Filka looked at the merchandise, all upside-down and attached to the topsides of the shelves. The floor above him had a matte finish and he couldn't see his reflection as he floated past shelf after shelf, taking his time. All of the security cameras in the place were trained on him, not that it mattered, they couldn't catch him, no sir.

Filka and Rogi had been tossing pine cones when the first men arrived. Back and forth at each other, they zipped and shot through the air to catch and lob those fatal missiles. Filka pegged Rogi with one, right on his furry thigh.

“Oh the anguish,” Rogi cried, clutching himself as he floated slowly to the ground. “Dead!”he declared, and both brothers laughed without care.

The crunching of twigs underfoot had been the first signal. Rogi sat up suddenly and they both looked to see the strange beasts - almost like them, but easily twice as tall, without horns or hooves, and each with pelts of vastly different color and texture, but with smooth skin on the upper halves of their faces, just as their own. And hooting on in the strangest fashion, what they would later learn was the creatures' language.

Filka hid, but Rogi flew right up to them and asked one who they were and what they were doing. Filka was surprised to hear the thing respond intelligently. It said they had come from the north east, from mountains and plains where they had fallen on hard times, and so had come to settle in the forest where the game was more plentiful. It said it was familiar with faun-kind, had learned the language in its youth, and had even once met Faunus, the God King of All Creation, and Everything That Was Important, and hoped they could live as neighbors in good faith and good spirit. Filka was impressed and floated over to join them. He had misgivings about the men, but a friend of King Faunus...

Filka could probably have easily earned himself enough of a living to pay for the wares, but he enjoyed more employing that most treacherous of shopping techniques, the five-finger discount. Filka sometimes wondered if his presence at Marshall field's actually helped other shoplifters get away with it, since so many resources were tied up with him. It certainly seemed to be that way, based on his online following. He righted himself in the air, his head now pointing more properly at the ceiling, and placed a small polished pebble on the top of the box of a toaster with eight bread slots. The pebble was engraved with runes, and anyone who tried to disrupt its position would suddenly forget what he was doing, or find it too heavy to lift, or would simply not be able to see it at all.

The trouble had come quickly. The men had gone about with sharp implements like large artificial claws and had felled trees at a rate that Filka had never witnessed in his life. He was flustered, dismayed, but Rogi told him to come look at what the men were doing with the trees. Rogi led him to a clearing by a brook where the men were fastening the logs together and making structures, dwellings, and halls. It was an astonishing act - rather than rely on the forests wisdom to provide a dwelling place, they were warping the forest in an unsettling fashion. Filka knew this was bad, but the look of awe on Rogi's face...

He placed another such pebble on a luxurious duvet, a box of kitchen knives, and a small extreme-sports camera. He stopped by the children's clothing section and sewed a pale crystal button onto each of several flannel shirts (since you can't have enough flannel shirts), and then headed toward the exit, nodding to the glowering security guard on the way out.

The settlement had grown quickly, and Filka learned that he was either to get on with the men, or leave. He had no wish to live his home, and Rogi liked the men so, that Filka found his dealings with them less uneasy as the spring passed into summer. The men were twice as tall as them on average, and the brothers had taken to hovering so that their faces met with the men in all their dealings, so much so that this started to become a general habit between them. most of the men were still just hooting beasts, but some were kinder and smiled, especially the female men, though there was still only one who could speak their language, the one named Bodir, the obvious leader of the settlement.

He had time to kill, like every day, and flew over to the nearby Chicago Stock Exchange. he could have "walked" on the sidewalk by flying three feet off the ground, as was sometimes his habit, but instead he just shot straight over to the 40th floor windows, to peer into the Everest restaurant and wave to the maître d', who only rolled his eyes and shook his head. Everest did install some conservative traps on their windows, but it was a simple matter for Filka to guess one hundred percent of the time which window they had "unluckily" forgotten to lock, and circumventing the traps was no big deal. He had planted a number of his own tricks inside of Everest a long time ago, and they had never been able to find them.

The unlocked window he found had a pair of cursed snake's eyes inset discreetly in the opposite wall. Filka could tell they had been carefully contrived to target only intruders and paralyze them in their tracks, but they required direct eye contact. luckily for Filka, he could see with his eyes closed as long as he glass in front of and behind him, and so only had to hold a small piece of glass from his tool bag out in front of his face as he entered and he was good to go.

He headed straight to the wine stores and picked out an Alsace Riesling. He sniffed at the mouth of the bottle and took the tiniest of sips. Yeah, this was the good stuff. He used to like the sweeter Rieslings more, but had grown to love the dry vintages from Alsace, and Everest had the best.

The main dining area was mostly empty, it was too early for a large lunch crowd, but there were patrons scattered around at various tables. The maître d' was on the phone, talking in low, exasperated tones as Filka waved to him again and flew back out the window.

If Filka understood the next events correctly, it was Bodir who had given Rogi the ale. Filka was playing with a sparrow - they had been discussing bug catching techniques which had quickly turned into a challenge of who could catch the most. The sparrow was bearing him by three when Rogi charged in, an enormous bottle clutched in his arms and a wild look on his face.

“Filka, you must try this”, Rogi declared, but Filka felt the sickness in his brother’s voice and being and asked him to explain.

“Oh, of all the greatest wonders in Faunus's endless kingdom, this is certainly, the greatest, and the most wondrous, and the kindgdomest.” Rogi was leaning forward, towards Filka at a rakish angel, the bottle extended to him. “And the most greatest,” he added for further clarification.

Filka took the bottle and sniffed it first. He thought to dump its contents but wondered where in the woods it would be safe to do so. the potion had a strong, dark smell, telling of damp weight and bitter laughter, but yet somewhere deep in that smell was a mystery, a question waiting for a n answer, a deep warm hole into which to thrust a hand and grasp for treasure.

“Come on Filka, I'm ready to conquer the world!” Rogi declared triumphantly, and Filka placed the bottle to his lips and took a swig.

Filka was now several blocks away from the Stock Exchange, tucked into a little alley and comfortably sloshed. He had a small wagon there in the alley, and in the bed he placed a coaster he had painted with the image of his own face, smirking. It was all part of the spell. He closed his eyes and rubbed his hands together, then placed them over the wagon as if it was small fire warming them, as he recited the short chant linked to the pebbles and beads he had placed earlier that morning. In a moment his wagon was suddenly filled with the boxes and clothes he had marked.

Filka and Rogi were holding onto to each other, laughing uncontrollably, flying haphazard and drunk through the woods. The potion had come with an invitation to a party, a festival for the men's summer god, some fellow with an inscrutably name, and there were promises of food and games and more ale (lots of ale). It was a potion the brothers the brothers would have been shocked to learn contained no magic, for it had a deep effect on them, and almost instantly - not only were they so much smaller than the men who brewed it, but their senses were so much more finely tuned.

As they approached the clearing where the party was at, Filka dimly recalled that it had one been a densely wooded grove. Old trees and a certain fungus... it had been delicious. But then Rogi was telling a joke about the old man who grunted and pointed all the time and they were both laughing again.

The clearing was just ahead, and they could hear strains of music and cries of joviality in the evening air. They entered the clearing, jostling each other in high spirits, ready for a rowdy night. But then they saw what was happening at the center of the party, around the bonfire, and the source of the jovial cries.

There were a number of young men arranged around the glowing bonfire, stripped to the waist, each of them straddling a sheep, and they were cutting off all of the sheep's fur. Not only that, but they appeared to be racing each other, to see who could do it fastest, and the cries and applause were coming from the audience each time one of them finished ahead of his competitors.

Filka turned about in a daze to find Bodir, for some kind of explanation, but it was in that moment that the veil was lifted - he knew the truth. The men were not beasts, they were monsters. It was Rogi who began to wail, a plaintive, guttural cry, drawing much attention to himself as he flew over to the nearest sheep and started picking up shorn clumps of fur and trying to put them back on. He was crying even louder now and the music stopped, the party completely halted as all eyes were on him. The desperate fistfuls of fur just fell off again and again but he wouldn't stop, and one of the young men said something and tried to pull Rogi away from the naked, violated sheep. There was a short moment of struggle, and then Rogi yelled "No!" and picked up the young man, easily three times his weight, and threw him onto the bonfire.

He took off the red flannel shirt he was wearing and put on the blue one, looking down to admire himself. That was when he suddenly felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder from behind. He struggled to get away but there was something in the hand, a strong grip and strong magic that wouldn’t let him get away. Another hand clasped around his mouth, and he suddenly found himself drained of energy. As he struggled this way and that, as best he could, he saw that each hand was wearing several rings, some with gems, some with engravings, one even made of bone. The wine was not helping, and the only other thing Filka saw before he blanked out was a human face, a man with an unsettling smile.

There was a burst of embers and much commotion. Filka rushed forward to help his brother, hardly able to tell what was going on around him - screams, rushing bodies, conflicting smells and bleating sheep. But then Bodir was there, and Filka turned to him for some sort of support, but something suddenly threw Filka back, twenty feet in the air to a nearby tree where he righted himself. Bodir was standing over Rogi with a ram's skull in his hand, pointed down over Rogi’s wailing upturned face while two other men were holding his arms and shoulders, pinning him to the ground while yet another man wassawing off his horns.

The anguish, deep, unrelenting, the pain of blood and a brotherly bond beyond the ken of men, was boiling over inside of Filka and there was heat and thunder raging in his eyes as he flew over again towards the monsters. He would have burned down the entire scattered festival if he could have, but Bodir turned to face him, that ram skull now pointed to Filka's face, and the full magnitude of it came to him. There were carvings in the bone, all across its surface, with a few small inset stones twinkling in the firelight. Filka was forced first to the ground, the wind knocked out of him, and then flung off into the trees, smacking hard into a strong trunk.He raced away, to find someone, anyone who could help. He asked the bears and the wolves, but they were uninterested. He asked the deer, who were willing to help but had no idea what to do. He spoke to the old ram, who had been leading the flock for years. The sheep were kin to the fauns, and the ram understood completely, but could do nothing. He had tried to raise rebellion against the men already, but had been quickly defeated. The men fed the sheep in exchange for the fur, and so the ram had become resigned to the arrangement. He gave deep sympathy for Rogi but would not lift hoof or horn in aid. Filka floated away in disgust, at the cruelty of the men, at the old ram's complacency, at his own incompetence. He could not get anywhere near the settlement, and the clearing was not abandoned, the strewn remnants of the festival littered on the ground.

Filka could feel his brother's pain but could not find where he was, something that had been an impossibility since the day of their birth. By morning Filka could still not sense his location, and further, could not sense him at all. Filka left the forest then, and never returned.

Filka woke up in a small room, the man holding a carved tablet in front of his face.

“Aw, there we are,” he said, and Filka immediately tried to get up from the chair, but was restrained. thick living vines of bougainvillea, one of the most stubborn and spiteful of plants, were wrapped around his arms and legs from soil-filled pots placed around him, the ends of the vines done up with clasps of polished granite. He could feel a crown on his head though could not see it, but knew with certainty that it was negating him. The locks and ratchets of steel handcuffs would have been nothing for him to undo, but even with the crown he would have had little change of convincing the bougainvillea to let him go. This man meant business. His facial expression was unchanging, just hollow eyes and a shark-toothed grin.

“Hello Filka, I'll be as frank with you as possible. I am Agent White, connected with US Homeland Security. The department I work for technically does not exist, nor does this room, and anything that I do was never done and nothing that happens here ever happened. We have no files or paperwork, though I did borrow some pertinent documents from the FBI.”

There was a thin manila folder on the table between them with a white sticker stating only "Faun, Filka" in black letters. "I'm sure you are aware of your legal status." Filka knew he wasn't referring to his criminality. Human rights debates had raged on in recent years as to whether these extended to faun and centaurs, sphinxes and harpies, and the other such beings who cohabited the earth with humans in that nebulous band between man and nature. Some, most notably the tribal, bipedal felines of Kenya called the leonine, received full legal status in their native lands, but by most of the world, including US federal law, they were considered a separate class, with only slightly better rights than animals. Filka remembered with irony when he used to have similar sentiments about humans.It was clear that Agent "White" could and would do whatever he wanted with Filka - to a point. Filka had learned and developed many tricks in the last fifteen hundred years. He used only the more sedate ones on Marshall Field's and Everest and his other favorite haunts, because he liked them and wished them no actual harm. The agent had only caught him because he hadn't been expecting him - obviously he had been letting his guard down. He was in grave danger, there was no question, but it wasn't hopeless. Plans were already forming in his head - he'd just have to wait for the right moment.

AgentWhite picked up the file and flipped through some of the papers. "Millions of dollars worth of diamond jewelry at Marshall Field’s, and yet you only steal the less valuable gems," the agent stated without looking up.

"I don't like diamonds. They're no good for magic," Filka responded.

"Yes, I know." He put the file down. He had done a good job of sounding almost casual for a moment. "Too bad about King Faunus, huh?All those years ago. Do you think he was sitting next to Buddy Holly on that plane? The seating plan says he wasn't, but who knows, maybe he moved over, maybe they were sharing a drink half an hour before they were ground to hamburger. It's an interesting thing about fauns, isn't it - you live forever as long as someone doesn't do you in first."

Filka had nothing to say to this and the agent continued. "Homeland Security doesn't have much interest in shoplifters or burglars, even a high-profile one like yourself. I personally would really like to dissect you because I've never dissected a faun and I'm sure you are fascinating on the inside. I have the head of a gorgon, in my lab. I won't tell you much about it but we've developed some very interesting tinctures from its venom. I could send you into an irreversible degenerative spiritual shutdown. It starts with your dreams and your imagination, then your moral compass and eventually your senses and your will to live. It reduces you into an apathetic, shambling husk of your former self." He was grinning ever wider now, and resting his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands, like a wistful child. "I like it more than simply killing someone. The video feeds are quite amusing."

Filka had known a gorgon once, a long time ago. It would take some serious sibylpharmacology to induce gorgon venom to do all that to a person – they must have quite a lab. Filka felt himself begin to lose his composure, a fact which obviously pleased the agent.

“Good, I’m glad you’re listening. No, as I said, we have no interest in a wino home goods thief. There is, however, a national security matter we do have great interest in. And it seems you could actually help us with it. A project we are working on has gone awry - a certain element has gone missing from one of our dynamos, and when I say ‘certain element’ and ‘dynamo’, you realize this isn't generating electricity and the core might be something we don't want running loose in the world.” He picked up Filka's file again and started studying it once more, a theatrical pause.Filka’s mind was still racing, plans and back-up plans - he wouldn’t give up.

Agent White had crossed his leg and turned to an angle, propping himself on one elbow as he seemed to be reading something. Finally he glanced to Filka past the side of the folder. “Tellme, are you familiar with a faun named Rogi?”

After Filka left the forest he had been born in, he wandered all over Europe and eventually the world, studying and learning all he could from whoever would teach him. It was an interesting and useful distraction – there was a hole in him, a hole he could cover up with magic and food culture, but one he could never fill. Through over a millennium, there was never a day when he didn't think about his brother, couldn't feel him out there, somewhere in the world, unlocatable somehow, a great secret he hoped to learn from him someday. But more than that, he wished simply to share his embrace, to hear that infectious laugh, and see the sparkle in his eye as a new idea was forming.