A fish that was Basil splashed around inside the meagre confines of a glass jar filled halfway with water. His prison sat on the scratched, singed, and stained stable overlooking the alchemists’ macabre experiments.

“Aspen is definitely looking for me already… probably…!”

Mercifully, the water they kept him in was clean. They haven’t tried to feed him in the days that they held him captive.

On some level, Basil suspected they may have been trying to starve him. Unfortunately for them, druids didn’t need to eat.

“Probably definitely looking for me…!” he thought. The anxious circles that he swam accumulated in a slight vortex that carried him every time he got tired.

A familiar ruckus filled the air as the beast in the big, heavily dented cage opposite his jar began to club the bars of its prison with its spiked tail.

Basil recognised the creature as a fenrake – a filter-feeder the shape of a tardigrade, the size of a bear, and the consistency of a coarse sponge all the way throughout its porous tissues.

Its back was lined with rubbery organs designed to resemble corals.
Those same sacks of fluid designed to keep the creature wet worked to dose and deliver the chemical cocktail injected inside by the alchemist.

The syringe – the fenrake didn’t seem to register, much less mind. However, whatever the alchemist was putting inside it was definitely having an effect.

The metal creaked and squeaked more with each persistent blow. If the beast were a human, it would have been able to slip through by now.

The warlock hurried inside the room, fiercely clutching a worn leather bag or clinking glassware.

Basil watched dumbly as the warlock frantically searched the bag for the appropriately labelled syringe in the dim light of an alchemical lantern halfway across the ‘room’.

The warlock administered the injection to the bright blue fluid sack in the middle of its back.

As the sedative repressed whatever concoction was driving the fenrake feral, the warlock breathlessly slumped against the rock wall and proceeded to slide down to the cave floor.
He wordlessly clutched an unsigned document in his pocket. “We didn’t last this long to give up now…” Daniel breathed shakily. “Just a couple more months and this will all be a bitter reflection at the bottom of a glass of something purple and shimmering.”

When the two sapient minds locked eyes ever so briefly, a heavy silence smothered the space.

Daniel looked down at his feet. Less abruptly than he tumbled in, the warlock gathered his things and left the dimmest partition of his employer’s lair.

When they were alone once more, Basil turned his gaze to the pitiful creature lying near-inanimately in the dented cage.

“Hello…?” he attempted to communicate with it using his druidic technique. “Are you okay?” he asked thoughtlessly.

Basil became aware of the fact that his words were reaching the fenrake in a dream of sorts. A flat experience playing out in a spartan semantic resolution just large enough to cover the qualia Basil didn’t even think to take for granted.

It was a truncated experience befitting a trudging sponge – but one that somehow felt more alien to Basil than conversing with lichen did.

The dream was very formulaic and played out over and over again in seconds. It started with a cognitive pressure – like an itch – but for self-preservation. Then came a feeling of actuated movement, followed closely by the disappointing clutches of paralysed appendages.
At the far end of the creature-shaped dream, frustration glacially accumulated to the beat of the fenrake’s brain.

Basil felt like he was intruding on something profoundly intimate when he remembered who he worked for.
“It’s okay. There’s nothing trying to hurt you…” he said – finding the soothing remark shipped without the accompanying asterisk.

The animal stilled briefly – giving a slight twitch as its instincts rebelled against it for ignoring the dire stimuli.

Before long it succumbed to the overpowering instinct, lacking the face for more complex mental manoeuvre.

The fishman grimaced inwardly. “I’m sorry…”
“I shouldn’t be waiting for a druid to rescue us…” he thought, leaking gas from his swim bladder into his blood and falling to the cold, crystal floor of his glass prison despondently.

“You’re a druid…! You’re supposed to be the rescue…!”
With a sharp intake of water, the fishman brute-forced his way at the problem.

His body reacted sharply and immediately – in an instant the jar became home to wet, tightly packed feathers – more than it seemed equipped to hold.

Seconds before it was too late, Basil turned back into a suitably small fish.
He wanted to cry out, to shudder, to twitch and retch and get as far away from the memory of the horrific experience as possible.
His body let him do none of those, and he only gasped mutely.

But as he looked back to the fenrake – an existence negotiated so openly between stuff and things – the fishman understood the power to act – or at least appear to act – against causality’s pet project: sense.

With another gulp of water, the fishman tried again.
He didn’t ask for any number of limbs, any texture, or any specific senses – only for something that would fit.

This time his body managed both a twitch and a shiver that ran all the way down to the tip of his reptilian tail.
“Bigger…” he thought with the first budding glimmers of hope.

His lungs began to burn as he went from a small lizard to a larger, puppy-faced serpent coiled crampingly inside the glass jar.

Basil had faith that the sensation would stop at discomfort, like hunger and exhaustion.

Up to a corvid, then a big sapphire-blue crustacean armed with eighteen differently hooked and tipped feet.

The water stung him now, burning his face and joints as the fresh water raced to equalise the osmotic pressure with his marine body.

Basil fought hard to work in spite of the discomfort; he reached up and began working his sharp appendages into the lid above.

Just then, Daniel walked into the room carrying a small plate of crackers with the salt wiped off.
“Hey, uhhh… man…” He said, not taking his eyes off the meagre offering held between his hands, “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to feed you… So I guess I should…”

When Daniel finally looked up, he saw the big blue crustacean scrambling around the inside of the jar frantically. Its hard feet rattled a tachycardic rhythm against the glass.

In a burst of newfound strength, the fishman pushed the jar over onto its side. Water spilt out through the fresh holes in the lid as the warlock lunged at the falling vessel.

The plate with the food clattered to the ground solidly, while the glass shattered on impact, spilling the contents and spreading sharp, colourless frit around the cavern.

“Shit…” The warlock gritted his teeth and searched for any small tadpole or gnat hiding in or around the glass-filled pool.
After finding nothing at first, they came back with an alchemist lantern and searched even harder.

Basil was gone, and his absence was felt by every druid almost immediately.