Nicodemus tipped his head up to study the stars. He had seen them before, with Bel of course, but even before then. Whenever he had glanced into a Ring at night, he had seen these trees and those stars.
“Are they for me?” It was arrogant to think stars could be for one person, but then, this was the Realm. Was that what Nicodemus had to learn of himself here? That he had arrogance enough to claim the firmament for his own? The stars were, truth be told, not so different from street lamps, and he had never once considered those to have been invented for him.
“I don’t want the stars,” he decided aloud, and stared down at his feet before he once again started to walk. The light was helpful and lovely, but he really wanted not to be on this path alone. That was a risky wish here. Perhaps anywhere.
He walked more. He ate the nuts until they were gone. He might as well have gone back to the manor at this rate. It was unsatisfactory and worrisome. He didn’t know if his affliction mattered here, but it would at home, and he and Bel were running out of time.
“I am Nicodemus the asterion,” he recited for anyone or anything listening. “I keep house. I am loved by… I am…. Bel, where are you?”Please do not be dead, or suffering, he thought, only for Bel, although Bel had said he’d felt Nicodemus’ desires, not read his thoughts. Bel could be feeling them now.
Nicodemus stopped. “Bel!” he shouted furiously, perhaps desperately, but the animals already knew he was here, and the Realm either knew or had no consciousness and did not care. “Bel! I would have you here in front of me! Right now!”
The starlight glimmered on leaves in the distance and turned the moss that spilled out from the path into a clearing a vibrant blue.
Nicodemus tumbled gracelessly from the path. The clearing was not large and appeared perfectly circular although he again saw no signs that any of the branches had been cut to make it so.
“Lamb.” Bel stepped into the starlight, smiling.
Nicodemus straightened from his half-bent, clumsy posture, the trees at his back.
Bel was thickly built and impossibly handsome in the gleaming darkness. His eyes burned hotter than Nicodemus at his most feverish.
“He does not wish me to see him as he is,” Nicodemus whispered, for a terrified whisper was all he could manage. “You should have tried a mask.”
“Stronger than you seem,” said the thing that had tried to trick him, fingers and then hands and arms melting away to merge with the twinkling light of the stars. “You will be sweet indeed.”
Nicodemus turned, although there was nowhere to run but the narrow path that had brought him here, and flinched at the quake that shook the ground and nearly sent him tumbling again. Animals screamed among the trees. Another scream, high and thrilled, came from the clearing behind him.
Nicodemus risked a look over his shoulder. Fog or smoke or sand,somethingthe color of the night sky under the stars swirled around the massive body that nearly had it pinned against one of the trees on the other side of the clearing. The loose, shifting form made of smoke or fog was howling and laughing, nearly in the same breath. If it breathed.
Sometimes, it held the shape of a person, arms and legs, a torso, and then it was nothing but smoke that wriggled free of the claws digging into its depths and drawing—Nicodemus did not see how it could be blood, but it must be. Bel had said it was human, or had once been.
Its blood also gleamed beneath the stars.
But it changed shape and twisted and reformed as silently as steam, engulfing the other creature within moments and smiling, somehow, at the resulting roar of pain.
Fog could not smile or bleed, and yet it did, with teeth red and dripping wet.
But it screamed as it was torn away, and, smoke or not, hit a tree with a solid crunch of wood or bone.
The large thing closed in after it. It did not lumber or leap, it simply moved, crossing the clearing in only two steps and squeezing the nearly formless body until the fog made teeth and sank them into one giant arm and then tossed its head like a starving street dog with a piece of meat.
There was no roar this time, no cry of agony of outrage. The bigger creature lifted its head to the sky and Nicodemus clung to the nearest tree to keep him upright since his legs could not. The shape before him was animal, its grin fanged and mean, more than even a starving dog might be. It bit down on its own arm, canines piercing both fog and its own muscle. Nicodemus looked away again, staring into the thick of the forest and wishing he had fled like all the other little creatures.
There was a squelch he did not care for, and a cry that made him shudder, and then a thud, followed by a long, drawn-out cry of pain—or perhaps not pain.
In the clearing, not far from him, the creature was curled up at the base of several trees, panting, bleeding,grinningup at the monster looming over it.
Without the cover and haze of the fog, the second creature of the Realm stood tall and distinct and solid. When it raised its head this time, Nicodemus noticed first the size of it, nearly twice the size of a large man, and then the teeth again, displayed in a mocking, bloodied smile, and then what he should have noticed from the beginning; the horns, blue-black and thick and loosely spiraled, that crowned it.
They looked not unlike a bull’s horns, but bulls did not have teeth like that, and did not walk on two legs or step slowly and deliberately onto encroaching tendrils of greedy smoke along the ground.
The first creature writhed beneath one heavily booted foot before slithering over the leather to twine around a shapely calf. The bull creature merely grinned and stepped down again, eyes closed to savor the soft hiss that still did not indicate pain, or at least, not only pain.
“This,” said the bull in a deep rumble, “is as good as pleasure when you aren’t capable of feeling more.”
The fog hissed again, curling up to claim a knee, then to possess a broad thigh.
Nicodemus threw out a hand.
