The dog began to bark excitedly as Kaleth ran back and forth in a panic, searching for a direction to run. The racket was starting to draw the attention of onlookers, who either whooped in amusement or shouted in irritation.
"Will someone shut that damn dog up!"
"Look! He's trying to catch a mouse!"
Kaleth ran through the gap in the dog's forelegs and shot past him as fast as he could. He thought about he was doing the opposite of everything he had set out to do when people looked at him. Now, a gaggle of annoyed people and a starving dog all wanted him dead and all he could do was run. He hugged the side of the alley as he fled, searching for the tiniest nook to squeeze into. But escape would not be so simple. Every time he stopped, he found himself standing between a wall and the wind blown by the snout of the desperate beast.
His efforts to put some distance between himself and the dog were undermined by their difference in size, a disadvantage only slightly mitigated by the shortcuts his tinier body allowed him to take. Every time he did so, he would continue to run without breaking his gait, only for the dog to catch up after running around. He needed to find somewhere the dog couldn't follow, but such an opportunity was proving difficult to spot. His tiny muscles screamed for rest, but he couldn't find so much as a chance to slow down and pick a more suitable direction to run.
As he broke free of the alley, however, he was visited by a stroke of incredible luck. As he continued his sprint, he noticed that the humans walking around ahead had begun to slow again. At last, this strange perversion of time that followed him around gave him some relief instead of questions. He stopped and looked around desperately for something to run toward. All he could see was the unused festival grounds far in the distance. If he could get there, he wouldn't be safe to return to his normal body, but he could at least turn into a bird and fly away.
He decided to go for it, skittering along quickly, but not at quite the hurried pace at which he had been running before. He had a ways to go yet-- between the feet of the humans, no less-- before he could reach this small measure of safety, and he would need to pace himself. He was already beginning to consider finding another direction in which he could run to find a hiding spot. But before he could make up his mind, he started to feel that hot breath on his back again. Kaleth glanced up to find that the dog was upon him again, moving faster than before.
This didn't make sense to Kaleth, who was sure that the magic was supposed to last a lot longer at this point in the pattern he'd painstakingly observed. Yet, the dog was tilting his snout down in an attempt to snap him up. He continued to run, noticing that the humans still weren't moving any more quickly in the process. He managed to find cover between the legs of a soldier who was apparently herding Restan refugees and turned back to look at his pursuer. The animal was changing before his eyes. What was once a mane of patch brown was gradually turning white, and his head grew slightly larger. By the time the animal began to nudge his way through the soldier's legs, he was no longer a dog, but a frost-colored wolf.
Kaleth continued to run from the new creature, who was now not only moving as fast as the dog had been before, but much faster. Fortunately, all of the people in the way were still reacting with the urgency of snails. Deciding to use them to his advantage, he weaved between the many pairs of feet in his path and left the creature behind to struggle against the humans. Finally, he managed to make his way into the festival grounds, which were empty at this point in the year. Although he could no longer rely on humans for cover, he had lost the wolf somewhere in the crowd. With his line of sight clear of anyone else, he took cover behind a fence post and transformed into a hawk. He could have breathed a sigh of relief as he spread his wings and took to the sanctuary of the sky.
But another problem became clear as he took to the air. Although no one could reach him, the cold of a Heronite autumn was too much for his current body for bear. His mind screamed as he fled for the relative safety of his inn. He nearly crashed as he landed on the roof and hurriedly took on a warm-blooded body. As a field lynx, he still shivered in the cold and stood out in the middle of Heron. But here, nobody could see him, nor could they react quickly enough to trouble him if they did. He rested from his turbulent outing enough of his energy returned for him to resume his mousy shape and slip back into his room. He was alone yet again and finally free to return to his body, but something was wrong.
Impossibly, the wolf was previously chasing him was laying on his bed. This didn't stop him from returning to normal, but his mysterious appearance here did nothing to calm his nerves.
"How?"
Kaleth had let out the word with an expression of shock, which only deepened when someone answered him.
"You have finally asked the critical question," a smooth and velvety voice said to him from out of seemingly nowhere.
Kaleth jumped back from the wolf, who only glanced lazily at him before lowering his head on his paw. "Who was that?"
"Think back to what you last heard when your mind was too small to comprehend it," the voice said enigmatically. "The answer to your question lies in this memory."
Kaleth thought back to the meeting between Avatars in The Deer's Fang. Something his father had done with the power of Geos had led to the calamity that was overtaking the rest of the world. Now he was dead, and the Avatars were convinced that he had been replaced. By him.
"Geos?"
"It is always most helpful when the mortals we speak to are so clever," the voice responded. "Now that your mind has been opened to the truth, we can begin to make sense of your impossible existence."
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