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It takes you eight deaths and three victories against Tau and his hounds for one of the two beasts to meet you on the road without its master, strangely docile, the way of its tail visible in brief gkimps s behind it. You're sure Tau knows where it is — the greatest hunter in the cosmos, shooting out stars with his rifle but unable to keep track of his giant dog? Please.
But 'giant dog' is a little bit of an oversimplification. Always busy dodging gaping maws and swiping paws, you've never had the time to truly take in just how massive, how awesome, each hound is. You can now. It watches you calmly, its eyes wide open, each glowing with the force of a luminous sun. Each soft, panting breath sends sparks into the air between you. Its body is nothingness, the swirling inky void of a miniature black hole. You watch, frozen in place, torn between running and advancing, as it sucks in fallen leaves, tiny stones, a tiny bug you can't remember the name of — if it even existed before memory and time were imperfectly destroyed.
And the most astonishing part: the beast is huge. You remember your adventures down the looping road well enough after each one ends to be sure that it was never so massive any of the multiple times you fought; its eyes are level with yours as it stares you down, making its spherical body rise over you a full, dizzying foot. Maybe two. Maybe three.
"Good dog?" you say, feeling utterly small and human and confused. You're proud of yourself for getting a single word out.
"W O O F," it says.
You've definitely heard that one before, enough times to be a fairly standard feature in your strange and half-formed nightmares following each death to one hound or the other. This time, though, the earthshaking bark isn't quite so full of menace — it just is. Maybe, without The Hunter commanding the snap of powerful jaws, it could actually be friendly?
This is stupid. You shouldn't waste a so-far successful excursion on a hunch, especially not with your pack full to the brim (remnants of stone, bone fragments, the concept of a log, a veritable feast of food for the other survivors that you know would have rotted away decades ago if time still meant much) and yourself well-armored from looting a dozen bandits just prior to this turn in the path. The hound is watching you so patiently, though, beautiful in its terror.
It takes longer than it would if you weren't being stared down, but eventually you decide that you can risk being a little stupid just this once. The worst that'll happen is you die again, most but not all of your gathered supplies lost in the strange and confusing transport back to camp to be stitched up and summoned back to life. You can totally live with that.
You pet the dog.
"W O O F," it says again, and it's still deeper and louder than any living voice you've ever heard but just like the first time it sounds different. The black hole hound leans so hard into your scratching fingers behind one perky ear that it actually starts rolling slightly, nimble legs no longer separating ground from spherical body. Surprisingly cute to watch, all things considered — but you'd better take the victory and move along before its master comes calling.
Except— when you try to pull away, saying your farewells to this great big horrible puppy, it follows your retreating hand so that you never quite stop touching dark, cosmic fur. It pants harder, lolling tongue dripping plasma onto the dirt beneath its feet, and comes closer, closer, closer with each ensured scritch until you're suddenly bowled over and pinned by the weight of nothingness and everythingness.
Oh. Huh. The sentient black hole in the shape of a hound is a he.
He keeps demanding pets so you keep providing them because, honestly, your plan didn't account for your former (and likely future once this is over and done with) enemy being so damn friendly. You also didn't account for his body melting your armor away piece by piece, singeing your clothes and hair, nor the white-hot press of his cock against your quickly disintegrating boot.
You kind of wonder why he even has any reproductive features in the first place, not being an animal at all in the ways you understand them to exist. Are black hole puppies possible? Didn't Tau tell you once that he made his two companions?
The hound crushes you further into the packed dirt with a cheerful snuffle and a burning lick up one side of your face. The weight is starting to hurt now. A root or loose stick digs into your kidney — the well-enchanted chestplate you had been so proud of finding has become a silver puddle around you, hissing and steaming against places where your memory conjured damp earth for some novelty. The tunic Yota made you is no more than fluttering scraps of singed linen. Your body hair twinkles oddly, like it's too awed to burn just yet, but you're sure it will soon, just like you yourself probably will.
Humans aren't supposed to touch black holes, even tiny ones with wagging tails and puppy eyes and tippy-tappy paws. You're experiencing sensations now that you're sure you're the first person to ever experience, even before existence almost vanished. The hound moves up your body, flailing chest to living, breathing vacuum, and you can't breathe for more reasons than one. You can't inhale properly with his weight atop you, sure, but even if you could it's a mystery whether you'd manage to do it right while the tapered point of that white-hot rod you felt against your boot notches itself at your asshole, searing and singeing and terrifying in a way nothing so far has quite managed to terrify you.
"Bad dog," you wheeze, barely a whisper of breathless effort. "Bad do—hhh..."
He spears you open with everything in existence, some haunted counterpoint to his nothingness of a torso. It hurts so badly that nothing about it hurts at all, perfectly complete agony obscuring the difference between a pebble pressing against your spine and your organs charring like meat on a spit as he skewers you whole. You don't have breath left to scream with, but you try anyway because—
Because you know what it feels like to die. You know it so well, in fact, that it's started feeling a little strange when you don't — when you stumble back to the rapidly expanding town you all still just call Camp with your arm stuffed in your backpack and your remaining hand pressed to your gut where intestines keep trying to spill free, because Grieve's skill as Grave Keeper has grown to the point where he can put you back together again from nothing but you still cling to pieces of yourself when you can, thinking of a story someone told you once about a ship rebuilt in small sections again and again until it was no longer truly itself in any way but name.
You know what it feels like to die — which makes it easy to recognize that you are, right here and now, dying. Each eager thrust of too-big-too-hot-too-much sends you closer to that final edge, teetering as your vision swims from lack of air in crushed lungs, lack of working organs anywhere, or perhaps simply the fullness of it, the enjoyment rumbling through you from above as if Tau decided that his loyal world-eating hounds should get to purr like cats do just for the hell of it.
The hound W O O Fs again, his cheerful slobber melting through your neck and your cheek and your scalp, and a star explodes inside your abdomen, your limbs jerking where they can as a bulbous knot that must be another black hole presses at you, presses more, presses-presses-presses with unimaginable force—
And then everything stops.
Finally.
Grieve greets you upon your bleary, gradual wake-up with a very interesting, somewhat difficult to translate sigh. "Are you done?" he asks, his hands buried in your abdomen where he apparently cut a long vertical seam at some point just so he wouldn't have to magic your insides back into correctness through the existing hole much further down.
"Done?" you rasp. You're still a little dead, you're pretty sure — it's an incredibly distinct sensation.
"Your body has been... excreting... while I work," Grieve says, looking the most confused you've ever seen him. He nods his head at your crotch, where pearly jizz drips from the head of your notably flaccid cock onto your thigh. "That's never happened before."
You stare at your own dick for an embarrassingly long time, both it and the sizeable puddle it's made on you. You do feel strangely sated, even as Grieve waves your ribs back into place with one hand removed to hover above your chest and coaxes your intestines back into existing at all with the other. It had been a strange death but this sensation throughout you, like a nice long nap and an even longer climax, might be the strangest part of it all. Were you orgasming a little the entire time you were dead?
"Stop making that face," Grieve tells you. He's sewing you back up now with thread that doesn't really exist, just magic turned thought turned temporary form to make it all a little easier to understand. "The thinking face. Whatever you did, you shouldn't do it again."
Shouldn't you? It wasn't a terrible way to die. Drawn out and particularly excruciating, sure, but you feel pretty great now.
"No," Grieve insists, reading your next face all too easily. He guides you upright, then off his workbench, steadying you when your legs tremble like you've never used them before. "The Cook made soup for you, and Yota found you a new set of clothes that..."
You aren't listening the way you should be. It's hard to when you can feel something trickling out of you slowly and steadily now that gravity is helping it along, burning its way down your inner thigh like your memories of near-death but sweeter. You absently bring a hand around behind you to run your fingertips over your neatly mended anus, and when you peer at the watery something coating them it shimmers like starlight and moonlight and the twinkling glow of a flickering fire all at once.
Grieve, who clearly knows when he's defeated, sighs and leaves you to your afterglow.