In hindsight, it had probably been a bad idea to follow the nice-looking, majestically bearded stallion geezer into that cave where nopony else could see them, but one does not simply say no to cookies.

The world around her exploded into a kaleidoscopic eruption of garish colors. The ground beneath her folded in on itself and vanished, leaving her falling in an infinite expanse of light in which down was just a more confusing up. She “fell,” if one could really call it falling when she didn’t really have any destination, remained uninfluenced by gravity and might not even have been going in the same direction, for approximately nineteen seconds.

Then, a section of the cacophony of color that at first seemed no different from the rest leapt out and swallowed her whole. She had just enough time to wonder what a rainbow’s stomach would look like before it spat her out covered in yucky interdimensional spectral goop. Darkness engulfed her in stark contrast with the light, broken only by a shining mote of effervescent green. It came closer and closer until its radiance became blinding, at which point it expanded and burst into a miasmic cloud of sickly green fog. The fog coalesced and hardened, molding itself into the unmistakable shape of a squamous kraken.

“Gasp!” Sonata gasped. “Mom? Is that you?”

The kraken nodded sagely.

Sonata cocked her head, frowning. Eventually, she glanced downwards and, with a start, realized that her gem had vanished. “Gasp! Are you here to punish me for losing my gem?”

The kraken shrugged its tentacular shoulders.

Sonata hung her head, feeling her shame pinning her to the ground. “I- I understand,” she whimpered. “Just… give me a chance to get them back, okay?”

The kraken gesticulated in an approving manner.

The events that followed had never been meant for mortal eyes to perceive, let alone comprehend. Sonata’s time-devouring eldritch abomination mother twisted its tentacles into sanity-blasting geometric shapes, invoking the most heinous of magics. Bones split themselves apart and knotted back together in alien shapes, scales sloughed off and morphed into soft, delicate flesh. The void in Sonata’s chest, left by the removal of her gem, reignited with pulsating green light.

A shining pillar of silvery radiance, twinkling with star-like motes, descended down from wherever “up” was and bathed Sonata in its reassuring essence. Under its light, she felt her body changing again, surging with vigor and power. Her fleshy form sheathed itself in muscle, tough hide and sleek fur. At the tips of her newly formed fingers, her nails hardened into deadly claws. She threw her head back, opened up her elongated muzzle and bared her fanged maw, letting loose an ear-piercing howl.

“What. The actual. Fuck.”

“Pretty good, right?”

“I feel like you just violated my eye sockets with a cactus.”

“How do you know what that feels like?”

“I’ve had some weird exes, but whatever.” Aria ground her knuckles into her forehead. “Let’s go back to the part where you think your mom is some kind of space squid and you’re the product of whatever mind-blowingly kinky stuff she had to do to get off.”

“I… don’t actually think that. Also, gross.”

“Then why’d you put it in your autobiography?”

“What? No no no, you’ve got it all wrong. One sec.” Sonata darted out of the room and came back with another, nearly identical, book. “See, this is my autobiography.” She gestured at the book in Aria’s hands. “That, my dear Aria, is fanfiction.”

“One: don’t ever call me that again. Two: you wrote fanfiction.”

“Yep.”

“Of a book that you wrote.”

“Yep.”

“You are the dumbest thing.”

“Well.. y’know how our lives have actually been really boring ever since we came here?”

“Right. Having an entire world where we can pretty much screw around and do whatever and nobody can tell us to stop is the epitome of boredom.”

“... Anyway, I decided to spice things up a bit.”

“By deciding that a space squid popped you out and turned you into a werewolf.”

“Aria? Gross.”

“Whatever. Does this train wreck ever get any better?”

“Oh yes. We’re coming up on one of the best parts, actually.” Sonata beamed at Aria and bat her eyelashes. “You didn’t think I’d keep all the werewolfey goodness to myself and not have any for my amazing bestie, did you?”

Now, being both an insufferably adorable little girl and also a wolf-thingy at the same time was pretty confusing for me and, being the magnificent storyteller that I am, I wouldn’t want all you lovely people to have to go through the same confusion. So here’s the rundown: we were wolf-people when we wanted to be, wolves when we wanted to be, and smexy human siren thingies when we wanted to be those. We lived in a forest where we didn’t really have any of that clothing stuff other people had, so we made do without it (That last part actually isn’t true, but Dagi always said that a little bit of skin would do wonders for the sales. Servicing fans or something, she said).

Aria, being the totally amazing person she was, was the biggest and baddest of the wolves. And when I say big, I don’t just mean, “Wow, that’s a really big wolf” kind of big, I mean, “Oh my gosh, she just threw a bear off a cliff with her teeth” big, ‘cause that’s totally a thing she did one time. She was pretty awesome like that.

Then there was me, who was somewhere in the middle of the pack. I wasn’t as perfectly toned as Aria—because really, who is?—but I was still nice and muscley.

Lastly, there was Adagio, who was the smallest and weakest of us. Now, you might be wondering, “Well, what good was she, then?” The answer: Sometimes, not a whole lot. Sure, she could be really smart from time to time, but mostly she just sat around looking pretty. Fortunately for her, she had us around to make her seem scarier, kind of like how she’s actually really short in real life and needs agonizing shoes and gigantic hair to compensate.

We still put up with her, mostly because she was fluffy. Like, sooo fluffy. Since, as anyone can tell you, it is a physical impossibility to lead a life that is both fulfilling and fluff-deprived (Ask anyone who’s happy, they’ll back me up) and good fluff is quite hard to come by in the woods, we were kinda stuck with her. Once in awhile, she got her hands on some of that yucky stuff the humans drink when they want to be stupid and forget about stuff and got super super cuddly, which was totes adorbs, but apart from that she didn’t really do much.

Anyway, let’s get back to the fun stuff!

In the forest that Sonata and her best buddies had come to call home, they had quickly learned that they could find an abundance of things if they put their minds to it. When the winter had come and the temperature plunged to the low fifties, they’d moved into a cave behind a waterfall. Immediately afterwards, Adagio, despite her abundance of fluff, dispatched Aria and Sonata to the nearby human village to fetch her the most luxurious blankets they could find. Once Adagio had said blankets, she promptly burrowed underneath them and emerged only to eat or occasionally act in accordance with what remained of her natural siren instincts and pose dramatically for an inevitably unseen audience (Sometimes in her sleep, so she didn’t always realize that last part).

Meanwhile, Aria and Sonata frequently chose to instead fend for themselves out in the wild. The cold might have been too extreme for Adagio’s delicate tootsies, but Aria and Sonata were made of sterner stuff.

The thing about forests, though, is that they’re big. Like, really big. Big enough that, if one were so inclined, one could easily chillax all day long and never be bothered.

Aria, reclining on a high treebranch with her back against the trunk and one furry, sexy leg lazily dangling, glanced down at Sonata. “Hey. I’m bored.”

Sonata, curled up by the base of Aria’s tree, stretched herself out and yawned. “Me too.”

“C’mon. Let’s go do some stuff.”

Sonata wagged her not-quite-as-fluffy-as-Adagio’s-but-still-pretty-fluffy tail and set off to roam the forest.

The bitter chill of the winter left the forest predominantly dominated by tranquil silence, but not too long after they left Sonata spied a stag off in the distance, blissfully unaware of its impending doom.

Sonata might not have looked all that cunning, but in the quiet depths of the forest she had proven time and time again that only a few things struck terror into the hearts of men more than a werewolf adept at stalking. And, unfortunately for the stag, Sonata just so happened to be the inventor of the greatest stalking technique the world had ever seen.

She crept closer on all four legs, keeping her body low and tense, coiling all her muscles like they were springs. With catlike tread she made her approach. When she hid just a few feet away from the stag, she sprang into action.

A less clever stalker might have thought it best to strike directly at the stag, so as to take advantage of the stealthy approach and secure a quick, decisive kill. Sonata’s technique, however, depended on abandoning all pretenses of subtlety at the last instant, just when her prey would least expect it.

She flung herself through the air, flopping like an intoxicated fish in the air and hurling herself to the ground at the stag’s feet.

There, lying with her tongue lolling out of her open mouth, she glanced upwards at the thoroughly perplexed stag and uttered a single word: “Smirk.”

Just then, the final phase of her technique began. She heard a rustling of leaves and a creaking of wood mere seconds before Aria descended from the treetops.

The stag only had a fraction of a second to react, during which it used it extraordinary reflexes to scoop Sonata up with its antlers and hurl her through the air, securing one last act vengeance before Aria landed on its back.

Coincidentally, and quite fortunately, Sonata landed facefirst against the roots of a tree and was hence spared the grotesque sight that was Aria finishing off the stag. Slightly dazed, Sonata picked her head up off the ground, shook it once and stared at a glinting fleck in the mud. “Gasp! Aria, take a look at this!”

A free-range antler whizzed through the air and stuck in the tree by Sonata’s head, vibrating slightly. “Busy!”

From the hole left by a distinct hoofprint, Sonata picked up a tiny sliver of ruby. “No, seriously! I think you need to see this!”

She heard a wet slapping sound behind her that she decided not to seek elaboration on. A moment later, Aria appeared next to her, clawed hands still soaked in that yucky sticky red stuff animals had inside them. “Fine. What is it?”

Sonata held up the sliver. “I think this horse had our gems!” She frowned. “Or maybe just generic rubies that are all boring and mundane and stuff, but really, what’re the chances of that happening? They’ve gotta be ours, Aria!”

“What kind of sense does that make?”

“Shrug.” Sonata shrugged. “But they’re here, whether it makes sense or not!”

Aria grumbled to herself, folding her arms and sighing. “I guess it’s too much to hope this’ll be enough to make Adagio get her dainty rump off the ground and pitch in?”

“Probably, yeah. We should just go without her.”

Back at a cave behind a waterfall, a fluffy snout protruding from a mound of warm blankets twitched. Adagio wriggled her head out, eyes narrowing. “Don’t. You. Dare,” she hissed.

The hoofprints led Aria and Sonata to the forest’s edge, where a faintly babbling brook trickled off a steep rocky cliff into the ocean. A horse, blissfully unaware of its imminent, sudden demise, stood tied to a tree, muzzle dipped in the brook.

“That’s gotta be it,” Aria whispered. She lowered herself into a crouch, stalking forward on all fours. “Keep an eye out for the rider.”

Nodding, Sonata scanned the trees and cliffside. A couple seconds later, she squinted at a large boulder some distance away. “Aria?” she crept up and nudged Aria’s shoulder. “I think he’s on that rock over there.”

Indeed, as she peered closer, she could just make out a manly silhouette perched on the rock, cloaked by a long coat and apparently staring out over the ocean.

Aria bared her teeth in a toothy grin. “Cool. He’s never gonna see us coming.” She planted her hand on Sonata’s shoulder. “Right, here’s the plan: I’m gonna throw you at him.”

“And then what?”

“While you’re busy taking him down, I’m gonna go after his horse, just in case he gets away from you and tries to make a break for it.”

“While I’m busy doing what?”

“What you do any other time you want to kill something, of course.”

“Oh, okay! I can do that!”

“Good.” With a devilish smirk etched onto her lupine face, Aria hoisted Sonata up into the air, secured her in a grip that was only slightly uncomfortable, and then hurled her with all her feral might.

Sonata hurtled through the air, landing solidly right in front of the now thoroughly befuddled man on the rock. The second her paws touched the ground, she promptly spun around to face him, thumped her haunches to the ground and stared at him.

The man stared back. Sonata blinked.

In the distance, Sonata heard a startled whinny and then a high-pitched horse-shriek as Aria dismembered the poor stallion with abundant aplomb.

The man looked back at Aria. Then to Sonata, who blinked again.

The man tilted his head, frowning. His eyes darted back and forth from Sonata to Aria, unsure whether he should stand his ground or take his chances and flee.

A stray femur, freshly cleaned of meat and discarded with reckless abandon, clattered to the ground at his feet and silently urged him to stay in place.

“Alrighty then.” The man eyed Sonata carefully and closely. “I’m well buggered, aren’t I?”

“Pretty much,” Sonata chirped.

If the man was surprised at all by Sonata’s ability to speak, he took it in stride. “So… how’s this going to work?”

“Uh, we’re killing you. Like, duh.”

“Ah. Shouldn’t you be… I don’t know, maybe tearing my throat out or something, then?”

Sonata peered around the man, winced at the gruesome sight of Aria bludgeoning the thoroughly dead horse with its own skull, and then looked back at the man. “Give her a sec. She’ll be with you shortly.”

“Really? You’re not going to…”

“Uh, no. That’s Aria’s job, silly. See, she told me to do what I do any other time I want something to die, which is to distract it and then have Aria… well, y’know. Aria stuff.”

“Ah. So, hypothetically speaking, if I were to, say, turn and bolt right now while… Aria, was it? While Aria’s occupied, what would you do if I tried to run?”

Sonata frowned, gazing thoughtfully at the sky. “Um…” After a few seconds, she hung her head and sighed, then gave the man her most puppy-esque look. “Hey, could you just wait here for a few moments? Pretty please? I need to go get Dagi so she can tell me what to think.”

The man looked back at Aria—who had discovered that, when slam dunked with sufficient power, an average horse liver was indeed capable of denting bark—and shrugged. “Works for me. But if I’m dead when you come back, there’s a cave a little ways east of here. Would you mind dropping by? See, I was hired to track down three talking wolves in this forest—not my best idea, I know, but one does not simply say no a lifetime supply of cake—and I think my client would appreciate it if you could swing by and pay him a visit. Said he had some gems for you or something.”

“Well… Dagi always told me not to trust strangers… but you seem pretty nice. Sure, I could do that!”

“I suppose I’ll be off, then. Pleasure talking to you, miss.” The man tipped his hat, which toppled off his head and to the ground when Aria gripped said head, removed it with minimal precision and hurled it off the cliff.

“Sonata? You suck.”

“What? I did exactly what you told me to do!”

Aria rolled her eyes, covering her brow with her palm. “Whatever. Let’s go through his pockets and see if he’s got our gems.”

Aria, thoroughly perplexed, stared at the inexplicable, tattered remains of humanity on the ground before her. “You know, I’ve never accidentally eaten somebody before.”

Sonata offered a consoling nuzzle. “Well, you were still blinded by rage. Could’ve happened to anyone, really.”

“Yeah, I guess. Shame about the gems, though.”

Sonata blinked twice. “What about the gems?”

“You know, the ones we thought this schmuck had? Like, literally the only reason we’re even here?”

“Oh, they’re in a cave over that way. The guy told me while I was waiting for you to eat him.”

“And you’re telling me this now because…”

“Well—”

“Whatever. Let’s go get them, then.”

“Question.”

“Can’t it wait? We’re getting to like, the best part.”

“Yeah, no. If you had to describe me—like, more detailed than just ‘that crazy hot punk-slash-goth chick,’ I mean—do you think you could do it?”

“Probably, yeah. Why?”

“Do I really seem like the kind of person who could accidentally eat someone?”

“Uh… yeah? I mean, didn’t you do that to Adagio that one time?”

“Okay, two things: One, being drunk and stupid does not make it an accident. Two, different kind of eating. Which brings me to my next point, actually: You’ve written a story about hot naked babes turning into wolves and eating people—which is metal as fuck, by the way, so keep that up and I might actually like you one day—so what the hell constitutes ‘yucky stuff’ in your eyes?”

“Well, ehrm… hehe.”

“Am I going to be profoundly disappointed? You’re making that kind of imminent disappointment face again.”

“Right, moving on!”

Gloom filled the halls of the cave. Dreary gloom, of such inkinesss that only the most duplicitous conspirators or most fervent nyctophiles would ever dream of seeking it out. Aria led the way, gripping a small candle she’d taken from the dead horse person to keep the darkness at bay. Sill, though she remained largely untouched by it, Sonata felt the darkness’ presence all around her. Sometimes she felt it as a frigid touch slithering down her back, other times it felt like it constricted around her, forcing the air from her lungs and making her gasp and shudder.

It was a little-known secret of hers that Sonata was terrified of the dark. When she had been little more than a fledgling siren, flitting about in her beachside cove in search of shiny things, a roaming band of marauding colts that prowled the beaches quickly discovered that, due to Sonata’s lack of dexterity, she would thrash about for minutes on end if they put a thick blanket over her head. Ever since that first day they tried it, she’d been plagued by nightmares of that suffocating darkness.

It actually only happened the one time (She never knew what happened to those nasty colts, but one day Aria said she didn’t want any dinner and Sonata never saw any of them again), but it had been so traumatic that the scars it had left had never fully healed.

Fortunately for her, she didn’t have to worry about it so much in the cave; Aria, being the perfect best buddy that she was, quickly took notice of her distress, punted her into the ceiling and told her to suck it up.

Sonata, no stranger to sucking, eagerly complied.

Besides, if she imagined the walls were lined with butterflies, it actually wasn’t so bad.

Unfortunately for Sonata, the newly-coined Butterfly Method of fear avoidance only carried her so far; the tunnel terminated in a wide chamber well-lit by flickering torches lining the walls but nearly as unnerving as the tunnel had been. First of all, the torches shed green light, which was already pretty darn freaky, but it only got worse from there. Bones hung from the ceiling, strung together in elaborate… she wasn’t quite sure what to call them, actually. Wind chimes, maybe? Sonata wasn’t sure what sort of psycho would waste good bones by using them for wind chimes in a cave that didn’t even have any wind, but that’s what it looked like they were.

All that paled in comparison to the shrine that she saw squatting in the corner. Carved of glossy obsidian, it devoured the light that shone on it. She strained to look away, but still her eyes glued themselves to that crude, jagged block and the small stone idol on top. It didn’t have any kind of shape except perhaps that of a mistake, but still she felt a flood of memories rushing into her.

A sound of ragged breathing stole her attention, bidding her eyes to fall on a corner where there lurked a small, mousy man curled in the shadow. His vivid green eyes had a wild, manic glint to them as he slowly unfurled himself and lurched closer. A filthy brown cloak obscured most of his body, but a thin arm reached out and long, bony fingers petted her soft fur. “I knew I’d find you, one day,” he rasped. His voice sounded strained and only barely functional.

Aria swatted the creepy man’s hand away and moved to pull Sonata back, but the unusual resistance and deathly serious stare Sonata gave her made her pause.

“I know why he’s looking for us,” Sonata murmured. She edged a little closer to Aria. “I think my dad sent him.”

“Yes,” the man croaked. “I am one of many servants of your father, Ecived Tolp. He sent me to give you a chance to redeem yourself and your beautiful companion here.” He gestured to Aria, then paused. “And the voluminous one, if you’re feeling generous. It will be a harrowing journey, but your loving father is eager to forgive your recent failure.”

Aria cocked her head. “Who did you say you were, again?”

“I am but a pawn,” the man drawled. He slipped his fingers into his cloak and they emerged a moment later clutching three ragged linen pouches. “A servant of chaos, crawling forth to do my master’s bidding.”

Aria exchanged quizzical stares with Sonata. “Cool story you got there,” Aria blurted, hurling Sonata over one shoulder and marching out of the cave. “We’ll be right back. Gotta… y’know, girl talk.”

Once out of the cave, Aria dropped Sonata on the ground. “So… is this guy for real? ‘Cause if he is, you have got one screwed-up family.”

“I, uh… maybe? I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time my dad’s pulled something like this.” Sonata shuddered. “The spooky minions usually do a better job hiding their psycho-ness instead of just dumping it all out like that, though.”

“Right.” Aria stopped to think, then looked back into the cave. She planted a hand on Sonata’s shoulder. “One sec, okay? I’m gonna go ask him something.”

Sonata nodded, and Aria vanished into the cave.

A few seconds passed. Sonata’s acute hearing picked up the sounds of muffled voices in the depths of the cave.

“Tell you… mumble mumble mumble fork… mumble mumble mumble don’t have to… mumble tweet mumble tweet… tweet tweet...”

Pigeons, it turned out, had a high priority in Sonata’s mind.

A couple seconds after she stopped paying attention, she heard a faint crunching sound and approaching footsteps. Aria reappeared a moment later, a satchel in one hand and gnawing on a long, thick femur gripped still dripping a strange red liquid in her other. “Say what you will ‘bout raving lunatics,” she said between crunching bites, holding up the bone and giving it a long, slow lick, “but they always have the good bones.” Without waiting for a reaction, she lobbed the satchel at Sonata. “Oh, and we have our gems now.”

“We do? But how did you—”

A particularly loud crunch cut Sonata off. “I can be very persuasive.”

“I believe you, but… for realsies? You made him just… give them away?”

Crunch. “Very persuasive. At first, he was going on about how we’d have to go on some kind of quest or something to redeem ourselves—something ‘bout building a pair of cubes on top of a mountain and trisecting something or other and a bunch of other freaky stuff like that.”

“But we don’t have to do that anymore?”

“Nope.” Aria stuffed the rest of the bone into her mouth and chewed it up before gesturing to the satchel. “Anyway, let’s take those back to Adagio so we can figure out how to put ‘em back together.”

“ARIA!”

“Well, speak of the devil…”

“That’s the devil? I didn’t think he was so shrill…”

Nearby, a tree exploded into splinters, showering Aria and Sonata in a deluge of floral gore. Adagio kept going through the now thoroughly dismantled tree and barreled into Aria’s side, but a high fluff-to-muscle ratio made her impact less like a tackle and more like a nuzzle with intent to maim.

Aria glanced down at Adagio. “ ‘Sup.”

Adagio glared up at Aria. “What. Did. You. Do!?”

“Sorry, couldn’t hear you over all that thanking you’re not doing.” Aria pointed at the satchel Sonata still held. “Got our gems back, duh.”

Quietly seething, Adagio pulled back and folded her fluff-covered arms. “I see. And how, pray tell, did you go about doing that?”

“I can be very persuasive.”

Adagio shot Aria a glare even more withering than usual. She then pointed towards the sky, which they noted had turned a shade of deep, murky purple and been mostly occupied by a titanic squid-like mouth filled with countless smaller mouths that all had nine thrashing, toothed tongues and perpetually gnashing fangs.

Aria cleared her throat, edging back a little. “In my defense, he never said I couldn’t just eat him instead…”

Sonata’s eyes widened. “Gasp! Aria, don’t you know what this means?”

A noise shook the forest. Beginning as a low rumble like an avalanche of raging thunderclouds, it rose in pitch, fluctuating in volume at faster and faster rates until it sounded like little more than an incessant, shrieking whine. Sonata and her buddies clamped their hands over their ears, unable to hear the sounds of their own screams.

The trees warped around them, twisting apart and stitching themselves back together until they reshaped into a disgusting amalgamation of gnarled bark and oozing sap. The deciduous abomination reached out with slithering branches, plucked the satchel of gem fragments from the defenseless girls, then swatted them away with an animate root.

Air crackled around them once they were in the air. Space bent and folded around them until they vanished with a loud popping sound.

The next thing they knew, they were all lying face-down in sand.

“And that, my dear bestie, is the first chapter.”

“Didn’t I just tell you not to call me that?”

“I might’ve ignored you a little bit. So what do you think so far?”

“I gotta say, I’m kinda liking the part where Adagio’s a useless ball of fluff, and there’s something morbidly fascinating about a story that uses ‘squamous’ on one page and ‘adorbs’ on the next. It’s so schizophrenic I just can’t look away. So, as far as disasters on rails go…” Aria gnashed her teeth, grimacing, “... I think this one will never be equalled.”

“For- for realsies?!”

“Often exceeded, but never equalled.”

Author's Notes:

Okay. So. 99-ish percent of the reason this exists is because I got sidetracked by a spontaneous werewolf obsession that kept me from focusing on another very different project, so this was a diversion I had way too much fun with that’s ultimately done what I needed it to do. I honestly might not’ve gone through all the extra effort of making it coherent and pretty and stuff, but then forbloodysummer told me that bits of it were actually not so bad, so here it is.

It’s marked Incomplete because I’m open to the idea of continuing it, but if there’s not a lot of demand then I’ll be perfectly content to make this a low priority and work on other things.

So, if you did like it, please let me know. It’s quite different from what I usually write, so feedback would be quite appreciated.