Chapter 1: HONK

Quincy was not a deep sleeper. Most nights, all it took was a dog barking at a car to wake him. Just last week, he’d woken to what he thought was someone breaking into his house, but was actually a stray cat pawing at a downstairs window. Point being, it didn’t take much to wake him up. This made his current circumstances notable: Quincy was sitting in the middle of a dark and cold forest rather than in his bed, and he could not for the life of him figure out how he’d gotten there.

The world stretched around him strangely, almost as if he could see behind his head, and he could feel the beginnings of a migraine as he tried to process the change in perspective. He raised his head and took in his surroundings. Somebody had scribed a complicated circle filled with runes in something dark and wet, then lit it with crude candles which dripped black wax at even intervals all around. A triangle around him held bushels of smoking herbs at its points, and circles positioned halfway along their sides contained dark lumps which Quincy couldn’t make out in the dim light.

A dozen chanting cultists in dark red robes walked outside the circle in a clockwise pattern, wafting smoking branches and incense into the circle. Their chants were badly coordinated, speaking in varied tones and not at all consistent in their rhythm.

“What’s all this about?” Quincy tried to say.

Instead, his throat twisted in an unfamiliar manner, and what came out was an incredulous…

“HONK”

This made him pause. Quincy did not honk. He spoke English with a somewhat thick, but perfectly understandable, Pennsylvanian accent. He’s kept that accent after he moved into the city and was quite proud of his roots.

Quincy tried again.

“HONK!”

The chanting stuttered, then trailed off to a scattered murmur of whispers as the cultists stopped circling and turned to look at him, noticing his presence for the first time. One of them trod on the robe of the cultist in front of him and winced as the victim quickly chastised him.

“Is that it?”

“I ’unno, ’e said the result was up to chaos’s hims,” a thick-voiced cultist said.

“Whims, you dunce,” one said in a nasal voice.

“But.. a goose?” said the first.

Quincy glanced down at his body. His chest was covered in white feathers, which blended into a lighter brown on his… back? He twisted himself around to be sure. Yup, his neck was flexible enough and his eyesight distorted enough that he could indeed look at his back. He spread his arms, and the brown feathers resolved into wings. He tried to move what he thought of as fingers, and the feathers on the trailing edge of his wings spread and tilted. Then, his eyes moved further back, and an itching urge filled him until he twitched the bottom of his spine and a glorious spread of black feathers wagged from side to side at his rear.

“Honk,” he said, awed at the majesty of his transformation for the moment, before the reality of his situation crashed home.

A goose! Of all the animals I could turn into, why a goose?

Quincy was not a fan of geese. They were noisy, dirty creatures with a tendency to fly in large flocks, leaving droppings all over the groomed soccer fields they frequently took a liking to while migrating. They were emphatically unafraid of humans and had brains the size of a walnut.

He thought for a second. His thoughts didn’t feel noticeably slower than they had the day before yesterday, but given his history of parkour while under the influence of alcohol, he wasn’t sure whether that was a good or bad thing.

Then again, why was he so upset at the thought of being a goose? They were magnificent creatures. Wing plumage the color of toasted wheat. White body feathers as pure as snow, and head feathers of a deep black perfectly suited to sticking in places where they didn’t belong.

Quincy shuffled in confusion. Did he hate geese? Or were they the most wonderful creatures on the face of the planet? He was no longer sure.

The cultists were whispering. Whether because they were in awe of Quincy’s fabulous form, or entranced by the music emitting from his beak, he couldn’t say. One of them, a tall fellow whose robes draped over skeletal shoulders with little other substance beneath them, stepped forward. His voice rattled like a smoker’s as he addressed the others.

“Brethren, I know not what the Lord of chaos intends by delivering us this creature in exchange for sacrifice most dear. He promised us a beast to harness for our ends, and we see before us what he has delivered: a goose.”

The cultist paused his speech to glare around the circle.

“As you should all know, there is a simple test to identify beings rooted in chaos. Holy water, blessed by the Divine Lira, in drops three shall reveal chaotic forms true.”

He pulled a flask from under his robe, and with a trembling hand shook free three drops over Quincy’s head. Quincy, for his part, looked up in curiosity. When the drops contacted the feathers on his head, something deep within him swelled. A burning feeling spread through his limbs, causing his tail-feathers to shiver, until at last, Quincy did the only thing he knew how to in his new form.

“HOOOOOONK!”

The cultist swore, stumbling backwards until he tripped over his robes and spilled the flask all down his front. As he scrabbled to stand back up, another cultist, a portly fellow with robes stained at the armpits, let out a guffaw which cut off abruptly when someone next to him elbowed him sharply.

Quincy noticed none of this; instead, he focused on a red dot which appeared in the corner of his vision. When his eyes moved to it, it expanded into a transparent screen, which shimmered and twisted between different runes before resolving into plain English.

“I.. I’ll say!” The drenched cultist stood, waving away another cultist who ran over to help him up and trying to gather what little dignity he had left. He squeezed his robes, dripping holy water on the ground between them.

“I believe this makes things clear. This beast is no Herald. Something, or somebody made a mistake.”

“Harry, did you mix the sage up with the rosemary? I swear, your nose is worse than my husband’s!” a female cultist shouted.

“Aw shucks, do I gotta get more sacrifices? Hunting’s not easy y’know?”

While they argued, Quincy had a thought: what else lay in the cultist’s robes? He had water, so it logically followed that he might have food. He strutted forward and started tugging at the bottom of the wet cultist’s robe, hoping it might shake something else loose.

“Ack, away, goose! Damn you, let go!” The cultist tried to pull away, but Quincy was determined, and any robe food would be his!

Seconds passed as they waged tug-of-war on his robe’s hem until a terrible sound split the air.

r-iiiii-p

The cultist stood shock-still with bare feet now exposed up to the knee as the goose smugly tossed aside a half-meter swatch of fabric and advanced towards him again. His shoulders vibrated with fury.

“Ichal, you were just complaining about finding more sacrifices, were you not?”

Flickering candlelight briefly illuminated the bottom half of the cultist’s face, and Quincy saw thin lips widen into what might charitably be called a grin. His hands reached back into his robes a second time, and came out holding a wickedly curved dagger still stained with blood. The man lunged forward in a fury, swinging the dagger with dexterity unbefitting of his previous blunders.

Quincy, despite his confusion, was quite adaptable. When he was a teenager, he’d play games with his friends involving a great deal of alcohol, practicing parkour around the abandoned factories which littered the city. They’d all gained their fair share of bruises and broken bones that way, but one thing he’d learned well was how to flee from the cops while inebriated. Those same instincts filled him now, and it was with a tremendous HONK that he shook his head, spread his wings without a second thought, and ran away from the advancing cultist.

His steps were unsure, but something in the back of his head pushed him onward. His wings cracked forward, smashing into the knees of cultists, and he waddled forward with a determination which only a habitual rule-breaker could match.

Red robes flipped above and around him as the circle devolved into something Quincy’s addled mind briefly interpreted as a dance. He joined in, smacking with his wings, honking as loud as he could.

Behind, he heard a cultist shout, “Put that knife away before you hurt someone!”

The fat cultist dove with his arms outstretched. Quincy wobbled to the side, and sneezed as the dust from the cultist’s landing filled his nostrils.

Another waved a burning bundle of twigs and herbs at him. Quincy wasn’t sure how flammable feathers were, but if they were anything like hair, he didn’t fancy mixing them, so he sprinted to the left.

Two cultists had found a net and loomed out of the dark, lit by candles at their feet. They tossed the net, and Quincy found a fresh burst of reserve energy to sprint forward as fast as he could. Again, he heard swearing as the cultist chasing him with a sacrificial knife got tangled in the netting.

There were no more cultists in front of him. Above, the moon was full, and he saw a clear path up to the sky between the trees. Without a second thought, he pushed his wings down, and took off. A blast of flames singed his tail feathers, and he honked indignantly as he wove around a tree and put distance between himself and the ritual clearing. Shouted curses faded into the night as he breached the treetops.

It wasn’t until several minutes of half-asleep flight later that Quincy fully came to his senses, realized that he shouldn’t have wings, and in his panic, tumbled into the leaves of a tall tree before knocking himself out cold against the trunk.

---

Quincy dreamed of a man in a pinstripe suit spinning what appeared to be a large game show wheel while cackling madly. The images on the wheel blurred past, but a few stuck in his mind: a dragon, a shrew, and an ant. It spun and spun, and the wheel filled his vision until abruptly it stopped on the image of a goose.

Quincy woke with a splitting headache. It’d been a long time since he’d been hung over enough to feel like this, and he struggled to recall just what had happened the last night while pulling what felt like a blanket of feathers over his head. This left his feet bare, and he shifted, trying to cover himself properly. He groaned, and it came out as that dreaded sound with which he would become intimately familiar in the coming days.

“HONK!”

Fully awake, the events of the previous day rushed in with embarrassing clarity. That led him to consider his current precarious position: namely, the tree branch he currently balanced on top of. Quincy twisted around in alarm, clutching the trunk with his wings as his webbed feet scrabbled against the branch while he tried not to fall.

Before Quincy had a chance to examine his circumstances further, he noticed a faint glowing blue dot in the corner of his vision. He remembered the red dot from last night. Again, when he focused on it, the dot expanded out into a screen.

Quincy stared at the last sentence. He cleared his throat.

“Honk.”

The screen didn’t react.

“Honk HONK.”

Before his eyes, the screen shivered, then a red-black stain bled across its surface, corrupting it like blood soaking into a puddle on a moonlit night.