The first thing she heard was a strange sound, like someone sharpening a knife mixed with the whistle of wind passing through the shutters of a broken window.

Then, shuffling, choking, gurgling.

Despite her better judgement, she sent out small, quick pulses of mana, enough to not feel so hopelessly blind but not strong enough to give her details of what was happening above.

Even if she knew, she didn’t want to feel it. She was a coward that way.

The symbols at her feet seemed to grip at her flesh, keeping her pinned in place, her awareness expanding to match the circle’s influence, the ritual circle becoming her and her becoming the ritual circle, a fixture.

The first drops of blood rained down on her, the liquid seeming to pulse and curve midair to land on the upturned crown of her head, trickling down her face, her cheeks, her chest, every scar and injury, pooling in her sockets, before overflowing, tears of blood twisting on her ribcage into bizarre shapes like living snakes as they continued downwards.

Each string of slime, a dizzying caress, the brush of a warm, living blanket being pulled over her squirming skin, come to chase away that ever-present chill.

She felt those above weaken in their struggles, their lifeblood forming soft fingers that felt at her flesh, broken hands clasping over every inch of her.

She tried to breathe slowly, calmly, but she felt her thoughts fuzzing, context and presence slipping, her soul grasping for something old and twisted as the first whispers of starved ecstasy began to dig into her, making her back arch, her mouth open in a gasp. Flashes of light and sound danced around the edges of her mind, and she stiffened, trembling in place.

“The blood of a vampire and a shadow.”

Someone spoke, and she felt their offering, a small trickle of brackish blood along the outer circle, sinking into the symbols carved in space, into her veins, melting into a phantom presence of age and ceaseless struggle that loomed over her, intertwining with her. A creeping shadow, a misbegotten lonely wretch, splitting itself into a million so it would never be alone. A dozen flashing, fleeting memories of darkness and a locked metal door.

A message prodded at her mind, a warning of power and pain.

She knew. He warned her already.

The blood of the sacrifices reached her feet, spreading over the inner circle, the symbols and runes flaring and melting into the floor, the cold stone beneath her warming, breathing with her.

“The blood of a wolf.”

Another offering, a steady trickle of blood, bringing with it the scent of death and carnage, of ceaseless, tireless change, of freedom.

It was fresh, so fresh.

It tried to sink into her runes, the fractaling spires, and they snapped under its weight. The circles twisted, snapping and squelching like broken bodies as they began to spin across the cold stone beyond her, the sound mixing with reality’s harsh, rasping gasps as the ritual pulsed with power.

The blood of ceaseless hunger crawled, raced across the runes, reached her feet, pooling into the grooves in the center, swirling around her, before finally, it began to intertwine with the wretched being’s, consuming it, wrapping around her ankles.

Threads of memory and shimmering mirrors reflecting mirrors and mountains made of bones flashed across her mind. The flashes of light at the edge of her mind glimmered and twisted, forming a world wreathed in red, expanding, taking her away, into somewhere she should never be.

The skies, a million shades of crimson. The clouds, a miasma of death.

She watched the stars shiver in the distance as nothing but an empty skull, one amongst a million, a billion, rolling and tumbling endlessly in an endless ocean of them, each a soul without a mouth with which to scream, a cacophony of cracking and clacking as they tumbled in a broken pocket of reality, in a prison.

A howling shriek from a thousand maws broke the silence, and the stars wailed for mercy, winking out, one by one.

Nothing but the silent darkness remained, cold and desolate as they waited, rolling and tumbling, a world of the dead and the devoured.

In an instant and an eternity, the silence and darkness receded with a slow scream, the blurry image of a thousand straining chains filling the sky, bending and snapping as something monstrous and divine howled above, straining, thrashing, faster and faster, red whips and coronas flashing through the gaps.

It howled, a shrieking, broken noise, a familiar sound, and the chains rattled, cracking, reforming, straining inch by inch as something made of twisting flesh thrashed and jerked for freedom.

Each howl was filled with the essence of inevitability, of futility. It filled her soul with knowledge so ancient it eclipsed her, an ancient piece of the world.

It would one day break free, to devour all who had restrained it, and all their measly pawns.

Her stomach withered like drying branches as she jerked back to reality with a harsh gasp. She felt her ribs crack, bend backwards like splindly fingers, cracking branches, her chest snapping open. Agony choked her scream into a gargling groan as her knees hit the blood-covered stone.

Something split inside her, like the flesh of her soul parting before a scalpel. The blood rushed into the gaping chasm of her chest, covering her like a second skin, more than there should possibly be, more than mere twelve people could ever provide. The runes began to bleed, the bones turned to ashes.

Crimson pooled around her, softening the stone, breathing and shuddering, racing up from the ground, falling from above, covering every inch of her, twisting like fabric being pulled, a curtain of warmth twisting around her.

Every ragged gasp brought in another rush of ecstasy and agony, of power and the sense of being filled, to the brim, and even further. She smelled iron, she tasted starlight.

She felt herself stretch, blood forcing itself into her veins like tendrils. Her flesh stretched, her skin pulsing and splitting, her blood mixing with the rest, and she choked on a word, she didn’t know which.

Someone was talking, two voices, one worried, another calm, sending messages she couldn’t parse, just shoving them away, unable to comprehend words or meanings. Her ears were ringing, an insistent whine.

On the outer circle, another steady trickle of blood, thick like honey and shimmering, melting into the red, rushing through the ritual’s channels, through the pool of blood that slowly rose around her. It joined the tide flooding her chest.

She choked and gagged, spasming, her arm and stump jerking together, her spine bending, in and out. Her lips tasted ash and a new taste that didn't exist. The hunger stole her breath, her mind, her control. She felt her knees quake as she began to gasp and jerk, the flashes of light forming shapes, teeth and scales, all brushing past her mind, and she felt herself lurch as her eyes opened.

She saw an endless field as far as the eye could see stretched before her, a golden dawn framing a million bodies impaled upon aging, rusting spears. A scene frozen in time formed, like fragments of glass sliding together, and a man she knew, a man she could recognize, lay at the forefront, imperious, shoulders square and the weight of his glare so utterly crushing.

An arrow jutted out of his right eye. A dozen more out of his back, his arms, his legs. A spear had impaled him through the stomach, the man who’d done it dead on the ground, still gripping the shaft. His red cape was tattered, his armor shredded, his body destroyed, his right arm gone, not an inch of him not red in blood both his and foreign. And yet he still stood, the blood of millions forming rivers behind him, rushing to fill his wounds, an endless tide.

He stared down at a man wreathed in holy light with a glare full of hatred, his boot buried in their chest, his left arm raising another spear above him, hues of gold and red glinting in the waking yawns of dawn that rose behind him.

She felt the damp scrape of wet stone on her half-formed scales. She inhaled the sky, and drank in the world’s essence as if from a chalice.

She watched a strange human cradle her in her arms. She lay on a crumbling temple’s altar, dying, her wings broken, and the woman drank from her, drank her rotting, dying blood, and carved symbols on her own flesh.

A tinkling chime, a flickering mass of existence wreathing Ergos like a veil.

The frozen images winked out, and she was back, her mind pulled between ecstasy and agony. Her skin tore, her fingers snapped backwards, and the sensation combined with the pain of her torn open chest. She shrieked as she collapsed further, her open chest cavity hitting the squishy floor, fire and jagged glass and stabbing electricity racing through her nerves.

Another mental message, one she sent back to all of them without the ability to parse the information, too confused, consumed. She heard words devolve into incomprehensible sounds.

Something dropped into the slowly sinking pool of blood, a spider leg, another, another.

The blood rose, rushing into her, through every open stretch there was. Through her eyes, her burns and scrapes. The blood pulled, filled her. Her flesh ballooned, tore through her own skin, then turned to goop, her body fading, her mind lost, panicking.

She raised her arm above the blood slowly consuming her, and it bent, squelched. Her wrist and all after it detached with a disgusting gloop sound, like a half-melted slab of butter, and she realized that she was melting alive for the second time.

It didn’t hurt nearly enough to make her believe it.

She tried to get up.

Her vision snapped back and she could see again, feeling eight legs move at her command, spiked and black as she skittered through a tunnel made of webs, a million beady red eyes staring at her through every gap in the silken strands. Then she could not see anything, trying to get up with a hand that only melted into the inch-deep pool of blood around her with every push.

She felt her flesh drip off in wet, goopy chunks, felt her limbs spasm, felt foreign strings inside her yank her in ways she wasn’t meant to bend. Her knee snapped backwards as she tried to rise, and she tried to shuffle upright, or even just away from this place, only to feel a wet, sticky tide of crimson broil and froth out of her mouth.

Sounds faded in.

“Is she really okay?! This looks like it’s killing her!”

“She is not okay at the moment. I told you, it hurts. But she will not die. And for the last piece, the eye of a contract demon.” A voice spoke.

Something dropped into the edge of the pool, and she felt it as acutely as if it had dropped onto her head.

Sounds faded out as her skull hollowed.

The eye melted, into the bottomless roiling pool that filled her, into her.

A broken, stuttering series of whispers, overlapping each other, a thousand images flashing past her eyes, each a memory with weight yet fleeting, gone before she could even process more than a still, vague impression. A bloodied grate, the inside of a box covered in scratches, her nails bloody and broken, a tongue dripping crimson writing letters on a scroll, a twisted effigy wrapped in her embrace, nails and stakes keeping her pinned around it, pain, betrayal, betrayal, betrayal, betrayal-

A black pool of sludge with a crying old woman slowly wading into its depths-

A humming buzz of ecstasy scattered her thoughts, racing up and down her very soul, her very mind. Despair and careless euphoria, intertwined, sensations never meant to mix filling her, overwhelming her. Heart-rending agony, soul-filling pleasure, the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, despair and hope.

Someone was yelling, something was snarling.

Something was whispering, a susurrus hum at the edge of her hearing.

The circles flared with a grating, shrill sound like a despairing wail, and contracted, spasmed. She tried to scream again as she felt her tongue and throat drip down her gaping chest, through where organs should be but weren’t, her arm bone struggling to find purchase against the breathing bottom of the pool, moving softly up and down beneath her.

She couldn’t breathe, too much blood rushing into her, through her nostrils, her eyes, breaking through the cracks of her bones, into everything she was.

What was she?

The second, third, and fourth circle activated below her, the spider legs finally sinking down into the depths.

The blood rushing around her, inside her, twisted, trying to curl into a ball. Her spine snapped as her torso spun into a spiral, her legs crumpled like paper, breaking, twisting. Her neck was wrenched backwards as tendrils of blood coiled around her, tighter, tighter, into a ball, a cocoon, each contortion and tear making equal ecstasy and agony overwhelm her.

Nothingness consumed her.

Katherine's fists shook as she stared at what little she could see, the overwhelming cocktail of emotions leaving her with a strange, panicking numbness.

She couldn’t see clearly, none of it, but she could see enough to be disturbed, to wonder if her friend was ever shaped like that.

Her breaths came hard and fast, and her eyes flit to the left, to the half-dozen glowing eyes illuminating Ghoul’s silhouette in the pitch black darkness.

The wolf, the wretched beast, snarled and shuddered, a mass of glaring eyes and tense limbs, glowering at Ghoul and barely restraining itself from jumping into the circle.

She just tried to focus on breathing right, on the simple, logical facts of all of this, even as what little she could see from within the circle and its glowing runes looked like Emhreeil was writhing and twisting horrifically.

That shriek echoed in her head.

Ghoul would not have gone through all this trouble just to kill Emhreeil by fucking up his ritual. He had warned them of this. Pain and power.

Then the sphere of roiling blood that had encased Emhreeil began to sink into the puddle of blood on the floor, a puddle that couldn’t possibly be as deep as the bloody sphere was tall, yet it still continued to submerge. She took two hurried steps forward without realizing.

A hand of steel clamped down on her arm, and yanked her back, a little.

Her head whipped to the side, staring up at the faint reflection of gold on the edge of Ghoul’s metal headplate. Her eyes flicked to the wolf, half its eyes on Ghoul, the others on the ritual.

It wasn’t moving or attacking. Not running either.

Emhreeil...

Her head jerked to the right to look at the tranquil ring of blood, empty. No monstrous spider limbs, no bizarre eyes with six pupils in one iris. No strange wolf blood, glowing across the runes and creeping forth like the trail of a snake.

Nothing.

“Where is she?” She demanded, teeth grit, forgetting for a moment that there was a wolf that was scared of this man, or at least wary enough of him to cower at first sight.

“Being reborn. In a sense. All part of the ritual. Just wait.”

She clenched her jaw and nodded, eyes glued to the still, perfect circle.

It felt like there should be something to disturb it. Some breeze, some stray drop of blood from the people above, a tremor through the floor to send ripples across the tranquil surface.

For a minute however, there was nothing.

Then she felt it. Felt her.

She was so happy about [Pack Hunter] including her in its bizarre sensory ability that she was tempted to try and forget what the curious-looking ball of limbs and eyes in the corner of her vision was.

She could feel Emhreeil, in the center of the bloody puddle, but deeper.

Not in the floor, either, just… somehow deeper than the ring was thick.

And she felt different. It was strange and distorted and too new a sense to be sure, but something about her felt off.

Did that mean it worked or not?

Regardless, she neared the circle, mirroring the wolf by accident, both of them staring into the tranquil, inch-deep puddle that somehow held their… mutual friend within, only fifteen feet across.

She could feel Emhreeil twisting and bucking and moving… upwards? Swiping down? No, just.. Undulating like a ribbon. Or maybe flapping like fabric? It was making her dizzy trying to figure out how she was moving and what she was doing.

“Come on.” She muttered softly, trying to encourage her even if she didn’t really know how to, regardless of if she could even hear her.

“I would suggest you back away.” Ghoul droned, and it took her a moment to remember why, his instructions to the wolf before Emhreeil stopped relaying the messages.

Emhreeil would be hungry.

With a deep breath and a nod, she stepped back, not stopping until she was several feet away.

The first sign of life brought with it elation, and she slumped a little with a sigh of relief.

Fingers triumphantly jutted out of the puddle for a moment, before jerking, twisting, as if they were moving through quicksand. They disappeared again, leaving the ripples of the pond behind, before the hand they were attached to speared forward, up to the thumb.

That was where elation began to mix with apprehension, as she began to notice the details, how the fingers were a little too bulky and ended in sharp tips like the clawed gauntlets Katherine herself was wearing. The wrist began to tilt, and another note of apprehension rose as she saw how far back and forward the hand could bend.

Said wrist was almost as thick as the wolf’s. She said she would accept Emhreeil regardless. She meant it. Still, she fervently wished that what came out of that puddle was not a monster. Not another one.

As if peripherally thinking of the beast summoned it, the wolf excitedly began to circle around, keeping its head pointed at the middle, damn near prancing around, tongue lolling out of its mouth like a common stupid dog.

If it wasn’t for the uncanny, unnaturally human anatomy of its upper body, she might have found the sight a little cute. As it was, it was uncomfortable enough to turn her eyes back to Emhreeil, jerking and bucking to free her forearm, like she was stuck in wet mud.

“Does she need help? Can we help?” She asked, and Ghoul scoffed through his mouth.

“I told you this already when the elf could still relay my messages. Stop worrying.”

“That’s not a no.”

Ghoul somehow managed to portray a sense of annoyance without shifting a millimeter or changing anything about the way he talked.

“No, you cannot help her. Struggle is the essence of all life and creation. The chick that cannot break through its own shell will not be strong enough to survive what lies outside it. To help her would change her and weaken her. It would violate the spirit of the ritual, even if not its rules.”

She turned back to the puddle, the wolf now bouncing around as it ran circles around it, its cheery demeanor contrasting terribly with the slaughterhouse aesthetic of the entire thing.

She was never one to understand magics and rituals and the arcane to any measure. She just didn’t really get it. What spirit? Was the ritual done by a spirit? The blood had looked to be alive, from what little she could glimpse from the candle light.

Or did he mean the spirit in a more general fashion, the idea of it? That didn’t seem right either.

Would it really weaken her physically and magically, or did he mean it mentally, or spiritually? She was really starting to hate this man, even if she wouldn’t dare say it out loud.

She stopped thinking about it.

Emhreeil’s hand was out, up to the elbow now, and she grimaced at what she could see. The blood made it difficult to be sure, but the smooth bumps, the curving, dripping spikes that randomly dotted her forearm that looked suspiciously like clumps of wet fur?

Whatever Emhreeil looked like now, that arm was not human. The wolf seemed to understand Ghoul’s idea more than she did, because even when it began to slow and tilt its head, pretty much bouncing in place in anticipation, it didn’t take one step inside the ritual circle. The elbow was freed, and she flinched as she watched those clawed fingers slam into the puddle, sending a wild spray with enough force for a few drops to pepper her face as far away as she was.

No sound of breaking stone, somehow. Was there even stone under the blood anymore? She pursed her lips, annoyance and concern battling for space in her head. She wanted to help, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t much stronger than the average street thug, even if she had much better training due to House Kervile’s generous employment, but she wasn’t delusional. Emhreeil was, bizarrely enough, stronger than her ever since they’d reunited. And that was before she turned into whatever she just turned into.

So she just observed, even if it grated her. Emhreeil’s hand looked… more like a thick paw covered in harsh edges and plates, with small lines and patches of other textures she couldn’t see from afar.

The final joint of each finger was just one long line on the lower side, barely curving downwards into a sharp point. After the sharp point, it was a backwards line all the way up to the upper side, giving a sort of slanted axehead look to each finger. It looked vicious. More for grabbing and grappling and crushing than actually cutting.

It wasn’t what she was expecting on someone like Emhreeil that fought like a snake, from what she had seen. Emhreeil would wait, make or see an opening, and strike it hard and fast with everything she had, like a nigh-suicidal assassin. That arm looked like it belonged on the wolf.

Did the ritual put no thought towards how she was like?

The shoulder finally emerged, and it was the wolf’s intense gaze that lit up what she had been squinting at all this time, gold and orange light mixing to provide her with an image.

The entire arm from the wrist up was a twisting vortex of soaked fur, scales, and some kind of smooth, segmented plating. Chitin, she could guess, from those huge spider legs. The muscles were off too, like someone who didn’t know anatomy tried to draw them, strange bumps and misplaced or duplicated muscles covering the entire arm.

The shoulder slowly turned into something like gnarled leather as it neared her collarbone, the texture slowly turning to smooth skin near her neck, the delt covered in small, cone-shaped little spikes. Then the right side of the head began to peel off of the puddle, and she groaned, a sharp, deep sound of relief, slumping forward to support herself on her knees.

That was a human head. No ears on the sides, but that was a human head. She’d half expected some six-armed monstrosity to crawl out of that puddle and start talking to her like the wolf did, and then she’d probably just give up on life making sense forever.

“Oh thank gods.” She breathed out, breathing low and deep.

So, it was just the right arm. That was completely fine by her. Em deserved to be mobile and able again. It even looked strong as hell. That was good.

An excited yip-whine followed by a strangely low-pitched snarl made her raise her head, and she paid more attention.

Emhreeil…

Didn’t look the same, snarling and straining to pull her hair out of the pit.

Her eye shape was more hawkish, her brows more angular. There were spots on her face that had scales or randomly shaped plates, even a bit of fur coming out beside her right eye, just around her cheekbone. They’d almost look like highlights if they were a little more symmetrical and orderly, but now, they just straddled the line between looking like an unfortunate defensive mutation and a cosmetic highlight.

Her facial structure had also changed. Cheekbones were a bit higher, her jaw was a little more angular, her eyes somehow even bigger than they had been before, to the point it looked a little eerie, even when they stayed firmly shut.

But beside the appearance, what made her heart drop was that Emhreeil wasn’t acting like Emhreeil. Emhreeil wouldn’t be thrashing and pulling like an animal in a pit of quicksand, wouldn’t be snarling with a vocal range human throats just didn’t have.

Her eyes moved to the nape of her neck, where her spine jutted out in strange, blocky ups and downs, nothing like a human spine, and much too thick to be.

The neck muscles were wrong too. The front two tendons to pull the head down were there, but they were also on every other side of her neck, standing out against her skin as she tried to remove her hair from the puddle.

Another minute later of awkward silence broken only by Emhreeil and the wolf, she finally yanked her hair out and shook her head like a dog, spraying blood everywhere for a moment before she began twisting at the waist, hunching over and pushing down, slowly managing to dig her left shoulder out, then her left arm.

Her entire musculature had changed in ways that didn’t seem to make sense. Why did her forearm have two of those tubes of muscle curling over the top, and why did one go under the other and around to her tricep? So she could snap her elbow backwards at will?

There were small bunches of other odd muscles at her shoulders and around her deltoids which also didn’t make sense. Lady Anna had taught her anatomy fairly well. What she was watching made no sense.

The wolf didn’t seem to care much, its massive tails sweeping the floor in quick, wide wags as it hopped back and forth, its front half always pointed to Emhreeil.

She wished she could ask it what on earth was going through its head right now. Was it happy Em might match it, in some way?

Emhreeil’s chest slowly dug out of the mire, significantly faster with the help of both arms, and as her utterly soaked hair settled, she spotted movement in said hair, fast twitches, before something triangular dug itself out. The ears weren’t exactly like the wolf’s. They were furred, but much thinner and more maneuverable, judging by the way they erratically spasmed to free themselves of her hair. They were also a fair bit longer.

Her chest had a modest bulge where breasts might once have been, but it was just a flat plane now, half-covered by a crooked V-shape of scales on one side and a bunch of segmented chitin plates on the other.

The puddle quickly reached Emhreeil’s stomach, which presented more inhuman musculature that made her so utterly confused. The muscle definition, borne more out of a lack of fat than exercise, helped her see it all.

Her abdominals weren’t the classic, blocky pairs, instead being pairs of downward tilting rectangles forming rough chevron shapes, almost a dozen of them. The muscles on her waist and sides looked like ropes with skin over them, more than obliques. The addition of half-random seeming patches of scales, plates and fur did not help with the aesthetic. She didn’t look monstrous, not really, the sight wasn’t nearly as horrifying as the wolf when he wasn’t hiding everything. She just looked… inhuman. Strangely twisted.

A particularly violent, snarling twist made her realize she may have spoken too soon about Em not being a six-armed monstrocity.

She wasn’t sure what she saw, but she saw something behind Emhreeil’s back twist, watched some of her frontal chest muscles contract as if pulling something around her.

Ghoul had said something about a dragon vampire or something as he emptied a large jar of blood into the circle, so she assumed it was wings.

When Emhreeil had dug herself out enough to reach her hips, her snake-like middle shifting to free the hipbones as she flattened herself forward, Katherine assumed she was right, to some extent. It looked like bulky, muscled wings mixed with a spider's leg, without the membrane or the little bones in the interim, just one large mass that seemed to dig itself out from beneath her shoulderblades and fold its tips near the base of her back.

They were huge.

Maybe it was morbid curiosity or just impatience, but nevertheless, she began to circle opposite the wolf, trying to get a better image.

With most of herself out of the mud-like floor, Emhreeil’s body language had more room to unnerve her. There was more room for the inhuman musculature to contract and pull things in just the right way to make something instinctive in herself a little squeamish, nothing like watching the wolf move but enough to make her uneasy.

With a struggling groan and a pull full of quivering tension, the tips of the spider-like wings freed themselves, snapping up into the air with a spray of blood, into the darkness where she couldn’t catch many details.

She did catch the glint of the light reflecting off something that moved where it shouldn’t, and only when the wings slammed down into the puddle to help Emhreeil dig her thighs and legs out did she realize what she was looking at.

Hands at the tip of the wings, where nothing but a thin bone should be.

The palms alone were larger than Katherine’s head, each finger almost two feet long, the last joints nothing but bleached blades of bone that seemed to refuse to let blood cling to them.

She gulped, suddenly worried that they had been lied to by Ghoul. That maybe this was all some ploy to turn Emhreeil into a monster. It wouldn’t be out of character with how terribly their lives had gone up to this point, but she still held hope. Ghoul had told them how this would go. Emhreeil would be… feral, for a little bit. Hungry, rabid.

That was the wolf’s job to deal with.

Still, as long legs covered by patchwork biological armor rose, segmented plates and coarse fur and large scales, she felt somehow responsible. Complicit, in a sense.

She didn’t have much time to ruminate or stew in her guilt before another monstrous detail came to sight as she circled behind Em. A tail, rigidly stuck behind her leg as it stretched down to the floor with tension, barely squirming.

Her eyes followed the appendage, noting that it looked more like Emhreeil’s spine decided to continue far past where it should have stopped, something like a blocky whip just barely covered with everything except human skin.

Her eyes roamed up to the bizarre, twisting muscles on Emhreeil’s back, only a pair of bat-wing shaped muscles on her upper back looking even vaguely familiar.

Emhreeil suddenly threw herself backwards, back flat to the floor as all four arms scraped for purchase in the blood, slowly working her knees out of it, panting, eyes still closed.

After digging her shins halfway out, Emhreeil tensed her legs and arms, throwing herself upright with a frustrated cry, quickly pushing down with her hands and twisting.

Then she was free.

Or so Katherine thought until Em twisted around to grab her squirming tail in all four hands, plant her feet down, and pull.

The way those bony knife-fingers jutted out where they clenched like gigantic urchins clamped onto the tail made it easy to remind herself this might not be Emhreeil at all, even if only for a bit.

It looked painful, but only a familiar, determined sneer lay on Emhreeil’s face. The tail came out, and out, and out, until it was almost seven or something feet long, and finally, Emhreeil lurched back with a barely audible pop, her tail in her hands.

The wing-arms snapped backwards to catch her before she could hit the floor, and Katherine felt faintly sick at the sight. Arms, three jointed and not bending right, like someone took a wing, stripped it, covered it in a wild mash of armor and fur, and added two gigantic hands at the tips. But... no, they didn’t look like wings, they didn’t look like spider legs, and they didn't move like arms, despite looking like they were some kind of hybrid of all three.

It just looked wrong in that sickening way that was hard to look away from.

Emhreeil straightened, slumped forward, staggered in place, the ears on her head twitching manically as she panted.

A humanoid arm, the only one that Emhreeil had, the left, extended down to the pool.

The blood suddenly began to whirl and rise, wavering in the air as it retreated from the edges of the ritual circle to carefully and slowly begin to rise towards Emhreeil’s head. Her mouth opened, the faint glint of fangs making Katherine wince in the middle of her pacing. Then the mouth opened even wider, muscles on her face she hadn’t seen before pulling the cheeks back like stretching rubber, and it opened even wider like her face was degloving-

She looked away, closed her eyes, and tried to swallow down the bile that rose into her mouth.

“It is still her. Give it some time. The wolf will deal with her until she’s past the initial frenzy. I’ll step in if needed.” Ghoul said blankly.

Was it still her?

It wasn’t like she could do something here. Best she could do was take his word for it and hope.

Worst case scenario, she’d follow the wolf until it took revenge. It looked like the spiteful type, at least. No wonder he and Em seemed to resonate so much together, much as she didn’t want to see or admit it out loud.

She took a deep breath, and glanced back.

The blood on the floor was gathering into a swirling spire that fed straight into Emhreeil’s mouth. A mouth wide with perfect teeth and eight thin, needle-like fangs on the front, wide enough to make her feel like it could clamp around the lower half of her own face without much issue, the gums exposed as the skin and patches of other materials gathered around the base of her jaw and behind her cheekbones. It looked like the grin of a madman turned beast.

Her stomach roiled with unease.

Ghoul said it was still her. She just had to believe that.

It was a little difficult.

Emhreeil looked like something out of a nightmare as she stood there, hunched over, arms and shoulders limp, her hair a wet, crusting curtain. Even the blood that covered her seemed to gather into streams and crawl forward to feed into her gaping maw, her wing-like arms barely moving, their blade-like tips softly feeling the floor’s markings as if tapping a rhythm.

She watched the last of the crimson ichor gather off the floor and float into Emhreeil’s mouth, watched Em stand there for a moment, not even breathing. Did she need to anymore?

It was silent enough to hear a pin drop.

Instead, it was the sound of a single drop hitting stone, and Katherine’s eyes jerked to the right, where the wolf had dug into its own wrist with its claws. It put its paws down, and unfurled its limbs, crouching in preparation, tails wagging despite its battle-ready stance.

Emhreeil’s eyes opened.

Two orbs of pure golden light, with no white sclera in sight, the pupil just a giant slit like a cat’s eyes.

A very, very thin slit.

Emhreeil took a deep breath through her nose, turned her head to stare with unseeing eyes at the wolf. Her ears twisted to the side, then pressed back and flat against her own head.

One moment she was there.

The next, she’d practically teleported to the wolf with a jerky blur of motion, and all Katherine saw was a tangled yarn of snarling limbs tumbling off into the darkness as they collided.

Her jaw dropped.

“Did you expect the wolf to give its blood without struggle?” Ghoul asked, something that might have sounded amused if he didn’t sound so bored.

“Yes.” She numbly breathed out, watching the flashes of golden light tumbling and striking at each other, snarls and thudding impacts making her flinch.

“Shouldn’t we…”

“They’re not in danger. The wolf is in the mood for some play-fighting before it gives up its blood. There’s no point to a game if one capitulates immediately, there has to be some illusion of struggle.” Ghoul explained, watching alongside her.

She watched the jumble of golden eyes slam into the floor, a blur of teeth and jerky motions following the meaty thuds of flesh striking flesh. A roll of some kind, Emhreeil’s body tumbling for a moment before she assumedly hit the floor, and immediately charged the wolf again.

“That’s not play fighting.” She said, fists clenched.

She hated how little control and impact she had in this. All of this.

An intrusive thought rose, and she discarded it for the moment. Maybe later. Maybe when she got a little more used to this insanity.

As if to accentuate her doubts of this being some kind of casual fight, the wolf lurched, dragged, then a moment later, was thrown into the metal poles around the ritual, bowling them over, the aftershock of its impact snuffing out the candles entirely.

Something tapped her shoulder, and a small, thin pipe was pressed into her hand before she could react.

“Flashlight. Shame to miss such a show.” Ghoul casually explained without sounding like he cared at all or felt any such shame about missing the fucking ‘show’, and she backed away in caution, before she found the button and clicked it. Pale, weak light shone in a wide cone, barely enough to see.

The wolf was…

Getting destroyed.

Emhreeil was keeping it off the ground, battering it around then stabbing at it with those bladed fingers, trying to latch onto its bleeding wrist, only for the wolf to constantly twist it out of the way, throw her off, and then just charge into her like a mindless brute, only using its limbs to grapple and smack Emhreeil away.

But it was getting hit more and more, getting more and more careless.

As the seconds turned to a solid minute, and Emhreeil’s snarls began to sound more enraged and more savage than even the wolf’s, she quickly realized that while Emhreeil was flagging, the wolf barely seemed to notice anything. It wasn’t dodging anything except the right arm by now, as if it had tested how hard Em could hit and wasn’t worried. And even though it barely dodged anymore, she could still only barely follow them with the light, they moved so damn fast.

She watched Emhreeil slam her wing’s claws into its unprotected throat, and the sudden stop made her feel like she just watched Em try to punch through solid steel.

It wasn’t even feeling the strikes. She just wasn’t doing any damage to it. The wolf was letting her tire herself out, wagging its tails between whips and smiling a wolfen grin between snarls.

She could see it now. Ghoul was right. It was playing.

Until it wasn’t.

Emhreeil charged in again and for once, the wolf didn’t let her.

A ball of air exploded on Emhreeil’s left foot mid-charge, a tail slammed into her shoulder. Her wings tried to scrabble onto the floor to prevent her suddenly spinning fall, and the tentacle on the wolf’s back whipped out to ensnare them in a tight grip against each other as it let their bodies collide. The tails tightly wrapped around the right arm, twisting it around her back.

A dizzying twist and shuffle of a dozen limbs, and Emhreeil’s panting, snarling form was on the floor, wings wrenched painfully to the side, arms pinned by the wolf’s. The right one seemed to be giving it a lot more trouble than it was expecting, making it growl in frustration and use both tails and its main left arm to keep it pinned, writhing to shift its weight onto it.

Then it jammed its bleeding wrist into Emhreeil’s mouth, and settled down on top of her as she struggled to free herself, biting down on the arm and futilely punching its ribs with the other arm.

Each impact sounded like it should have turned bone to splinters, but other than grunts and annoyed flicks of its ear, the wolf barely seemed to care. Emhreeil slowly calmed, then just stopped struggling entirely. Then she began shuddering and writhing and making sounds that were almost scandalous, if it weren’t for the fact the scene was disturbing and horrifying enough to make any such insinuation downright sickening.

The wolf tried to peel its wrist back after releasing her limbs, and Em’s head rose with it, clamped.

It gave her an unamused look that was bizarrely legible and expressive for a wolfen face, its brows flattening into a line.

Emhreeil’s left hand rose to flick its ear.

The wolf growled, and then they started grappling on the floor again, Emhreeil laughing through its fur, still latched on, letting out muffled squeals and woops of joy as they rolled on the cold stone.

Em twisted to her, and their eyes met.

Her eyes were so large, practically twinkling with pure joy, happiness.

She couldn’t help but beam back at her, tension leaving her, feeling like she just turned weightless after carrying the entire world on her back.

That was Emhreeil. Her friend was still here. Even if she was now… six and a half feet tall or so, and built like a disfigured beastkin with too much mixed blood to have a category.

The wolf’s jaws clamped over Emhreeil’s head, damn near swallowing the whole thing in its massive jaws, and Em made a disgusted sound, a muffled protest that sounded like “my hair!” leaving her mouth as she twisted out of its grip. Still refusing to let go of its wrist.

Everything worked out. Miraculously. Emhreeil was fine, the wolf was fine, they were all alive and nothing had gone horrifically wrong and turned her friend into a gibberish hellspawn like she had been afraid of.

The light was shaking.

She looked down.

Her hand was shaking.

“I feel lightheaded.” She mumbled, suddenly feeling oddly numb about the whole situation.

Was she in shock? Or just so relieved she couldn’t process it?

A hand clamped down over her nape, bunching her clothes up in its fist, and her feet left the ground.

She turned the light to the side, staring at Ghoul as he held her up in the air like a disobedient kitten.

“You can faint if you wish.”

She couldn’t tell if he was joking, but it didn't sound like it. And that only made it more absurd, so she couldn’t stop the hysterical, slightly manic giggle that left her, dropping the flashlight to cover her face with her hands, unsure if she was sobbing in disbelief, relief, or laughing, or just making weird coughs anymore.

Scruffy at least tried to pull her down, bless her little heart.

It was almost a full minute later that Ghoul let go of her, only for her to be picked up by something else distinctly humanoid.

She knew these arms, even if they were built wrong and there was way too much fur and chitin and scales to make it work. She hugged back.

“You okay?” Emhreeil whispered, her voice shivery and jerky, but also a little too deep to feel like it was actually Emhreeil talking to her.

She took a moment to think about it.

“Yeah. Going to need some time to get used to you again. Make my… mental image match you again. Right now you feel like a little like a stranger with Em’s memories. But I'm alright.” She mumbled.

Emhreeil grimaced with a slight sound of understanding.

“I’m a bit offended, but fair enough. I know that feeling more than well enough. Wolf as a friend and all that. He changes a lot.” Emhreeil hummed, then hugged her tighter, her mouth on her shoulder making it all too easy to know that she was beaming, even as she shivered with worrying intensity.

The hug was making her ribs creak, but she didn't have the heart to tell her to let up, seeing as it didn't hurt yet.

“I can see again. I can move again, I can feel heat and cold, and nothing- nothing hurts at all, I can fucking wrestle with him, and my right arm feels like its made of fucking granite. I have wing arms!” Emhreeil rambled with a light laugh, then twisted. “Ghoul. Thank you.”

“...You’re welcome. I’ll drop you off nearby, somewhere with more than enough morally acceptable targets for all three of you to rack up a kill count without it being a complete slaughter. Somewhere close to the middle of the third floor. Can’t go further. I’ll give you a couple things for communication and such, and occasionally feed you information.”

Before Ghoul and Em could start going back and forth with details, she cleared her throat, blinking the remnants of tears out of her eyes, whatever emotion caused them gone by now.

“Can you put me down first?” She asked.

There was no reply for a moment.

“I’m tall as hell. Taller than Ghoul. I... wow.” Emhreeil breathed out with an air of awe.

She pinched Emhreeil’s side in reply, getting mildly annoyed with being manhandled. Especially after hours of enduring such things from the wolf yesterday.

All it did was make her gauntlets slide over skin that felt like porcelain.

“Put me down.”

“Right, right.”

Her feet touched the floor, and she took a step back, trying to reorganize, her head feeling swamped and overwhelmed.

“Ghoul, do you want to come with us? Eating in a group is good for bonding and all that, and I assume at least three of us eat people now, since your name is Ghoul, and... This sounded a lot better in my head.” Emhreeil murmured, then shifted. “Wait, I’m naked." She half-asked, patting her chest as if checking for where her breasts were.

“Strange invitation. No. Maybe when I have time. If it makes you feel better about being naked, the goblin and the human cannot see in the dark.” Ghoul said.

“It doesn’t. I won’t even fit in my old clothes anymore…. Do you... have a tailor? You seem much better dressed than last time.”

“Yes. I’ll leave some of my contacts with the rest of the items.”

Some walking, some shuffling. She couldn’t see who, not really, despite the soft glow of her friend's and the wolf's eyes. She picked up the flashlight, and looked around for a moment.

Emhreeil gasped.

“Wait, do our eyes match?” Emhreeil asked, sounding oddly excited, staring right at the wolf. Then she shifted, and squinted.

Another familiar prod at Katherine's mind, which she accepted.

The wolf stared back, then a moment later, it accepted too, as did Scruffy, and Emhreeil sent them all her question after a dozen seconds of sitting there with her brows furrowed in concentration. The same question. Did their eyes match?

The wolf replied with a blatant sense of confirmation before any of them could, and Katherine got to watch the uniquely disturbing sight of Emhreeil throwing her hands up in triumph, only for her massive wings to follow, flaring up and to the side in a twisted imitation of a human gesture, her tail, seven feet of bony leather and scale, whipping and wagging.

She tried to bundle that feeling of unease, and sent it through.

Emhreeil blinked, before turning to her.

“Oh.”

A few seconds of awkward silence reigned before a bundle of apology and a begrudging sense that she’d just have to get used to it was sent by Em. The wolf was just confused about what made her uneasy about their forms. Typical.

She sent back agreement to Em after a few lagging seconds of trying to get a hang of the strangeness of not thinking with sounds and words in her own head.

She would just have to get used to that too.

If only she could get more than a single damn day between disturbing developments and spine-curling changes.

“Not to ruin your conversation, but I have places to be.” Ghoul said dryly, and Emhreeil nodded, suddenly all business. Then she turned to her, owl-wide eyes staring at her in the darkness.

She raised the light to be able to see her rather than pointing it at the floor.

Emhreeil was a lot paler than she remembered.

“Hey, uhm… could you help me dress a little? It’s… going to be a little awkward to see what might fit or not with three... or four new limbs.” Em said with a guilty grimace.

Katherine shook her head.

“No, it’s fine. Have to get used to it. Yes, I’ll help.” She said, a little more hesitantly than she would have liked, then sent a message through the link.

“Scruffy, hold the flashlight on us?”

The wolf sent annoyance at the human sounds, but she couldn’t care at the moment.

Scruffy sent back agreement as she stepped forward, and after the flashlight swapped hands, she joined Em in seeing which of her clothes could still be worn.

She tripped on something that moved and pushed her foot to the side, likely Emhreeil’s new tail, and a giant, twisted palm slapped itself down on her chest to stop her fall, one she instinctively grabbed onto before freezing up, staring at the foot-something long blades just an inch or two away from her neck.

“Sorry, sorry!” Em rushed, pushing her back and upright a bit. “Not used to having a tail yet, it just… moves on its own.” She shrugged, and her wings moved with the motion. “So do these.” She added, clicking the claws on her other wing together to emphasize.

Katherine stiffly nodded as she pushed off of the limb, finding it as unbending as iron, and swallowed, emptying whatever feelings were still inside her.

She cleared her throat, and without another word, sidestepped the new appendages a little, not wishing to get any closer to them than she had to, and bent down to rifle through the heap with Em.

The cloak and underwear might be serviceable. Dart launcher and mask too, maybe. It would be a bit hard without ears on the side to catch the fabric strips...

Emhreeil's left hand, the human one, reached for her wrist, then took her hand.

It helped.

“You’re squeezing way too tight.” She murmured as she unfolded the cloak with one arm, well-practiced.

The wolf was off to the side, enjoying pets and scratches from Scruffy, who somehow didn’t seem to give one single damn about any of this, her free hand pointing the flashlight at them.

Was she more of a coward than a literal goblin?

The notion was offensive enough to force her to push through any disgust or unease, and keep them aside, shoved into a corner, still present, still there, but no longer as overwhelming.

“Sorry. Stronger now.” Em said, and relaxed, a hint of worry in her voice. A familiar flavor of worry, in fact.

“Stop thinking I’m about to leave and never come back every time I feel weird or disturbed. It’s seriously annoying. I’m staying.” She said, her voice full of steel, almost spitting the words out.

Emhreeil smiled widely at the corner of her sight, her mouth normal, not that stretching grin from before, and averted her gaze, before nodding.

Her eyes flicked up to the ears as they bobbed with the motion.

“And I want to pet them.” She blurted out. She wasn't sure why, but she just didn't like the quiet, or maybe her brain was too frazzled to filter her thoughts properly.

Em turned to blink at her with those too-big eyes, ears twitching.

“I… okay? Later.”

Katherine turned back to the dart launcher, theorizing if they’d have to change anything to refit it back onto Em’s left arm.

She nodded resolutely.

“Later.”

She wanted to send a smidge of gratitude to Scruffy for making her ‘man up’ a little, but she was a little too embarrassed to use the telepathy channels for it, and speaking of it wouldn’t be much better.

A wet snout nosed her hair, and she only minutely flinched this time as it licked her temple once before walking around them both.

She couldn't see much when she turned to see where it was going, the flashlight not pointed up enough, but she caught some glimpses of husk-like figures in the darkness, those tied to the crumpled metal poles and thus significantly lower than the rest were, and watched the wolf shimmy up the poles to get to them.

She just turned back around. She didn't want to see more.

She wasn’t sure if it was healthy or if something was bleeding over from the wolf and Em, but she couldn’t wait to get to those acceptable targets, if only to use the action to unwind.

She also wasn’t sure when the potential threat of injury and death became less overwhelming than dealing with all of this, but it had, and she itched to swing her sword at something squishy.

She watched Ghoul snap out another unfolding stick covered in enchantments, another portal gadget, and hurried along as she heard corpses hit the floor behind her, the wolf assumedly gathering them to take with them. Or maybe it had some way of swallowing them whole.

"You should probably tell the wolf that Ghoul is in a hurry." She murmured, and Em took a moment to process that before nodding and closing her eyes to focus. The mental prod was sent.

The sounds from behind them abruptly began to quicken in pace instead of stopping.

"Greedy." Em mumbled, smiling with fond exasperation.

She didn't know how to take that, so she ignored it.

"Give me that enchanted dagger." She asked, and Em grabbed the ring off the floor then let go of her hand to pop the handle into her palm.

She quickly set to making holes and carefully adjusting straps where needed. There wouldn't be much that would fit, but a decent amount would.

Ghoul stood in the corner, somehow projecting an air of impatience without doing anything.

Fuck him. He could wait a minute or two.

-

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