Gen opened his mouth to say that was an amazing name, genuinely amazing, the kind of simple perfect name that made him wish he had thought of it himself, when a high pitched shriek cut across the clearing and shattered the moment.
“GENNNNN! GENNNNN!” Nyobin came tearing out of the treeline on the far side of the settlement, moving so fast his feet barely touched the ground.
His tail streamed behind him and his amber eyes were huge and wet with panic.
He was screaming at the top of his lungs, his voice cracking on every other syllable.
“GEN! YOU HAVE TO COME! MASTER IS IN TROUBLE! MASTER IS DYING! GEN PLEASE!” Gen spun around.
“What? What happened? Nyobin, slow down—” He did not get to finish the sentence.
Groova’s hand closed on his shoulder and the world folded in on itself.
One blink he was standing in the yard, the next blink the clearing had been replaced by the inside of a small cabin on the far edge of the settlement, and Gen’s stomach was still catching up with the fact that his body had just teleported 8 times in the space of a heartbeat.
The cabin belonged to Nyobin and Ozin.
Gen had helped them build it, a modest little structure against the treeline, and he had never once been inside it during a crisis.
He was regretting that now.
Ozin was on the floor in the middle of the room.
He was writhing.
His panther sized body was contorted, his back arched, his claws gouging deep furrows into the wooden planks.
His two tails lashed wildly behind him and his golden eyes were squeezed shut, his mouth open in a silent scream that kept breaking into low, guttural growls of pain.
His whole frame shuddered with every breath.
“What the hell happened?”
Gen asked.
Nyobin had collapsed just inside the door, his chest heaving, his words tumbling out in a desperate flood.
“I don’t know, nya! Master said he was gaining back some of his lost miasma, nya! He said he could feel it coming back to him, nya! He was so happy, nya! He said he was finally going to be strong again, nya! He said we could stop hiding, nya!”
“Slow down,” Gen said.
“Gaining miasma?”
“Yes, nya!
He said the magic was returning to him, nya!
More and more of it, nya!
I was so excited, nya!
I thought master was finally going to be powerful like he used to be, nya!
But then he started rolling on the ground, nya!
He started screaming, nya!
I’ve never seen him like this, nya!
I’m so scared, nya!
I think master is going to die, nya!”
Gen looked back at Ozin.
The panther demon’s body was still convulsing on the floor, and the air around him was starting to hum with pressure, the same kind of heavy magic pressure Gen had felt around the dryads when they fought.
Behind him, there was a soft displacement of air and Groova appeared, crouched low because the ceiling of this cabin was nowhere near tall enough for her.
She had teleported in after them, folded down on herself like a mountain trying to hide, her head brushing the rafters and her knees jammed up against her chest.
Asp came in right after, ducking through the door on all fours and settling into a low crouch beside Groova.
She was thinner than Groova, narrow enough to fit in spaces the bigger dryad could not, and she moved through the cramped cabin with the practiced ease of something that had spent its whole life in the woods.
Neither of them could stand up straight in here.
Only Gen’s cabin had the tall ceilings, and he had never gotten around to doing the same for this one.
His body started to shift.
His torso lengthened first, stretching upward out of the panther frame.
His hind legs straightened, the paws reshaping into something closer to feet, the claws pulling back into nails.
His forelegs lifted off the ground and the whole front of his body rose, muscle and bone flowing and reforming as his spine straightened.
For one brief second he looked like a beast folk, the classic image from the old stories, a cat man standing on two legs with fur and fangs and a tail.
Then the fur receded.
It rippled away like water, revealing skin underneath.
Pale skin, almost human.
The shape kept refining, his frame slimming down, his height settling at around 5 foot 6.
His face reformed, the muzzle shortening, the features sharpening into something that was almost, but not quite, human.
His ears stayed pointed, perched on the sides of his head.
His fangs remained, small and sharp, just visible when his mouth moved.
His hair came in dark and thick, textured more like fur than actual hair, and a simple tunic formed itself over his torso as if the magic had decided he needed clothes before anything else.
The convulsing stopped.
Ozin lay on the floor, breathing hard, a man now.
A small, skinny man with cat ears and cat fangs and two twitching tails, dressed in a plain brown tunic.
His golden eyes snapped open.
“THE HELL!” His voice.
That was the first thing Gen noticed.
Ozin’s voice had always been low and rumbling, the voice of a predator, the voice of a demon lord, the voice that had made Gen’s spine crawl the first time he heard it.
This voice was not that.
This voice was high and reedy and cracked on the last word like a teenager going through a growth spurt.
Gen stared at him.
“Mitt- I mean, Ozin,” he said slowly.
“You can speak now?” Ozin pushed himself up onto his elbows.
He looked down at his hands.
His own hands.
Pale skin, human shaped fingers, his claws gone.
He turned them over, staring at them like they had betrayed him.
“I… I guess I can…” He stopped, and his face twisted with outrage.
“BUT WHY DOES MY VOICE LACK THE CADENCE OF A DEMON KING?! WHY DO I SOUND LIKE AN ADOLESCENT IMP?! I SOUND LIKE A HATCHLING! I SOUND LIKE ONE OF THOSE LITTLE PEST DEMONS THAT SCREAMS AT THE GATES OF THE 4TH LAYER!”
Gen clamped his jaw shut.
He bit the inside of his cheek.
He stared very hard at a point on the wall just past Ozin’s head.
Ozin caught the look.
His face went red.
“YOU IMPUDENT MONKEY! YOUR KIND LACKS THE MATURITY OF EVEN THE MOST JOKESTER LIKE DEMON! YOUR SPECIES HAS NOT EVOLVED ONE BIT SINCE THE GODS SEALED US TO THE DEMON REALM 1 MILLION YEARS AGO!”
Gen lost it.
He doubled over, laughing so hard he could not breathe.
But the voice delivering them was a squeaky, cracking adolescent whine, and the combination was the funniest thing Gen had heard in months.
Ozin sounded exactly like a 17 year old twink larping as a demon lord on a discord call, and there was no universe where that was not hilarious.
Ozin’s face went from red to purple.
“I’LL MURDER YOU, YOU MONKEY!” He scrambled to his feet, threw his arms out wide, and began to chant.
His voice rose, straining for a depth it could not reach, cracking in the middle of every phrase.
“GREAT BEAST CERBERUS! I SUMMON THEE! THREE HEADED DEMONIC HOUND OF THE 9TH LAYER! I DEMAND YOU DEVOUR THIS HUMAN! HELL SPAWN!!” The cabin went still.
The air thickened.
Gen stopped laughing, because for a second, just a second, something enormous seemed to stir at the edge of his perception, something old and hungry and far below the surface of the world.
And then, from somewhere impossibly distant, echoing up as if through a thousand miles of rock, came a single sound.
“WOOF.” It was not a menacing woof.
It was a small woof.
A confused woof.
The woof of a dog that had been called by name and was not entirely sure why, and was not sure it wanted to find out.
Silence.
Gen let out a long, shaky breath.
“Okay. That was terrifying for a second.”
Ozin stared at his own outstretched arms.
His face cycled through outrage, confusion, and a dawning horror at his own weakness.
Gen shook his head and moved past it.
“Alright, real question. Where did all this magic come from? You were a panther, now you’re a guy, you’re speaking, you just tried to summon a hell hound. That’s a lot of power all at once. I want to know where it’s coming from.”
Ozin lowered his arms.
He looked down at his hands again, flexing his fingers.
“I… do not know.” He paused, thinking.
“My brother. Solkin. He must be trying to open portals into this world. He has been searching for a way through for years. But the portals cannot open fully, the barrier will not allow it. Yet every time one of his attempts rips a hole in the veil, even a tiny one, some of my magic seeps through and returns to me.” He kept talking, thinking out loud now, the words coming faster.
“And if he keeps trying, if he keeps opening those portals, more and more of my magic will keep coming back to me. More and more, until I have it all back. And with that much power…”
A grin spread across his face, sharp and hungry.
“Heheheheheh. If I get enough of my magic back, then I can rule this entire continent. I can build an empire here. And then I can get back at my stupid brother. I’ll make him pay for everything he did to me. I’ll…” He stopped mid sentence.
Why had the room suddenly gone so quiet?
He could feel it now.
The weight of the silence.
The wrongness of it.
His eyes darted to the side and he saw Groova, crouched against the wall, her head nearly touching the rafters, her red eyes fixed on him with a stare that could have frozen lava.
Her hands were very still, resting on her knees, and the air around her had gone cold.
He looked the other way and saw Gen, standing with his arms crossed, shaking his head slowly back and forth, wearing the most disappointed look Ozin had ever seen on a human face.
And behind Gen, near the door, Asp.
Ozin’s grin evaporated.
“Can you… can you hear me?” His voice cracked again.
“No. That is absurd. That is completely absurd. I was thinking out loud. No one heard anything. We were all just… standing here. Silently. Right?”
Nobody answered.
Groova’s stare did not waver.
Ozin took a slow step backward and very, very slowly lowered his hands.