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The thing called Falada is screaming. He is being pulled from his world like a spider from its web. The pain is incandescent. The pain is alive. The pain is everything. He does not know what is happening.
The pain grows to a fever pitch. Falada screams, long and loud, his voice the only proof he has that he is still something beyond only pain, until unconsciousness finally crashes over him. Until he once again has enough of a self to become unconscious. For a long time, Falada is blissfully unaware.
Then he wakes. He is collapsed on a floor, in a world that is not his own. And he instantly knows that this world hates him. It wants him gone. The very air seems to hiss at him, for it knows he does not belong.
He would leave if he could.
There is a sorcerer in front of him. He can tell by the way his self warps towards her. Is being called to her. Being bound to her.
“By blood and bone I bind you. By tooth and tongue, by heart and hands, by flesh and fear. I bind you, Falada. You are mine.”
There is a dead man on the floor. His crumpled form leaks in front of the sorceress. He is the catalyst, the sacrifice, the price she paid to call Falada into her world. It is his blood, his bone and teeth and tongue and heart and hands and flesh and dying fear which brought Falada’s doom.
The sorceress has a bloody knife in her hand. She is smiling. It is a beautiful smile, sharper and deadlier than the knife.
Falada staggers to stand on unfamiliar legs. Furred, white, ending in hooves. Legs that do not belong to him.
He realizes that he has been bound into a new form, that he now looks like an animal native to this ugly world. Falada, horror churning in his new stomach like a whirlpool, realizes he is trapped.
”I will kill you,” he says.
“I am your mistress,” says the sorceress. “You will do nothing I do not command. And here is my first command — you will never harm me.”
She pauses.
“Or her, I suppose,” she adds as an afterthought.
For the first time, Falada notices the infant in one corner of the room. It is so still and silent, easy to miss. He can see an enchantment spiraling over its skin like frost, keeping it from interrupting its mother. Keeping it from crying, moving, doing anything its mother does not wish.
It is a prisoner, too.
Falada hates the child. He hates it as he hates its mother, as he hates his new shape, as he hates the dead man, as he hates this whole foreign world.
”One day I will get free,” he promises. “One day I will kill you and your child.”
The sorceress laughs. She doesn’t believe him.
One day she will.