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though, he didn’t want to be eaten. As the last of his load fell from his arms and he broke into a full out run, he heard a deep growl much closer behind him than he cared to think about. His panic made him reckless and he tripped on a root, falling face first into the soft carpet of dead leaves on the ground.
    Benen stayed down, putting his hands over his head and hoping whatever it was that was coming for him would overlook him there if he kept quiet and still. He heard soft padding footfalls nearby, barely causing the leaves to crinkle. The sounds came closer until they were coming from directly beside Benen. He heard breathing, like the panting of an animal having exerted itself.
    O Mysterious Creator, I wish I’d paid more attention at church so I could pray to you properly, Benen prayed in his head. I meant to, I swear! I was just always distracted and church is so boring . . . .
    He might have continued praying in this vein, heading deeper into blasphemy, if a voice hadn’t spoken from directly beside and above him.
    “Boy? Would you please explain to me what you’re doing?”
    It was the wizard! Benen looked up and saw no sign of the beast. What he did see was the wizard. More of the wizard than he could possibly have ever wanted to see. The wizard was naked!
    The old man’s naked body was not a pleasant sight. The skin that was usually hidden under robes was slug-white, except in the many places where the wizard had red blemishes and pimples. His penis was a tiny shrunken thing, all wrinkles and dirt, sitting in the middle of his large unruly mat of pubic hair. Benen averted his eyes after that, feeling he’d overstepped by even gazing upon the wizard’s naked form.
    “You think I look poorly don’t you, Boy? That I look old and withered and unwell. See if you look half so good when you’re over eight centuries old.”
    More than 800 years old?! Benen’s first thought was that the wizard was lying, but having seen what wizards can do, he was uncertain where the truth lay.
    “Get up Boy!” the wizard said. “Go and get the wood where you dropped it in your foolishness and let’s return to the camp. I’m famished.”
    “But, the . . . .” Benen wasn’t sure what to call the beast. What he had seen was most like a wolf, but over-sized. He settled for pointing back the way he had come.
    “What?!” The wizard demanded.
    “There’s a wolf, Master, but not a normal wolf,” the spell over Benen brought out the words.
    The wizard rolled his eyes. He muttered an incantation he had evidently practised many times; he said it much faster and more fluently than any of the other spells Benen had seen him perform. The wizard finished the incantation and then stood as if expecting an attack, tense and ready to react to anything.
    Benen jumped back from the wizard suddenly, when he saw, moving under the skin of the wizard’s belly, what he thought was the shape of large wolf’s head. The shape moved within the soft skin of the belly and made its way up the wizard’s body, deforming it as it went, bending it out of shape. When the head moved past ribs, the ribs broke and the wizard screamed in agony. He fell to the ground and began convulsing. The wolf’s head made it to his neck and came out beside his real head. The howl of the wizard’s pain mingled with that of the released wolf’s head.
    Benen scrambled to find a branch he could use to defend himself, all the while keeping an eye on his master’s death-throes.
    Did he try to summon it? Did the spell backfire? Benen wondered. He thought he’d probably never find out.
    As he watched, the wolf head crushed the wizard’s in its jaws and began ripping and tearing at the wizard’s remaining human form. Where flesh was removed, wolf was revealed until only wolf remained. There was gore everywhere around the wolfish shape.
    It looked like a wolf, only too large. It stood three feet at the shoulders. The head had grown once freed from the constraints of