Character · Book 4, The Gate of the Feral Gods

Mordecai

The tutorial guide assigned to Carl and Donut: a former crawler, born skyfowl, who chose Changeling and reached the eleventh floor of his own season, now serving out an indentureship as a shapeshifting NPC in a guild room with his mother's ashes and a photograph of his brother. He is bound by rules about what he may say, and he says as much as he can.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 1 — Hump Town
• Chapter 2 — The Wasteland through a telescope
• Chapter 3 — A goose from the sky
• Chapter 4 — The Royal Chariot; Ifechi
• Chapter 5 — Rapid Detox
• Chapter 6 — City hall
• Chapter 7 — The frog con
• Chapter 8 — A yam from the pacifists
• Chapter 9 — Ruckus
• Chapter 10 — Squeeze out the Juice Box
• Chapter 11 — The Vahana
• Chapter 12 — Dolores Doesn't Splat
• Chapter 13 — Gerbils
• Chapter 14 — Maggie
• Chapter 15 — The Gate of the Feral Gods
• Chapter 16 — Denise
• Chapter 17 — Jennifer and Dale's house
• Chapter 18 — One
• Chapter 19 — Orren
• Chapter 20 — Gwendolyn Duet
• Chapter 22 — Mrs. Ghazi
• Chapter 23 — The winding box explained
• Chapter 24 — Samantha
• Chapter 25 — The Akula
• Chapter 26 — Lusca
• Chapter 27 — Leatherface
• Chapter 28 — Emberus
• Chapter 29 — Where the Red God Glows
• Chapter 31 — Emberus, summoned
• Chapter 32 — Acolyte of Emberus
• Chapter 33 — Phase three
• Chapter 34 — Seeding the pond

Arc

A clipped bird

On the fifth floor Mordecai is a rock-edge skyfowl cleric, near his real shape for the first time in ages and furious about the clipped wings — 'a eunuch […] thrown into a supermodel orgy' (ch. 1). He is the floor's manual: shapeshifters sorted by how they change, Gondii and Infiltrators explained (ch. 5, ch. 14); saferooms that protect NPCs only when a crawler is present (ch. 4); the marketplace and when to sell (ch. 3); Faction Wars laid out on a flower-shaped map, petal by petal (ch. 24); withering spirits, Primal Degeneration, and the law that protects an insane AI's life (ch. 24, ch. 28). He brews Rapid Detox for two drunks and calls it torture (ch. 5), Dolores Doesn't Splat for a fall (ch. 12), and, with a sex doll's help, a Phase Lava Rock potion from a sponsor's yam (ch. 32, ch. 34).

'By his left tit'

He shatters a table under Firas's boots (ch. 5), streams Toy Story to forty children from a library he never mentioned (ch. 10), tells Carl not to trust a man who slept with an ooze (ch. 22), and is taken into a liaison hold for five days without knowing why (ch. 19). He remembers Drakea, a bune who died when a trap 'unnaturally backfired' (ch. 28). At the end he begs Carl to throw the ring away: 'You can't fight a war like this and expect to win' (ch. 34).