There’s more muttering around him. It’s hard to see how many men are there.

The confusion doesn’t stop whoever’s off to his left, though. There’s a moment of steadily increasing heat, and a hand pries his fingers apart, and then the glowing knife descends on his pinky.

Fucking useless human shape, they'd have a much harder time doing this to forty feet of angry reptile—

His form declines to change. But he sure sounds like an angry dragon, hissing and spitting and shrieking.

The men gathered around him laugh and jeer and snarl back.

The knife slices through his each of his fingers in turn, leaving only his thumb - and then someone grabs his wrist, and his thumb, and bends it backwards until it snaps.

He howls in pain and rage.

A man walks by with a hot iron in a twisting shape, and the thin man raises a hand for a moment.

"Listen–"

There's a scream, and the sounds of a struggle.

Hisssssssssss.

A corresponding hiss, a burning smell and a sob.

The knife falls on his other hand.

He makes a sound that's half a gasp, half a scream.

His right hand gets the same treatment as his left, more slowly this time.

He yells and snarls and hisses and finally cries.

They seem to find this hilarious. One of the men in the crowd spits on him.

"Now, if we let you go, will you run back to your village and show them your new paws?"

He answers with a low growl. It does not sound very cooperative.

The thin man shrugs.

"Your toes it is, then."

And so it is.

It's better not to listen to what's happening in the background.

Snarling furiously, he resumes his struggles. They haven't helped before and they don't help now.

But this is his body, and that's his pretty girl with her sweet smile—

He takes a deep breath, and

roars

and pulls with all his strength, heedless of pain and other mortal limitations.

The ropes hold steady on all but a single hand—and moments after that hand comes free, there's an awful cracking noise from his other wrist—but meanwhile, the table shudders in protest of these unaccustomed forces, and splits apart with a prolonged splintery snap.

The roar of the crowd changes its tone very significantly.

A few of the men go pale and wide-eyed, gesture signs of protection, turn and flee. The thin man himself stumbles backwards away from the table.

A few of the others waste no time in drawing their weapons.

The noise in the background stops — the man breaking the table in half is now a much higher priority than a new girl.

His assorted wounds still aren't healing, and also he is still tied to two halves of a table, and you'd think this would slow him down some, and in fairness it does a little; but nevertheless he lunges teeth-first for the nearest armed soldier.

He takes a significant bite out of him, but he is met with a sword through the shoulder and another through the belly and then a warhammer to the skull.

He barely has time to feel it.

(All his other wounds heal up good as new before his dented skull finally reassembles itself.)

When he awakens there are shackles on his wrists rather than ropes, and he is in a damp stone cell alone.

He growls.

A shout comes through the wall behind him the moment he makes a sound.

After a moment, the door swings open, and a few men – better-dressed than the soldiers from before, in colored fabrics rather than leather and coarse cloth, save for one – file in.