I was so proud of my horn, because it was my actual mouth. If I had managed to stick it into an opponent, I could have sucked them dry and empty in seconds.

  It was so perfect and funny for a unicorn.

  But I never got to use it.

  As soon as I set hoof on the floor of the barn, it turned into a bowl and then a funnel and I began to fall down into it, with the flying boars above me, circling.

  I don’t think I could accurately describe how utterly terrifying this was while also using the names of what we looked like or what was happening. But I’ll try.

  I noticed the warped space of the barn and slowly began to register what was happening, and then I saw the dark hairy bulks moving around me, making disturbing noises. Snorts, squeals, and the leathery creak and fp of flexing wings accompanied the sudden sensation of gravity seriously warping spacetime and causing my hooves to slide out from under me.

  My haunches hit the muddy ground first, and slid through it toward the center of the space. And since my reflex had been to rear up, I went nose over ass backward, legs filing above me, and the back of my head smacked a rock that just happened to be there.

  But these were just the physical sensations meant to disorient and distract me. They did no real harm other than y me prone and draw me to the center of the sughter box.

  And the world around me expanded, making me very, very small, surrounded by a ballet of teratovores.

  And then I reacted.

  I didn’t really think. I didn’t have time to think. I knew I was already losing, caught in someone else’s domain. I just reached for the most successful form I’d ever taken, the bck cloud of tiny compound eyeballs, but with that added addition of a proboscis for each one.

  And I did my best to fill the ever growing space with myself, so there was no pce to get away from me, and no way to box me in.

  I grew so fast, injecting the domain with every quantum of myself from the Strands.

  But it didn’t work.

  I felt myself buffeted and churned by the wing beats of the boars as they circled me, braying and croaking, and I was pushed into myself by the whirlwind. And, of course, the ever warping scale and weight of the pce outpaced me.

  Something about it was extra disorienting, and it took me a few moments after realizing I couldn’t find purchase to figure it out.

  I felt like I was in a kaleidoscope, tumbling, with images of myself overpping, being chopped up by some fundamental force of the universe itself that I’d never encountered before. And it was only a matter of time before portions of myself were divided up and snorted into oblivion by these monsters.

  There was no longer any light, only me and the intersecting prisms of reality.

  Trying to make sense of it, I recalled what I’d seen as I’d fallen into the trap. Twelve winged boars circling in lockstep, fpping alternatively in a wave that rotated counter to their movement. Clockwise against counterclockwise.

  The shards of space I was now inhabiting were doing something very simir. The same kind of movement and dance.

  I wasn’t caught in one domain! I was caught in twelve domains simultaneously!

  This was very bad.

  Obviously, I’d never experienced anything like this before, because if I had I wouldn’t have existed to experience it then. I would have been killed. I generally tried to stay out of shit like this, and had had a seven hundred and forty some million year track record of being very good at it.

  To say I was humiliated by the experience would have understated the situation beyond description.

  But I didn’t have time for pride. I had to escape, and for a few pulses of consciousness I worked at it mindlessly, scrabbling feebly and desperately at the bounds of all reality around me.

  After a bit, though, I realized the monsters weren’t attacking me. They weren’t bothering to try to eat me. And I wondered if they hadn’t figured out how, yet. I knew that if they tried in the ways I’d been attacked before, I could turn it around on them. And maybe I had a reputation that scared them.

  Which then gave me enough calmness to remember that I’d just eaten a carpedominator, and now knew how to adopt that adaptation.

  Ah.

  One little adaptation, without even a physical change. It was coming so easy to me now. Especially one that I had the memory of using before, even if it wasn’t my own memory. Such a shortcut.

  A little self origami of waves in my own energy and I was able to sh out in twelve directions and corrupt all twelve domains to make them mine.

  And that was my undoing.

  I should have guessed what was going on. The way that Chord had fed me such a vulnerable carpedominator earlier, stroking my confidence while giving me a crucial skill. And the way these boars were so identical and so adept at coordinating not only their movements but the complex interpy of their domains, disguising them and letting me into them without my notice in the first pce.

  It was all spelled out before me, and I just hadn’t read it.

  Because it wasn’t my wheelhouse.

  I may have been able to eat other monsters, but in my heart and my sheer mass of experience and honed reflexes I was not a teratovore.

  My size and my complexity didn’t save me.

  Cackling with glee at turning the tide on my captors, I seized their domains and gripped them, bringing their dance to a halt.

  But just as I took a moment to decide what to do next, they wheeled in synchronicity, lowered their heads, and charged, sinking their tusks, their own proboscides right into my very mind.

  And I knew such pain.

  And, unlike Felicity, they didn’t hold back.

  It was over in less than a second.

  Because, what happens when a carpedominator tries to take a domain? They make that domain a part of their own psyche and start to draw the owning emanant into their own being. It’s how they feed.

  And, normally, I would have been able to use their domains against them, to keep them from making the distance to charge me.

  Except, their own domains were now me. All they had needed to do was pierce the fabric of those domains.

  And the real crux of it was that they were carpedominators, too. And when a carpedominator attacks the domain of another carpedominator, which I had no idea about, apparently it just becomes a force of wills.

  I was huge, but I was outnumbered twelve to one. And I hadn’t known what was coming. I barely even saw it happen, and I had less than a second of awareness to make sense of it when it did. And that time was spent in the deepest agony I had ever known.

  The boars grew very fat, very fast.

  “The livestock ate her,” came the next message, remarkably quick on the heels of the st one. “She’s gone.”

  He’d hardly had time to visualize the different ways his trap could py out after that. Synthia had been so wiley that he’d expected her to best his livestock, but not unscathed. Sewer Teeth should have had time to use the drain carefully pced and concealed beneath where she had been held, in order to deliver the coup de grace itself.

  But obviously he’d overestimated her.

  What a wonderful relief.

  The city was his again.

  It was a little bit of a shame, though. Without Sewer Teeth eating the st bite of her, all her memories were gone forever. The livestock hadn’t been configured to do that. He couldn’t risk them getting that smart.

  Such a treasure, destroyed.

  Oh, well.

  Greg may have been speeding.

  He may have, in fact, been speeding through a school zone.

  Normally he never even came close to doing that. He’d learned how to drive from his dad, who had been the most careful driver anyone had ever known. And he’d inherited his dad’s rock solid nerves, and used them on the road every moment he was behind the wheel.

  But, tely, life had gone beyond even his family’s legendary endurance. Synthia’s nightmare storm of st night had shaken him so deeply that now the wheel of his truck itself shook him whenever he gripped it.

  And in his panicked desperation to get to Cassy, he’d forgotten to compensate for that.

  And now he was waiting for a police officer to finish running his ptes before coming up to tell him the bad news that had the worst timing ever. It would be a big ticket. The first in his life. When he had no income.

  And he didn’t think he could contest this one.

  The school zone light was visibly fshing on the sign across the street.

  He’d made a legitimate mistake.

  He texted Ayden to let him know he was being detained.

  Ayden pushed his phone toward Charlie again, with sleep ridden and pained eyes, asking, “Could you drive me there? I think we need to hurry.”

  Milk was pleased with itself.

  It had learned a neat trick from a tiny organism a long, long time ago, and now it was going to use that trick.

  It was its favorite trick, even though it so rarely had had the opportunity to use it.

  After it had snagged the very st morsel of Synthia from underneath Chord’s livestock, it had used the property’s overdone network of sewer-like piping to find a safe pce to message the master of this trap with an update, using the memories it had acquired from eating Sewer Teeth to spoof its identity.

  Chord had praised it. The ruse had worked.

  And fooling Chord wasn’t even its trick.

  Then it left entirely for more familiar territory where it could address what it had done and make new pns.

  Having originally manifested as a physics eater had given Milk so many delightful options for being sneaky. It loved being sneaky.

  When it was all over, Chord returned to his property to survey the aftermath and to set up his domain again.

  He traveled there as a very small worm riding a mount that looked something like a hawk. He could change his size at will, but he couldn’t truly change his own shape. Despite the fact that he could sculpt and reconfigure other emanants, he still hadn’t figured out that trick for himself.

  What he did to others was invasive and altered an emanant at a deep and fundamental level. It often changed their memories. And he couldn’t adapt that to himself without changing the way he thought and behaved, and he couldn’t allow that.

  All that he could safely do was change his apparent size.

  Which was fine. He was so very content as he was.

  But what he found when he approached his ranch threatened that contentment and gave him disquiet.

  Sewer Teeth was missing, and so were his livestock.

  Bremerton, the dog, was still there, napping on the porch. And so were Bremerton's keepers, Chordate jr. and Kate Montgomery, the current humans who legally owned the property for him.

  And when he confronted them in their living room about what had happened, they reported that Sewer Teeth had not spoken to them since he, Chord, had set the trap and left the farm. And when they had seen the unicorn attack the barn and allow the livestock to escape, they had been powerless to stop it.

  They did tell him that the livestock looked bigger than before and had flown off in a flock toward Mount Hood.

  This was all he ever expected of them, so he thanked them and went about reestablishing his domain in the attic.

  The livestock could be tracked down or repced.

  The absence of Sewer Teeth was more worrisome, but flying into a panic or rage about it would only put him at a disadvantage.

  He needed to think, and he needed more intelligence.

  He could do the former just fine, and he had servants and agents all over the county for the tter.

  So, once he was settled, he sent out commands and instructed his remaining forces to fill the vacuum in Gresham before the common thralls and peasantry could return.

  Despite his major losses, one benefit of all of this was that he'd have a stronger grip on the county seat, and he could now build a stronger foundation for his long term goals.

  The hardest part would be repcing Fate Vine. Overlords with its talents weren’t exactly rare, but very few were ever as cooperative as it had been.

  At least he no longer had any local enemies to worry about, besides maybe a rogue Sewer Teeth.

  Hm.

  Had Sewer Teeth lied to him? Had it successfully consumed Synthia and gained the adaptations she’d collected?

  Did Sewer Teeth now think it could rival him?

  That would prove amusing.

  Still, it would be a good idea to start ying the groundwork to trap it now.

  He sent out messages to his Portnd contacts to start the politicking necessary for an idea he had.

  theInmara