And his eyes! His eyes had been pleasantly dim things, that could tell day from night, and movement from stillness. Now they were his world, gaping holes that let all of reality in, raw and bright-colored. He wanted to shut them, but they would not shut—they lacked even the fleshy covers that the true Men had, to blot out the searing, garish world. Instead he was forced to stare and stare and stare, to know his surroundings by the uncompromising medium of light and not the comforting subtlety of vibration.

After that, once whatever they had done to him had forced him to come to terms with his sensorium, there had been the body. No more the comfortable scuttle of many legs, secure and low to the ground. Instead, every step these Men took was ridiculously precarious, a prelude to a fall that never came. Nth fell many times at first, until he learned to listen to the alien demands of his new frame. He was bruised and battered at the leg-joints just trying to find his too-few feet. And that was another thing—how tender and raw his skin was now! Gone the armored exoskeleton, so that all of him was one great wound waiting to be opened. He hardly dared touch anything lest he be laid open, innards exposed to the painfully bright sun.

Being human was horrible.

But they drove him and they drove him, and the terrifying fire-handed Man who had remade him gave him sharp commands, and he could only stagger on and on to their mad plan. Terrified, chained by magic, tormented. Mother, for you, he told himself, but it wore thin. He could not have known the agonies and the horrors he would be subjected to. He might even have defied Mother, faced with this.

For a long time he let their babble wash over him, his attention only on the misery of his new being, but eventually he found sufficient equilibrium that the words started falling into place, no matter how much he resented it. His ears were as perpetually open as his eyes, and he wondered if true Men could close those as well. Surely they must be able to. Nobody could live happily with such chaos continually intruding into their skulls.

A moment after that thought, he was struck with a wave of nausea at his own changed self, because the word “skull” had come naturally to his mind, and it had no place there. He did not want to own a skull.

He was just finding a tenuous balance within himself when they reached the place called Shogg’s Ford.

He had no idea. Perhaps even Mother had not known. She had not been abroad in the world for a long time, after all.