The baby lay in a ditch of black mud and had not cried in two days. Scruntzz did not know his name yet, or that he had one. He knew only the ache in his belly and the wet heat of the ground under his back. When the ache grew sharp, something in his blood answered without asking him. The mud around him churned. A pale, eyeless worm pushed up through the muck, teeth bared, red ooze sliding from its segmented flesh. It crawled to his mouth and let him suck the rot from its skin. He lived another day on that milk. He lived a week on the beetles that followed, and a month on the raptors that dragged rabbits to his feet, and a year on the serpent-people who watched him from the reeds and left fish on flat stones. He never called them. His half-god blood called them for him, the way a fever calls sweat. He was four when the cats came for him. Three of them, long as canoes, teeth the color of old bone. He ran on all fours because he had never learned to stand straight. The blood in him screamed and a mammoth broke the treeline, tusks down, and crushed two cats into the dirt. The third fled. Scruntzz sat in the churned ground and shook, and for the first time he understood that he had almost died, and that something had chosen to save him. The understanding sat in his chest like a second heartbeat. He reached for it. His blood reached with him, and this time he felt it move. The air beside him folded. What stepped out was not a beetle or a worm or a mammoth. It was small and shifting, fur one moment, scale the next, eyes steady. It looked at him and made a sound close to a word. Then another. Then his name, which he had not known he had. It told him the cats belonged to the god-beasts. It told him the god-beasts owned the mud he was born in and the sky above it and the throne at the center of the world. It asked him if he wanted to keep eating worms in a ditch, or if he wanted the throne. Scruntzz stood up on two legs. It hurt. He did not sit back down. He pointed the way the third cat had run and the shifting thing smiled with a mouth it had just made. They walked out of the ditch together, and the mammoth followed, and behind the mammoth the reeds moved with things that had fed him since birth.

He walk on in a trance. Time seemed to fade away. Only a desire that seamed to come more from the shifting thing than from himself drove him. It somehow knew the way. A lake of black and red water lay at the center of this open air temple. Something enormous moved under the water, through the shifting thing scruntzz felt the glowing monster under the waves. Many serpent men milled around, some holding a sacrifice in various states of array. None saw him. the shifting thing had camouflaged him somehow. Scruntzz looked at the water and understood. This serpent god lived in the minds of his followers and their sacrificial offerings. At once the idea reviled him. And with an anger and skill he never knew he had he went about cleansing the temple of serpent people. At last it was just him and the serpent god. Now that the carnage was over the serpent god slowly rose from the water levitating 20’ off the ground dripping blood and lashing its tongues intermittently tasting his sent and his power. At the same time he realized his power is much alike this lizard god but how could that be? Then the shapeshifter thing shimmered into sight and his massacre comes flashing back into his mind. He fought not like a human or beast but like a god. And then he realized he was part god part raptor part human and the lizard god respected him and his goals. The Lizard god sent a picture into his mind the the shapeshifter sometimes did of a snake eating its own tail. He looked on at the vision and saw the whole world doing the same including the other gods and their kingdoms all revulsion and needing cleansing. He looked at the lizards around him and realized the had lost something of him self he never new he had in the first place empathy for the little things that grunt in the muck and die before they even know what they are. Much like he could have been. He lost empathy for himself?! The idea confusing and scary. In that moment he lost focus of the serpent god and it stock hard heads and legs everywhere all at once. He was sure it was all over but the shapeshifter plunged into him a split second before and time seemed to stop a second time. He felt the mammoth and the serpent and the mud beetle and the rot worm all within and the raptor human himself seamed to grow twice as big. Then he was faintly aware the the shifting thing had gotten bigger than the serpent god as the looked up at the shifting thing he sensed a surging of him self out a pulling of himself up up until he realized with fear and awe that the only way to live was to pour himself out into the shifting thing no matter the cost.