A BOUGHT STORY OF THIS WRITER:
https://www.furaffinity.net/user/mavortheturnip/






They did tell him to stay away from the factory, but how dangerous could an abandoned industrial ruin really be? It was in the middle of the woods! Nature had taken it back, and everyone knew nature wouldn’t be so cruel as to play pranks on its own children; never a better time to explore an abandoned coal processing facility, in fact, as far as Tom was concerned.

Plus, if there was anything in the way blocking access, he was certain he could handle it; he hadn’t been hitting the gym for the past year for nothing, nor had he decided to replace every item of clothing he had with far more skintight varieties for no reason. Sure, there may be no one around to appreciate his sculpted physique, but Tom didn’t quite care: he enjoyed it, and that was as far as his thought process went.

He found the factory itself deep at the end of a forest trail, one that might’ve once been an access road: bits of asphalt lined the sides, chunks of it poking out from below years of dust and dirt, hinting at the presence of civilisation, retaken by the wilderness. A sobering reminder, and one that the wolf didn’t really think twice about; for him, it just meant he was getting closer to his goal, and could afford to step up the pace.

The facility was… certainly large, though not nearly as much as it had been back during its heyday. Large sections of it had been fully recovered by both the treeline and assorted vines, with the whole structure covered in greenery as the forest worked to bring down an intruder it could finally defeat. Give it a couple of decades or so, and there’d be nothing left of the old processing plant but stray slabs of metal scattered on the ground, destined to remain there, buried underneath sequential generations of roots, brambles and bushes.

For Tom though, it was an opportunity to explore the past. The factory used to be important enough that an entire town was built just a couple of miles out from it, but ever since the market for what it produced ran dry, it was simply left to fend for itself against the elements; with the town itself slowly bleeding population as more and more of the old families found their luck elsewhere, it fell to people like him to explore what the facility still had to offer, and, presumably, make off with a couple of relics to show off for it.

Thankfully for the wolf, no breaking and entering was needed, as the main doorway had been conveniently left ajar, pulled apart by wind, rain, and a non-insignificant amount of creeping woodland forcing its way inside the facility itself. Sunlight just barely filtered through the dust-caked windows, giving the whole place a moody, gloomy feel; together with how all sound seemed to be muffled the moment Tom stepped inside, the atmosphere very quickly swerved from a warm summer’s day to the most oppressive of silences, leaving him feeling like he was trespassing, and somewhere he’d regret being as well.

In fact, nothing made any noise apart from the pads of his paws on the ground; he kept them uncovered to make it easier on him to traverse rougher terrain, but in cases like those, he was left cringing whenever he stepped on anything at all: there wasn’t supposed to be anything in there at all, much less the copious amounts of loose… coal dust? Looking down, it certainly looked the part: thin, black, left his paws even darker than they already were, and he was definitely in the right place for it. But the factory had been abandoned for close to a decade; surely, weathering alone would’ve cleaned the whole place out, to say nothing of the flooding.

Regardless, he kept going; he was there already, might as well make it deeper into the factory itself instead of chickening out at the last moment. Easy to do so though, given how… wrong, everything felt. Like the place wasn’t merely abandoned, but dead, killed off by some unseen entity hellbent on making sure that whatever had happened here never did so again, until even the very spirit of the place was drawn and quartered, splattered over the ground in the form of a thin coating of black dust.

Odd thoughts to have for someone who never recalled themselves being nearly as metaphorical on a regular basis. It didn’t help that, when Tom turned around to look at the exit, it looked to be significantly further away than what it should be; he’d only walked about ten or so seconds (or at least believed he had), yet the exit, that small square of light through which he could see the tiniest sliver of the outside world, was already so small that he could block it off if he only raised his thumb in front of his muzzle.

Tom was frozen in his spot, not so much unable as unwilling to move. If he turned and ran back to the door, he might be able to escape from that hellpit, but then he’d be left wondering just what had been wrong with it for his entire life; do the opposite, and he risked being stuck inside that dreadful not-place until his soul vanished into the aether… presumably. It could be that he was just spooked and there was no real danger to him, that was always a possibility; or, it could be that he was definitely being watched by some strange, impossibly ancient entity that did not like having someone walk into its turf, and now looked at him as a fly to be swatted away.

Whatever the case, he had to make a decision, because he was reasonably certain the door was closing right in front of him and his window of opportunity was quite literally getting smaller by the second. He didn’t even need to hear a weird, groaning sound coming from the still-dark depths of the factory, but hell, of course it provided; Tom was lucky he didn’t let out a yelp with how rapidly he turned tail and started sprinting towards the exit… or tried to, at least.

The moment he performed a perfect one-eighty and placed his paw down to propel him forward, he fell onto the ground instead. His centre of balance completely out of kilter, all he could do was extend his arms and soften the pratfall as best he could, and even then he nearly knocked his lower jaw into his nose from force of impact alone. Scrambling, desperate to get as far away from it all as possible, the wolf tried to get back on his feet, only to suddenly become acutely aware that his paws weren’t touching the ground.

He expected to hear his claws scraping against the hard concrete underneath him, but instead all he got was the rustling of dust being shifted from place to place, and a terrifying numbness below the knee. Tom immediately picked up on what had happened as well, but chose to believe it wasn’t the truth; easy enough, given that it should be anatomically impossible, giving him an extra layer of defense against the realisation that his paws were, indeed, not there anymore.

So he tried to get up, again and again, hands moving of their own accord as they dragged whatever was left of him closer to the door. Every inch gained were five lost, as the distant light grew dimmer by the moment, salvation so close, yet forever unreachable. The numbness spread, crawling up his legs, until the shifting of coal dust became loud enough that the wolf found his head automatically trying to turn back, hoping to see what was taking place just a couple of feet behind him. Tom held himself, refusing to give into the instinct; surely, if he just got out, then he’d be fine, and whatever happened would be reversed, and he’d walk back home just like he walked to the factory itself.

But the view of the outside was only ever more distant, and his arms weren’t growing any stronger. The more he dragged himself, the harder it became to do so, until each heaving gained him nothing but a couple of inches, until eventually, even this was too much. Now his motions were nothing but a slow, snail-like crawl, where he felt his entire front being dragged along the ground, scraping painfully on the rough surface. Luckily for him, this wouldn’t be the case for much longer; eventually, the same fate that befell everything below the waist spread upwards until his chest began disintegrating, falling away into a thin layer of black dust whenever he tried moving. Eventually, his arms too would be reduced to this fine powder, until, with a final clenching of muscles that weren’t even there, nothing remained of Tom but a smear of coal dust on the floor.

… but he was still there. He didn’t expect to be; part of the wolf had been fully on-board with the idea that he was going to open his eyes and either wake up from the nightmare or find himself awaiting judgement in some aetherial realm. Instead, he was just… there. He had no body to speak of, but he still felt himself: he couldn’t breathe, but had no problems with shortness of breath, couldn’t see, but knew perfectly well what was taking place around him. He couldn’t feel, but was aware of his surroundings, couldn’t hear, but wasn’t in silence anymore.

For once, the abandoned facility felt downright warm, like for the first time since coming in, he was actually welcome in there. Sure, all it took was being reduced to a bunch of dust on the ground, but at least the eldritch presence telling him to get out wasn’t there anymore; now all he had to worry about was being locked inside a body that didn’t even exist, lacking even the most basic motor function and unable to scream for help. Honestly, if it weren’t for the shock of it all, Tom would likely be experiencing some form of extreme existential meltdown, but in the state he was in, his first thought was to, oddly enough, try and reform himself.

He didn’t know why that was the first thing that came to him, but it felt natural to assume he would be capable of such. He was still alive, after all; this meant he had to have something physical to him to help process the fact that he was, indeed, alive. Maybe not a brain, but… something, and this something was clearly functioning the way it should be if he could think and produce coherent lines of self-inquiry. If he existed, then it stood to reason there was something there to exist, and if his many, many read-throughs of terrible fanfiction online had taught him anything, it was that willpower alone could literally move mountains if needed.

Thus, he decided he was going to reform his entire body. How, he had no clue, but it was going to happen; through sheer force of will, he was going to take the many disparate parts that were him and become his old self once more, one tiny little particle at a time.

Easier said than done though. He “sat” there for quite a while, wondering how exactly he was supposed to do it; maybe he should command himself to reform… if he had a mouth. Or lungs. Or the capacity to speak, now that he thought about it. Hell, when he did think about it, Tom realised all he had was the ability to think about it: therefore, it made sense that he could think himself into reforming… sort of. Kind of. It absolutely made sense, because it had to make sense, because otherwise he had literally nothing and was stuck being a pile of coal ash for the rest of his life, assuming he could even die at all!

He was still left stuck as nothing but dust for what felt like hours, maybe even days; gauging the passage of time was made somewhat more complicated on account of him lacking the need to eat, sleep, or drink, to say nothing of having been plunged into complete darkness without the slightest indication of where the sun was. But he tried; it was all he could do, but he tried, in the only ways he could think of: willing himself back together, begging for his body to do so, praying to whatever god he was supposed to pray to, then to creature-thing that was surely to blame for all of this happening to him.

But nothing happened. The longer it went on, the more Tom came to believe that this was it: he was permanently stuck in this dismantled form, without any way to return to his old normal, and the worst part about it was that he’d never even find out why. It was highly doubtful that whatever entity or phenomenon was responsible for it would show itself to him if it hadn’t already, which could only mean he was destined to remain perpetually ignorant of the root cause for his transformation.

Tom wasn’t about to give up though. He may not have a clue, and he may very well be stuck in that form until the cows came home and back out again, but he was going to keep trying, even if it killed him; not like he could get any worse, so he might as well throw his all into it and hope for the best. Eventually, he figured, he’d stumble onto something that worked, and once he did, it was a simple matter of repeating it until it “stuck”, whatever that ended up doing for him.

Unfortunately for Tom, this took the form of him repeatedly smashing his head against the wall and failing to make any progress whatsoever, leaving only a bruised ego and, he assumed, a lot of disturbed ash on the ground where his body used to be. Nothing he did seemed to work; he would’ve settled with even the slightest rustling of his shattered form, the tiniest movement that betrayed his control over what used to be his physical self. But with no eyes to see, no hands to feel, he might as well be whole again and he’d have no idea.

… which brought an interesting new notion onto the table: what if he was whole again? What if he’d been whole that entire time and just… wasn’t aware? What if his body, in the general shape of itself, had been there since he first commanded it to be, and he merely lacked the extremities, nerve endings, and the sensory input required to be able to experience? If so, then he was seriously more screwed than he thought he would be, seriously enough that the wolf started to panic as the existential dread set in and he realised that this was his life from that point onward.

But something stopped him midway through that thought process, locking him in place and refusing to let him go forward. Dangling off the edge of the precipice, this unseen presence held onto him, a sturdy grip wrapping his shirt around it to keep him from doing something stupid; he fought against it, unwilling to turn around and keep fighting when the universe clearly wanted him to give up, but whatever this force was, it refused to yield. It pulled him back, further and further, until Tom couldn’t see the edge anymore: crawling and begging to be let go, the wolf was dragged kicking and screaming back to something that half-resembled consciousness, waking up at some point after having that initial thought of embodiment.

With a slight difference: he felt warm. Not exactly novel, except for what it meant: he could feel heat. And if this was the case, then it stood to reason that he should have a physical form that could both sense temperature changes and process them in a way that made sense to him: a body, with skin, muscle, organs, even a brain thrown in for good measure!

Tom tried opening his eyes, only to get more darkness in return… but he did open his eyes. Like doing so in an unlit bedroom, there was no change to what he saw, but he felt his eyelids move regardless, sliding over what might be a cornea, letting him know that he did actually have a physical self he could manipulate just like before. And this, this was a start: he could use this.

The first proper motions came a few minutes later, after Tom made sure that he wasn’t imagining things. There were no cramps, despite him imagining that he might be clenching down tightly; there was only himself, present, clearly there in some more tangible manner, but still none of the senses that allowed him to interact with the outside world. An odd sense of equilibrium though: Tom knew he existed, he was just locked away from existing within a world, or at least being consciously aware of it… but he did exist, and not just as a disembodied spirit attached to a pile of coal dust.

He sat. Or, at least, he performed the same motions he usually did when he wanted to sit, absent any external confirmation that he was, in fact, doing any of them at all. But he instructed his body to sit regardless, and then waited; he waited, because there was nothing else he could possibly do, convinced as he was that his condition was temporary and he just had to give time a chance to fix him. Why else would he have spontaneously returned to a more solid form after trying everything and failing?

Now, how much time he spent “sitting” there, Tom didn’t know. Could’ve been a day. Could’ve been a week. Could’ve been there for long enough that, once he opened his eyes again, there would be no factory, only himself on the forest floor, staring up at a world he no longer recognized. But he sat there regardless, knowing that it was the only way he could ever hope to find himself again; sometimes he’d try to push up his eyelids, others he would attempt to clench his fists, but never succeeded, not until so much time had passed that Tom genuinely didn’t know whether he was even alive anymore, or if the whole thing had been one long, excruciatingly detailed dying dream.

The numbness was the first to come, first in what the wolf presumed were his extremities, then spreading through his limbs and into a core that was, definitely, still there. A numbness where he knew something was present, but he couldn’t quite feel it properly, but a numbness that confirmed he had something to feel with; it just wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. So he took to his patience, exhausting whatever other thought he might have and sacrificing it for more restraint and self-control: upon the altar of determination he would pray, for the strength to carry on sitting throughout his metamorphosis, for the will to power through his transformation, for the time to complete it without anything going wrong.

More seconds, hours, years. More of his existence bled into the drain like a fat, swollen pig being led for slaughter. More of himself, yielded to the inexorable passage of time, until he was left staring at a wall… staring at a wall. He was staring at a wall: indeed, looking at a flat piece of concrete, held upright against the force of gravity, covered in odd scratch marks and the occasional graffiti tag. A tall, supportive piece of a structure built to withstand the test of time, created artificially by mortal hands. Definitely a wall.

Yet by being a wall, it was at once several more things, the most important of which was that it existed. By existing, this meant that he had to be looking at it, which meant that he had eyes and a brain to interpret what the former saw (or, at least, a close enough analogue), he had the body to sit down and the neck to look up at the wall. He had himself, and he existed, physically, in the same way that he used to, what felt like a million years prior.

No celebrations though; by then, the former wolf had learned to curb his enthusiasm, knowing as he did how fragile his situation was. At any moment, he could splatter into a million different shards of dust yet again, returning to his frail, broken state, smeared on the floor of an uncaring facility that wanted nothing more than for him to be quiet and never move again. But he was alive again, he was at last back in his old self (presumably), and if that was what he had to hold onto in order to literally keep himself together, he was going to hook onto this notion and refuse to let go.

It came easier, with time. Tom could actually see the passage of it now, with light filtering through his eyes, letting him know that not only was it the middle of the afternoon, it was likely the very same one that he’d arrived at the abandoned plant to begin with. No longer bereft of a frame of reference, it didn’t take much for the wolf to come to the conclusion that all he’d been going through was a momentary spot of confusion: he hadn’t been lying there for a million billion years as some sort of powdery stain on the floor, he was just… tired. Dehydrated. The whole thing was likely just a freak occurrence that would never bother him again.

Or, perhaps, he should stop trying to pretend like he hadn’t just been smashed into bits and spent a considerable amount of time as dust on the ground. The only way forward was acceptance anyway; what else was he supposed to do, ignore what felt like a thousand thousand lifetimes just because it was the most convenient way out of that mess? It had happened, and as he got back to his paws, rising from his position so painfully that he was surprised he didn’t cramp up immediately, the truth became apparent in but an instant.

Looking at himself revealed not fur or flesh, but something akin to hardened, compacted powder in the rough shape of his former body, a substance as alien to him as it was to reality at large: all it took was the wolf dragging one finger along an arm for a large chunk to be carved out from it; painlessly, but still visually distressing, especially since it didn’t heal back up and he was forced to collect coal powder from the ground to help “rebuild” himself.

Still, at least he was there. Unrecognisable and utterly impossible, but there regardless, and that was more than could have been said for himself just a few moments before: he was physical, he could see, he could touch, he could hear, he could feel; the warmth permeating him came not from within, but without, as one of the higher windows, mercifully spared from the years of grime and dust, allowed the sun to shine on him, revealing the glint and glimmer of the fine, powdery material he was now built out of it. To a certain extent, it felt deliberate; the entity or force responsible for it all, most likely.

No matter. He had what he wanted, and now he just needed to live with it. Not his fault that he was turned into something akin to a dust cloud, but now that he was once again physical (in some way or another), Tom could start making plans to move forward… even if he didn’t know how he was supposed to do anything, given the state his body was in. It wasn’t as if he could just walk into a shop and act normally; he was made of coal dust! He was a golem!

… but he had to try anyway. He couldn’t remain within the confines of the abandoned facility for the rest of his existence, especially not now that he lacked organic components to degrade to begin with. He could remain rooted in place, staring at that wall for as long as it took for him to cease being, but then people would come knocking anyway: he left messages with several of his friends that he was heading out in that direction before leaving the house that morning.

So it was either stay there, be found, and likely end up in a laboratory as some kind of freakish mutant, or get out and try to at least be proactive about. How he wouldn’t end up in a laboratory in the second option was anyone’s guess, but Tom figured that, if he just kept on the offensive, then he could keep control of what happened to and with him; maybe, if he refused to yield even an inch, he alone could determine what people did around him.

And who knew, maybe he could disguise himself! His fur was already black and sooty by nature, so with some careful placement of cosmetics and the use of tactical fashion, maybe he could pass for perfectly normal unless someone looked closely; he hadn’t had the chance to see himself in a mirror yet, but surely he shouldn’t be that much different that anyone could tell he was some kind of dust creature at a glance… surely.

The biggest problem was going to be physical integrity though. For all that he was doing a decent job convincing himself that he had to move and get out of the factory, Tom hadn’t actually twitched a single inch. He knew, in the way that one knows an unstated uncertainty, that there was a non-zero chance he might just collapse entirely again the moment he turned to head for the exit; he was perfectly fine then, when he was standing still, but any stress on his form could very easily make him fall apart, and then what would he do?

Lie there, reforming himself yet again? He had no clue how much time had passed since he fell down the first time; for all he knew, the police had come and gone and saw nothing, unaware that the pile of coal ash splattered around where his clothes were was actually him-

His clothes! Without thinking, Tom turned around and practically leapt at the crumpled pile covered with soot and black dust, entirely unaware of the fact that he’d just moved without compromising his structural integrity. He needed to go through his pockets, and anything else was promptly shunted straight into the back of his head; just his luck that he kept a cellphone on him at all times, and just his luck that it hadn’t cracked open when fell on the ground!

Tom smudged the screen badly enough that he couldn’t even use it at all. In his rush to see the time and check if he had any messages, he forgot his hands weren’t exactly the cleanest anymore, and in just one or two motions, completely covered the monitor in a thin layer of coal powder, sending the touchscreen activation into an overdrive. Grumbling, the wolf was about to wipe it on himself, before remembering what that would do; now sighing and rubbing his temple with his free hand, Tom bent down to grab his shirt, found the spot with the least dust on it, and did his best to clean up.

Using the cloth as an improvised glove, the wolf settled for looking at the locked screen; if he did have messages, they should show up. He didn’t know what he was expecting, actually: maybe it being several days later? Perhaps the phone having died from lack of battery, or its internal components having rusted. A million calls, none of which were answered, maybe a news piece sent to him in the hopes that he might read it.

He had left the house at roughly one in the afternoon, and arrived at the forest trail leading to the abandoned facility at around three; with not much exploration needed, it likely hadn’t even been half past by the time he crossed the threshold, and from there, just a few seconds until what happened happened. An infinite number of possibilities, cut into a fraction when Tom pressed the lock button and the phone actually turned on, cut even further when he looked at the screen and saw that it was still the same day as it had been when he left the house.

Fifteen hours, forty-seven minutes.

He couldn’t believe it. He was seeing it, but he couldn’t believe it. For Tom, the notion that everything that had happened had done so within the span of just twenty short minutes (hell, not even that much) was nothing if not unthinkable. Lifetimes were wasted in contemplation, aeons spent looking at nothing, epochs thrown away like they were seconds where he did fuck-all beyond exist in that disembodied, dusted state. He had more experience living than he could ever want, none of it usable, all of it weighing on him… and it had been twenty minutes?

It was almost insulting. Tom found himself wanting to have lost millions of years, if for no other reason than, at least then, everything he went through would’ve meant something. Now it just felt like he was a drama queen who didn’t know how to keep his emotions in check, and how the hell was he supposed to handle that?! How did everything he experienced just get thrown into the proverbial rubbish bin while he got told to suck it up and deal with it?

But while he could refuse it as much as he wanted, the phone was still there, it was clearly still functioning, and the odds of it having somehow broken its internal clock in just the right way to display that time and date were… low, to put it generously. Maybe it was true, and he’d walk out into a different world, but as Tom carefully put his clothes back on, finding that they rested on him just as well as before, he slowly came to the conclusion that everything he’d gone through was just… not real.

The wolf felt increasingly warm as he walked closer to the wide-open gates, the sun outside presumably working wonders with the material he was built out of. The clothes rustled on him as well: there was no friction between himself and his attire, letting his shirt and pants almost float freely with every motion; multiple times, he had to stop and readjust the latter just to keep them from falling to the ground, seeing as he couldn’t exactly tighten the belt without bifurcating himself.

Once outside, it was horrible how nothing had really changed. The trees were the same, the wind was the same, the building was still just as abandoned and deteriorated as before, rather than more. He had, indeed, just stepped in and out for a quick look at the place, with the exception of… himself, apparently. The world had carried on, for the minute amount of time that he’d spent in the old coal factory, and now he had to deal with it.

Crying wasn’t an option. Screaming was, but it wouldn’t resolve anything. He could try throwing himself at the nearest wall just to see if he could reform himself again, but that wouldn’t do much to fix the actual problem. Instead, he stood there, staring at the sky, wondering to himself why… everything. Of all the things that could’ve happened, why that, and why to him? Why couldn’t he have just gone in there, taken a look, and left, like he had with so many other places already? Why couldn’t everything have just gone right?

Tom looked aside, to where he just then realised he’d punched a wall. He felt the force of impact, but rather than bruised, sore knuckles, he instead decelerated almost instantaneously, losing his balance, in fact; when he tried opening his hand to anchor himself, he found it wasn’t there anymore, and looking downwards revealed, indeed, a small pile of ash right under where he would’ve punched the rusting wall.

On his arm, a stump. Not even a malformed, mangled, hand, just the complete absence of one, almost as if someone had cleanly cut it out of him, leaving him with a useless limb to wiggle around. Tom, however, didn’t scream, nor did he despair; if anything, the only emotion he could muster was annoyance, along with an exasperated sigh when he tried to figure out how he was going to get his hand back. He needed that one, he used it t-

Oh. Right. He’d need to check that later as well.

“Stupid fucking… alright, get back up,” he commanded of the pile of ash, “I don’t have time for you, get back on my wrist and make a hand again. Stat!”

For a moment, nothing happened, leaving Tom feeling somewhat foolish that he was literally yelling at a pile of dust… until it began stirring, forming together into a larger, denser pile, before a thin strand of it moved upwards, snaking its way closer to his stump and attaching to it. He felt nothing: not warmth, not a tingle, not even the slightest itching, just him, looking at a bunch of coal dust creating a swirling series of circles as it rose up and reformed into the rough shape of a hand, starting at the wrist and ending at the tip of his fingers.

It only took a few seconds, after which Tom wiggled his digits to make sure they were still working. Sensation returned a moment or so later, after which he had his hand back fully, with seemingly no repercussions.

“Right. No sudden impacts or I go poof again, gotcha,” he mused aloud, “so… no more throwing myself off cliffs, no wall jumping, no… swimming? Probably no swimming either, I’d dissolve into the fucking water. No boxing, no shooting, no anything but being a fucking porcelain doll all day long. Wonderful. Just great, exactly what I needed!”

The grumbling only got worse. Most of it was just a repeat of the core complaints, but Tom had nothing but time as he carefully dragged himself through the trail towards his car; he hadn’t considered if the amount of pressure needed to use the pedals would be too much for him to handle, but there was plenty of room for him to keep snarling at himself, at the factory, at reality in general, for having saddled him with a body that wouldn’t be able to withstand a stiff breeze.

And what was he going to say to everyone else? How was he supposed to explain to his friends, his family, that he was made out of ash? How was he going to walk up to anyone and let them know that hey, by the by, he’d walked into an abandoned factory and was now cursed to be a pile of walking dust, and please don’t push him too hard or he might just fall apart!

It was ludicrous, preposterous, and downright ridiculous; it had to be a bad dream, because how else was he going to explain it? He had to be asleep still, having knocked his head far too harshly on the way down; he was probably still lying around, leaking wound on his temple, slowly getting infected by coal dust, hence the sudden inexplicable delusion he was dealing with. Good chance he might not even wake up, which as far as he was concerned, would still be a one-up from what he was going through.

This and more went through his head during the trek back to the car, most of which would be forgotten by the time he did get there. He might complain, but he would never choose to give up, especially now of all times; maybe mope, definitely lock the front door to his house and refuse to leave for months, but never give up permanently. It was a challenge, and he had to look at it like one; it was the only way he could see himself getting through the day, the week, the year, the rest of his unnatural life.

His car was still exactly where he left it, almost taunting him with how much it looked the same as always. The whole word was the same; twenty minutes had passed, and with them, only had had changed in any significant matter. A hiccup in time, nothing more, and yet enough to turn him into something that had some genuinely difficulty getting its keys out of its pocket.

Tom almost wanted to laugh. Every time he stuck his hand in there, it’d just get stuck, breaking off entirely when he tried to pull it back; served him right for not widening his pockets when he had the chance, but at least it served as decent practice to see just how quickly he could reform his lost extremities: the process was excruciatingly slow at first, needing him to concentrate on nothing but moving the ash towards him, but as he tried and failed to fish the keys out of his pants, the amount of time wasted grew gradually smaller. Soon enough, he’d even find himself keeping his hand intact even when disconnected from his main body, allowing him to just “plug” his wrist into it; some more effort, and it managed to move even when not linked to the rest of him!

The wolf found himself with his keys in his free hand after a while, yet still putting the other one in his pocket, purely to exercise his ability to keep himself solid and recover whenever he failed to do so. It took him long enough that, by the time he noticed he’d been standing in that same spot for heavens knew how long, the sun was noticeably closer to the horizon… but at least he did know how to quickly reshape his hand if need be.

Not that he could explain how he knew that. It was an instinctual approach to it, almost like breathing or taking a step; while the intent to fix himself was there, the subconscious command worked on a level too deep for him to be able to verbalise how it worked at all, leaving him staring at a hand that he could freely turn to dust and reshape with about as much difficulty as he could take a breath. On the other hand, he literally just then noticed he wasn’t breathing, nor could he breathe, leaving him panicking for a few moments before realising he likely didn’t need oxygen anymore.

… did this mean he couldn’t eat anymore? Because if that was the case, then that significantly changed things, and not necessarily for the better; not like he was exactly eating that diversely to begin with, and he could do with less food bills on his budget, but what if he felt like something fancy? What if he was invited to a restaurant and had to pretend to enjoy what he was offered? Hell, what if he needed a quick hot of sugar and was now forever barred from eating chocolate?

Oh, he didn’t like that, not one bit. He’d need to get home and test that as quickly as possible if he wanted to even remotely be at peace with himself; if he was barred from food forever, Tom was absolutely going to flip out and blow something up, he knew that for a fact. He jumped into the driver’s seat, slamming the door hard enough to rip one of his hands out, then reformed it directly on the steering wheel; only then did he stop and remember that he had yet to check himself on any reflective surface, pulling down the visor and drawing open the small mirror within.

Honestly? Not that different from before. From a distance, it’d be practically impossible to tell if his smooth black was anything other than his naturally dark fur; the only noticeable change came in the form of his sclera being slightly darker than before, inching closer to a light gray than a proper white, as well as his pupils and irises being effective indistinguishable now that they were all just one black circular mass. Freaky, but… he’d seen bodymods that went further, so he could probably get away with claiming it was a cosmetic decision.

Still couldn’t run a finger over his new “skin” though, that was for certain. Even with higher levels of control over his constituent dust, it was still depressingly easy for him to carve a groove onto his face, and despite him being able to repair himself far more quickly, any damage done would be too obvious not to notice. Sighing, Tom started the car, figuring that he could think about that later, after he was safe in his own home and not out in the middle of the haunted woods.

Surprisingly, driving came far more naturally to him than he expected it to, likely as a result of him taking the time to familiarise himself with his new anatomy somewhat… or the fact that he was going at a far slower speed than he normally would, all that without even noticing he was doing so. It took a police car flashing their lights behind him for Tom to wake up from his trance and realise he was driving so slowly that people outside in the town were walking by faster than his car was getting down the road.

Grumbling, he stopped, hoping to get through the conversation as quickly as possible. Only, the moment he looked in the side-view mirror and actually saw a police officer walking towards him, along with himself just lounging around in the driver’s seat looking perfectly normal, Tom came to the dreadful realisation that he was about to get caught: the doberman walking towards him would take one look at him and immediately see something was wrong, he’d have to step on the gas and flee, before inevitably being caught a few miles out and vanishing into a government lab somewhere.

He would be sweating, if he still could. Alas, he had nothing but his trembling, which the wolf tried desperately to control to keep himself from turning into a thin cloud of coal ash through vibration alone; didn’t help that the officer tapped on the window with an exceedingly sharp claw, practically drawing a line on the glass as a result. Out of options, Tom rolled it down, trying his best to remain calm as he looked up at the cop and pretended not to be what he was…

… and, in a move that left the wolf wondering if he was even dreaming or not, the officer just looked at him for a moment or two before speaking up. At no point did they squint, stare harder than usual, or even so much as hint that they saw anything wrong about him; they just opened their mouth and started barking out questions.

“Y’all are aware of how slowly you were driving, yeah? Somethin’ wrong in there, sir?”

“Uhm… n-no, no, no, I just…” - utterly perplexed, Tom took a moment to breathe out… or, at least, mimicking breathing out somehow, despite having no lungs to do so; he was certain it sounded weird - “Sorry, I was looking for something I thought I dropped under the seat. My bad, I’ll keep it up from now on, sir.”

The doberman outside the car leaned in closer, silent. Tom could feel their gaze from behind the black shades, piercing through him and straight to the heart of the lie. They knew what he said was bullshit; they might not know why it was said, but they could tell that it was nonsense. Alas, even their well-trained nose wouldn’t be able to pick up on any drugs, though, at that point, the wolf almost wanted to be high off his ass; it would at least justify everything that had happened so far.

“Y’all know the coal plant’s a dangerous place to go without friends, right?” the officer asked, moving back and crossing his arms, his tone softening somewhat, “Place is falling apart. You coulda gotten trapped under a part o’ the roof with no one to pull ya out; people say the whole place has gas leaks as well, y’all should stay far the fuck away from it unless you know the place, ya hear?”

Despite the words being used, the officer sounded nothing if not wholly sincere. This wasn’t a warning: it was advice, and some that Tom would’ve loved to have received before… well, everything. He nodded, offered some trite pleasantries, then waited for the officer to tip their hat and go back to their car; the wolf only started his own after he was certain that the doberman was properly out of sight… and after checking himself to confirm that yes, he was still made of dust.

He could be hallucinating still, but it’d be an incredibly specific delusion for him to be having. Him, made out of coal dust, and nothing and no one else? A police officer bringing up the possibility, and the illusion not breaking or getting worse? Hell, him having driven for a short while and having spent some time outside the facility already, and still being caught in the mental trap? Especially when he could still take his hands off and reattach them; it just felt like too easy an out.

No, the cop just hadn’t noticed. How, he had no idea, but that had to be it; they were just too busy or disinterested, having no stake in the matter, and just wanted to get on with their day. He got lucky. The moment someone actually paid attention, then he’d be entirely and completely fucked, no questions asked… so he needed to get home and prepare. Yeah, that was it, he needed to go home, lock the doors, and get ready for his new life.

It’d be a couple of hours driving at his regular speed, so about three, maybe more at his current rate; the last thing Tom wanted was to execute a complex gear change and suddenly find himself lacking a hand, even if he was reasonably sure he could move them without direct contact. No, best if he just remain at a constant enough velocity that no one would think twice, while still safely within his ability to slam down on the brakes… accounting for his foot being dislodged as well.

He felt like screaming. It was only through sheer, unfettered willpower that Tom didn’t just start pulling chunks of himself out, instead directing all of his pent-up rage towards the road ahead of him. Wouldn’t take long before he was back at his regular driving speed, then slightly above it before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to be attracting attention. But it was all he could do; without an outlet, he was likely to just erupt into flames as his constituent coal was burned up and he was made to ignite out of pure anger, and righteous one as well!

Why him?! Why, of all people, him? It could’ve happened to anyone else, but no, it had to be him, and he had to be the one to be transformed into an ash golem, because of course! Couldn’t have been any of the people who used to work there, or the ones who came visiting, or anyone at all: just him, forced to deal with the curse, stuck going forward when he wanted to turn the hell back and run full tilt towards the beginning of the day.

… he sighed. The car slowed down, back to a more normal, less police-grabbing speed. He needed his wits about him, and raging about his fate wasn’t going to help.

It was going to be a long day still.