Within a few hours, the former denizens of Guina had been reduced to bubbling puddles of flesh and rot. Treeg had insisted on fetching the rest of the Blems, while Margo scoured the town’s limits in her fox form. She couldn’t understand how these people had lived in such big houses all by themselves. Their empty stone huts gave way to spacious tunnels below, which branched off into bedrooms of six or eight with little to nothing in them. She nosed through the strewn diary of a man who boasted a house of twelve rooms. Scribbled again and again at the end of each erratic entry was the phrase, “Just in case things get worse.”

  Margo stuck an indignant paw into the mess the man had become. His exposed skull cracked under the lightest pressure from her, and she stewed his decaying brain matter with her claws until it mixed in pulpy clumps with the rest of him. Things had gotten worse alright, she thought, grinning with both of her rows of pointy teeth. But what had his twelve rooms gotten him? Had the silk robes in his wardrobe upstairs protected him from Margo’s virus? Had the silver rings that shone bright around all ten of his leathery fingers stopped the boils from popping, a parade of acidic pus that melted down his skin and ate away at his bones?

  No, Margo thought, pouncing on the man-mush with both of her forepaws. None of it helped, a hard lesson she was proud to have taught the stuck-up people of Guina.

  Once she was finished prancing on the silly, paranoid man’s remains, Margo made her way back up to the surface. She nudged the front door and stepped out into the street. The sun was fading into the soft, golden hues of a well-lit afternoon. She shook her fluffy pink coat out under the warm rays, taking in the breeze blowing through the empty town.

  Margo’s pointy ears twitched. A noise disturbed her peace, the sound of something metallic hitting the pavement just on the other side of the wall to the stone hut. Carefully, Margo prowled around the corner, peering into the alleyway with her two fox eyes.

  The figure on the other side was familiar-- the redhead from the river, Bennet. His robes were covered in gore, a bloodied pair of handprints soaked into the bottom of his robes where someone had clearly tried to climb him. He panted in heavy breaths, clutching the same robes the so-called “Duke” from the square had been wearing. The silver sword pin lay on the ground between them.

  “S-s-stay back,” he uttered. The unspoken ‘or else’ fell weak to Margo's ears. There wasn't anything remotely threatening about the boy’s statement; he trembled and shook, a house of cards in the middle of an earthquake. Margo lifted herself off the ground, shifting back into her human form. Tears sprang to Bennet’s eyes, a myriad of blubbered pleas for mercy erupting from his mouth.

  Margo knew she should feel something. Sympathy, or empathy, whichever one was more fitting for this scenario, she could never remember the difference.

  “The e in empathy is for equal,” the Doctor's age-old teaching voice lectured in her mind. “You feel what your equal feels. You only sympathize with those you pity.”

  It was definitely sympathy she was supposed to feel, as Bennet tried to scamper away from her only to trip on the bottom of his father's robe. He whimpered as Margo approached.

  “Why?” he asked, snot dribbling out of his nose. “Why are you doing this?”

  The human part of Margo wanted to say something about justice. He and his friend had made Treeg's life hard, and so now by Margo's righteous decree, they all had to die. It didn't really matter if the punishment was equal to the crime. These people hadn't seen Treeg or the rest of the Blems as equal. If they suffered at the measure of their own discrepancies, they only had themselves to blame.

  But all of these convoluted thoughts about her heroic duties and the pain of the many were nothing more than whispers in her mind. An overwhelming roar had overtaken her, rushing from the back of her skull and running over as though someone had thrown a bucket of water at her from behind. These weren’t thoughts at all, but rather urges, echoing in a language she couldn't quite understand. Margo had felt it before in the fox den, when the first pup writhed next to her, but this was so much stronger.

  “Why?” Bennet repeated, sobbing on the ground. Sorrow ebbed into rage on his face as he flung his hand out, a piece of jagged metal forming at the center of his palm and shooting out in her direction. The shard of metal grazed her shoulder, tearing her cloak with a shrill rrrip. Bennet oozed hatred, aiming another shard at her with a shaky hand. “Why couldn't you just leave us alone?”

  The foreign urges in her mind rose in pitch. The cacophonous chorus sang the same phrase over and over, the dialect too garbled and grisly for Margo to translate. But the feeling it evoked within her chest was undeniable.

  Margo laid her arms at her sides, tilting her head up and flipping her palms out. Her neck twisted and snapped, her collarbone fracturing beneath her skin and jutting upwards to form a necklace of pale, white shards. Her jaw unhinged, stretching her face into a fleshy amalgamation between girl and fox, slits forming in her new oblong cheeks and opening to reveal six pairs of eyes. Four spindly arms burst from her sides, pale and translucent under the sun.

  None of it was painful to Margo. She rose to her full height, the top of her head extending above the stone walls. She opened her mouth, attempting to smile but finding it hard with all three rows of teeth crowding her mouth. Sensing the inconvenience, her body seemed to relent at the notion, pushing the skin encasing her jaw further down to give her more room. This wasn't a transformation like the fox or Kara’s ogre form had been. This form-- whatever this form was-- felt startlingly natural, far more natural than Margo's human form had.

  Bennet let out an ear-splitting shriek, clambering onto his legs and scrambling out of the alley. Margo's forked tongue shot out of her mouth, and she hissed vengefully for him to stop. But it wasn't words leaving her mouth, just noises, the same growls and gurgles that had played over the thoughts in her mind before the transformation had begun. She could feel magic-- her true magic-- spraying from her mouth like a vicious wad of venom.

  Bennet cried out as his legs snapped from under him, his bones as brittle as twigs as he dragged himself further with his upper body. His flesh grew grey and lifeless, peeling in gruesome flakes. With a weak, final gasp for air, Bennet collapsed in a lifeless heap to the ground.

  Without a moment of hesitation, Margo scooped him off the ground and devoured his corpse, silken clothes and all. She shoveled his limbs between her sharp rows of teeth, licking the blood off her fingertips as she slowly shrank down. Bones cracked into place. Her arms retracted back to a single human pair. Grimly satisfied, she turned back to a shocking sight.

  Just outside the entrance to the grisly alleyway stood a herd of the Blems. She could recognize Xireal's astonished face amidst the crowd, with Granny Ophelia drooling down his back. Treeg was stock-still in the center, silent and wide-eyed. Margo fumbled with her hands before them.

  “I, um…” Margo stumbled over her words. Now that the adrenaline had passed and her bloodlust had been assuaged, she was left dreadfully uncertain. Most people seemed to think killing was wrong; many of her siblings had been hauled off and never seen again after such events inside the facility. But the books and scrolls Margo had grown up reading always had death, and always for the greater good. Staring back at the petrified Blems, however, that didn't seem like a good argument, and judging from their vacant expressions, it seemed as though they had seen the monstrous form she had taken too. She squeezed her eyes shut, clenching her cloak in two tight handfuls. “I'm sor--”

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  Treeg interrupted, picking up the silver blade pin off of the cold ground. He raised it high in the air, making concerned eye contact with Margo as he announced, “A token of the hero's victory!”

  Murmurs and gasps echoed the sentiment.

  “She's done it,” one voice said excitedly. “She's taken down the Duke!!”

  “The town is ours,” another added gleefully.

  The crowd began cheering for Margo. Xireal ecstatically laid the grounds for reforming the town; no more stone huts with unused tunnels, no more stockpiles of canned goods. The Blems would retune Fable’s Guina into something far greater, something self-sufficient and guided by the land itself. A bonfire was arranged in the center of the town square, where the Blems burned the lavish remnants of the previous citizen’s lives.

  “We'll call it Ophelia,” Margo announced above the cinders of another wardrobe of navy blue silk. “For Granny, and all of the heroes before.”

  The Blems screamed their approval, crowding around the dissociating Granny Ophelia to give their thanks and congratulations. Her piercing gaze moved through Margo, sending a shiver down her spine before she motioned for more to be added to the fire.

  Treeg sauntered towards her, a wooden goblet in each of his hands. He offered one to her with a solemn frown. “Here. Sherry’s Brew.”

  Margo took the goblet, taking a sip of the bright red liquid inside. It was warm and sweet, the taste of roasted berries with a peppery finish. “Thanks, Treeg.”

  Treeg grimaced at the fire, and Margo could see him deliberating each word very carefully before he spoke in a hushed tone. “I found the Duke’s body. He was mostly melted down anyways, so it was easy to make him fertilizer.”

  Margo didn't reply, eyes entranced by the fire and the happy faces surrounding it. Treeg continued gravely, “They all think you became what you did for him. We should keep it that way.”

  “Why does it matter?” Margo sighed, voice barely a whisper. And then she saw it-- the slight tremors in his wrist, the way his fingers gripped the stem of the goblet with such force it made his knuckles go white. Treeg was scared, scared of her.

  “Because if they find out,” Treeg said through gritted teeth, “that you did that to a kid who was trying to run away, they're not going to be happy about it.”

  “I didn't--”

  “Don't,” he raised a hand, cutting her off. “I know it was Bennet. No one else would be stupid or vain enough to take the clothes off the Duke. Even if I couldn't figure it out, I saw it.”

  He reached toward her face, pulling a black, spiky leaf out of her hair.

  “But how did that stay on me?” Margo asked, flabbergasted by the reveal.

  “It became a part of you, like how your clothes do whenever you transform,” Treeg said dryly, tossing it into the fire’s eager flames. “It connected me to you. That's how I watched you torture him before you ate him.”

  “Treeg, that boy was one of them,” Margo argued. She didn't like the judgemental look he was giving her. Where was his enthusiasm? His excitement? His gratitude? “He tortured you, and he would've grown to to torture everyone else here too!”

  Treeg's expression softened from stoic and standoffish to simply sad. The furrow in his dark, wiry brow smoothed, and he sighed. “Don't get me wrong. I don't think you did the wrong thing today. You took down those soldiers like they were nothing, and you championed our name. With your magic, we really might have a chance at being happy.”

  “So why doesn't it sound like you're thanking me for it?”

  “Because,” Treeg hesitated nervously. “When you transformed, I felt something beyond you. I don't know what it was, but it made you want to do that.”

  “I only wanted to show these people they were wrong because you told me they were wrong!” Margo said defiantly. “I wanted to give us a home, to fight back like you wanted to! That was me listening to you, no one else!!”

  Treeg snagged her wrist, yanking her away from the now curious Blems watching them from around the bonfire. He pulled her into a secluded hut, this one empty of all possessions save for a tattered red rug.

  “That wasn't natural, Margo!” Treeg finally said, voice raised with exasperation. “Whatever that thing was, it controlled you--”

  “--That was me controlling it--”

  “--Then why did you eat him?!”

  Margo scoffed at the incredulous question. Why did she eat Bennet? Because he was a nuisance, obviously. But the excuse sagged in her mind like a wet rag. She opened her mouth, ready for the truth to come tumbling out to silence Treeg, but nothing came.

  “You weren't hungry,” Treeg pointed out. “He wasn't trying to kill you. He couldn't even hurt you.”

  “I didn't know that,” Margo mumbled. Treeg's face sank with disappointment, and Margo suddenly felt horribly guilty for lying. She did know she wasn't in danger in the alley. She did know Bennet couldn't outrun her, much less fight her off. But still, she used to the full extent of her power to ensure his last moments were vile and cruel. Her mind was hazy, a forgetful fog settling in as she tried to recall the thoughts that were singularly hers before the incident.

  Why had she eaten Bennet?

  Margo simply couldn't remember.

  “My point is that you weren't you,” Treeg finally said, putting his hands on her shoulders. The look in his eyes wasn't sympathetic, Margo decided. There was an indignant determination in his sharp-eyed gaze, one that matched the gentle pressure applied by his fingers. “And I'm scared to think what would happen if you changed your mind about being my hero.”

  “I would never do that,” Margo said earnestly. Then, softly, she added, “I'm sorry for scaring you.”

  Treeg shook his head with a slight grin. “It's alright, like I said, I don't think that was you in there. We should probably figure out what that was before you turn into it again.”

  “If you're right, and I can't control myself, though…” Margo trailed off with an uncomfortable gurgle from her stomach. She imagined tearing Treeg into bloody pieces with her four clawed hands, or turning Xireal's body to glass with her venomous forked tongue. “I don't want to know what I am if I can't stop it. There'd just be no point.”

  “That's not true at all!” Treeg shook her with his shout. “We'll only be able to control it if we know what it is!”

  The sudden shift from concern to optimism was jarring to Margo. With a confused glance, she asked awkwardly, “Do you actually think so? Or are you just worried I'm going to eat you too?”

  “Just because you got some noble brat doesn't mean you'd get me,” Treeg scoffed, then meekly added, “I’d like to think I'd have a fifty second head start.”

  “Fifty seconds? More like fifteen.”

  “All I really need is five,” Treeg snorted arrogantly. “But seriously, we'll figure it out, Margo. Every hero needs a good scholar to back them up anyways, so you leave the studying to me. I'll be your Green Witch.”

  “My Green Witch?”

  “Nevermind,” Treeg said sheepishly. “All I mean is, I'll ask around and see if there's anything in this town that can point us in the right direction.”

  “What should I do?”

  “You just keep playing hero for now. And don't eat anyone else!”