Ares woke to the taste of blood.
His mouth was full of it.
Thick.
Metallic.
Warm enough that it had not yet cooled against his teeth.
He tried to spit.
Blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
He forced his eyes open.
Trees.
Not the cellar.
Not the concrete walls or the empty barrels.
A forest of thick trunks and low, heavy branches that blocked most of the gray sky.
The ground under him was soft with moss and old leaves.
His hands lay in front of his face, fingers curled, nails packed with dark red.
He pushed himself up.
Pain answered at once.
Not the white fire that had torn through him in the cellar.
This was deeper.
Settled.
Every joint ached as if it had been pulled apart and forced back together wrong.
His shoulders burned.
His spine felt longer than it should.
When he breathed, his ribs moved in a way that did not match the memory of his own body.
He looked down.
His clothes were gone.
What remained of the shirt hung in wet strips from one wrist.
The rest of him was bare, streaked with dried blood from throat to thighs.
The lines of his arms and chest stood out hard under the skin, long and sharply defined, as if the muscle had been drawn tighter and longer than before.
His hands looked larger.
When he flexed his fingers the tendons rose like cables beneath the surface.
He did not remember leaving the cellar.
He did not remember putting on or tearing off clothes.
He only remembered the spear.
It lay across his legs, still gripped in one fist.
The metal was clean except for a thin line of blood near the point.
He had not let it go.
Ares rose.
His legs held.
The weakness from the empty barrels was gone.
In its place was something quiet and absolute, a strength that settled into the longer frame of his body without effort.
He walked without thinking toward the sound of water.
A shallow pool lay between the roots of two fallen trees.
He knelt and looked into it.
The face in the water was his.
But the proportions were wrong.
The jaw had lengthened.
The neck rose thicker from broader shoulders.
Hair fell past his shoulders now, dark with sweat and blood, heavier than the short cut he remembered.
His eyes sat deeper in a face that had stretched taller with the rest of him.
When he leaned closer the surface trembled and the reflection broke.
He washed.
He scrubbed until the water turned dark and his skin burned from the cold.
He tore the last scraps of cloth from his wrist and threw them into the undergrowth.
The spear never left his hand.
When he stood again the forest was quiet in the wrong way.
He could hear too much.
A branch cracking far to the east.
Something large breathing three ridges away.
The slow drip of water from leaves he could not see.
His vision reached farther than it should have.
Details that once would have been lost in the distance now stood clear.
He walked until the forest disappeared behind him.
Time broke.
He woke again on open ground.
The deer lay a few meters away, throat opened, belly torn.
Most of the meat was already gone.
Steam still rose from the cavity in the cool air.
Ares sat in the grass with blood drying on his chin and chest.
His stomach was full.
The hunger that had driven him for days was simply absent, as if it had never existed.
His hands shook, but not from weakness.
From the leftover violence still running through the long, hard lines of muscle that now shaped his arms and shoulders.
He had no memory of the kill.
Only the aftermath.
He stood, found the spear again, always the spear, and kept moving.
The next time consciousness returned he was on his knees in a narrow ravine.
The thing in front of him was still twitching.
It was a mouse.
Or it had been once.
The body stretched nearly to his waist when it stood.
Thick through the shoulders, fur matted and dark, eyes the size of a man’s fist.
The skull was crushed.
The spear had gone in under the jaw and come out the back of the neck.
Blood soaked the dirt in a wide black circle.
Ares’s mouth tasted of copper and fur.
His bare chest and arms were painted with it.
The clothes he no longer wore had left no trace.
He looked at his own hands and saw how the strength lived in the longer bones and the dense, clean muscle that ran from wrist to shoulder.
He tried to roll the creature’s body over to clear the path.
It barely moved.
He tried to remember the fight.
Nothing came.
Every heartbeat sent a deep ache through his bones.
His joints felt too tight.
His muscles still trembled when he moved.
He forced himself to stand.
The giant mouse’s body steamed in the cold air.
Something large moved in the trees beyond the ravine and then went quiet again.
Ares wiped his mouth with the back of one forearm and tasted blood that was not only the animal’s.
He walked until the light failed.
When he woke the third time he was beside another pool, smaller, clearer.
Night had come.
He crouched at the edge and looked at himself once more.
Taller.
The shoulders broader, the chest deeper, yet the whole of him remained long and spare, muscle carved in clean lines that ran the length of his arms and torso without excess.
Hair fell past his shoulders, dark against the pale skin.
The scars he remembered were still there, but stretched, as if the body had grown around them.
He turned his hands over.
The palms were thicker.
The knuckles denser.
When he closed them into fists the strength felt absolute and slightly wrong, like a tool he had not yet learned how to use without breaking something.
He washed again.
The water ran red, then pink, then clear.
He stayed until the cold reached his bones and the last of the blood was gone.
Then he rose.
The forest looked larger now.
The trunks seemed closer.
Sounds reached him from farther away, a wingbeat far above the canopy, the soft pad of something heavy moving parallel to his path, the slow settling of earth under roots that had grown too thick too fast.
Ares looked down.
The metal spear was still in his hand.
He had not put it down once.
He started walking.
Ares woke on open ground under a low gray sky.
No trees this time.
Only broken asphalt and the skeletal frames of long-abandoned vehicles half-buried in dust.
His body felt heavier than before, the long lines of muscle still unfamiliar when he moved.
Hair fell across his eyes.
He pushed it back with a blood-streaked hand and realized the blood was dry.
Old.
He had no memory of arriving here.
The spear was in his right hand, as always.
Something moved high above.
A shadow crossed the cloud layer, vast and slow.
Ares tilted his head.
The shape resolved into wings wider than the street, a body the size of a small aircraft, feathers dark against the ash-colored sky.
Its head turned.
The eyes found him.
It dropped.
Ares did not think.
His arm rose.
The spear left his hand in a single clean motion.
The new strength in his shoulder carried it higher and farther than he expected.
The shaft stayed perfectly on line as it climbed toward the bird.
The spear struck true.
It drove straight into the bird’s left eye.
The creature screamed, a sound that tore the air and made the ground under Ares’s feet tremble.
Wings folded.
The massive body tumbled, feathers tearing free in a black rain.
It fell toward him in a long, uncontrolled arc.
Ares had no time to move.
The impact came like a wall.
Something hard struck the side of his head with enough force to drive the world into white.
Pain exploded behind his right eye, sharp and absolute.
He felt the ground vanish.
His body left the asphalt.
For a fraction of a second he was airborne with the dying bird, spinning in the same broken fall.
Then the ground returned.
The weight of the creature crushed the air from his lungs.
Feathers and blood filled his mouth.
The pain in his head became a single bright point that spread outward until there was nothing else.
His fingers still searched for the spear.
They found nothing.
Consciousness slipped.
The last thing he knew was the taste of iron and the distant sound of wings that no longer moved.
Ares woke for the last time on a wide stretch of broken road.
The bird lay around him, already stripped in places to bone and dark feathers.
The head was gone.
One enormous wing still stretched across the asphalt, half-buried under its own weight.
The air smelled of blood and open cavities.
Flies had already found it.
He felt no pain.
The impact had left no wound.
Not even a bruise.
The spear rested on the ground in front of him, point clean, shaft within easy reach.
He was naked.
The last traces of cloth had vanished somewhere in the black gaps of memory.
Hair fell past his shoulders in heavy, dark strands.
When he sat up the long muscles of his torso and arms shifted under skin that no longer carried any of the old softness of youth.
Everything about him had lengthened and hardened into clean, functional lines, shoulders broad, waist narrow, the strength visible in the way the body held itself without effort.
Ares picked up the spear.
If he had known what the liquid would cost him, he would never have opened the container.
The cellar.
The empty barrels.
The moment he said fuck it and drank.
He had expected risk.
He had not expected the long blackouts, the waking in blood, the bodies he could not remember killing.
He turned the spear slowly in his fingers.
He had no explanation for the blackouts.
The gaps remained closed.
He could not recall the deer, the giant mouse, or the bird.
He knew only that his body was no longer the one he had entered the cellar with.
He did not know the full measure of what he had become.
Something was breathing beyond the ruins.
Ares turned his head.
The sound stopped.
Whatever was out there had heard him too.
Ares stood.
The road stretched empty in both directions.
Wind moved the feathers of the dead bird.
Somewhere far off, another large shape shifted among the ruins and then went still.
He looked once more at the long, hard lines of his own body, at the hair that now fell past his shoulders, at the spear that had never left him.
Then he started walking.