Your heart beats in your chest. Much of your body is buried under snow that is turning to ice from the little heat that permeats from body, whelmed as it is in the winter pelt of a gray vixen, but as cold as the ice is, the surrounding air, in this whiteout, is colder still, sapping the life rapidly out of everything it touches.
Your teacher, who is a gray fox-person like you named Reynard, lies still as death next to you, his slitted eyes poking out of the snow like a crocodile. You have not turned your head in hours to see that he remains with you. You know.
The dog-men moving through the pass below are clad in furs tied 'round their limbs with woven sinew. Even with that protection, ordinary creatures would fall quickly in this weather, but these mongrels have been hardened somewhat to the Dreaded Plateau. These dog-men are raiders, and they have been stalking a hapless caravan of assorted and sundry refugees ever since the steam from their wet supply of wood first appeared over the horizon.
Although contact with the travelers has not been established, such a diverse group of steppe-dwellers braving the pass, at this time of year, must be fleeing a serious holocaust, according to Reynard's thinking. "They will be at their most vulnerable," he had muttered grimly, days ago. "Disunited, hungry, and hopeless, and they must be losing lives steadily just due to the weather unless they have a feline healer on-hand."
"Why feline?" you had asked.
"Housecat folk, specifically," he had expounded. "The ones that turn pred can sometimes kill at a touch, and they are both lightening-fast and resistant to most weapons. Fortunately, their aggression tends to be targeted mostly at each other. Those that don't can use the same power restoratively, and they sometimes hire themselves out to bands of hapless travelers, making a little extra whiskey telling fortunes and serving as phony-baloney mediums."
"How do you know it's phony?" you had objected.
He had just glared silently. Over the past several weeks of his intense, magically assisted training regimen--which has transformed your body into that of a survival-machine--you have had opportunity for many discussions, and this one had already been had. "Bring up that woo one more time, just one more time," he had growled once, while crafting a magical fetish from out of a leather thong and some beads. This was not quite fair at all because it was not that you had insisted that it was real. You just suffered a dearth of understanding as to what made it so very false, from his point-of-view. It was your own admitted ignorance, with which you had been encumbered at birth. Would it be genuine at all for you to pretend that you knew things that you didn't? What a frustrating conversation!
You nearly leap out of your skin as you hear him beginning to stir slowly. "They are setting up their ambush," Reynard whispers to you over the gusts of wind, "and walking right into our trap." With some amount of magical assistance, you and Reynard had set up the terrain to be on a hair-trigger for a rocky and quite deadly avalanche. You will have to kick one log out of the way, and the pass should be filled up, most abruptly, with rocks and snow.
As you break out of the ice-shell around you, every motion sounds, to your sensitive vulpine ears, like a gunshot. You finally manage to crawl your way out, leaving you nude save the utility belt strapped around your right thigh, exposing your body to the bitter cold. You quickly miss the warmth of the ice.
Quietly as a ghost, Reynard has taken off in the direction opposite of the raiders. He will be coming in from the rear to finish off any survivors. Although that would seem unlikely, there is at least one wolf-lord among the band of raiders. Unlike telepathically and empathically connected wolf-packs, wolf-lords lack any such empathy, and while they can think independently, they are also ruthless killers and can become powerful in dark magics. "They are often slavers, though," Reynard had said dismissively. "Sometimes, their only trick is a gender-inversion spell, or it's all they can remember in a pinch in spite of prowess in other arts. The culture in the valleys and, to a lesser extent, sometimes even on the steppes is so misogynistic, the victims often just assume defeat. Females of any species are a good to be traded, and they are not often harmed if they can be captured. Males are sometimes captured, but they are put under heavier restraint." On that, he clearly spoke from experience.
You are glad enough not to risk tangling with such a creature. You take off to where the trap was set at a dead run, sending ice and snow flying as you skid around bends in the path. Reynard's training has made your body resilient enough that clothes would be superfluous. Even though your tits are still c-cups under your fur--down from the unrealistic proportions that Grawnad had saddled you with--your body is all business. Every muscle in your body has a use, and you have learned them all. You go skidding down a slope and deftly somersault over a tree branch, bounding off the next up to a ridge where you catch hold of a projecting tree root. All told, being in a female body has not been so bad, and you have settled into the identity comfortably, even becoming better adjusted than you ever were as a human boy.
You crawl out onto the bluff where you can see the pass, and you see where a log jammed against two rocks holds back a huge tide of snow and debris. You know you will have to be swift to make it back to the bluff before the landslide comes. For now, you wait.
Predictably, the one identified as the wolf-lord struts out front, walking with a sense of self-importance ahead of the band of mongrels that skulk silently behind. Compared with the more seriously attired dog-men, the wolf-lord is a peacocking popinjay, clad in trimmed, tailored robes, of a roughly canine-looking humanoid, his body visibly less bestial than yours and Reynard's...but also less human. Just...less. He has this fixed sneer, more like that of an orc. It occurs to you that, while you might feel some remorse for taking out the rest, putting down this creature would be a pleasure.
However, you realize the necessity of following the plan, and with some reluctance, you let him pass, waiting for the knot of raiders in his wake to reach the danger zone. Only then do you slide down to the log, gripping the ice with your claws, and start kicking at the log. You curse as you find it to be stuck, though, and arrows start flying at you as the raiders become alerted to your presence. Finally, the wood starts to crack, and as the snow flows in behind it, you scramble to leap out of the way. Just in time, you catch hold of a root protruding from the bluff, and you cling tightly to it as the periphery of the avalanche flows around you, at each instant threatening to wrench you cruelly from your lifeline and pull you into the path of tumbling rocks and debris on their course to entomb the band of raiders.
You give a cry of pain as the root finally starts to rip through your paws, though, and you realize your only shot is to leap into the deadly landslide and hope to stay on top of it, which odds are against. You release your grip, and you leap out into the flow. You manage to get on top of a giant root that has been torn from the ground, steaming with the warmth of decay. Once that starts to tumble, succumbing to the weight behind it, you leap into the wake of a boulder, and finally, in one last flow of powder, you find your body being entombed in a suffocating sheet of snow, and you lose consciousness for a while.
~~~
As you come to, you assess your situation before starting to dig your way out, since the warmth of the snow around you might be keeping your injured body alive. You are close enough to the surface that enough air can leak through to sustain you as long as you don't panic, which is good. You sense that your left arm might be damaged, and there is definitely a serious groin-strain you will have to contend with. Finally, you can hear the sounds of a battle raging outside.
It would be unsafe to emerge in your present condition. Reynard might need your help, though. You make a decision after a moment, and with a whimper of pain, you mobilize your body to start digging itself free. Tunneling through snow from below with one's body entimbed is not as easy as it sounds, though, so it takes quite some time to get enough mobility to make any difference. With some patience and determination, though, you manage to start punching your way painfully through the ice, and you manage to get one finger out into the fresh, cold air. And for a moment, all you do is fill your lungs with fresh air. However, you realize you shouldn't linger too long because the walls of your breathing tube are freezing solid. Therefore, with great care, you start digging your way out of the hole.
Eventually, you heave your way out of the hole, and you twist yourself around for leverage. You lie out in the frigid air catching your breath for a while. It's cold. You miss your hole. You miss being warm.
If there were any surviving mongrels, they must have run. The only living things besides you above are Reynard and the wolf-lord, which are locked in a deadly battle of magical combat with arcs flying back and forth. As the wolf-lord gets a critical hit in, though, Reynard goes down, with one of his protective fetishes firing back in a counter-strike, reflecting back the strike with the last dregs of Reynard's energy. The strike knock the wolf-lord to the ground, so both are incapacitated at the same time.
You crawl over to Reynard, and you start trying to treat some of his injuries, using your fledgling healing skills. As the stronger and more able to take the wolf-lord on, you reason that getting Reynard back on his feet gives you both the greatest certainty of survival, so you ignore your own injuries as you work, although they hurt tremendously, sending blinding lances of pain through your temple.
Once he is fully conscious and a bit more mobile, Reynard takes over his own resuscitation, and he ties a temporary healing fetish around your neck to keep you upright for the remainder of the fight. "Don't try to take him," he says. "He's the strongest wolf-lord I've ever fought. Stronger than my old master, but I've progressed since I parted company with him.
You nod, and as the wolf-lord begins to rise, you dive for cover, remaining on standby, and wait while Reynard finishes him off. Soon, energy lances are flying between them again. In a few moments, though, Reynard gets a lucky shot in on the wolf-lord, and as the wolf-lord collapses, Reynard stops to try to tend to his wounds.
Getting up from your hiding place, you go over to him, and you immediately pull your healing supplies from your utility belt, laying them out neatly in the snow, and you both sit down to start tending to each other's injuries. "What happened to all of the others?" you ask Reynard.
"Well," Reynard says, stopping to pant. "I...I had intended to wipe out most of the band in the avalanche, but most of them survived. I'm really kind of glad." He snorts as a realization seems to strike him, " I mean, most of those guys didn't really deserve to die," he reasons, "but the travelers they had been stalking really didn't deserve what was about to happen, either."
"Aren't they killers?" you ask him innocently, wrapping his blistered and singed bicep in a bandage.
He shakes his head sternly. "We mustn't reduce them to that. Their indiscretions may be grievous and some of them unpardonable, but even that wolf lord had thoughts in his head beyond working iniquity. This intervention was necessary for saving lives, but the ones it cost should be no reason to celebrate. The living are a cause to celebrate."
As you rub one of his salves on your groin strain, you contemplate that. Did he move up into this wasteland, away from the violent morass of the valleys, because he thought in this way, or did he learn to think in this way as a consequence of living out here, so far away from any living thing?
Your train of thought is broken as you are struck with a magical energy bolt, and you remain sensible long enough to see Reynard getting struck as well.
~~~
You come to for a moment, and you see a cat standing over you. "His eyes moved..." is all you hear before she fades away again.
~~~
You awaken lying in a cot inside of a small, dark room, lit by a dim flame in a lantern that hangs from the ceiling. The room is moving. You hear a masculine voice groan nearby, and you startled and look around for the source of it. Nope, you're all alone in here. Just you and the walls. You're still feeling too sore to think straight, though, and you quickly fall back to sleep.
~~~
When you come to again, you see a vixen sitting in a chair next to your cot, and she is eating a soup of some sort. Your nose twitches, and you realize that you are quite hungry.
As she sees you stir, she smiles brightly, and she dips her spoon into the broth. "Here, you," she says in a motherly tone. "You could probably use some nourishment. You've been comatose for a while. You're not used to taking energy-bolts, though, so you have to expect that.
You lean your head over, with your lip pursed, and you wet your lips with some of the broth. You suppress a cough as the small amount you sip slides down your throat, providing some welcome lubrication for your tonsils. Once you've passed it around in your mouth for a while, you swallow the remainder, and you lean over to sip more, licking your lips as it goes down.
As she sits there next to you fully nude, you find yourself scanning her body several times. Wow. You look again, and your eyes just keep dancing over the curves. This is so weird. You've never done this when looking at a female before, even in your past life as a human boy. All of a sudden, though, it's becoming a preoccupation. You visualize the vixen in your mind several times, and you imagine her in several poses. You like all of them. Somehow, all the hard-packed muscle on her body makes her seem more feminine, not less. You see her shape more, and it's a great shape. It's such a great shape.
You shake your head to clear it, and you realize you haven't thanked this creature...this wonderful, benevolent creature...for that...whatever it was. "Umm...th-thank--"
You break off as you hear your own voice, and your voice catches in your throat. "Um-um-um-um" this is making it worse. You're hearing that masculine thrum again. What the heck? You turn your legs from side to side and look down at yourself, your heart thumping in your throat, and it dawns on you. "I'm...I'm a..."
The vixen puts a paw on your chest to calm you. "We can always find somewhere to get it reversed if you want to, Vixie" she says firmly, "but you must not overexcite yourself for right now."
You try to force yourself to remain calm, although your heart still pounds fiercely in your chest. You had just gotten used to being a female after spending your life not being much of a guy, and now you're back to being a guy. The memories of being taunted by peers that saw you as soft come back to you. The trauma comes back to you, and you find yourself pulling your elbows tight against yourself as the panic starts to overwhelm you. Slowly, you manage to get your heart-rate down to where you don't feel it thumping in your throat, and you are able to process something resembling reasoned thought.
"Ma'am," you say slowly and carefully, trying not to get distracted too much by the changed timbre of your voice, "I was traveling with this fox-man...um, he was a tod, about medium height, kind of wiry. He calls himself Reynard, which I know is not very imaginative; that's just what he goes by."
The vixen scowls at you. "The idea wasn't to be imaginative, Vixie," she says with tones of annoyance. "I happened to have always liked the name, and I might keep it as a vixen, thank you." To punctuate her remark, she takes a long drought of soup from her spoon, and she offers you more. "Here. Get your strength up, kid, and quit being a putz."
You take the spoon in your hand, and then you look at her kind of stupidly. "Um..." you look her up and down again, and your eyes must be quite wide. "You're...you're hot," you finish. Somehow, you know that sounded stupid, and you hunch down on your cot, embarrassed, trying to distract yourself from failing massively by focusing on the soup.
With a smile, the vixen just caresses your chest, seeming to find your discomfiture amusing. "The wolf-lord had set his final attack sequence to a mass gender-inversion blast, probably more as an act of spite than anything else," she explains. "It inverts orientation as well as gender, although that doesn't work well on me because I've always been bisexual." She grins and ruffles your chest-fur. "Now, you, on the other hand, got it at full strength."
You did. You did. You did. You wish she would rub your chest forever. It feels so good. Crap.
Before things can get too complicated, though, the door opens, and a new face enters upon the scene.