All he knew — all he had ever known — was warm, dark water. The survival instincts of a drowning animal boiled up inside his lungs. Black terror. Rage. Blindly, as if tearing at the flesh of an attacker, he clawed his way towards the dimmest gradient of light.
And then there was sand and mud, reeds in his hands, and dripping from his mouth as he vomited the lake out of him. The air burned. The blood in his ears almost blocked out the sound of his recovery, and his empty mind flinched from any understanding.
He struggled to his hands and knees, pulled his streaming muzzle out of the slimy shore. Ribbons of antler velvet dangled around his face as he shook his head, trying to clear the water from his ears. Threats. That was all that mattered. He’d been drowning, and now he wasn’t, and there were other things he must flee or destroy.
His ears drained, then.
There was a burbling sound a few feet above him.
He leapt back into the shallows, snarling, tail lashing, gills flaring — and his wide eyes took in a silhouette against the fury of the sun, the shadow of a god, like a man-shaped void in the unbearable sky. He tried to flee and found he could not, as if the water had frozen around his legs and buried him in summer ice. A mouse under the merciless gaze of a viper.
The man tilted his head, blocking out the sun over his shoulder so that it formed a soft, white halo around the silver edges of his hair. His eyes cut through the shadows of his heavy brow with frigid clarity. He held a white foam cup in one hand, a straw between his lips, from which the burbling sound was emanating.
For a moment, the two creatures watched each other, unmoving. Then, the man lowered the cup and its straw, and his mouth twitched upwards in the barest impression of a smile. “Hello,” he said. His curiously accentless voice was not loud, and not deep, and it rasped a bit in his throat, but it hit the creature with a force stronger than the instinct that had dragged him from the water. “Hello, Gideon Bale.”
Gideon Bale. Yes, that was his name. Or, if it hadn’t been, it certainly was now — now that this man had spoken it. As he considered this… considered. Considered? He hadn’t been able to do that only a moment ago. Animals never considered. His head was growing lighter. The shadows cast on the ground in front of him by the great claws of his antlers began to shorten. He watched as his muzzle receded into his face, the dark fur disappearing into pale skin, and his hands grew blunt in front of his eyes. The last of the water was expelled from his lungs as his ribcage shrunk and reformed. His next breath did not burn.
The man with the cup crouched down, elbows on his knees. He was wearing an immaculately pressed and tailored charcoal suit and tie with a white dress shirt. The heat didn’t seem to bother him as he studied Gideon’s transformation with detached curiosity. Gideon studied his new hands.
“My name is James Grey,” said the man.
“My name,” said Gideon in a hoarse voice, “is Gideon Bale.”
“Yes, I know,” said Grey. “I gave it to you.” He took another drink from his cup. Gideon wrestled his eyes away from his own changed form and they were pulled back to Grey’s face almost against his will. “Do you know, Gideon,” said Grey, “why I have given you this gift?”
“No,” said Gideon. “I… I don’t think I know much of anything, right now.”
“That’s right,” Grey said, and smiled again, briefly. “But I will teach you. I will give you everything you need to fulfill your purpose.”
“P… purpose?”
“The reason you are no longer one of the dozens of human bodies rotting at the bottom of this lake,” Grey said. Though his tone didn’t change, there was a strange edge to the words as he said them. “You died, Gideon. You were killed.”
Gideon took a moment to process this newest revelation. “Oh,” he said. Then, “Huh.”
“Quite,” Grey agreed. “But as you’ve noticed, you’ve been given a new life, a better life. A chance to never be the victim again.” He put a hand on one knee and levered himself easily to his feet again. Gideon squinted up at him against the glare of the hot sun, and Grey didn’t move to shield him. “Humans did this to you, Gideon.”
“Humans,” Gideon repeated. As Grey spoke, Gideon could feel the same primal tension uncoiling itself in his gut, the same energy that had gotten him out of six feet of shit under thirty feet of weedy water. He… had been human once, and wasn’t anymore. Humans, with their whispers and hypocrisy, their willful blindness and petty, meaningless conflicts. Humans were other. “Humans,” he growled.
“Humans, who are small and weak and multiply like maggots in the rotting corpse of their world.” Grey sipped from his cup. As Gideon’s head continued to clear, his brain learning to sort information at an unnatural speed, he could smell… milk, and sugar. “You can destroy them now, Gideon. You will destroy them.”
Gideon only snarled in response.
“You will be the tool of my wrath,” said Grey in a wrathless voice. “You will execute my orders with precision and intelligence. You will hate coldly and kill without either mercy or passion.” Grey dropped his cup, and Gideon’s hand lashed out instantly to catch it. In his grip, the foam cracked and collapsed. Cold liquid leaked out over the backs of his fingers.
“My previous Wrath disappointed me,” Grey said. “You will not.”
It was not a question, a command, or a threat. It was a statement of immutable fact, a declaration of will that could no more be resisted than the gravity well of a black hole. Gideon nodded and immediately felt very foolish for it, like a piece of wood thinking its acknowledgement or lack thereof could change whether it burned when tossed into a fire.
He dropped the warped cup into the mud. “Thank you,” he said after a moment. “For your gift.”
“Use it to serve your king well,” Grey said, “and I may allow you to keep it.”
