"Konstantin, boy! We have been looking everywhere for you! How on earth did you roam this deep in the forest?" Nayan asked the goat — the creature.
It bleated again, but the sound came out a half-second too long, trailing off into something almost like a sigh. Its eyes flickered to Rudra, slitted pupils holding steady in a way no prey animal's ever did, as if it knew, it knew that it wasn't fooling him. It took a few tentative steps towards Nayan. As it walked, the joints of its legs bent at odd angles that were almost natural — like something copying a walk it had studied rather than lived, each hoof placed a fraction too deliberately, as though counting its own steps.
It was getting too close to Nayan.
"Nayan!" Rudra took a few long steps, catching up with Nayan, and snapped, "Get back." A hand hooked around her arm; he pulled. Nayan stumbled back, letting out an undignified yelp, "What—!"
"The eyes!" hissed Rudra. "Look at its eyes."
Nayan blinked and shook her head, confused. "I don't see what you mean."
"It's not a goat!" Rudra said. "It's a shapeshifter."
Nayan went quiet. The goat went quiet — too quiet, its chest not rising with breath the way a living thing's should. "Well, there is no harm in trying, is there?" the goat said. Nayan flinched back so hard she nearly tripped over her own feet, a sharp, involuntary sound tearing out of her throat — not quite a scream, swallowed before it could finish. Her hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of Rudra's sleeve. Goosebumps crawled up her arms all the way to her neck.
"Did Konstantin just talk?!" she gasped.
The goat bent its neck, almost like how a human would nod — but the motion carried a beat too far, the head tilting past the angle a real neck should allow before correcting itself. "Indeed I did, General Nayan Dev," answered the goat — no, the creature — and its voice was wrong in a way Nayan couldn't place at first: too even, too resonant, as if several voices were speaking in perfect unison a half-syllable apart. "We're a species perfectly capable of communicating in the language of bipedal creatures you have aligned yourself with." It wasn't talking to Nayan; it was talking to Rudra, its slit-pupiled gaze never once drifting toward her. "So it is true. You are able to differentiate us from other lesser beings."
"How troublesome," hummed Rudra. He felt a slow, slithering warmth crawling up his spine, heating up his muscles — his dragon form on the verge of breaking through. "You are aware of the massacre of your people that took place in Ashkavar Forest a year back," he mused. "Then you must know you cannot take me down."
"We do not want to take you down," the creature said, smiling — or at least trying to. The lips pulled back over the gums in a stretch no goat's mouth was built for, the corners climbing too high, holding a beat too long — eerily similar to how Suba, the Shapeshifter King of the Ashkavar Shapeshifter Population, had once smiled at Rudra. "We are here to settle a score. We have come a long way from Partha."
Rudra narrowed his eyes. "You followed me here a week ago?"
"No," the creature said, shaking its head — a motion that rippled a fraction too far down its neck, like water settling after a stone's been dropped in it. "We came here a year ago, when you killed Suba and almost drove our population to extinction with your unreasonable, cruel, genocidal policy regarding our species. We were approached by an oracle of some sort who had predicted you would be coming here. Alone. Defenseless. So we waited. We honed our weapons, sharpened our canines, and we—"
The same eerie smile stretched wide again, teeth showing that no goat should have — too many of them, too straight, too sharp,"Waited."
"Unfortunately," Rudra exhaled, "waiting will not change the fact that you are still too weak to take me down. Perhaps you should have waited a few more thousand years to evolve better before coming to find me."
"Perhaps we should have," agreed the goat, its head cocking with that same unnatural, overshot tilt. "But she won't live long enough for us to carry out our revenge."
It looked at Nayan. Rudra stopped breathing.
"Marich," continued the goat, taking small but deoiberate steps towards them. Roughly, Rudra pulled Nayan behind her, "Is our new elected King. And he is far more simple minded in his methods than our late King Suba had been," it's voice thickened with respect,"Eye for an eye. Tooth for a tooth. Evil for an evil- isn't that what humans say? We agree with it."
It was staring at Rudra's direction but not really at him. As if it was looking at Nayan behind him, "You took his brother. And he shall take your sister."
"Nayan doesn't have Dragon Blood," Rudra prompted, "She isn't family."
"And yet you are hiding her as if she's someone precious!"
Here's the corrected version:
Rudra didn't wait for the creature to attack. He didn't wait even a second to find out what it had planned.
He transformed.
Heat rolled off his body, immediately turning the nearby trees into charred coal pieces. They cracked and shattered even before his enlarged form started occupying the land, flattening a mile of the forest. The mist evaporated. Rudra's shadow darkened the forest land faster than the arriving night.
Even before Rudra's fangs had torn out of his gums, he turned his head at Nayan, who had jumped several steps back.
"Nayaggrhhh," the words in his mouth became heavier and heavier until he couldn't speak anymore, "Ge—wreegh rhoowwgh graa!"
Nayan understood. She always did. She came running back. Rudra's foreleg had come down beside her, obsidian scales catching what little light filtered through the canopy, each one the size of a shield, rimmed faintly with that ember undertone that pulsed like something breathing beneath the black. Nayan didn't wait for an invitation — she didn't think there'd be one.
She grabbed the nearest ridge of scale, the edge biting into her palm, and hauled herself up. Her boots scrabbled uselessly against smooth obsidian for a heart-stopping second before she found a seam — the gap where one scale overlapped the next, just wide enough to wedge her fingers and the toe of her boot. She climbed the way you'd climb a cliff face with no rope, no plan, just momentum and panic doing the work reason couldn't.
Rudra felt her climbing, hand over hand, scale over scale, past the curve of his shoulder where the plates grew larger, more uneven, forcing her to half-drag herself over each ridge. She hooked an arm over the last scale and pulled herself onto the wide, sloped plane of his back.
She was breathing hard, but at least she was safe.
For now.
Rudra looked around. The creature was nowhere to be seen. But that only made him more anxious. He spread his wings and beat them, sending a tree or two uprooted and flying away from the miniature storm of his creation. And then he lunged into the air.
The view from above was even more uncanny. Even with his enhanced vision, the forest looked innocently quiet. There was not a single animal scurrying away, nor a bird fleeing the place of destruction Rudra had created by his mere transformation.
For a moment, nothing happened.
And then he heard it. Something moving across the dark sky. Something almost as big as him.
The danger was not on the ground.
It was in the sky. With him.
And it made things so much worse.