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"The wild is in you," the shaman said. "You are of the old breed. You walk the edge between beast and kin. You hunger for purpose."

Yu wiped frost from his face, using the motion to subtly rub at his earholes. It did not help sort our the mess of voices reaching him, voices now doubling, chasing each other, repeating the same thing. Everything the shaman said of the krynn echoed in her body. And as Yu could not stop listening, the boundary between speakers and subjects blurred until he realised that the shaman's body echoed her voice not just to underline them, but because her words did not describe the beastkin alone. No, they were a mirror revelation about her own existence. Her voice and body said the same. Still, one spoke about the traveller, and the other about itself.

The krynn's tail flicked again. "Is that the judgment?"

"It is truth," the shaman replied. Her head turned toward the borman. "His rage is stone. Heavy. Settled. It waits. Yours is fire in wind. Untethered. Flaming. Flickering. Fleeting."

The krynn's ears pressed back.

"Your loyalty is your own," the shaman went on. "You do not give it freely. Nor should you. But it must be given where it is due, otherwise you invite something else in its place. Not choice. Instinct." She leaned forward, not much, but with something unsettling in the way her neck lengthened. Like she had too many joints. "Yes, you are a slave to your hunger."

The krynn bared his teeth. "If you can see hunger in me, what have you swallowed to speak so calmly of it?"

The shaman paused. The blades around her shoulders rustled.

Defiance shaped the krynn's features, but the sound that followed was not yet a growl. It was quieter. Lower. A shape closer to assent. "May I enter?" he pressed.

Slowly, the shaman leaned in. Her upper body lowered towards the krynn. Her head, neck and shoulders bent down right above him, so close that her hidden maw could bite off his face. Then she spoke again, but not in Teh. She spoke in a language no one but a beast like the krynn should recognise. No one but Yu, who did not even notice the change.

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The krynn shifted, stepped back —

The rustling of all her blades stopped him.

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the krynn hissed. His voice scratched, clawing its way out of him.

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The krynn's fur rippled. His claws scraped stone.

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The silence that followed was not quiet. It was a silence stretched taut, like ice grown too thinly over something vast in the current underneath. It was listened.

And within this silence, another voice emerged.

Yu was already straining, trying to track the strange rhythm of speech between the shaman and the krynn, and the way her body gave shape to what her mouth did not say. But this — this was deeper. It slid beneath the level of sound, threading through the gaps in their words like a pulse too slow to hear. It surfaced amidst those words about hunger, about feeding. At first, he recognised only more of this hunger. Just a pull, drawing him towards the first subtle crack within the ice, from where it beckoned. And as Yu looked and listened for it, he felt himself pulled further in.

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Not from the krynn. Not from the shaman either, though from her too. Something not quite hers, yet around and bound to her. Something that spoke through her, but was not her.

It was The One Who Listenes.

At first, there was no form, no sound. Only hunger.

This hunger moved in waves beneath the surface of what could be heard, below where speech thinned into thought and thought into sense. It passed through that translucent veil, the one most minds never notice existed, lest dare to traverse, and entered into the space beneath, where nothing should ever reach. There, where consciousness fractured and stillness began, the hunger hunted shape.

And in its wake, the shape of hunger began to cohere, forming meaning out of those few fragments of consciousness that had transcended the veil of absolute stillness to seek it out. This shape of meaning did not exist in Teh, nor in the guttural tongues of beastkin. It predated even the ancient cadence of those arcane words that comprised all wizardry. It was meaning not voiced through flesh or throat, but born from a tether too deep to name — a communion between the shaman and whatever, or whoever, called to her and through her from within the mountain. A depth too vast, or perhaps too hollow. Too displaced to be found within a world rendered reality through physical sensations.

And still, Yu heard the hunger. For him, within him, it became language. Not through translation, but through intrusion; intention overriding interpretation from the inside.

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There was only one thing that kept Yu from absolutely losing his shit and bolting.

Yes, he had already noticed The One Who Listens. Yes, he had suffered a voice like this once before, a voice that grew and grew until it filled and then spilled from deepest crevice of stillness. That time, it had left him barely conscious. Regardless, none of that awareness or experience made this any less terrifying. If anything, it made it worse. Because he had spent months dreading it would happen again. And now, all that fear and madness was back. And worse still, it came from the same place the voice had taken shape, because at one point, Yu had just pushed everything down there to forever forget about it, which had been his way of conveniently non-dealing with all that trauma.

And now the fear and madness found an escape. They surged up with the new voice, latched onto it, threaded through the hunger. The hunger-voice cracked through the mental ice that had barely kept it at bay. It smashed the barrier and flooded in and surged through his skull, scattering fear and tossing madness, and then all the hunger it contained. There was no separation now. No then and now. No before and after. No voice of his own, just the Mountain King.

What made Yu hold his ground was not focus. Not resolve. Not courage. It was his fina nature. That most primal instinct, made to submit. When confronted with danger and death, this most useless suicidal instinct did not call for fight or flight, but to freeze and appease.

So Yu stayed where he was, back locked flat against the stone wall, while all that he was submitted to the hunger of the Mountain King's. And as he took it in, he began to discern it.

There was cruelty. Cold control. Precise, procedural command — not personal, not vindictive, just structural, like a fundamental law. But there was also commitment, yes, and even … compassion. Not kindness, but a kind of obedience to care. A reverence so old it no longer resembled care.

Within that reverence, a whisper of urgency.

Within urgency, desire.

And beneath desire, underneath all of it, again —

HUNGER.

So. Much. More.

It was not in the words. The words meant nothing. They were just the froth. Surface tension, ripples on a dark current of a much deeper pull.

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That was what broke him. It was the undertow. He did not hear it. He underwent it.

It ripped through him like sickness. His gut turned. His skin crawled. His feathers itched like they needed to be ripped out. It was too much. The voices, the cold, the storm-stung air, the suffocating pressure of everything, everything that tore at him for hours and days and weeks. Yu was at the end of his rope. He was fraying at the edges, worn thin by the endless stretch of dread. He had been made to cling there too long. He could no longer. Not one moment more.

He swayed. The stone beneath his talons shifted, tilted, as if the very world lurched away from the thing inside him. He lost balance —

Yu slammed his back against the wall. Hard. Cold. Solid. Real. But not enough. His talons curled tight against the grit. His legs locked. He squeezed his eyes shut —

Stupid. As if that would help. As if the Mountain King could be shut out by closing his eyes. As if that could make the deafening hunger and the sheer physical and mental exhaustion vanish. All it did was hurt. There was ice on his face, crystals which by now had settled into the base of his feathers, like shrapnel. When he grimaced, they tore at his skin. Tiny shards bit into him; flashes of pain along the curve of his beak, the ridge of his brow, and the corners of his eyes.

Yu blinked. Hard. Again.

And in that blink, in the space of that first shard-struck blink, just before his vision reset — he saw it.

Only for a split-second. Less. No time to make sense of it. But it was there. Not imagined. Not misseen. Seen, in that singular flicker of awareness that bypassed all logic. There, within that impossible crevice between raw perception and expectation in which his wizard-self recognised from within what could not immediately be overshadowed by what his fina-part assumed to find on the outside. In that crease, where logic had not yet snapped its harness over sensation, his wizard-self caught it. He caught it before he could even realise what it was, before he could stop himself from releasing, from blinking it away — - A Mountain Beast. - It did not stand where the shaman stood. It was where she stood. Not beside her, not looming behind, not instead of her — but inside her. It wore her.

The beast was too vast to fit her body, yet it wound itself through her silhouette with unbearable elegance. Its immensity did not break her form, it bent through and inhabited it. By silence. By permanence. Its stillness mimicked her shape.

Yet for that brief fraction of vision, caught in the fault-line between blink and breath, Yu recognised the distorted illusion. He truly saw it. Too tall, too wide, too old, bending right over the krynn.

And then he blinked again, and it was gone.

Only the shaman remained. Leaning back. Measured.

Just the shaman.

No beast.

No monster.

Her voice too, returned to its surface calm. "You are marked," she said to the krynn, in Teh. "But not by a witch. This reading is not for the soul. It is for what travels in the skin. You may enter. For now. Provided the truth you have offered remains unbroken."

And then, gently, with something almost like reverence: "Should you stray, your own bond binds you beyond these walls."

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