tone. He was worried-angry. Anxious. "I'm okay."

"Are you sure?"

"I don't know. Are you okay? How are, um. How are..." I could hardly say it. Partly from shame, as I envisioned his body, pockmarked with graying scars where I'd claimed him, but partly because what I felt was pride. Ownership.

"My new tattoos? They stopped bleeding. They don't matter, Look, I used one of those wipes, the ones in the magic med kits. There was a little residue from whatever you have in you, but I don't think it'll last."

"It will. Fuck." The first two words came out with an arrogant assurance. He was mine. I clenched my teeth against the famished fervor. "Phosphor, it's fucking with my head. I can't think straight. I think I'm still me, but I'm not sure."

"Please come home anyway," he begged. "I don't want to send anyone out after you. They might hurt you. Come home." He sounded desperate. I hadn't heard him care this much about me in months. Not that we really expressed all that much to one another, but...

The wolf howled again. I licked my lips. I broke past the sudden flare of hunger-lust that had my loins shifting eagerly and snarled into the receiver, so I could say things only half of me believed. "You don't get it. I'm about to hunt down a wolf pack and eat every last one of them. And if you fucking try to stop me, I'll eat anyone you send after me. You're meat, Phosphor. And you'd look so, much, better on me." I bit off the last words, ended the call, and darted through the trees.

I barely remember the hunt. I remember meeting the young male who had howled between trees. He snarled when he realized there was a fight to be had. We circled in the silvery, moonlight night. Predators hated fighting one another - it was a risk not usually worth taking. This one, though, seemed to realize that he wasn't a predator, here, though. He was prey, and he needed to fight to survive. A hundred pounds of muscle custom-designed to kill leapt at me, jaws wide. I ducked under its head and shoulder tackled it to the ground. The demon's inky, shadowy ooze went to work in a matter of heartbeats - which was lucky for me, because my underside was exposed to the young male's scrabbling claws. The movements became lazy, the eyes were unfocused. I had time to think about what was happening. It was a demon of fusion, of corroding barriers, not a demon of satiation or lust or sloth. What was it doing to make these creatures so placid?

My mouth was already working around its muzzle and stretching to contain its head, while we lay on the ground. I was so hungry. I could barely think, but the question demanded answering. What was happening in the wolf's mind? I remembered speaking with the shadow-me the demon had made. We had understood one another with nearly psychic precision. I had felt that our desires were one and the same. Was it - was I - making it so these animals simply wanted to be a part of me?

Its head squirmed where it was bulging out my throat and I realized it was pushing actively deeper into me. Not only that, but also my gluttonous body was already stealing its mass, its size. I was growing while it shrank. I rolled and twisted to let it back on its belly and to get on my own hands and knees. As soon as its feet found purchase on the ground, they dug into it. My gullet widened as though it were elastic as the wolf's forepaws stepped into my welcoming jaws. It wanted this. My throat muscles worked in tandem with its efforts, needing less and less as each moment passed. I felt its coarse fur slipping past my lips, was aware of lean, corded, predator musculature as its back and chest slid down, over my tongue, into the new organ in my belly - the not-stomach holding area, the absorption chamber. I still didn't feel I needed to breathe. Belly, groin, then finally, it fairly jumped to tuck its hind legs into my maw. My paw cupped its rear end and pushed it down my throat. My bodymind silently howled concordance. My abdomen was stretched absurdly around my meal, but there was no pain. There was just pressure, like a muscle stretch, a wonderful feeling of being full, as I toyed with the tail on its way into my lips and again, clicked my teeth like the closing of a jail cell to finalize my prey's exit from the outside world.

Time passed. I was well beyond halfway through absorbing the young male and teasing my wonderfully turgid, growing erection and cupping and rolling my expanding nuts and stretching my broadening physique. The chest and shoulders that let a lupine body run and rip and tear were mine. I had cum twice, spattered myself in my indulgence of the wolf's post-adolescent virility and libido, felt my balls surge and grow in my paws, and was on the way to a third orgasm in the space of twenty minutes when the demon's power abruptly ceased.

Panic set in instantaneously. I am not a naturally calm person. I am naturally anxious, worried, and imaginatively uptight. The magic had been doing many things: sedating a feral animal in my chest cavity; making my body capable of containing and absorbing it; and making me feel like the indefatigable top of the food chain. That magic vanished and my eyes bugged out in terror. I did what any animal gorged on food and faced with an existential threat would do: I regurgitated copiously.

Like the rest of the night, though, it wasn't normal. I felt the creature inside me shifting, squirming, being pressed and pulled about. Threads of ink crawled over my skin. There were wisps, vapors of the demon's powers still in me and I gathered those dregs together desperately. I willed them with every iota of self I could muster to get the wolf out of me. My body wasn't made to hold even the cub-sized mass inside it. My jaws creaked and ached as my entire form heaved. At least I was stronger now - and I felt magical energy incinerating those reserves to fuel the transformations that were saving my life. Out came a head, shoulders, feet-chest-belly-butt-tail of a wolf to land in viscous goop that reminded me in a bizarre flash of aloe vera sap.

I retched drily and spat. Unable to see clearly, my imagination was filling in the corners of what I assumed was a disfigured, half-digested wolf. There was no overbearing smell - just wet fur and my own bile. The forest went still again, quieting the nocturnal ruckus that had felt safe once the predator was satiated. "What are you doing?" I asked the demon in the stillness between panting, choking breaths.

No response. It had been a fragment of the entity. It had tapped into my mind, body, and spirit, then set me in a spiraling, voracious frenzy that had nearly killed me. I shuddered and sat back on my butt to curl my arms and legs up against me.

Fuck. I had almost died. Almost died from swallowing a fully grown wolf.

The wet mass spasmed. I retched again, but realized I had a duty, if the animal was still alive, to end its suffering one way or another. I had learned efficient ways to sacrifice a creature in labs, if needed, and instinctual mercy drove my actions. Most of my training had been in shaping the earth, so I didn't have any sort of spell to produce light or flame to let me see what was left of it. Instead, I felt around for stones and used my thumb and force of will to press them into mirror finishes. The stars were out. Their light filtered through the trees and with some careful adjustments and jamming the mirrors into tree bark, I managed to focus enough light to shine on what was left of the wolf.

Its eyes were open and glassy, but the pupils in them moved. It still had four legs. I couldn't understand how the demonic absorption progressed. It clearly wasn't piecewise, or this would be too macabre to endure. The feet pawed feebly. They seemed misshapen, but there wasn't quite enough light to make out why. I put my hands against its soaked pelt. The fluid from my new stomach - if I even had it anymore - was heavy and thick as molasses. I used my claws to comb it out of the fur, realizing the goo alone might be pinning the creature to the ground.

"What am I?" it rasped. I fell back with a yelp. It was looking at me. He. He was looking at me.

"Wha, what?" I breathed.

His forepaws moved and he got a shoulder under him. Leaves and detritus whispered with movement and clung to him. "What am... I?" he croaked again.

"I don't know. Y-you're a wolf. You're... an anthro," I stuttered. "A person."

With an enormous effort, it heaved itself up onto one hand and one elbow, supporting its upper body on one side. It had changed form. It had to be... had to be the last thing the demon had done. It had put part of me into the wolf. The anthro, no more than three feet tall - and that was generous - yawned enormously to stretch its jaws. Coating the inside surfaces of its maw was an inky blackness. I felt pulled towards it momentarily, like all that mattered was sliding down that throat. "You ate me," he said as he fixed me with a curious stare. The sensation passed.

"Yes," I answered. "A demon made - let - convinced me to do it."

"I... was hunting. I... was seeking a mate." Slowly, he got a grip on his voice. It was thin in some registers and full in others, like his throat wasn't made from the right stuff. "I," he stated, tasting the word. "I. Why can I talk?"

"Because you're me," I said slowly, working it out for myself. "You're part of me."

"I'm hungry." He stood up, stumbled back against a tree. "Hungry."

"I am, too. You're part demon. Part wolf. Part me."

He glowered at me. "What are you?"

I fumbled through words. "Mostly a grad student. Part demon, I assume, but I don't know how. Probably part you, now."

I didn't stand up. I didn't know what to do. I was talking because it was all I could manage, but my voice wasn't strong. We needed to eat. I had been burning through my body's reserves for hours, always assuming more would come, but now there wasn't that well of powers that knew how to directly turn mass into magical effect. That infernal mind was gone, and we were left with scraps of its flesh and sensations, and empty stomachs. "I can call someone," I said.

"Call?"

"Phone."

"Phone?"

He had only part of my mind. He was mostly feral. The only reason he hadn't attacked me again, yet, was that I was bigger. I understood that, finally. I simplified my words. "Follow me. I can get food. Safely." I held out my hand towards him, knuckles up, like I would to a feral dog.

He sniffed them without breaking eye contact. "You smell like me."

"Yes."

"Share food."

"Yes."

"I am... fasted."

"Hungry?" So he knew synonyms.

"No. My self. Name. I feel... fasted." He looked up at me expectantly, as though I should introduce myself.

I stood up slowly, not wanting my height to be seen as an attack, and looked around for signs of which way I had come. I sniffed. The demonic sense of where food was had gone, but I could smell my own trail. I had become part wolf. "Okay, Fasted. Follow."

He did.