Feverish & Prone- Fragment

Right now I’m recovering from my COVID-19 booster shot. I’m pursuing a rabies vaccination after this one. My body is tingling with chills and muscle cramps, not terribly unpleasantly. It is hampering my concentration and ability to stand and do things, but not terribly.

How many have felt this same sensation in its deepest colors? Easily millions, today and throughout human history. Fever is the sensation that arises from close relation with animals through long periods of time, inevitably.

In college my friends and I had a home campaign setting that included an unfortunate convention of a native culture being animal-people. In our defense, from an off-handedly improvised detail, borrowed from Warhammer. We revisited it in some time with the speculative premise of “What if the Mexica-analogue had some means of magic to ward off the plagues that European-analogue conquerors brought them? What if they were humans that underwent this animal transition purposefully, and for what reasons?”

Regardless of how worthy a revision it is, it lead to an interesting scene. One of these characters, one of the Dromua, who accepted the outwardly animal in the form of a snake’s head, speaking with an Arvan- a Spanish-analogous invader.

“You characterize us as beasts. But I know exactly where the human and beast in me lay together.” He traces the surgical line separating the scales of his neck from the human skin of his breast. “You do not. The beast runs marrow-deep in you. It sours everything you touch. It has wrought history into a bestial shape that is unforgiving to any animal.”