I want to say the journey out of the forest was pretty uneventful.

  It wasn't.

  The time between hunger pangs shrank steadily over the first two days until they weren't pangs anymore so much as a continuous low compint that I couldn't tune out. Not ordinary hunger either. The kind that puts a slight shake in your hands and makes the edges of your vision do something they shouldn't. I looked down at myself at some point and noticed I could see my ribs more clearly than I'd been able to a week ago, and my stomach had gone from ft to genuinely hollow, abs visible in the specific way that has nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with running out of reserves.

  I'd materialized an extra two pounds of anatomy out of thin air on day one. The ring had apparently needed to build that from somewhere, and combined with an increased libido that treated calories like kindling, I was burning through myself faster than I could repce it. Morning Dew addressed hunger in a functional sense but functional was doing a lot of work in that sentence. It was the nutritional equivalent of telling someone with a broken leg to think positive.

  I tried to solve the food problem by killing one of the rabbit-adjacent creatures with Cum Shot.

  The Cum Shot worked. The creature did not survive. I stood over it feeling briefly competent before the next problem presented itself, which was that I had nothing to skin it with and no particur skill in that department anyway. I decided to cook it whole on the logic that the fur would burn off.

  The fur did not cleanly burn off.

  What happened instead was a smell that I am going to describe once and then never think about again. The air around me already smelled comprehensively like cum — three days of continuous production in an enclosed forest environment with no wind to speak of will do that — and the creature had apparently absorbed enough ambient Morning Dew through proximity that setting it on fire produced a combination of burning fur and burning cum that hit my nose like a personal offense. I turned the creature over the fire for several minutes hoping the situation would improve.

  It got worse.

  I dropped the creature, kicked dirt over the fire, and kept walking.

  That night I camped under a fallen log and ate my own cum for dinner with the resigned acceptance of someone who had stopped having new reactions to things. The thought concerned me considerably less than it had four days ago. This was the new me. I was getting used to it. The Morning Dew mixed with it was actually fine, the sweetness cutting the salt, and the systemic warmth it produced was at least warm in a way that approximated comfort. I y under my log and told myself tomorrow I would find the city and get actual food.

  The ring pulsed once in agreement.

  The next day started the way all days started now — satisfying the ring, and incidentally myself, for approximately forty minutes before I could think about anything else clearly. I was beginning to accept this as simply part of my morning routine the way other people had coffee.

  I walked.

  Around midday I came out of the trees onto a proper road and followed it until a vilge appeared in the middle distance. Small, maybe thirty buildings, the comfortable agricultural density of somewhere that had been there long enough to stop apologizing for itself. I stopped at the edge of it and looked down at myself.

  Goblin leather pants. Precum saturated, stretched in the front by the tent my fccid cock made in fabric that had been designed for a goblin and was now being asked to do something it fundamentally wasn't equipped to handle. From certain angles you could see my balls through a gap in the cing. The whole ensemble smelled exactly like what it was. I was also filthy, and thin, and barefoot, and my hair had done something I couldn't see but could feel was bad.

  I needed food. I needed directions. I had no other options.

  I walked in.

  The reaction was immediate and comprehensive. People stopped. Actually stopped moving and stared, the way you stare at something that takes a moment to process. A woman pulled a child closer to her side without looking away from me. Two men by a fence exchanged a look that communicated an entire conversation in under a second.

  I covered myself as best I could with both hands, which helped with approximately nothing.

  "Look ma." A small boy, maybe six, pointing at me with the completely uninhibited accuracy of a child who had not yet learned social filtering. "I can see that guy's dingding."

  His mother grabbed his hand and turned him away with the expression of someone permanently revising her Thursday.

  A guardsman materialized from somewhere with the professional efficiency of a man who had decided this was his problem to solve. He was broad, practical, and looking at me with an expression that had moved past surprise straight to tired.

  "You need to leave," he said. "You're causing a scene."

  "I just need food," I said. "I've been in the forest. I'm lost."

  "Out," he said, and his hand went to my shoulder and began steering me back toward the road with the firm impersonal pressure of someone moving furniture. "We don't want your type here. You smell like a brothel." He pointed down the road with the conviction of someone indicating a destination rather than a direction. "City's that way. They like freaks like you."

  I shambled back out onto the road.

  My dick, to its credit, did not respond to any of that. It remained completely soft against my thigh with the subdued dignity of an organ that understood the assignment. I noted this with genuine relief. I would have had to seriously examine some things about myself if it had responded, I didnt need that kind of kink in my life. I kept walking.

  The road was mercifully empty for the next few hours. I saw a wagon coming once, two men on horseback alongside it, and stepped into the trees and waited until they passed rather than have the conversation. The guardsman's pointing had at least been directional and I followed it with the faith of someone who had no other information to go on.

  An hour or so ter I spotted a house set back from the road, and on a line strung between two posts, undry.

  I stood at the tree line and looked at the undry for a moment.

  I needed pants. I needed pants in a way that had become the central organizing fact of my existence. I was thin and dirty and smelled like the inside of a very productive brothel and I was walking barefoot down a road in goblin leather that showed my balls from the wrong angle, and there were pants, right there, on a line, and nobody visible anywhere on the property.

  I became a thief.

  I moved fast and quiet across the open ground, listening for sounds from the barn, hearing nothing. I got to the line and pulled down a pair of dark trousers and a loose linen shirt, pin, practical, slightly too rge in the waist and the shoulders but infinitely better than what I had. There was a coil of rope on the ground near the post and I took that too. I had a twenty-eight inch waist and the pants were at least a thirty-two, which meant without something to hold them up the situation was going to be simir to the goblin pants but in different ways.

  Six inches of fccid horse cock in oversized trousers held up with rope. The ring remained indifferent to fashion.

  I got back to the tree line and dressed fast, threading the rope through the belt loops and knotting it snug at my front. The shirt hung loose and long enough to cover the rope situation. I looked down at myself.

  Better. Significantly, materially better. I looked like someone who had been through a difficult time rather than someone who had escaped from a goblin's wardrobe.

  I picked up the goblin pants by the twine and flung them into the trees.

  "See you in hell," I said.

  They caught on a branch about fifteen feet in and hung there. I left them.

  The city was visible by the time the light started going amber, sitting in the middle distance with the solid permanence of somewhere that had been accumuting itself for a long time. Walls. Towers. The haze of a lot of people living close together rising above the roofline. It looked enormous from out here.

  There was a well on the road maybe a quarter mile from the gate. I stopped at it.

  I drew water and washed my face and hands and then stood there for a moment considering my situation fully. I'd had no proper bath since the stream on day one. Three days of sustained Morning Dew production had left its evidence everywhere. I could feel dried Dew fking from the backs of my knees as I moved, from around my balls, from the crease of my ass, from my inner thighs. I spshed water on my face and it came away slick. More on my neck, same result. The water in the bucket developed a faint luminescent sheen after the second rinse.

  What a mess, I thought. If my mom saw me right now she'd—

  The thought arrived fully formed and I let it sit for a second.

  Would I ever see anyone from home again.

  My cock went softer than it had been all day. Softer than the guardsman's speech. Softer than humiliation. Just quietly, completely soft, like something retreating from a question it didn't want to answer.

  I filed that information away. It seemed important but I wasn't ready to look at it directly yet.

  I tightened the rope at my waist and kept walking.

  The gate guard waved me through with the distracted efficiency of someone processing foot traffic at end of day. His eyes did a quick professional sweep and then stopped briefly at my midsection, just for a moment, before he looked away with the deliberate neutrality of someone who had made a decision about what he was and wasn't going to acknowledge.

  I walked through the gate and the city hit me all at once.

  It was loud in the specific yered way of somewhere that had never learned to be quiet. Not chaos — more like a sustained organized noise, a hundred separate things happening at once and none of them particurly aware of the others. Cobblestones underfoot, uneven and worn smooth by years of traffic, my bare feet reading every seam. The smell was city smell — cooking, animals, stone warmed by a long day of sun, the specific compressed scent of a lot of people and their lives going on simultaneously in close quarters.

  The main road in from the gate opened into something approaching a thoroughfare, wide enough for two carts to pass with room to argue about it. Buildings pressed close on both sides, two and three stories, the upper floors jutting slightly over the street on timber frames, blocking the amber light and turning everything below into a different shade of te afternoon. Signs hung above doorways, painted wood and wrought iron, half of them illustrated for people who couldn't read the script. A tavern with a painted cup. A cobbler with a painted boot. A butcher with something that might have been a cow if the painter had been more confident about cow anatomy.

  People moved with the purposeful energy of a pce where time had value. Merchants folding up stalls, loading carts, conducting st transactions with the slightly accelerated pace of people who wanted to be done. A woman argued with a man over something involving a basket of produce, both of them committed to it. Two children ran through a gap between buildings and disappeared. A dog investigated something in the gutter with complete professional focus.

  Nobody looked at me twice. Barefoot, rope belt, linen shirt — I looked like someone who'd had a difficult week and was walking it off. The city appeared to contain enough difficult weeks that mine registered as unremarkable.

  I walked deeper in.

  The street branched and I took the wider branch and it branched again and I followed the logic of the city. The denser, busier streets giving way gradually to quieter ones, the character of the buildings shifting as I moved. The nice taverns were obvious by the nterns outside and the quality of the sign and the sound coming through the shuttered windows. They gave way to slightly less nice establishments further along, clustered on streets where the mps were softer and the doorways had different kinds of occupants.

  I stopped at the corner of one of these streets and looked down it.

  A woman in a doorway caught my eye and held it for a moment without expression, the specific quality of avaible attention that meant something specific in every city in every world apparently.

  I looked at my hands. Thought about what I had to offer. Thought about the system that seemed to level me through exactly this kind of activity. Thought about having eaten my own cum for dinner the previous night while sheltering under a log.

  One night, I told myself. Until I figured out another option.

  I straightened my rope belt and walked down the street.