A paw bludgeons the side of my head. "Come on. Get."

"Where am I...?" I ask, blinking myself awake.

An ivory Canis with fur curled beneath his strong, stout jawline looms overhead, the singular thing between me and what seems like an eternity of soft blue light. With a voice dripping in mockery and a certain condescension, he says, "That's a good question. You want to be magical, don't you?"

"What?" I ask. "Who are you?"

"An answer. I can give you the powers you've been looking for."

I blink again. "What?"

"I have no words to express how much of a disappointment you are," he says, and his tail swings slow. He lowers his rounded head, every hair of which is cut to a uniform length, and looks me in the eye. I am reminded of the bird who used to stare at me at family dinners, and an old fear rises in my stomach. He continues, "I'll make this very quick, so it gets through your thick skull and embeds itself in your subconsciousness. I need you to murder someone."

"Rule one," I respond, drawing myself far as I can from his face.

His jowls lower into a deep frown. "Somehow I knew you'd say that."

Something invisible hits me in the gut. I fall onto my stomach, forced into a submissive posture before him, and said invisible force hits me again, this time much harder. Reality grays around me and I rise up into the real world, where, in a shocking turn of events, I am being kicked in the gut.

"I was having the worst dream," I wheeze, as Altair ceases kicking me in the gut. "And right now, you are the worst part of it."

"Did it involve me finding you in the middle of town just before dawn, surrounded by jerky, gagging on your own spit?"

I narrow my eyes. "No, actually."

"That's where I found you this morning," Altair gestures to the door, where the rest of our meager defenses are hardly holding up. "Barely managed to drag you back in here before this happened. There's someone knocking on the door, you know exactly what they want, aaand we don't have enough Bliss to keep throwing around if you want to keep the racket up."

"You're kidding," I say, turning over beneath our singular blanket, limbs thrashing against the constraint of the warm fabric. The door, which is 'locked' and has several pieces of furniture stacked against it, is bustling beneath a skimpy wooden table we awkwardly slid up against it. Magical traps are good and all, but sometimes, you just need to jam a door. I turn to Altair, "We need to make a break for it."

"Already on it. What are your opinions on window-jumping?" Altair asks, and when I cast him a dead of a glare as I can muster, he clarifies, "Hawk. It's too narrow of a hall for us to fight our way out and we're running out of crafty escape routes. Any more and we'll start digging into the valuable merchandise instead of just using tricks."

"It's all valuable merchandise!" I argue. With a shake of my head, I add, "Fine, fine. Is there any way to get out the window without breaking all our limbs?"

Altair takes his pointed pole, which extends to full length when he shakes it out in his mouth, and slams it against the wall. "If you help."

Without a second thought, I join him, fetching the roundgard from the satchel and tearing into the window, which thankfully gives at the frame. The inn is bordered by a long, sloping ceiling over the lobby, and as soon as Altair turns and kicks out our escape hole, the table falls off the door. I swing a bag over my neck, which magically tightens when it hits my fur, and sling the others over Altair's back, where the loose straps fasten themselves to him. We dash across the roof as the disgruntled customers appear in our room, and with a leap Altair bounces to a few barrels of cider and down to the ground. I take the full leap, regretting it, and we race into the woods. The pines overhead shake with disapproval, but I'm hardly listening to them. Instead, I'm catching the croaking of frogs and imagining the best way to cover our scent.

Rule eighty: no one ever tracks through bogs.

I keep a fast pace until the ground grows weak beneath our legs, and Altair shoots me a furious look. "Hawk." His skinny legs tremble like twigs. "Now, I know you're inconsiderate, but this is just mean."

"There are some logs around here somewhere. You can leap off those, but at some point, we need to lose the scent."

"Fair," Altair says, reflectively, "but you owe me a small favor. Several, counting the favor you owe me for the jerky ordeal."

"Mercy," I croak, still dizzy with the weight of last night's... last night.

"I am merciful," Altair says, getting a leg up on a log, which cracks through immediately. He drags his leg out with a painful scratching noise. "It's the terrain, the rest of the world, and your penchant for making stupid decisions that are cruel."

The bog eventually steepens into a particularly filthy lake. Altair struggles to keep the bags afloat, as do I, just a few hairs from drenching the last petals of Bliss and a few manuscripts aside, and I find myself unusually relieved when we pull up onto the other side, which is shallow and thankfully sinks less beneath us. We emerge from the reeds, which grip our coats, and pant before half collapsing onto the ground, legs aching. I see dark shapes on the opposite bank, through my delirium, but they slip back into the forest just as soon as they've approached. My tail hits the ground several times over, my muzzle creeping into a smirk.

Not everyone will give up so easy. On your paws.

Altair shakes himself off like a dog, lowering his head and ruffling his whole coat until it all stands on end. Perking his ears back up, he decrees, "Calling in the small favor. All my small favors."

"Already?"

"It's been on my mind for a while. I need you not to panic. I mean, if you do panic, that's fine, but next time I see you dying in a Felid's trap on the edge of town, I'm going to leave you there."

Oh no. He's rambling again. "Do your worst."

Altair rolls the bags off and retrieves a crystal on a necklace from the very bottom of our inventory. It's an unassuming brown, mixed with deep blue hues that stir the browns into a tumultuous landscape of night wind and sand. "Oh no," I say. "That is not a small favor! Small favor aborted! You put that crystal back in the bag right now--"

"We're heading home." Altair confirms, raising the crystal skywards. All the blue sand clumps to one side and Altair turns that way, kicking his bag closed and sitting down to begin sliding it back around himself. Tilting his head, chain still gripped in his teeth, he asks, "A little help?"

"No." I snipe. "I'm not doing a damned thing for you until you put that back in the bag and we head back towards some other city and con the daylights out of them."

"We'll hit a few places on the way. Remember Yaan?"

"Nothing says enticing like Felis bandits," I say, kicking up foliage. "Of course I remember Yaan. We almost died there several times over."

"You enjoyed Yaan. You raved about their ambrosia-spiced drinks and their vast inventory that had weapons that didn't require telekinesis. I remember you naming weapons you found in Yaan and promising to return for them."

"After six drinks and before Clarissa stabbed me in the hindquarters," I remark. "Damn. Clarissa's probably dead, isn't she? I liked Clarissa. Sometimes you just need a dam to stab you in the hindquarters."

Altair sighs, his ears slowly falling with his breath. "If you want to be level about this, then we'll be level. It didn't matter when I was in pain, but now you are clearly out of your mind and the only Sentient on this whole continent who can help us right now is Aunna Engreaves."

Saying Aunna aloud feels like its own kind of massive betrayal. It's an old title, spawned in part from Moonwalker culture (my mother's side) and in part from the inability of a few pups to pronounce 'Aunt' or the more archaic Moonwalker 'Anhua'. I lower my ears. "It's my family, and I don't want to go."

"Hawk."

"It's my family, and they don't want to see me, let alone help me."

They do not and you have other places to be. Cons to make. May we discuss that murder?

The voice continues to be vaguely helpful and more than slightly concerning. Unsure of whom to rebel against, I admit, "Alright. So I might need help."

Altair's face lights up. "You mean it?"

"If I didn't, would that stop you?"

Altair says slightly, "I may have been considering leaving without you. The Dog Days are getting to be too much, and as much as I love staring death in the face every two to three breaks, I think I'd prefer she and I stuck to a more long-distance relationship."

"Rule three," I protest. "You were not going to leave me."

"Desperate times."

"Are you certain? Because I think we're fairly loaded right now." I flick the inventory on my bag, which causes a little liquid to ooze out of a vial that was apparently poorly secured onto my back. Hopefully it's nothing poisonous.

"There's a cult out there who wants to kill us and bandits who are levelling cities. On top of that, my magic is fading out instead of growing with the Dog Days and you're sleepwalking. I would say times are looking fairly grim, Hawk."

I laugh, half because it makes me a little less afraid and half because it's so terrible and he's entirely right.