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He always seemed just out of reach, his glowing antlers guiding my way through trees, over rocks, amidst brush and thorn and vine. I would extend my arm to touch him and couldn't find him close enough to feel. He didn't get too far away, though, and it almost felt like he was exactly the same distance away from me at all times, maybe five or so feet ahead. If I slowed, he slowed, and if I stopped, he would stop, but I didn't want to stop. I wanted to catch him, in that inky black night, the moon behind the clouds, the breeze in the air chilly.

I went to call out for him, only to find I had no voice, and, as we walked together, we would find the creek, the creek I knew well. As we traversed through it, I shivered. The water was frigid this late at night, and as we passed through to the other side, I was trembling, my body soaked up to near my chest. I didn't stop, though, I couldn't stop. He wouldn't turn around, but he would speak as we walked. His voice sounded like it was underwater, like it was being shouted at me from a friend across a pool, both of us submerged.

"Everything that happens tonight is necessary."

We walked for over an hour, I was sure of it. I could barely feel my feet after a while, they had gone from a raw pain to total numbness, somehow still pulling my body forward following this strange, luminescent beast through the woods. Every time I opened my mouth to ask it something, I couldn't find the words. I knew it was a dream, somehow, by how it felt. Despite the very real pain I'd felt, everything else conveyed to me I was still asleep. The sounds, the paralysis in my throat, the ethereal fog in the world around us, I knew I wasn't awake.

In the distance, well into the night, I saw a light, a flickering light. I could see it like a halo around the stag, who walked straight toward it. As we arrived, I saw it was a campfire, a campfire in the otherwise completely solid black abyss, the endless darkness around us. I could see no tree, no sign of life, just this campfire, flickering, casting light on the stag, who finally turned to face me. He had no eyes, no hole where eyes should be. His mouth would move, but the sound I heard did not come from his throat. It sounded like it was already in my ears, like it had been recorded in my head ages before and he was activating it.

"What I am about to say is of utmost importance. My name is Croibhriste, and--"

An explosion echoed in my ears, in my chest, like a bomb had detonated directly next to us. Viscera burst from the right side of his body, the left side of my view, chunks of meat hitting the ground in total silence as my ears rang louder than the world around me. Croibhriste's body was thrown sideways, tumbling over itself as the limbs began to seize, his body jerking around as if he was running on his side, on his back, his body soaking the earth with blood as his throat moaned. It all happened so suddenly, his poor legs thrashing about until it seemed as if they were breaking, bowed and bent awkwardly as he spasmed until he was on his side once more, the side that had burst open now upright, visible, pouring blood. His body ceased after less than a minute, his mouth beginning to pour a strange, orange froth. His antlers had both broken off entirely in the struggle, lying a few feet away from him, rapidly losing their glow.

I went to run to him when my sense of sound would suddenly surge back to me, evident by how I heard the click of a shotgun pump to my right. Turning to face it, I was met with the darkness around me pulling away, revealing the world in which I occupied, a shotgun muzzle in my face, held by a man I'd never seen before. A domestic canine, Australian shepherd, probably 6' 2", athletically built, beard, glasses, dressed in denim and flannel, baseball cap. My brain took in every single aspect of who he was, within a second his image was burned into my eyes. I could've probably told you the amount of hairs in his beard, it was so crystal clear to me. On the other end of the barrel, there I was, frail, cold, fully nude, almost a foot shorter.

"What the fuck are you doing, hillbilly?" he'd ask in an enunciated accent, possibly northern, maybe just urban. All I did was raise my hands as he brandished the barrel an inch or so closer to me, barking "don't FUCKING move."

The shepherd gave me a onceover, and could see I was now crying, my eyes streaming with tears. I told myself just the night before that I wasn't going to cry anymore, and yet here I was, trying hard not to sob, letting it only happen as tears running down my face. He kept the barrel pointed at me, taking a few steps back, his eyes darting into his tent, one hand reaching behind him and groping inside as he pulled out a duffel bag, tossing it at my feet.

"There's zip ties in there. Tie your feet together, tight."

My hands didn't move from their position, afraid that if I actually made a move he'd shoot me dead. Not ten second passed before he'd thrust the gun forward, though, his voice shouting "TIE YOUR FUCKING FEET, FOX."

At that point, I had no choice but to obey, I felt, and I'd slowly sink to my feet and rummage around in the duffel bag, easily finding zip ties amidst the myriad of other things the hunter had in his bag. Calling me by my species had me more worried than the gun already did, it was never a good sign when a domestic dog referred to you as "fox". I had to string a few together, but I zip tied my feet together, binding them tightly as he gave a nod of approval, a slow "good, gooood..." as he approached me.

"Why're you doing this?" I managed to ask, finally finding my words somewhere in that numb feeling throat of mine. The shepherd would kneel in front of me, grabbing me by the snout and lifting the flaps of my muzzle, looking at my teeth, inspecting them as if I was some sort of trophy catch.

"You wandered into my camp butt-ass naked with a buck deer. That's not something you see every day. I just wanted to be sure I wasn't missing out on anything important. You country folk do tend to have those wiles about you, you know?" He'd ask as he looked over my eyes, my face, patting my snout a few times before standing, leaning his gun against a faraway tree, approaching the stag I'd followed earlier, now cold, stiff.

"What's this about, anyway? This your boyfriend? I heard that's how your kind likes to do things." He looked to me with a cocky smile, a degrading smile.

"No, I was," I swallowed hard, my throat was dry. I tried to pull myself together from the crying, but I wasn't having much luck, "I was following him."

"Following him?" the dog asked. "Why?"

"I don't know." I admitted, "I swore I was dreaming."

"Interesting. I'm sitting alone, minding my business on a vacation hunting trip, when suddenly a 16-point buck and a naked hick walk into my camp and act like nothing's happening. Then, he claims he thinks he's dreaming."

Something was off about this guy. I couldn't even bristle at being called a "hick", I had to keep my composure, but I couldn't shake a deeper, sinking feeling in my stomach. He didn't just tie me up to interrogate me. He had a violence about him, something sinister. I knew I wasn't dreaming, and I knew I was in danger.

"Yeah, it's...all a lot. I'm real tired." I said, trying to show I meant no harm without begging for mercy.

"Tired? You've got no idea what it's like to be tired." the shepherd spoke as he put his foot on the stag, giving it a few pushes to make sure it was certainly dead. "My wife left me, took everything. House, kids, cars. Surprised I even have money to travel on, fox. I decided I wanted to take a trip down south, to do some hunting, clear my head. Thing is, it's not deer season for a few more days, but I've gone and shot a buck, AND I have a witness. That's not good." the shepherd said as he approached me once more.

"Who cares about the deer?" I'd ask, trying to assure him I wasn't going to be trouble. "People shoot deer out of season all the time."

"How often do they shoot a deer out of season and have some conniving, naked half-hound spying on them? Crying because their little deer lover got shot?" he asked. "Half-hound" was a slur against foxes, a horrible sign for my well being.

"I couldn't care less. It just scared me" I lied. Had it been a normal deer, I really wouldn't have cared, but I was fighting back a deep, miserable feeling having watched Croibhriste be killed in front of me, right as he was about to give me some sort of important information.

"Well, that may be true," the shepherd approached his gun again, picking it up, looking it over, "but it may be a lie. Your kind's good at those."

"C'mon man, don't be crazy..." I whimpered as he stepped up to me, "I don't care about the deer, I just wanna go home."

"Well," the shepherd began, "you're probably harmless. Naked, tired, alone. That said," he was right in front of me now, kneeling once more as his gloved hand wrapped around the front of my neck, compressing my carotid arteries with his fingers and thumb. Almost immediately, I began struggle, squirming, my hands rising to fight against his as he set down his gun, grabbing me by a wrist and yanking one of my hands down.

"Why not have a little fun with someone no one will miss?" he asked, the pressure intensifying. I could feel my hearing start to buzz, a draining of my sense as he continued to intensify the pressure, his palm pushing on my trachea some too. He was trying to take it slow. My vision began to bloom with pitch black flowers, holes in what I could see before me as he released, my head spinning dizzy as I felt myself regaining blood flow, his hand a mere inch from throat.

"I could close my eyes and pretend you're Caroline, loading up the kids in the car, about to leave. I could pretend you're in the kitchen grabbing your fucking phone charger, and I could just end you right here." he said. The choking began again, and I began to struggle once more, arching my back, trying to break my restraints. His gun was just out of reach, and I had no strength in my upper body to lunge for it, pinned by my neck.

"Do you know what it's like to lose everything you've loved?" he asked. Truthfully, I nodded, my hands reaching for his, trying uselessly to stop him. He'd pause, though, lifting the restraint on my neck as he asked "Is that so? What happened?"

It was almost like, for a moment, he had an ounce of remorse for me, because we'd both suffered. I opened my mouth to tell the truth, but my brain threw out lies with it. I barely felt like it was me speaking. Rather, it felt like my primal Id, my feral desire to survive, was speaking instead.

"My boyfriend and I just broke up about half a year ago, and he took the house and our son. I had a nervous breakdown, that's why I'm here in the woods. I've got nothing left."

I couldn't believe how it had flown from my mouth, and I especially couldn't believe it when the shepherd's posture leaned back a bit.

"Damn. You too? Small world." he'd say, his hand lowering. I felt like, miraculously, I had saved myself as he began to stand up, remarking "life's fucking terrible, isn't it?" as he leaned his gun against a tree once more. I nodded, anything to agree with him, a quiet "yeah, I miss my kid" just to really hammer home how similarly I wanted him to see me. He'd picked up his duffel bag and was sitting on a nearby log, rummaging through it as I continued, just to solidify it all. I lied, told him my kid's name was Buck, told him about what school he was going to, a whole bunch of stuff. The shepherd seemed to really be buying it, nodding along, telling me about his wife, his kids, his job, how he'd first thought about killing himself but then decided maybe hunting would get the killing urge out of him. That was when I saw it, though, pulled from the bag.

He had a condom wrapper in his hand, and he was ripping it open, looking to me as I nervously asked "what're you doing with that?"

"You said you had a boyfriend, so I'm sure you wouldn't mind if I blew off some steam, right? We're out here, all alone, no one but us to judge."

I stiffened up, my back against the tree, protesting "n-no, no I think that's probably not a good idea. I've--" I paused, trying to think of something, "I could be diseased, with my lifestyle..."

"Yeah," the shepherd replied, "you're a fox. Of course you're diseased. That's what the condom's for" he said as he stood up, unbuckling his belt, letting his pants and underwear fall shamelessly to the forest floor, stepping out of them. He had a sheath, and he'd pull it back and apply the condom to his swelling dick before letting his sheath sag back over the shaft, tip poking out, excited.

"C'mon, no...no no no. Don't do it, dude..." I protested, starting to squirm away as the shepherd approached me, grabbing hold of me by the muzzle and holding it shut as he whispered "relax, man. I'd fuck your face but I don't trust you foxes and those teeth. Just a quickie. S'better than being killed, right?"

"Please, don't..." was all I could protest. I had no choice. The zip ties were snug around my ankles, I'd be shot dead before I made it out of the glow of the campfire if I tried escape.

The shepherd would push me to my side and forcefully roll me onto my knees, my chest and shoulders uncomfortably bearing my weight as he had me angled with my ass up, grabbing hold of my tail and lifting it. I closed my eyes, mortified.

"Goddammit. You're disgusting." he'd say, narrowing his eyes. "You foxes may as well be skunks with how you smell." He pushed me onto my side once more, walking to his tent and grabbing a bottle of water and a cloth of some sort, cracking the cap as he approached me, proceeding to pour water all over my backside as he reached down and aggressively scrubbed under my tail with that cloth, an abrasive scrap of fabric that rubbed uncomfortably against the bare skin of my most sensitive parts.

"Nasty fucking skunk smell, probably seeps through condoms," he'd grumble and carry on. I could see his gun against the tree. If I made a scramble for it when he turned to return to his tent, there was a realistic chance I could get it and shoot him. I felt confident in that. He finished scrubbing me, having thoroughly soaked my backside in water that was now cooling, cold in the night air, and he'd turn around and head for the tent. I wasted no time, lunging forward, scrambling for his gun as I approached it, closing the distance quickly.

Unfortunately, I made quite a bit of noise, and the hunter would turn quickly and see what I was doing. He made haste over to me, shoving me back onto my side as he grabbed up his shotgun, both hands on the barrel as he reared back and swung it like a golf club, connecting with my guarded ribcage and causing a horrific whack of wood against the bone of my forearms guarding my stomach. He repeated this several times, and I was certain he aimed to break my arms, the shepherd berating me before raising the gun, turning to hold it properly as he informed me "and I really was going to let you go! I just wanted some action! But now," he began, aiming the rifle at my face.

I heard another sudden explosion, ringing out. I was sure I was dying, or dead. I was sure the lack of pain I felt, the ringing in my ears, it all meant I'd been shot. I raised a hand to touch my face, expecting to find most of it gone, but I found it intact. I found my neck and chest intact as well. Amidst the deafening ring, my eyes would wander for an explanation of what had happened, and they would find it.

King was there, before my eyes, with the hunter pinned on his side, shotgun lying far out of reach. King had lunged at him from the side and had taken him down, throwing most of his weight on the shepherd's lower half. Both of his legs were fractured severely out of place, one bent sideways to where the foot was near the thigh, one with the femur having been snapped in half. His mouth was open, his glasses having been knocked away, and I could see he was screaming, though I couldn't hear it. King rose to his knees and grabbed the shepherd, shaking him in his arms like a rag doll. I thought sure he was going to break his neck from the force with which he shook him, and as I watched helplessly, the noise would begin to rise in my ears.

"HE IS NOT YOURS TO TOUCH! HE IS NOT YOURS!" King was snarling, guttural, vicious gargling animosity from his throat as he shook this severely damaged man in front of my eyes, the shepherd pleading for mercy as he looked to King, then looked to me.

"KING," I abruptly screamed out, "KING LET HIM GO!"

I didn't know why I didn't want King to do it. The man had killed the stag, Croibhriste, right when he was about to speak to me, and the man had been nothing but viciously cruel to me since he'd seen me. I didn't know why I didn't want him to die. King's body didn't even respond, though, not even his ears moved to acknowledge they heard me. Rather, he'd throw the shepherd down on his back, rearing his hand back and slamming it downward, closed fist barreling knuckles deep into the shepherd's chest, crushing it inward as the male wheezed all the air from his lungs. King repeatedly this mercilessly, quite literally punching a hole through the hunter so forceful that I could hear his fist slamming against dirt and rock beneath the ripped open torso. He'd quite literally beaten his bones and organs in his chest into a mush, and without any hesitation or pause he would lean down and bite open the man's throat, ripping the left side of it up and away as he fed off the final moments this shepherd had, drinking his blood as he often did mine. I was yelling for King to stop, and I saw the man turn to look at me, his eyes wide with peril before I saw them look past me, at nothing. He died facing me, and despite my protests, King showed no signs of slowing.

After feeding off the blood the dog had spilled from his neck, he bit again, on the shoulder, chewing, snapping bones in his teeth, swallowing. Bite by bite, in a hideously loud, traumatic manner, King was eating him. He sounded like a pig in a food trough, a sickening amount of sloppy jaw slapping and snorting, grunting, breathing, as he ate the dog from his neck down to his feet, bite by bite, mouthfuls of meat crushed and swallowed, some chewed, some taken down whole. He finished with the head, and I was reminded of how it sounds to hear a skull crunch open. I'd stopped yelling at this point, having instead fallen to my side in the fetal position, humming as loudly as I could to try to drown out the sound of a man being eaten. I felt like my soul left my body for a while, a dull fog in my head that seemed intent on clouding my mind out from what was happening around me.

Eventually, the sound of eating would quiet, and be replaced with the sound of King moaning, miserably moaning, hoarse, loud "ough" sounds as I tried to roll over to face him. He was on his hands and knees, one hand clutching his stomach. It was grossly distended, hanging heavy, swollen outward instead of his usual somewhat concave shape, and his mouth was open, profusely salivating. He'd eaten an entire man, and I could tell it was hurting him severely to have his body bloated like that.

"King..." I began to speak, interrupted by another horrific moan from King, who was dry heaving, then swallowing, dry heaving again.

"A-are you...are you alright?" I asked, punctuated by another moan, another wail of pain as King cried out "IT HURTS, NICO."

"King, we--we have to go home, you have to rest--" I implored, King's hand slamming down on dirt as he howled "I WILL NOT MOVE. I MUST REST HERE!"

"King, we can't! We have to get outta here!" I begged, the larger beast crying out in pain again as he sat up, leaning forward, both hands now holding his stomach, as if he was trying to do anything to alleviate the weight and pressure from the entire anthro body sitting dead in his stomach. He'd even eaten his clothes.

"I CANNOT. WE WILL REST HERE, NICO, THAT IS FINAL. STOP TALKING."

King cried out more in agony, like a banshee screaming into the night, horrific cryptic sounds of pain as I crawled to the tent, rummaging for a knife to free myself. I eventually found one and cut my zip ties, hiding the knife under blankets before standing to go check on King. His wailing hadn't subsided, but he'd moved to where he now was the one lying on his side, his stomach now allowed to rest it's weight on the forest floor. He was writhing, though, and as I approached him, I gently touched his hand with mine. He didn't fight it.

"It hurts TERRIBLY, Nico. I have never eaten like this BEFORE!" he said, his voice having lowered a bit, still sometimes rising as if he wanted to howl out again.

"I know, I know. I know you're hurting. We...have to get to sleep, though. We have to be quiet. This is serious, King. You can't get caught."

His breathing was intense and labored, and I rubbed his hand as he looked to me, then looked away.

"Go to bed. We--we will both go to sleep, and we will wake in the morning and go home. Leave me to rest" he would insist, and I agreed. We gave brief goodnight affection, I kissed his head, and I made my way for the shepherd's tent. I couldn't sleep, though, or so I thought. I was so focused on King, laying out in the open, all the noise he'd made, the dead stag next to him. The scene outside the tent was grisly, and I was sure I was going to be up all night thinking about it. I wasn't, though. I actually fell asleep rather quickly, from the post-adrenaline exhaustion.

I didn't dream, which wasn't surprising, but what was surprising was where I awoke. My eyes opened to the ceiling of the cabin. I was in our bed, tucked in. The sun was shining through the open windows. King was nowhere to be found, but I felt rested. It must have, indeed, been a terrible dream. My arms didn't even feel like they hurt where I'd been hit with the hunter's gun. I felt a bit tired, but otherwise fine, relieved King hadn't actually murdered someone in the woods. There was a gnawing in my chest, though, about the deer's name. Croibhriste. I had to write it down.

I slipped out of bed, immediately going for my phone, powering it on and and sending a text to myself with the deer's name. It felt weird, as complex of a name as it was, I had an image of how it was spelled burned into my brain. I wrote it down, Croibhriste, and powered off the phone once more, then I stepped outside to stretch and breathe in the morning air, cool, crisp, refreshing. The yard looked as it usually did, strewn about with feral carcasses, and I wondered where King was, wondered if he was out hunting or foraging. I made my way down to the water to wash my face and relieve myself, but then I saw something strange. An old fire, still smouldering, down near the waterfront. It looked as if it had been hastily made, and as I approached it and kicked about some of the remains, I could see little pieces of orange plastic, the color of that hunter's tent. My chest felt suddenly very tight, and as I kicked about more I found more pieces of it. I looked around for King, suddenly calling out for him, with no response.

All I could do was wait for him, and I tried my best to do so, washing my face and going about my morning routine as normally as I could. Nothing about last night made any sense to me, how effortlessly it seemed to have faded into the past. I felt entirely too fine, physically, for it to have been real.

A few hours passed, my time largely spent resting in bed, reading over that tome, before I would hear King lumbering about in the yard. I peeked out the window and saw him tossing carcasses into the grass, half-eaten, dead.

"Hello," I'd call out from the window, and he'd look to me from out in the field before looking away, not returning the greeting.

"Good morning to you too..." I said, more than loud enough for him to have heard me, dogearing my page before closing the tome, tucking it away. I rose to join King in the yard, approaching him from behind as I asked him "are you feeling alright?"

He didn't answer, though we were only a mere foot or two away from each other. I approached him and placed a hand on his back, asking "are you not talking to me today or something?"

"What you did last night was remarkably stupid, even for you." he finally said. My hand slid down his back, slumping off to my side near his tail as he stood, looking down at another mangled raccoon.

"I think I was sleepwalking for a lot of it. I felt like I was dreaming, for so long."

"Dreaming? Sleepwalking for almost an hour through the woods? You knew well what you were doing."

"No, I--"

"You were seeking to run away. I suspected this would happen if we visited town again. You even made a path toward your truck, but it was clear you got lost along the way."

"King, no, I didn't even bring my keys or phone or anything. I was following a deer."

"A deer?"

"Yeah," I began, his back turned to me, "in my dream, I saw a beautiful deer with glowing antlers. He beckoned me to the yard and I followed him, all the way to that man's camp. I think we would've kept going, but that guy shot him. Did..." I paused. "Did that really happen? Did you really..."

"Yes. Yes, it happened, and yes I did. It was a terrible night, I do not feel as though I got any rest, and my stomach has been hurting all day. I am very angry at you for putting yourself in such danger."

"I didn't mean to, it was so dark out, I was just following the deer, and--"

"Oh NONSENSE, Nico. There's nothing some forest spirit would have to tell you, you just went out wandering and don't want to admit to me that you got lost."

"He told me his name, and he was about to say more to me when that man shot him! He was the deer laying dead near you last night!" I insisted.

"There is no reason any other spirit would have to guide you around! That is my duty!" King insisted back, turning to face me now.

"Just because we're dating doesn't mean another spirit or creature or whatever can't talk to me!"

"YES, it does." King had turned fully now, his elbows bent, hands raised in an assertive manner. I wanted so badly to stand my ground, but after what had almost happened to me the night before, and after what I'd seen him do, I backed down.

"You are MY love. You've got no reason to be wandering ALONE in the woods with some strange talking creature, and none of them have any reasons to lure you into that, unless they are seeking to get you killed, which I am certain he intended to do."

"That's not true!" I suddenly shouted. "He was kind to me, and he didn't force me to follow him!"

"Kindness means NOTHING, Nico! Look at where he lead you, STRAIGHT into the mouth of danger! Had you not had me, what would have happened?!" King snapped at me, his hands suddenly grabbing mine and tugging them up into his grip, where he shook my forearms as he spoke.

"I..."

"You would have been assaulted at best, killed at worst. He lead you DIRECTLY there. You do not trust creatures blindly like that! They will hurt you!"

I grew quiet, unable to really fight what he was saying. Croibhriste had indeed lead me directly from the yard to the hunter's camp. The things he said, too, implied he'd known something was going to happen. For all I knew, he could've not actually been dead. He was some sort of mystical beast, after all, and I doubted then that one shotgun blast could kill a mystical beast. He probably left the vessel and returned to the Forest's Heart, or something of that nature. King, as much as he was intimidating me, had a good point.

"I'm sorry, King..." I admitted quietly. "I felt like it showed strength to go out without you."

"Because you are naive, you are simple. You think you can simply wander through life and weasel your way out of all your problems, but you cannot. You are not intelligent enough to live as carefree as you'd like, and you have nothing for which you need to be searching. We are settling down. I am preparing for us to marry, and you are out gallivanting with another spirit in the woods, nearly getting yourself ruined or killed." King said, all while holding my hands rather tightly in his, gripping every few words as if to accentuate the importance of what he was saying.

"I...I'm really sorry, King. You're right. If I want you to take this seriously, I need to be doing the same" I admitted. No wonder he never had anything nice to say about me.

"You've betrayed my trust, but I am going to have faith that it won't happen again. I have to go out for a while, and I need you to pull some of the fungus from my stomach. I have experimenting to do, and something else, which I cannot tell you about just yet."

I agreed to help, and we went through the motions of dredging up that strange fungus from the pit of his stomach. I felt particularly terrible doing so this time, knowing what had been in his stomach the night before. It was all gone, though, it felt. His stomach was hot and slimy as always, and he'd grown a bit more accustomed to having his stomach probed by my hand. He'd learned to keep it held under his tongue, in between the muscle itself and the residual meat that held his skull connected to his neck.

After he left, I meandered around the yard for a bit, inspecting the carcasses he'd been leaving to rot. All of them were missing at least one limb, if not more. Some of them were hollowed out, on their backs, rib cages devoid of organs. Some of them were headless. He'd mangled them all in unique, terrible ways, a tragic irony in pursuit of a presumed gift of life. At this rate, all the animals in the woods would be dead before he'd figure out if that stupid fungus could bring any of them back to life. I could tell that was his goal, but at what cost?

Eventually, I headed inside, to work on deciphering that book as I usually did in my spare time. Flipping pages, looking for pictures, anything to act as the start to translating. Every time I wandered over that picture of king, fanning through the pages, I couldn't help but stop and stare at it. There was something so frustrating and so enticing about how I knew secrets were written about him, potential truths and explanations about who and what he was, and it was all right in front of me. There could've been answers to his curiosities about his fungus, or about how to reverse his curse, anything of that nature. I only had to keep trying. He never wanted me to bother with it when he was home, though, he would get temperamental about it because he felt like it was pointless. I could tell it really bothered him that there was potential truth about him right in front of his eyes, and he just couldn't access it.

Still, it made me wonder. Where had he gotten this book? Who was the man that left it behind? How had King gotten ahold of it? It made me wonder if King had anything else in his possession worth inspecting for clues. He'd never unbundled them. After we left his cave, he'd just left them tied up in a pelt, sitting in the corner of our shelter before, sitting in the corner of our cabin now. Part of me felt like he'd be upset with me if I looked through them without him around, but the other part felt like it might not even see him until nightfall, if I see him at all today. I had hours to kill, so I decided to take the risk, better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

As I unbundled the pelt, trinkets and items would tumble out into a small pile in the floor. There were, as expected, pretty rocks, a few gemstones, jewelry, odds and ends you'd expect from a monster's hoard. I couldn't help but smile, looking at the surface of the pile, at how stereotypical it was that he collected shiny objects, like something you'd read about in a fantasy fiction book.

I picked through the pile, though, setting aside the large amounts of rocks and jewelry. He had old clothes, presumably picked off the forest floor or off dead bodies, some of them t-shirts and some of them fancier, coats. Some of them looked very old. He had a few bones, some of them clearly anthro. I felt a bit strange that I wasn't more horrified, dealing with anthro remains, but he'd lived in the woods for over 100 years. I was sure he'd found plenty dead bodies, and it's not like he could call the cops about them. What else can a "Lesidhe" (as he called himself) do but collect what he finds?

There was nothing immediately of interest, unfortunately, and as I began to pile up his belongings again, I realized that the old coat had something in it's pocket. Flipping up the flap, I pulled from it several pieces of paper, and a small book, a personal notebook of sort. As I flipped it open, more papers fell out of it, photos as well. I scrambled to collect them, inspecting each one of them meticulously. They all had that same runic symbolism on them, written as if it was note-taking of some sort, the backs of photos also covered in notes. Whoever this man was, he took a lot of notes, and not one of them was in English. There were several photos, almost all of them photos of trees, or interesting parts of the forest. There was a photo of mushrooms, a photo of flowers, a photo of the underside of a fallen tree, all black and white. One photo, though, stood out. It was a blurry photo of King, moving between trees. I could see his face clearly, the skull face on display, his neck and waistline covered by trees but his body otherwise visible. On the cover of the photo, though, was an English symbol, and part of another one. "M", clearly written, followed by a forward slash symbol. "M/", written clearly on the upper left of the photo, the only photo that had writing on directly on the picture itself, the back covered in notes in the usual runic symbolism.

I must've sat for well over an hour, flipping through that notebook, the photos, the loose papers, all written in rune. The "M/" was the only thing I could read, tragically, and I'd finally bundle up his belongings and tie them back up in the pelt. It was a conversation I didn't want to have until I had started translating, and I decided after putting away his belongings that I would go out for a walk and a bath in the creek. Winter was coming soon, and the creek was getting harder and harder to bathe in, and I wondered if there was going to be a time, any day now, where we were going to have to gather water and warm it ourselves if we wanted to continue bathing. I was sure King wouldn't go for it, and he'd probably just tell me to wait until spring before washing again.

King would arrive home that night, after sunset, dragging the body of a deer by her legs as he called out for me. I had, admittedly, fallen asleep, and I sleepily wandered to the yard to greet him as he threw the deer carcass toward me, remarking "I have made a discovery. Come, see this."

The deer was certainly dead, rigor mortis had set in, and it's torso was gored wide open, organs still intact. As I approached it, I could see that the heart had been cut open, a clean incision in the middle of it. King would approach the carcass, sticking his fingers in his mouth and pulling out some of the fungus mash from under his tongue, his finger swiping through the open wound in the heart. It began, moments later, to beat. The organs would shift slightly, and within a minute, the rigor mortis would soften, the deer's limbs going limp as I saw it's lungs began to hyperventilate, breathing frantically. The body did not move, but King would say "she is looking at me" as the body remained animated. I, admittedly, could only watch in horror. No reaction surfaced in my body but terror in my eyes, bewildered terror. I could not imagine what thoughts were going through the poor girl's head, if any. She'd been dead for a while, I was certain there had been loss of brain cells. She may have had no sense of awareness at all, her body alive purely as a machine and not as a sentient creature. There was no way of knowing. She made no struggle, and she died once more about three minutes later.

"You saw that?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"I can bring things back to life." he was looking at me with his mouth open, his most visual sign of excitement.

"The body was alive, yea, but the brain, King..."

"Nevermind the brain! We can discover more about the brain later! This is tremendous! All this time, the power to practically be a god was growing inside me!"

He had indeed discovered something amazing, but I couldn't feel any sort of excitement over it if all it was going to do was reanimate a body, send it into some sort of frantic half-life half-death state for a few minutes. It just felt like torture, like the old Soviet experiments of reanimated severed dog's heads. What purpose did it serve, and how could we tell even how aware they were? Were we pulling their very souls out of paradise? Were we damning them to some sort of purgatory state in those moments? I couldn't imagine what it was like.

"King, it's amazing, but...I think you should focus more on healing what's already alive. This seems a bit...inhumane..." I could barely stomach saying it, knowing he was going to go into a defensive frenzy, which he unsurprisingly did. I was told I didn't understand, I didn't appreciate how incredible it all was, how intelligent he was for discovering it and how ignorant I was for not wanting to help partake in helping solidify it's potential.

"I have your ring, but I wonder if it's even worth giving it to you now." he said.

"Why's that?" I asked, taking a seat on the porch steps to look at the carcass of the deer, to witness it's stillness once again.

"I have found my calling, I have found purpose in my life after my curse, and you cannot be excited for it. You're so full of civilized morals and nonsense, that spoiled aversion to death. How can I marry you if you cannot join me in this?"

"It's not that I won't join you, or help you, King, it's just that I'm--"

"Scared. You're scared. I know that's what you're going to say. You're always scared!"

"Well, yeah! It's a pretty scary thing seeing you suddenly goring animals and tossing their bodies all over the yard, and NOW you're bringing them back to life too!! Am I not allowed to be scared?"

"Yes, you're allowed to be afraid, but your apprehension shows a lack of commitment."

"How about you give me a little bit to adjust? It takes time to come around to this shit." I threw my hands up. We squabbled about it like we were arguing over who should clean up dinner, not whether or not I should be comfortable with my lover slaughtering and reanimating animals.

"How long do you need?" he asked, like I could put a timestamp on it.

"I don't know, King. Give me a few days. It's a tough thing to witness."

"Fine," he began, "I had not yet decided when to give you your ring, but this will work well. You will tell me when you are ready to commit to this endeavor, and then we will have our marriage. It will be a beautiful wedding, and we will have a thrilling honeymoon, and soon after we will make a child. I am sure of it. I am sure, somewhere in this discovery, that there will be a way for us to procreate even through this degeneracy."

I sat there for a minute, staring at the carcass, trying not to feel ill thinking about what I'd seen, the way it's body had breathed. I knew I need to somehow normalize it, not only what King was doing but our relationship in it's entirety. It had fallen horribly off kilter again, and I needed some normalcy. I needed something like the photos we'd taken, like the sex we sometimes had, to make this feel normal, to not feel crazy.

"King," I began as he ascended the stairs, turning back to look at me.

"Yes?" he'd ask.

"Could you indulge me a bit, tonight, before bed? Some comfort and intimacy would help a lot in adjusting to all this."

King stood there at the stairwell, looking down at me, while I remained looking at the open carcass of the deer, cold, thankfully stiff.

"Yes. Yes, come inside with me, and we will have some fun."