"He's too heavy! Just push him!"

  The squeaky voice was the first thing to penetrate the fog in Trenn’s mind.

  He felt the rough wood of a cart bed beneath his cheek, then the lurch of wheels hitting a rut. Hands—small, trembling paws—shoved at his shoulder and hip.

  "Tipping! Let go!"

  The world tilted. Gravity took hold.

  Trenn spilled from the cart, his body tumbling over the edge of a steep ravine. Into the Morning Mist.

  The impact with the slope knocked the air from his lungs. He slid, gathering speed on the loose scree and slick mud.

  The wind roared in his ears. Instinct, sharp and adrenaline-fueled, snapped his eyes open.

  He was careening toward a cluster of jagged rocks at the bottom of the ravine.

  He tried to dig his heels in, but the mud offered no purchase. He flailed, grabbing for a root that snapped in his hand.

  His body twisted, the massive counterweight at the base of his spine swinging with him.

  Use it.

  He flexed. The muscles at the base of his spine coiled, and he drove the golden tail into the hillside like a plow.

  The metal scales bit deep into the earth.

  Dirt and stones sprayed in a violent fan behind him. The sound was a grinding roar, like a ship running aground on a reef. The drag was immense, a sudden, brutal deceleration that wrenched his spine and burned his core muscles.

  He carved a deep, dark trench through the clay, raking, slowing, tipping…

  He stopped inches from a moss-covered boulder.

  Steam hissed from the friction-heated scales of his tail. He stayed there for a moment, chest heaving, staring into the fog.

  He winced, his hand flying to his stomach. A Wolf Kin’s bullet had punched a hole in him earlier.

  He pulled his hand away, wet with sweet-smelling ichor.

  The wound was already closing, the golden liquid hardening into a resin-like scab. The pain was distant, a dull throb rather than a sharp bite.

  He looked at his tail. It was buried a foot deep in the clay.

  He flexed and lifted his entire body off his tail. This is so cool. With it, he pushed himself onto the jagged rocks, where he found stable footing. His makeshift skirt of tied-together shirts was tattered and mud-stained, but it held.

  He stood, swaying slightly as his brain recalibrated his center of gravity.

  He was alone in the mist.

  "Hello?" he rasped. The word died instantly, smothered by the heavy air.

  He picked a direction—downhill, presumably toward the valley floor—and began to walk.

  The mist distorted depth perception; trees loomed out of the grey like sudden, skeletal apparitions, only to vanish as he passed. Roots snagged his dragging tail, jerking him backward with frustrating regularity.

  Time became a fluid, meaningless thing. Minutes stretched into what felt like hours of trudging through the silent, damp void. He was bleeding, he was naked, and he was completely lost.

  Then, the silence shattered.

  The rooster crowed. The cry rolled down the valley, hitting the ravine walls and doubling back on itself, building into a deafening wall of pressure.

  Trenn’s hands flew to his ears as the sonic wave washed over him. The mist vibrated, the droplets of water dancing in the air.

  But as the echo compounded, he felt the hum in his bones react.

  That… rooster’s crow is amplified by sound attuned mana!

  He dropped his hands. He let the deafening cry vibrate through his skull, tuning his internal frequency to match its pitch.

  He closed his eyes.

  The grey mist dissolved into a vibrant, pulsing map of echolocation.

  It was a chaotic storm of noise. The mist trapped every sound, bouncing echoes off water droplets until the world was a wash of static.

  He gritted his teeth, pain spiking behind his eyes as he tried to parse the data. It was like trying to listen to a whisper in a foundry.

  Focus. Filter it out.

  He pushed the roar of the rooster aside. He ignored the static of the wind. He swept his perception in a wide arc, hunting for something distinct. Something rhythmic.

  He passed over the erratic scurrying of a beetle. He ignored the random snap of a twig.

  There.

  Faint. Barely a tick against the background hum.

  Clack-clack-clack.

  Dry. Rhythmic. Hollow.

  It sounded like dice rattling in a cup, or... bones hitting each other in the wind.

  Unnatural.

  The word hissed in his mind, carried on a current of cold, reptilian instinct. Bones shouldn't move on their own.

  He locked onto the signal, refining the focus. Beside the rattling, another sound resolved—a tearing noise. The sound of meat parting from bone. A knife sawing through gristle.

  Something was butchering prey in the fog.

  A low growl vibrated in his chest, unbidden. The golden scales under the skin of his neck flared, but he kept them from manifesting.

  I can control it! He thought, panting under the strain. A wet glob of viscous gold dropped from his eye and ran down his cheek.

  Mara wiped the Raptor’s blood from her eyes, her breath coming in shallow gasps against the constriction of the chitin armor.

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  "We should move," Mara said to Almitad, who was floating near the tree line. "Something approaches."

  Almitad stiffened.

  "Another Raptor?"

  "Maybe. It’s circling us," Mara said, producing her necrotic, jagged claws.

  It was trying to be subtle, but Mara’s eye followed them.

  Mara spun, raising her claws as the grey curtain tore open in front of her.

  A massive silhouette lunged from the fog with the explosive speed of a striking cobra.

  Mara stepped in front of Almitad, her heart hammering against her ribs. "Back!" she barked.

  The mist thinned around the monster.

  Mara’s breath hitched. The creature froze.

  He was naked from the waist up, his skin pale and crisscrossed with angry red scars. A crude skirt of knotted grey rags flapped around his powerful thighs.

  But it was the gold that held her gaze.

  A ridge of metallic scales grew from his spine, fusing flesh to metal. It extended into a massive, muscular tail that coiled behind him, studded with raw gemstones that glittered in the gloom.

  His face was a mask of dirt and dried blood. A jagged white scar pulled his lip into a permanent grimace.

  His eyes were wild, searching.

  Mara barely recognized him. He was taller. Wider. His stance was all wrong. She saw a monster. She saw a hybrid abomination come to haunt her.

  She shifted her weight, bringing her claws up in a fighting stance. The adrenaline of the Raptor kill was still singing in her blood.

  "Back away," she snarled, her voice dropping to a growl.

  On Mara’s head, the black helmet vibrated.

  Skate.

  The obsidian slime shrieked with a high-pitched, joyous buzz that rattled Mara’s teeth.

  The helmet liquefied. It flowed down Mara’s face, blinding her for a split second before dropping to the ground.

  It bounced.

  Skate launched itself across the gap, slamming into the Gem-Croc Kin’s chest with a wet thwack.

  He staggered back a step, catching the slime instinctively. His hand—a mangled ruin missing two fingers—cradled the creature against his chest.

  Skate purred, a sound like a heavy engine idling.

  Mara froze. The knife wavered in her hand.

  "Skate?" she whispered.

  She looked up, really looked at the face beneath the grime. The scar was new. The tail was terrifying. But the eyes…

  "Trenn?"

  He looked at her. He looked at the white fur, the amber eyes, the black armor that Zeen had built.

  He reached out with his mind.

  He didn't cast a spell; he opened a door.

  He forged a tether.

  It snapped into place with the violence of a thunderclap.

  He didn't send an emotion. He received an avalanche.

  It wasn't a wave; it was a sudden, crushing gravity. Mara’s soul poured into the empty vessel of his mind, heavy and suffocating.

  Her exhaustion was a leaden weight dragging at his limbs. The phantom pain of her fused ribs sparked in his own chest—a hot, jagged stutter of nerves. And sitting in the center of it was a block of ice: her rage.

  There were no pictures. No names. Just the suffocating density of grief.

  He broke. He left me.

  The realization didn't wash over him; it snapped like a taut cable. The psychic recoil whipped against his mind, a sharp, stinging confirmation of a bond violently severed.

  He knew this frequency. It wasn't a stranger's pain; it was his fault. He didn't know how, or when, but he knew with a sickening certainty that he was the architect of her agony.

  The golden instinct in his brain hissed, urging him to sever the connection, to reject the weakness. But the man beneath the scales held on.

  "I know you," he rasped. His voice was a stranger's, rough with disuse.

  He took a step forward, his hand reaching out, his eyes wide with confusion and guilt. "I... I hurt you."

  Mara stared at him. The shock on her face hardened instantly into something hard. Something sharp.

  She crossed the distance in two strides.

  Trenn braced himself, expecting... he didn't know what. A scream? A weapon?

  She punched him.

  Her fist, encased in the heavy chitin gauntlet, connected with his jaw.

  Trenn’s head snapped back. The world spun. He stumbled, tasting fresh ichor.

  "You idiot!" she screamed, her voice breaking. "You absolute, moronic idiot!"

  She hit him again, a shove against his chest that couldn’t move him.

  "You put us in danger just to watch your pet die! Then you turned yourself into a monster, and you ran!"

  Ran?

  “You left me for dead!”

  She punched him in the gut, making him double over. “That was… too close to the wound…” he said, falling to his knees.

  A door in the back of his mind kicked open.

  A metallic smell filled his nose. A scream—"Trenn!"—cut short by the thud of impact.

  He felt the phantom vibration rattle his new spine. He felt the resistance of her body against his tail. He saw the white fur launching into the mist, discarded like refuse. And worst of all, he remembered the cold, alien satisfaction that had curled in his gut when he did it.

  I almost killed her!

  "I left you?” Tears gathered in his eyes. “I'm so sorry."

  She raised a trembling fist to strike him again, but the motion died halfway. The adrenaline that had marched her through the mist evaporated, leaving only the crushing weight of the chitin armor and her mended bones.

  Her knees buckled. She fell forward, on Trenn’s kneeling body.

  Her hands grabbed his shoulders. Her forehead collided with his chest with a heavy, exhausted thud, right above where Skate was purring.

  "You came back," she wheezed, the words vibrating against his sternum.

  Trenn wrapped his arms around her. He pulled her close, careful of her armor. His tail coiled around their kneeling bodies.

  “I just… woke up," he said softly, resting his chin on her helmet-less head. "And I knew I had to find you."

  He tightened his hold, a desperate need to ground himself. The movement stretched the skin of his flank, reopening the gunshot wound.

  Almitad floated over him. He looked up at her. He didn't know her name, but respect and a terrifying debt pierced his chest.

  I know them?

  Almitad drifted forward, but her calm was gone. The Mana Bloom in her ribcage flared, casting long, erratic shadows through her sleeves.

  "Two souls bound to one body? Trenn… what have you done to yourself?"

  Mara stiffened in his arms. She pulled back violently, breaking the embrace as if she had been burned.

  She stumbled a step away, her chest heaving, her gaze dropping to the glowing stain spreading on her black armor. She looked past it to his abdomen.

  A jagged hole in his side, the size of a coin, oozed thick, amber fluid.

  "You're bleeding," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. She touched the fluid with a clawed finger, bringing it to her nose. "Honey... and lightning."

  She grabbed his arm, her grip tight. "Trenn... how long ago did you wake up?"

  "I... I don't know," he admitted. "This morning? Yesterday? It's a blur."

  "You walked around for over a week, in a daze, with no food. Did you eat since?" Almitad asked.

  He shook his head slowly. "I... I wasn't hungry when I woke up. I didn’t even think..."

  "You don't need food anymore. You're… a god. Constantly regenerated by its own golden blood."

  Mara stared at him. Her hand unconsciously manifested her claws.

  She saw the man she bonded with, but his humanity was losing the war against the Gem-Croc.

  "You look like him. You sound like him. But you’re not him anymore, are you?"

  Her voice dropped to a whisper, laced with a new, terrible fear. "Are you even in there?"

  "It's me, Mara," Trenn pleaded, stepping forward. “When I woke up, I didn't remember my name, but I remembered yours.”

  "Stop," she commanded, raising a hand. "You don’t get to say that! You chose a pet over me. You hurt me. You left me for dead!"

  Trenn flinched. He wanted to reach for her again, to bridge the gap, but he let his arms fall to his sides.

  The silence stretched between them, thick and suffocating. It was a chasm filled with everything he couldn't remember and everything she couldn't forget.

  He shifted his weight, suddenly acutely aware of his nakedness, of the monstrosity of his form. He tugged self-consciously at the knot of his makeshift garment.

  Mara watched his clumsy struggle. She watched the god-monster fidgeting with a pair of grease-stained trousers tied around his waist.

  The sheer, pathetic reality of it cracked her anger.

  Mara’s gaze dropped to his waist. She looked at the grease-stained sleeves knotted around his hips, and at the way the rough fabric bunched and tore against the sharp edges of his golden scales.

  "You're wearing trash," she whispered, the sorrow in her voice cutting deeper than any mockery. She plucked disdainfully at a soiled sleeve. "Trenn... look at you."

  She watched the tail twitch, the heavy, metallic scales grinding against each other with the sound of chains. It moved with a will of its own, a serpent grafted to his spine.

  "It's going to keep changing you, isn't it?" she asked, the question hanging heavy in the mist. "The gold... It's eating you alive."

  Trenn didn't answer. It was hard to deny.

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