Theo woke up, and immediately wished he hadn’t. He could feel the chill all around him, an inviting numbness that was only inches away. All he had to do was lower his head, close his eyes, and he’d never wake up again.

You’re a temperature casualty, his brain thought. You’re freezing to death. If you don’t get moving, you’re dead.

Theo wasn’t ready to give up yet. With incredible effort, he finally got his eyes open, breaking through a layer of melted snow as he did so.

He was on his side in a drift, with wintery hill spreading away beside him as far as he could see. A few sparse evergreen trees rose in the distance, but that was all. There was something pale in his way, covering much of his lower field of view. Probably a scrap of cloth frozen to his face by snow.

Talk about lucky. The snowstorm must’ve dropped him from low enough that he survived the fall—like those American tornadoes that deposited cars delicately at the top of buildings.

“Corey, can you hear me?” he asked, and immediately felt that something else was wrong. His ears must be ringing like crazy for it to sound like that. “Dude, are you there?”

The shock was enough that he tried to sit up, reaching for his radio.

Well that was what he tried to do. Instead, he lifted up on the snow a few centimeters, then smacked back down again. He caught a glimpse of yellow, speckled with bits of ice, then landed again and sunk deeper into the cold until it hit something hard.

He waited, but didn’t hear the hiss of radio, or Corey’s reassuring voice. Only a distant, mournful wind. “Dammit.”

I must’ve hit my head hard on the way down. But he was feeling more awake by the second, and the more his body told him the less certain he was. It wasn’t just his body that was wrong--the sky was light now, and he could make out the feeble polar sun somewhere in the distance. I’ve been unconscious for hours. Surviving an entire night exposed was some kind of miracle, but he couldn’t count on his luck holding out forever.

Okay, break the problem down into steps. One, stand up. There was no telling how long he’d been lying unconscious in the snow—and the longer he went, the worse his chances got. Corey hasn’t found me yet. I might be too far from the base for him to see me buried here.

He groaned, flexing arms and legs one at a time. Nothing felt broken, though they didn’t move quite right either. Probably still the cold playing tricks on him. Whatever, hands and knees first. He was already on his face, so that wouldn’t be so hard. Theo settled each limb in turn, ignored the numbness, then pushed.

It came surprisingly easily. He rose out of the snow, trailing white powder all the while. The instant he did, he caught a glimpse of green in front of his eyes for a second, before the wind pushed it behind him.

He looked down, flexing his fingers in the snow.

Even in plain sunlight, his arms looked wrong. His jacket was gone to parts unknown—which explained the silence from the radio—but under his black thermals he could see yellow fur emerging, rubbing uncomfortably on the tight spandex of ill-fitting clothes. “This is… bad.” The voice was worse. Much too high, with an almost singsong quality to it. And as he spoke, he could see something pale yellow moving.

Was that a… he reached a hand to confirm, and saw more than he wished from both. Yes, he did have a beak, hooked over at the end like a bird of prey. And his hands were a little shriveled, with thick skin and sharp nails on the end. Claws.

This can’t be a hallucination. It’s so complex… The simple way to break a delusion down was to examine it from all possible angles. So he tried standing up.

For a second, he had a much better view of where he’d ended up. He was still atop something massive, a ramp that towered above the surrounding forest, and was so large it had its own trees and snow-covered bushes. Nothing around him looked familiar—the mountains he used as landmarks were all in the wrong places, and nearby was a frozen river leading towards the buildings of a town that shouldn't exist.

But he saw all that in the second or so he could keep up his balance. Standing straight hurt his back, and he wasn’t holding still. His legs wobbled, and he smacked down to the ground, spraying snow again. This time his claws smacked through the eight or so inches of snow and into something solid—solid stone, with numerous bumps and cracks like it had been hand-carved.

Is this ramp some primitive superstructure, like the pyramids? Theo leaned down, scratching at the ice with his not-fingers. Bits of ice crumbled away, and underneath he could see carvings on the structure. Letters, or maybe hieroglyphs. He couldn’t read them either way. I didn’t know any of the local cultures worked in stone.

A distant thought, and one that seemed pale compared to all his other questions. Can’t stand up, got it. But he could still turn around, looking up the ramp instead of down. A trail of clothing and personal effects had been spread there—all his things.

His massive jacket was nearest to him, with a few tears in the arm and down scattered on the snow. A little higher up were his boots, torn socks, and the cargo sledge. His pants were gone too, though the embarrassment hardly ranked compared to his survival.

He also got a good glimpse of his back, which looked nothing at all like what he’d been expecting. Not only was the shape all wrong, but that was clearly a set of wings there in the middle, matching up exactly to another set of unexplained sensations.

Theo dared a few steps forward up the ramp, and found that things didn’t go back to normal. His brain felt almost completely clear, except perhaps a little tired from the cold. Less than he’d been expecting for wearing only the thermal underwear—if he really had fur, it was a much better insulator than the jacket he’d been wearing before.

Theo walked carefully up the ramp, until he reached the place his jacket had fallen. He pushed it open with one hand, having to balance on three legs while he worked. The radio was still there, though like so much else his headset was lost to time completely.

The radio was still on. The LCD screen had cracked, and part of it had died, but the rest showed the standard Barrow Observatory transmission frequency. He bent down, and carefully twisted the volume knob all the way up.

Static, interrupted with long stretches of silence. He listened for almost a minute straight, tapping his fingers rapidly against the ground. Nothing from base transmission.

Finally, Theo gave up, and held the transmit button down. “Corey, this is Theodor Pichler. I’m alive. I don’t know where I’ve ended up—near the top of some huge ramp. Looks about a hundred meters tall, you can’t miss it. Over.”

That voice did not get easier to hear coming out of his mouth the more he heard it. A little like his younger cousin, with all the musicality she’d had in choir. But no, probably just his head playing tricks on him. A lot of tricks.

He waited in silence for a few minutes, as the wind continued whipping up powder around him. No answer, just an occasional burst of static that never resolved into anything.

“I know the computer listens to our radio… maybe it will record this. Might be you’re not around. In case you’re hearing this… lots isn’t right. The sun is out here, way more than it should be. I must’ve been out for at least an hour and there’s no sign of it setting. Doesn’t look like it’s noon either. But… if you can hear how I sound… yeah. Please respond.”

Nothing. He tried talking back for a few more minutes—begging for rescue, asking for directions back to base, anything. Still nothing. By the time he gave up, the battery had dropped all the way to half, and Theo was fairly sure he was getting nowhere. He stopped trying to transmit, switching the radio into alert mode. It should keep going for days like that, alert to any transmission on the standard frequency. Hopefully I’m not out here that long. I can’t survive on my own.

The stupid thermal underwear was way too long—it was clearly slipping down his legs, and the sensation of fur on tight cloth did not get better the longer it kept going. Do I even need it looking like this?

He started with the top, since removing the bottoms would face him with things he wasn’t ready to look at just yet. But the top was easy enough—he could hold it against the snow with one hand, while lifting it off with the other. It got caught on his beak, and his wings, and lots of other things, but with only a handful of tears, he finally managed to pull free.

Even ripped and torn, the top looked way too big. Like he’d been wearing something comically large. But the radio had that look to it too, too big to hold except in both hands. The clothes aren’t any bigger. I’m smaller.

The chill ruffled his coat at first, making him shiver briefly. But it passed quickly enough. The top didn’t make much difference, and neither did the bottoms.

I must look ridiculous wearing these.

Maybe he did, but he wouldn’t take them off yet. That village was his obvious destination. Barrow shouldn’t have been this close to base, but then again it shouldn’t be as sunny as summer with a full blanket of winter snow either. And I shouldn’t be some comically oversized songbird.

Theo made his way up the slope a few steps, his claws not sinking all the way down to the stony layer beneath the ramp. It wasn’t much further to the edge, and he stopped just short of it.

There was nothing up here—a sheer drop down to simple wilderness no different from the rest of it. Just his cargo sledge, still open from when he’d removed the last of the sensor modules. Theo leaned down to glance inside—but there wasn’t much. A testing toolkit, in case something went wrong with one of them and he had to make a replacement. The rugged tablet used to manually tinker with the programming of individual units looked intact, though he didn’t open the hard-shell case.

I can use this sledge. It was much too large to be worn as a backpack, large enough that he could’ve climbed inside and still had plenty of room to spare. But there was a vest attached, with straps that could be tightened and worn to drag it as a sledge.

Theo spent a few minutes gathering up everything he could, even his ripped clothing, tossing it into the backpack and zipping it closed. His claws were going a little numb from being in the snow for so long, but he managed to work the zipper without too much trouble.

Having something with the NOAA logo so big should stop anyone from thinking I’m a dangerous animal and tranqing me. The sun still hadn’t set—had he been asleep for months? That couldn’t be right—his radio would’ve been dead. He would’ve been dead. They could’ve tracked the GPS in his tablet by then.

Can’t think about that. I have to keep moving. There was still a distant voice in his mind, whispering for him to curl up in the snow and sleep. If he listened to that voice, he would never wake up.

Theo slipped into the vest as best he could, though there was nothing to be done for the painful way it would rub against his wings. Wasn’t built as a mythical creature harness. What a surprise.

Hopefully that village had a mirror. Hopefully the people living there wouldn’t shoot him as soon as someone saw him.

It would be a long trip. Theo gritted his teeth, and started walking.

Author's Notes:

I really wanted this picture in the description, but as it turns out story descriptions aren't allowed to have images. So enjoy it here instead. Zutcha's done the art for all my stories before this, and it would've felt wrong to break the streak, even if the commissioner on this project chose a different artist for the cover.

And also seems excited about chapter art too. I'm not involved with any of this stuff, other than making sure the text lines up. But holy crap if it isn't gorgeous stuff. This chapter's art was done by Jasper.