Harvest - I (Patreon)

I crept forward slowly and quietly for the third time this night, right up until I was scant inches away from my prey. It was resting casually, slowly beating its wings as if to stretch them, and totally unaware of my presence. Tensing my legs I readied myself, waiting for just the right moment... and pounced, leaping after the moth atop the long stalk of turquoise grass.

Only to miss, planting my nose straight into the ground beyond.

My ears twitched as they tracked the sound of soft wing beats fleeing from me, fluttering off into the distance once more. Scrambling back to my feet, all of them, I started chasing after it; I wasn't going to be beaten by a moth in my own dream! Every time I caught up and got close I jumped into the air, snatching at it with my legs and mouth. The scenery blurred around us as we darted between gnarled black trees and through bushes and over thorny vines.

In my chest, my heart soared with the thrill of the chase, of the hunt, even as the more lucid part of my mind took simple pleasure in this escape from the nightmare I'd been having before.

As I bounced off a tree, gaining more height and flying above the fleeing insect, we came upon a small gap in the canopy where a bright beam of moonlight shone down on a field of moonleaf that shone with the same light. Above it all, a swarm of moths danced, rising and sinking in intricate patterns as they flew between moonbeams or alighted on the flowers of the plant.

The moth I was chasing flew through the swarm, joining in their dance in an attempt to lose me. But my eyes weren't tricked, tracking it perfectly in the silvery light of the White Lady.

Undeterred by the sight before me, I barrelled into them. The sudden intrusion scattered and sent them fleeing for the thick canopy of grasping black branches and vibrant emerald green leaves above.

With keen eyes that found the dim light of stars and moon no barrier to their work, I tracked my prey as it fled and separated itself from the rest of its kind. Dropping low to the forest flaw I began to stalk after it. I had been so close the last time I caught up to it, it was growing tired, all I had to do was wait for it to rest again and pounce again. Each time I caught up I was better at it than the last.

It wasn't going to escape again.

Wriggling my way through a bush, careful to disturb it as little as I could so it didn't make a sound, I pushed out into a wider glade. A field of turquoise grass spread out before me, the butterfly flapping its way upward towards the purple canopy of the single resplendent tree that stood at its centre and stretched all the way into the skies above. A powerful and majestic tree that had me pausing, falling back onto my haunches, in wonder.

Opening my muzzle I tried to voice a thought, only to yip confusedly.

Dreams were strange things. They were ephemeral, transient, and incoherent. They changed and shifted and altered on a whim without any real rhyme or reason. They were the mind's way of ordering and sorting and categorising and understanding things the waking mind encountered, of turning the memories of a day into something that would last into the future. A way to process all that one encountered; and then there were the mystical aspects.

I had thought I was dreaming. That the shifting colours of the trees, the moments where night turned to day and the sun turned into a moon, and the eagerness and instincts I felt were all just symptoms of a dream conjured by the presence of the Wild God I had fallen asleep beside.

But, that cold and wet sensation which had trickled down my body and into my very soul and had shattered the nightmare of saying no and not being heard hadn't heralded the beginning of a dream.

No, looking up at the unquestionable presence of Daral'nir – or Sofnadrasil, the Slumbering Pillar, as Lord Renard had called it – the twin of Tal'Doren – Ótamdrasil, the Wild Pillar – and felt its drowsy yet alluring lullaby that called all to rest beneath it in a slumber without end, I realised I hadn't been dreaming.

A soft mewl escaped my muzzle, my fur stood on end as goosebumps rippled across my skin, and my tail bristled and rose stiffly as it hit me that I had fallen into the Emerald Dream without even noticing. That I had so foolishly thought was just my own dream. A dream of being a fox because I had fallen asleep surrounded by foxes and a god that was a fox.

Despite the soft lullaby that suffused the glade, the sheer terror I felt at that moment drove me to wakefulness, shattering the haze of sleep that had clouded my mind and given me distance from the form I wore. The sounds I heard increased a hundredfold and a thousand new scents assaulted my nose. My eyes snapped to the rustling and shifting of leaves and the faintest waving of blades of grass, my ears twisted to track every sound they could, and I took in deep lungfuls of air to try and find the scent of any danger.

It didn't matter that I had been here before, that I had entered the Dream before and explored this place. At that time I had chosen to do so, willingly and purposefully fallen into a trance so that I could visit this place. This time I hadn't. The Emerald Dream wasn't hostile so long as it remained pure, untouched by the Nightmare that slipped in through the roots of the fallen world tree, but that didn't make it safe. What if I'd caught that moth and it had been the child of some spirit moth that took umbrage at my catching and killing of its child? What if I had interrupted some mystical part of the Dream when I disrupted those moths and angered them?

Even if there wasn't anything like a spirit moth in the Blackwald or Gilneas as a whole, that didn't mean there weren't any here.

Slowly, and with a lot more caution, I made my way towards the great tree at the heart of the glade. All around me, flowers were in bloom and I caught the scent of animals that had passed through the glade, their trails as clear as tracks in snow to my enhanced nose.

Somehow all of the sounds I heard from my ears as they tracked to and fro, the scents that my nose took in with each great sniff of air, and the sparks of movement that my eyes caught and tracked didn't overwhelm me. I had no context for many of them, as while I could smell that something, some animal, had walked a trail that I just passed I didn't know how to differentiate one species from another. Let alone the dozens of other signals that my nose was telling me were important.

And that was just one sense. While my eyes and vision were scarcely sharper, I could pick out the faintest of movements as my eyes were drawn to them and even in the shadowed light cast by the stars and moons I felt as able to see as I would during the light of day. My ears picked up sounds and isolated them in a moment, from the bending of a blade of grass in the breeze that swept through the glade to the beating of a single moth's wings.

I was looking upon the world in an entirely new way, with new eyes, new ears, and a new nose. And for all the fear I felt over falling into the Dream unknowingly a part of me couldn't help but love it.

As I drew closer to Daral'nir – for all I knew a new name for the tree, I had known it by its elven one for far longer – a familiar scent drifted through the air. One I recognised, even if I didn't understand how I recognised it or what it meant; or why it smelt like family.

It wasn't long before I had my answer, with a small blue form clambering over the roots of Daral'nir to look down at me. Tricks chirped out a cheerful greeting as she saw me and leapt down from the root to dash across the field of grass and sniff at my new form. It took a few moments to process that I stood taller than her, that while I was shorter than I was as a human I had to still be at least three feet tall.

Or more, with Tricks only coming up to my knees.

Her pungent fox smell, which I had grown intimately familiar with last night as I was buried amongst so many of her kin in Lord Renard's grove, was strangely pleasant now. A stream of information on her health, her age, and so much more making itself known to me.

Most of all, though, it told me she was almost family.

I chirped out my own greeting and she jumped happily, chirping back. I could always understand animals to some degree, but while this wasn't the true speech of language it carried so much more meaning than I could interpret in the past. She was happy I could speak her way now, that I was like her, and she called me pretty and a big sister.

A series of further barks and chirps, little sounds coming from the back of her throat that I wasn't sure how to copy, told me Lord Renard wanted her to teach me how to... well, be a fox.

Almost as soon as she was done she darted away, looking over her shoulder and barking mockingly. Daring me to catch her.

Taking one last look at Daral'nir, and beyond it to the top of the cliff where Lord Renard's grove would be if it were visible from outside, I tensed my legs. With a sudden leap, I was beside Tricks, surprising her, and slapping a paw to her flank.

I barked, telling her she was It and that it was her turn to catch me, and then darted away as quickly as I could.

She shrieked behind me for a moment, declaring it wasn't fair at all before I heard the pounding of her legs as she started following. The chase was on and the thrill and excitement from earlier filled me once more.

-oOoOo-

It was hard to tell how long my game of tag with Tricks lasted as we ran across Daral'nir's glade due to the strangeness of time in the Dream, the moon never quite in the same place and dawn seeming to start and stop and even reverse at times, but I enjoyed every moment of it. We used every trick we could come up with to evade or corner the other, each tag and chase a reason to become even more familiar with my fox body.

I found my claws remarkably adept for climbing trees, despite my clumsiness at times, and also that the trees were more willing to accommodate me in bending to give me a path to leap from one to another when Tricks started to catch up. More than once I leapt to a branch and used it to ascend higher only for Tricks to try and follow, but found that the branch I had used moved out of the way.

Poor little vixen, having to clamber her way up slowly while I watched.

Not that I was the only one with reason to snicker playfully. As much as I was the swifter of us when it came to running, thanks to my larger body and longer legs, the moment our paths and movements became complicated I started to... trip. Badly. More than a dozen times I misjudged things and stumbled on a turn, or tripped over my own four feet while too intent on tracking Tricks, and I had made many jumps that ended in a less than graceful landing where my nose hit the ground first.

The last happened often enough that Tricks stopped laughing and started sighing disappointedly at me.

On her side, she made extensive use of illusions to try and distract me. Extra foxes running off in different directions, the pitter-patter of feet or even her scent coming from a false direction. Thanks to my ability to sense magic they never truly fooled me but they still slowed me down, forced me to stop and check which ones were real, and that let her get away more than once. Or ended up being the result of my nose planting pounces.

Even if I could tell them apart she could still make it hard to tell exactly where she was amongst the mirror images of herself.

I learned some tricks of my own too, as after the first time she frustrated me by crawling through a hole too tight for me to fit through I found that I could grow and shrink like Lord Renard had. Squeezing down and compressing myself until I was no larger than a mundane fox, or growing until I was as big as a wolf. I was fairly sure I could make myself bigger as a fox than I was as a human.

The first time I followed her through a hollow log, nipping at her tail and tagging her, she had protested that I was cheating again. Though it had been more playful and friendly than angry, happy I'd discovered something.

She had been even more overjoyed when I first slunk down to the ground, copying her illusions, and made myself unnoticeable. It wasn't perfect and she eventually sniffed me out, circling around and around until she caught me after my trail went dead, and I hadn't managed to project it in any way like she did yet, but I had effectively made myself invisible to her eyes.

But eventually, we grew tired and exhausted, Tricks panting heavily from exertion even as she radiated happiness from our play while we walked back towards Daral'nir and its comforting lullaby. I wasn't quite as out of breath as she was, though I had a number of bumps and bruises from my mishaps that I was struggling to heal while I was in this form. It wasn't so much that the magic I used wasn't there, but that everything felt so different that trying to do the same things just didn't work.

Much as I no longer had hands with which to grab or shape things and had paws instead,  I now had a fox's sense of magic instead of the human one I was used to.

Given time I got the feeling I could learn to do almost everything I did as a human in this form, but there would always be advantages to doing what was familiar and symbolically aligned with the body I wore when I did it.

Tricks flopped down next to one of Daral'nir's roots with a satisfied huff, smugly telling herself she did well.

Snorting softly I nuzzled her gently before settling in beside her; she had. It had been amazingly fun.

There wasn't a reply as she closed her eyes, drifting off and fading out of the dream. The sun started to peek over the tops of the trees surrounding the glade, creating sunbeams that danced through the leaves. This time it wasn't a false dawn, the way the forest responded told me that, and though I was tempted to stay I pushed it aside. Ignored the lullaby of Daral'nir that promised to calm the nightmares I kept having and closed my eyes.

I let myself fall away from the world, not into a slumber within slumber, but following the same path out of the Dream that Tricks had shown me.

-oOoOo-

Wakefulness from the Dream came in the form of a bed of warmth and comfort, of sleepy breathing and familiar scents, and of fur and shifting bodies. My ears twitched, flicking as the breath of one of my vulpine bedmates tickled them. As I opened my eyes, taking in the rays of sunlight that filtered through the leaves above and the muzzle that lay before them, I felt less surprised than perhaps I should have.

The change hadn't been just part of my unintentional foray into the Emerald Dream.

Careful not to disturb the others too much I wriggled my way out of the pile, my body shrinking down to make it easier, and stretched instinctively the moment I was free. There was something immensely satisfying about the motion, about the way I opened my jaw so wide and let out an immense yawn.

"Well, hello there you pretty little thing."

Letting out a startled bark I leapt away from the Wild God that had surprised me, my tail raising in alarm as I started to pay more attention to my surroundings. Lord Renard was there, a smug grin on his face as he watched me with one half-closed eye. Tricks sat before him, staring at him incredulously while her tails twitched irritably. Her parents – I wasn't sure how I recognised them as her parents... but they smelled like her? – stood behind her, a measure of worry and pride in the way they held themselves.

But, mostly, the two older blink foxes were snickering as they turned to look at me.

Aderic, sitting on his log on the other side of Lord Renard, looked up from his whittling and sighed. "Perhaps a little much, my lord. Even if she is taking this remarkably well."

Staring at them with wide eyes I pulled my claws back in and tried to calm the furious beat of my heart. Then, I barked out a protest, not appreciating being startled.

Lord Renard huffed, though he winked at me with the eye pointing in my direction. "But look at her, Addy! Just look at that fur, that tail! Truly a paragon of excellence now, she is far better as a fox than a pale little human." He turned to Tricks' parents. "Nim, Nem, you agree, don't you? You do, don't you?"

Nim, Tricks' mother, made a show of debating it with her tails swaying from side to side behind her before barking. "No, she makes a good human. Not a bad fox but a good human." She said, her voice strangely melodious amongst the yips and barks that made up her speech, the words twisted and entwined with the same magic Tricks used for her illusions. "We need more good humans."

"She is pretty, though." Nem countered, his voice softer and more ephemeral, only to receive his mate's tails batting him heavily. "Ah! For Tricks, not me!"

"Our daughter doesn't need a mate, Nem," Nim said, nipping at his ear and tugging on it, "she needs a protector."

I mewled in confusion, tilting my head curiously. Tricks couldn't speak, so why could her parents?

"The tails," Aderic said, answering my question, "Tricks, for all she is growing swiftly, is still young. Her parents have had far longer to learn..." He looked at Tricks, who glanced up at him expectantly, and sighed. "More tricks."

Lord Renard started to snicker loudly while Tricks yipped happily.

"Regardless of the living pun your apprentice has forced upon us, there is one more matter to handle." He put away his whittling and stood, brushing himself off as he walked over to me. "Now, the hard part is over. You are accustomed to your blessing and know the feeling, the essence, of what has been gifted to you. A necessity to return, to mould your soul into the right shape and have your body follow suit after you have become human once more."

"Not how it works," Nim muttered.

"It's a metaphor," Aderic said patiently, not sparing Nim a second glance. "Inside of you is a memory of your human body, the experience of living that way. To change back–"

I had started searching before he had continued from Nim's interruption, finding that spark of human consciousness, the feeling of skin bare to the world without fur to protect it, of immobile ears and dull scents. Of tactile hands that brought out sensations far in excess of what the pads of my paws could provide. The flow of magic through my body as I shaped it,

"–And you've already done it." He finished, a wide smile splitting his face. "Always a swift learner. Save, of course, your imbuements."

Blinking up at him, readjusting to the dimmer light my human eyes caught, I smiled. "I've a fair bit of experience being human." I said amusedly, letting the comment on the one thing I 'struggled' with under Celestine pass me by.

Picking myself up from the position on my hands and knees that my transformation had left me in I was relieved to find my clothes had survived the transition without any apparent damage or change. Including my expanded pouch, which honestly baffled me. Where had it gone? Where had all the things I kept inside it gone? I didn't keep a small amount of things in there!

"More than most!" Lord Renard barked in amusement. "Welcome to the family, Gwyneth Elwyn Arevin. I am sure you shall bear my blessing well."

"Indeed, welcome to an exclusive club. It is you, I, and two others who bear our lord's blessing." Aderic smiled, offering me a hand to help me to my feet which I took. "True foxes amongst all those that claim such as their name."

Nem scoffed and curled his tails disappointedly. "Boy grew up to be a stubborn coward scared of change. Should hardly count."

"Who?" I asked curiously.

Lord Renard grinned toothily. "Don't spoil it for her! She can find out on her own."

"If I thought that the knowledge would be of use to you, I would tell you," Aderic said, taking a moment to roll his eyes at Lord Renard. "But Nem is correct that one is a coward, only willing to join the reformation out of fear of being left out. The other..." He looked off for a moment. "Would cause trouble knowing you gained our lord's blessing."

"Because I'm a girl." I guessed grumpily.

"No." Aderic shook his head. "Because his child was denied the blessing when he asked."

Lord Renard flicked a tail, a measure of anger to it, and I decided that continuing along that topic was probably not a good idea.

"How secret is the form?" I asked instead. "I didn't know you could, and... obviously you aren't telling me the others."

"In the past, it was considered a secret kept but not concealed," Aderic said, looking at the still-brooding Lord Renard. "Something which was not to be told to others but was no crime for them to learn, to discover. If they had the wit to discern that you bore our lord's blessing then they were worthy enough to know."

There was a moment of silence, waiting to see how Lord Renard would react. Nem lowered himself down, curling around himself at his mate's side and wrapping two of his three tails around her while eyeing him cautiously.

In the silence I looked back inside myself, searching for the same type of feeling that had led me back into being a human again. The sensations and experience of being a fox, the little prism of memories and magic that bore the mark of a Wild God that encapsulated what had happened to me last night within the Emerald Dream.

It didn't take long to find, a scent like a fox interwoven with my magic and humming with a playful melody.

"Do as you wish." Lord Renard said eventually, closing his eyes and turning away. "Take my blessing and carve your mark into the world. By fang and claw if you must."

I nodded solemnly. "Thank you, Lord Renard. For trusting me with this."

The implication was clear enough. So long as I fought against the coming tide of darkness, the onrushing storm of chaos, I could do as he wished with the blessing he had granted me.

Without a word, he stood and stalked away. His tail was stiff, dark thoughts plain to see in his mind from the way he walked. Yet, none moved to follow the retreating Wild God as he departed his own grove even as they watched with worried eyes.

"Are you ready to attempt the–"

Rolling my eyes at Aderic I pushed on that little spark within me that resonated with the Fox. Within a moment the transition began, my clothes melting away into fur, arms twisting and bending into legs and paws. My nose lengthened, becoming a muzzle, and my spine stretched to form a great flowing and bushy tail.

Despite being aware of every aspect of it, from start to finish, it had taken no time at all. There was no pain, no cracking or twisting of bones, nor was there any disorientation from the shift.

In one moment I was human; in the next, a fox.

"Heh, quick," Nim said smugly, "better than your first time, Addy."

Tricks let out an excited bark, her tails swaying happily as she moved up to rub against my leg. Telling me in whines and yips that she had enjoyed our dream, but she had so many more things to show me. The best places to hunt, the best trees to climb, the best spots to nap, and more.

A chance to explore being a fox and learn more about what I could do, the experiment and learn exactly what went into the transition and transformation.

Though I was tempted, I mewled a refusal as I nuzzled her back affectionately. With how urgent things were I didn't have the time to take days away from what needed to be done... but, I could indulge a little.

With an upwelling of excitement flooding me I started cackling, feeling unadulterated joy as I sprinted around the grove.

I had an animal form.

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As an update on the writing situation, I've not had much progress on restoring my buffer. A number of stumblimg blocks and mental issues preventing me from getting as much done as I liked.

Part of me wanted to get further along, to push back against the sluggish pace this chapter, but I didn't manage that. So here's Gwen being a fox and gaining her first animal form.

Thank you, as ever, for your support.