You consider your options carefully. You know that your dad could easily swallow people and, presumably, there was some method to get them back out again since you saw Ahrena's father within the last few hours. If there was any danger, surely no-one would let you play together, so they were probably expecting something like this to happen. Your surroundings, while familiar to you over the past few years, are entirely unfamiliar to your newly-awakened memories; you recall a jungle, but you're surrounded by savannah; yellowed grassland with an occasional twisted tree. You look back at the wooden pallisade of your home for the past four years, then you sigh and start walking back towards the village. The open gateway looms invitingly overhead.
"We're going to see my dad," you say conversationally, in case your accidental passenger can hear. "I'm sure he'll have something to say about what happened."
It might be your imagination, but you feel a sensation a little like butterflies fluttering in your gut. You rub your abdomen thoughtfully as you walk, not entirely sure whether the sensation means anything. You look around, eyeing the familiar-alien grass-roofed huts, the occasional chicken pen, the lion-people going about their business and the very occasional human. Everyone, you notice, is naked and either burned black by the merciless sun, or covered in fur that ranges from black to gold to near white. It just seemed entirely normal until now.
The nakedness adds another level of awkward when you walk face-first into something fluffy that has no give at all.
"Ah! Sorry, I-" you begin.
"Ah!" says the stranger at the same time, turning to look. Not a stranger after all, you realise, as you take in the familiar black pelt. Her muscular arms scoop you up as though you weigh nothing at all. "My son! My precious!" Your mother's mouth stretches into a wide smile that shows no teeth, and then she practically smothers you to her muscular torso. The only saving grace is the lack of a mane, but otherwise it's like being mashed into a fur-covered rock. "You are well. Are you guarding Arenha?"
You flick your tail with minor irritation and mumble something that borders incoherence, since your face is being pressed into something so unyielding.
"Yes, yes! My son, the important guard." You're lifted away from your mountainous mother and, out of habit born of long experience, snatch a deep breath before you're being smothered once more into her torso. This time you manage to turn your head slightly.
"I am four, you know," you say reproachfully into her armpit. This elicits a strangely girlish giggle, not at all the response you wanted. "You should put me down. I need to talk to dad."
You're lifted up into the air instead, and your black-furred mother looks at you with tawny eyes. You recognise a mock-serious expression with one set of memories, while the other set remains utterly clueless. She gently sets you on your feet, and then combs her fingers through your hair.
"Your mane has come in well." You endure her ministrations in stoic, and not at all sulky, silence. "Well. Your father is home. He is... relaxing."
Significant pause 'relaxing'. You remember that as having a specific meaning, but it mostly involved your dad sleeping and the hut smelling funny when you came back after a long day of play. A suspicion forms in the back of your mind, but you keep it to yourself since your mom is still talking.
"...if you're done guarding Arenha today, I'll bring you something good to eat when I come back," she's saying.
"Thanks, Mom," impulsively you hug her, although you only come to just over her lower chest. You can't get your arms all the way around her muscular torso, and she laughs.
"Yes, yes. I shall pretend I didn't see the state of your face and leave you some dignity by not washing it for you in public."
You barely manage to suppress a wince. Tongue baths; you had a lot of them as you grew up this time around, and they all felt like a cross between sandpaper and some kind of wet cactus being swiped lovingly across your fur. You let go, catch a knowing smirk as your mother turns away, and start walking towards your family's hut. It's only when you're halfway there that you realise that you talked entirely in English, not the language that you were raised with. Did your Mom have a faintly European accent?
Your tail curls around your thigh; a habit you picked up whenever you were nervous. You uncurl it with an effort and, with a deep breath, resume your resolute march that gradually turns into a kind of forwards sidle. You hesitate, take a deep breath, catch a whiff of something vaguely familiar, carefully push the curtain aside with your forearm and step into the hut.
The first thing you spot is some kind of tufted snake. You stare at it as your eyes adjust to the gloom, and realise that it's your dad's tail swishing and occasionally twitching in the air. A bit more time passes, and you realise that his face is on the floor, and he's rubbing one cheek and then the other over the rushes that make up the floor covering. His arse is up in the air, and you have an excellent view not only of his brown pucker, nestled between muscular buttocks, but his enthusiastically jiggling nuts too.
You clear your throat, take a breath and wince as the same cloyingly sweet smell that you caught outside invades your nostrils. It's familiar, somehow, a scent from your old life that you can't quite place.
"Dad." You pause as the guilty party rolls onto his back, legs apart hands up near his mouth. He's chewing on something and entirely focused on it. "Dad, I, uh, I kind of ate Arenha." He says nothing, and you focus more on the thing he's chewing. Is that... Is that a catnip mouse from a pet store? The cloying stench immediately identifies as a strong smell of catnip, far more powerful than you've ever smelled before. You wonder whether the stench is because of the strength of the plant, or because of how much more sensitive your sense of smell is now. You switch to English and add "You totally stuffed me down your dick too, you bastard."
"Mrf?" You see him try and fail to focus in your direction, the catnip mouse hanging from the side of his mouth. "Nur mff mfmf. Mrfnmb effm."
You stare at him, then flick your gaze to the mouse, and cross the room to snatch it. He tries his best to stop you, but the only thing your dad can manage is some unfocused, slow flailing. The stench is even more powerful up close to the cloth mouse, and it takes you an extreme effort to carry the reeking thing over to the corner, open the lid of a jar on the floor, drop it in and clap the lid shut. You cross back over to the curtained doorway and start wafting fresh air in to the accompaniment of several noises that sound like 'Nuuurr' from the golden-furred heap on the floor.
"We need," you tell him, "to have a talk. You need to be sober." Under your breath you add "fucking catnip."
Despite your worries, and maybe because of the constant waft of fresh air into the hut, it takes a surprisingly short time to sober your father up. You eye him as he recovers and note the faint streaks of white that shoot through his golden pelt, the hints of strain and worry around his mouth that a human would easily miss. Mostly you think about flicking him in the balls and wonder vaguely if the shock will make him vomit while he's coming down from his catnip high.
"You're far too cruel to be any sone of mine," he says, after what feels like an hour but from the movement of the sun is probably closer to ten minutes. It's the first sentence he's managed to string together properly.
"Dad. Arenha." You stop wafting the curatain and stare at him. "I ate her. I'm panicking. Help, dammit."
He raises his forearm off his face and glances at you with one eye. His gaze flicks down to your abdomen, and then he relaces his arm over his face.
"She's fine. She'll come out in five days. Probably after the Majority Feast." He snorts. "It's going to be as much training for her as for you. You did speak the terms of shelter to her this morning, didn't you?"
You rack your brains for the memory of this morning, a thousand years ago.
"I think so," you hazard.
"Good. That's the temporary one. If you said sanctuary, that's more permanent, and you'll need to be more pro-active to get her back out." He sighs and grumbles something under his breath. You don't know the language. "There was something else, right? Please tell me you didn't sober me up just for that?"
"Yeah. Yeah there was." You steel yourself, take a breath, and then sigh. "So about four years ago you stuffed me down your dick."
His arm coms off his face again and he stares at you, unblinking, for several long seconds. He sits up, wincing, crosses his legs and leans forward.
"No. I stuffed a human up my dick four years ago, had sex with your mother, and then I let him out a few days later." You stare at him, uncertain. "I took him back to where I found him to let him try to find his way back through the jungle. Even after I warned him to wait for my son to guide him through, he was adamant it was 'just through the trees'." He snorts. "Complete idiocy. I found him again, we barely made it out of the jungle alive, and then I offered him sanctuary again after he'd recovered. All to make the wait go faster." You watch, owlishly, as he pats the dark orange fur covering his crotch. "He's still in there, and now you've finally awakened his memories. Hooray."
You barely notice the sarcasm. The world seems to go fuzzy and grey as the implications sink in.
"So I'm just a copy?"
Your dad does a double-take, then he clambers across the ground surprisingly quickly and hugs you around the shoulders. His reddish mane blocks your vision, and the tender moment is only slightly spoiled when you feel something you suspect is his erection poking you in the leg.
"No." You feel him take a breath. "And how dare you imply that any son of mine is merely a copy of a half-baked human who doesn't know how to wait." He pulls back, and you glance down. You see your tail wrapped around your upper thigh, and no sign of anything poking out of your dad's crotch-fur. "So," you look back at his face as he continues, "do you want to meet the source of your memories, or shall we leave it? I'm perfectly okay with him taking up space where he is."
"Really?" You can't help it; the relief you feel has loosed something once dormant. "It feels that good, does it?"
His familiar, toothy grin from four years ago is the only reply you get.