Stone under his belly.
Cold. Wet. Someone had washed the altar recently, or something had bled on it and they'd done a poor job of scrubbing. The smell hit him first — copper and incense, the kind that stuck to the back of the throat and wouldn't leave.
Daniel opened his eyes.
He saw stone. He saw his own breath fogging in the night air. He saw four legs beneath him, tied at the ankles with rough rope, and the legs ended in hooves.
Hooves.
He tried to sit up. His body didn't respond the way he remembered. The center of gravity was wrong. The spine curved differently. He tried to push himself upright with his hands and found only forelegs, stiff and strange, ending in split toes that scraped against the stone.
What.
He tried to speak. What came out was a sound he'd never made before — a flat, nasal bleat that echoed off the alley walls.
A man in crimson robes leaned over him.
"The spirit goat is awake," the man said. "Good. The blood will be fresh."
Daniel's body froze.
Not his mind — his mind screamed, move, move, MOVE — but the body locked up, every muscle going rigid, eyes fixed on the knife in the man's hand. Prey instinct. He knew it was prey instinct and he couldn't override it. The knife came down.
It missed his throat by a thumb's width and bit stone.
The cultist cursed. "Hold the head."
Another pair of hands grabbed his horns. Horn nubs, really — small, barely grown, more like hard bumps under his wool. The hands twisted. Daniel's body stayed frozen, but something else was waking up behind his eyes, something that didn't care about goat biology, something that had filed taxes and stood in line at the DMV and knew that sharp metal meant death.
The hands slipped on his wool.
The cultist raised the knife again.
Daniel's hind legs bunched. He didn't decide to move. The body moved for him, coiling like a spring he'd never known he had, and he drove his skull into the man's throat.
Cartilage gave with a wet, ugly crunch. The cultist's hands flew to his own neck, the knife forgotten, a thin whistling gurgle replacing whatever curse he'd meant to say. He went down hard, choking on his own breath.
The knife clattered on stone.
Daniel ran.
Not well — his legs worked wrong, too many joints, the hooves skittering on wet cobblestones. He crashed into a wall, rebounded, kept going. Behind him, someone shouted. He didn't look back. He couldn't. His eyes were on the sides of his head and he saw backward without turning, a 270-degree panorama of terror that made him want to vomit.
He vomited. While running. It didn't slow him down.
Something dragged at his jaw. Heavy. Cold. Metal. He tried to spit it out and couldn't — his teeth had locked around it, the muscles seized, and the weight banged against his chin with every stride. A sword. A rusted short sword. He didn't remember grabbing it. It was just there, filling his mouth with the taste of old iron and blood, and he couldn't let go.
The alley opened onto a wider street. Rain hit his face — not his face, his muzzle, long and alien. He ran through mud and garbage and something that crunched under his hooves. The shouting faded. His lungs burned. His legs burned. He had four of them and they all hurt.
He collapsed behind a tannery.
The smell here was worse — piss and chemicals and rotting leather. Daniel curled against a wall and tried to think. His heart hammered against ribs that felt too narrow. He tried to raise a hand to his face and watched a foreleg twitch in the mud.
I'm a goat, he thought. I'm a fucking goat.
A bleat came out. Loud and indignant.
He had no memory of how he got here. The last thing he remembered was — what? An apartment. A Tuesday. The vague, humiliating shape of a life so ordinary it barely cast a shadow. He'd died, maybe. He didn't know how. The knowledge was a blank wall where a door should be.
Something cold touched his mind.
plain
[AWAKENING]
Vessel: Capra aegagrus hircus (juvenile)
Soul: Human [anomalous]
Binding... complete.
Status: SACRIFICIAL OFFERING
Daniel stared at the words. They hung in his vision like afterimages, white text on the dark alley, and they didn't go away when he blinked.
What the fuck, he thought.
A bleat came out.
plain
[STATUS]
Vessel: KID · MORTAL
Qi: 0/10 | Body: 2 | Speed: 4
Devour Stomach: 0/2
Spatial Stomach: 0/0 [LOCKED]
Corruption: 0% [░░░░░░░░░░] Floor: 0%
Stubbornness: 100/100
Humanity: 0% [LOCKED]
He read the numbers. He didn't understand them. He understood "Sacrificial Offering" well enough — the altar, the knife, the cultist in crimson.
I need to move, he thought. I need to —
His body wouldn't uncoil. The prey instinct had locked him in place, trembling against the tannery wall, and his human mind hammered against it like a moth against glass. He was going to die here. They were going to find him frozen and stupid and cut his throat while he couldn't even run.
Footsteps. Light, careful. Daniel's ears — huge, mobile, catching sound from directions he couldn't name — swiveled toward them. A heartbeat, ten feet away. A whisper at fifty. The rain masked some of it, but not enough. Someone was coming.
A girl stepped into the alley.
She was twelve, maybe thirteen, dressed in rags that had been washed until the color gave up. She carried a clay jar and a bone knife. She moved like someone who knew which shadows belonged to her and which didn't.
She saw him.
She saw the sword in his mouth.
She didn't run.
Daniel looked at her with horizontal pupils, with eyes that saw behind him without turning, and he felt the full weight of what he'd become settle on him like wet wool. He was a goat with a sword in his mouth, hiding behind a tannery, and he was going to die a second death before he'd even figured out the first one.
The girl's eyes dropped to his legs.
She went very still.
Daniel followed her gaze. The rope was still there, frayed where he'd pulled free, and woven into the fibers was a pattern he couldn't see — three knots, a loop, a twist that meant nothing to him and everything to her.
"Third-pattern," she whispered.