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Throbbing pain in the back of Ember's skull made opening his eyes a challenge, but with effort he managed to look at the ground as it steadily scrolled by. He pitched his chin downward and saw a muscular brown back, a tail tuft, and the subtle bump of a muscular behind under a loincloth. He deduced that he was being carried by a buck but he couldn't recall how he had gotten in this situation.

Wolves are keenly attuned to smells. It evokes the deepest memories and sensations for them. Ember bent and sniffed indiscriminately on the back of his captor and received his cervine musk. After a slow moment he recalled everything up to and including his own violent defilement. Appropriately and as if on cue, Ember felt a dull ache in his throat, a tightness to make breathing difficult.

Ember felt a flush of anger but cowardly self-preservation superseded it at once. Slung over the stag's shoulder and in the grip of one of his meaty arms was no good place for a wolf to be. Ember knew that the stag and his kind were leaf-eaters but eliminating the possibility of being food didn't quell Ember's unease. He looked down at his paws and found them bound with vines cured into rope. He kicked with his feet and felt them unbound but the stag squeezed so tightly around his middle that Ember gasped.

"So you're awake," said the stag. His tongue was unaccustomed to Ember's language but his grasp on it was passable. "We're near the village."

The village! Ember thought, suddenly frenzied. "My village?" he asked aloud with pert ears. The stag chuckled darkly. Ember took that as his negative answer.

Drifting low in the sky and framed by ominously dark and bloated clouds was the sun as it cast golden radiance on the forest which Ember might have appreciated in different circumstances. All he saw in the beauty now was the abstract idea of home slipping further and further away. He wouldn't be sleeping among his fellow carnivores tonight and the realization evoked a pang of homesickness and heartache.

The density of the forest which made walking clumsy and ponderous for the stag gave over to a steady but not complete clearing. Ember could smell that he was in herbivore country. Cervine and equine musk hung around in the ambient smells of the fresh air, growing thicker as his escort took him deeper. Ember saw no other creatures, only their signs of life. Small habitats crafted of wood stood sturdy under the canopies of trees. Swatches of berry bushes sprouted liberally, some picked clean while others sagged under the weight of their fruit. Had he been able to look up, Ember would have seen more assorted fruit hanging from the trees.

Night was falling fast and just ahead the torches were lit in the stag's home village which never slept. Warriors like the stag patrolled for meat-eaters like Ember and young lovers were most active after the moon rose. As he carried Ember along, the stag wondered if the wolf would be among them long enough to learn their nuances.

Footsteps from in front of the stag alerted Ember and even more so when the stag halted. The warrior and another deeply-voiced male conversed in their own tongue, an alien language to Ember. Hard consonants and a flash of anger from the other male, followed by a lewd and disarming chuckle from the buck. A heavy and unfamiliar hand clapped down on Ember's rear and startled a yelp out of him. It uncaringly molested him, squeezed his ass cheeks, groped his balls and flicked his sheath in dismissal. Then came more ugly words and a menacing chuckle from the other male. When they passed one another on their separate ways, Ember saw the stranger to be a stallion of no special appearance beyond his terrible size.

Ember doubted if the courtesy of translation would be given, but he softly asked, "What did he say?"

To reaffirm his possessiveness the stag shifted Ember from one shoulder to the other and held him down tightly. "He said your hide would make good clothing." He let the animosity hang when he left out the rest of the translation: I will enjoy him when the rut comes.

It was now that Ember chose to lament his lack of warrior's blood. As far as he had seen the warriors of his tribe selflessly and fearlessly faced death but Ember was fixated on his very real mortality to the brink of tears. He wriggled uselessly against the binds and wondered if he had any hope of outrunning even their lamest stallion, when suddenly the muted thumps of the buck's hooves gave over to a hollow clop against wood. They were entering a den well-lit by torches and of solid construction. Its walls were lined with crude but expressive art of shed antlers and honored skulls. No skulls of enemies were displayed as trophies unlike in every hut in Ember's home village.

Ember smelled the den's occupants before he heard them. Stallions and something vaguely cervine were obvious but chaff from the buck warrior's scent threw him off. Harsh herbivore words from the buck were answered with the same tongue but in a tone infinitely more civilized. Ember could detect the officiousness in the alien language and intuition said he was in the chief's lair. Words in Ember's tongue stuck out to his ears: "Put the wolf at my feet."

Ever bound, Ember was maneuvered to kneel before the chief's throne of wood and rock, well-crafted and a testament to the herbivores' advancement beyond the straw huts of Ember's people. Blind spots in the flitting torchlight kept his view of the chief down to a terrifying shadow of muscle and antlers but oddly familiar, yellow eyes glistened with fierce intelligence. A tingle of fear buzzed from the bottom of Ember's spine to the base of his skull and his nipples stiffened with this new anxiety.

"I never meant to end up here, I mean no harm to your tribe," Ember said, nearly pleading.

The chief smiled and his teeth gleamed too briefly for Ember to see that they didn't bear the uniform leaf-grinding flatness of an herbivore's teeth. "And yet here you are, and your harmlessness is not mutual. Do you realize how far you are from home?" The chief shifted and scuffed his hooves against the floor. "You must realize it, I smell fear on you. Tell me something, wolf," he mused.

"I will tell you anything," said the scout. He looked to either side of the chief and saw his praetorian guards, colossal stallions bearing white fluff on their wrists and ankles to break up rich, brown coats. Their faces were like stone but their eyes bored down into Ember with intensity that promised death at the slightest transgression. To escape their gazes, Ember put his head down and shivered.

"Tell me your given name," the chief grinned, tightening his grip on the knobs of his armrests.

"Ember," the wolf answered evenly.

"Ember," the chief repeated as a whole. "Em-ber," he said again, playing with the two syllables on his tongue. "I hope that you've enjoyed your name. You won't be hearing it anymore. Wolf will serve you just fine." At this, he earned Ember's ire in the form of sudden and admittedly unexpected eye contact. Despite the vitriol in the glare, the chief could only grin smugly. "In this village your very life is a privilege, wolf. A name is a luxury, and slaves do not receive luxuries." So suddenly and calmly as to baffle Ember, he promptly added, "Lick my hooves."

On his knees and tightly bound at the wrists, Ember peered down at the chief's hooves which gleamed in the torchlight. In the most subtle display of disgust, his jowls drew up on one side and he averted his gaze.

"Very well," the chief said in a mild rumble. This was the first hint of anger the wolf had heard in his tones. To the stag warrior he said nothing but made a sharp gesture down at Ember.

Silently and with the cord of his bolas, the warrior snared Ember's throat. He gripped both ends in one heavy mitt and braced against Ember's skull with the other, pushing with the latter and pulling on the former. Ember shrieked a strangled cry and he reached up with his bound paws to try to fight the cord off. Against such a brute, he had no chance and when he began to gag, he became all the more aware of his mortality.

With a decidedly fine eye for torture, the stag relinquished the wolf before any real injury could set in. Ember would be raw for a few hours, but it was a lesson learned. Amidst gasping bleats of pain, he scooted closer to the chief whom obligingly held a hoof aloft. Ember's paws were bound and trembling but he was still able to cup the hoof and hold it steady for his tongue. He reluctantly began to lap over the shiny black walls of it while he blinked off the sudden, hot tears brought on by the strangulation.

If there was an erotic subtext to the licking, the chief didn't indicate it. Putting Ember to work seemed to be strictly a means to dominate the carnivore but he did watch Ember lick and lap his unfeeling hoof with crude interest. As softly as was possible, he spoke in his sharp native tongue to the stag warrior whom loitered nearby. In a tone Ember recognized as lewd, the stag replied. At this, the chief chuckled. "According to the honorable words of my warrior," he mused and turned his hoof against Ember's tongue, "your unclean mouth has many uses."

Ember gave no response and the chief stewed in thought as Ember worked. So much licking left his hoof gleaming with slobber many times over. Over the steady crackling and hissing of the torches came a nearing rumble of thunder. Ember's ears, splayed in humility, perked briefly at the sound.

"A storm is coming," the chief said solemnly and tonelessly. "Now about what you will and will not do with that filthy mouth of yours," he remarked with a dirty smirk.

Ember's licking appropriately tapered off. He felt a knot in his stomach and a tightening in his throat. The burn and the fear of the stag's relentless oral rape came back to him and he let out a slight, uneasy whine. His fears grew more intense when the chief murmured some short, alien command to the warrior whom promptly snatched Ember by the scruff and dragged him up between the chief's legs. With his nose an inch from the chief's loincloth, Ember looked up and tried to discern his tormentor's features. Something was inherently wrong in how the alleged stag smelled and looked in silhouette but the den's torches were of no help.

The chief lay his heavy hand on the back of Ember's head with little weight behind it. His fur was rough like briar, the flesh beneath calloused from hardship. In sharp relief was Ember's supple body which had seemingly never known backbreaking labor. "My very own meat-eater to do as I please with," the chief sneered. Gingerly he pulled Ember in and allowed the wolf's nose to bump where Ember guessed the chief's sheath lie beneath the loincloth and the scout expected his encounter with the chief to be a reprisal of his suffering at the hands of the warrior. He felt anything but relief, however, when the chief flippantly said in Ember's own tongue, "Show the meat-eater to his new home."

Quite a smart clap on the back of Ember's neck precluded the warrior's pinching grip with which he easily hoisted the scout up mid-yelp. Though Ember's feet did touch the floor of the den, he was given no time to walk. The stag dragged him by the heels if necessary out the door and into the breezy open air of the village. It was a moment of discovery for Ember to finally see the village right-side up and unencumbered despite the stag dragging him along. Had he not been under duress or so biased, he might have found the village pleasant to inhabit and look at.

Ember and his burly escort passed looming male figures both cervine and equine. Mares and does kept some distance from the carnivore though none seemed to fear him. If anything, Ember thought he saw vague pity in their eyes when he managed to catch their gazes.

Finally Ember's small tour of the village ended outside at what seemed to be the square. Amidst a small and unnervingly quiet crowd of mixed spectators, Ember beheld what must have been his new home. It was a pen constructed with technical ability unknown to his own tribe. Relatively evenly-cut timbers formed pillars perhaps four feet high in a tight rectangle. Overhead in slats were more timbers lashed together with cured vines to make a heavy roof. The wolf guessed at a glance that he could fit in the pen with only a bit of wiggle room if he were to lie down.

"You're going to put me in there?" he said in a mortified squeak. To look at the wolf then was to see utter terror in his splayed ears. His tail was tucked between his legs and he showed a strange, childlike manner by huddling close to the stag like a pup might cuddle into its mother's flank. That stag was the only villager that he knew could understand him, absent chief notwithstanding.

Predictably the stag disregarded Ember's feelings and yanked on his scruff. "No talking," he barked in his broken corruption of Ember's language. To his burly compatriots in their native tongue, he issued a command. Three stallions and another massive buck began to lift the slatted roof of the pen, hefting hundreds of pounds of solid wood with little effort among the four of them.

The warrior barked a command to what looked to be a teenage stag. Though certainly younger than Ember, he was already a head taller than the wolf and clearly a warrior in training. He neared with more cured vines like the ones Ember suffered on his wrists and with ruthless efficiency he tied the slave's ankles tightly together. He stood, his eyes cold, and he lashed another length around the wolf's snout. So as to keep it from slipping free, he tied the excess behind the scout's head and rendered him completely helpless.

At this, the warrior hoisted his charge and lay him in the pen. Ember watched in desperate fear as the herbivores put the timbers back down and effectively entombed him. Though nothing held the timbers in place, a small wolf Ember's size had no hope of budging them even if he hadn't been bound from head to toe.

Ember flinched at a crackle of thunder and peered out through the bars of the timbers where he saw a sea of legs. The herbivores were closing in to look at the strange beast in their midst. They leaned down and kept their snouts back from the timbers when they peered at him, some uttering under their breath in their native tongue. As ever, Ember knew not what they said but he picked up on the ugliness of the words. He was a strange sight for them to behold.

A familiar but hardly friendly face leveled with Ember's. The warrior was kneeling, sneering through the timbers. "A storm is nearly here. You'll be dressed down in mud. I think that kind of filth fits a meat-eater well."

Had he not been bound, Ember still wouldn't have sniped back. He was focused on his self-preservation and the growling knot that was his stomach was finally beginning to burden him. He looked pleadingly at the stag as a last resort.

But it seemed the stag ignored his pitiful eyes. "You will eat tomorrow. You're too important to let die," the elk said with mystique. Ember clearly wished to inquire. After an uncomfortably long stare, the stag stood. Rain began to tap the ground and Ember's audience dispersed one by one. The wolf cowered under the timbers and curled in upon himself to bare only his soft back to the cold rain. For hours and hours it fell heavily and Ember, as he shifted time and again to pull his face out of the mud, did indeed sully his body entirely. He fell asleep hungry, filthy and softly weeping.