Page 14 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger
LYSSA
T he air in the clearing is different tonight.
The space between us is no longer filled with simple curiosity; it is charged with the weight of his confession.
There are parts of me you should still fear.
The words echo in my mind, a constant, chilling reminder of the truth of his nature.
He is a killer who once found joy in cruelty.
I know this now. Yet, I am still here. My presence in this clearing is a choice, a silent declaration that I am not ready to give up on the creature who listens to my stories as if they were prayers.
He is still, a statue of bone and darkness in the woods, his heart-light a low, anxious green.
Waiting for me to set the tone, to decide if his dark past is a wall between us or a bridge to a deeper understanding.
I choose the bridge. I decide to offer him a piece of my own past, a story steeped not in simple joy, but in the terrifying, beautiful bond between a mother and a child.
“I was six,” I begin, my voice a soft thread in the vast stillness. “It was the first deep freeze of winter, and the creek had frozen solid enough to walk on. Or so I thought.”
“I was chasing a snow suru,” I continue, a faint smile touching my lips at the memory of the small, horned rabbit-like creature.
“It was so fast, darting across the ice. I wasn’t thinking about the danger, only about its white fur against the blue-white of the ice.
I followed it right into the middle of the creek.
” The smile fades. “Then the ice cracked.”
“The air snatches the warmth from my lungs, a brutal blow that steals my breath and turns my limbs to stone. Wool, heavy and waterlogged, drags me deeper into the black. Above, through the jagged rupture in the ice, the sky is a distant, distorted blur, a tantalizing promise of light impossibly far away. Panic ignites, a searing fire in my chest, whispering promises of inevitable death.”
“Then, a sound, sharp and desperate, slices through the frigid silence—my name, a frantic beacon. A hand plunges into the icy water, fingers closing around mine with the unbreakable grip of iron. It holds fast, refusing to release.”
“She pulled me out,” I say. “I was so cold I couldn’t even shiver.
She wrapped me in her own cloak and carried me all the way back to the village, running the whole way, screaming for help.
” I look down at my hands, remembering the feeling of her arms around me, the scent of wet wool and her fierce, desperate love.
“The village healer said another minute and it would have been too late.”
I look back up at Thorrin, a small, self-deprecating laugh escaping my lips.
“She saved my life, and then she scolded me for a week straight about chasing after a suru with more foolishness than sense. I think I was grounded until spring.” The laugh is a soft, watery sound, a release of the tension from the telling of the tale.
It is a laugh born of love and the absurd, beautiful memory of being a clumsy, reckless child who was utterly, completely cherished.
The reaction from Thorrin is immediate and violent. A growl rips from his chest. He turns away from me in a single, sharp movement, his entire body going rigid.
His claws extend with an audible schlick , and he drives them deep into the bark of the nearest pine tree, the wood groaning in protest. The sheer, unexpected violence .
The laugh dies in my throat, my blood turning to ice. I stare at his back, at the tense, corded muscles, at the chaotic, flickering light in his chest, and I have no idea what I have done.
My mind races, trying to find the offense. Was it the story of near-death? Did the mention of mothers and children stir some painful, phantom memory in him?
I sit frozen on the log, my heart hammering against my ribs, watching as he trembles with the force of some emotion too powerful for his monstrous frame to contain.
The air crackles with his silent agony, and the clearing, which had begun to feel like a sanctuary, is once again the lair of an unpredictable, dangerous predator.
I have misstepped. I have crossed some invisible line, and I am terrified of what comes next.
After a silence that stretches for an eternity, he speaks. His back is still to me, his voice a broken, gravelly thing, scraped raw by an emotion I cannot comprehend.
“Don’t,” he rasps. “Don’t laugh like that.”
My confusion must be a palpable thing, a scent in the air, because he continues, his words strained. “I can feel it… here.”
His free hand, the one not buried in the flesh of the tree, rises slowly. It hovers over the center of his chest, over the pulsing, chaotic light that is the core of his being. The gesture is one of profound, agonizing vulnerability. He is showing me the wound.
My own hand rises, a mirror of his motion, and I place my palm flat against my own chest, over my heart. “There?” I whisper, the word barely audible.
He gives a single, jerky nod. As he does, the light in his ribs flares with an intensity that is terrifying and beautiful all at once.
It is not red with hunger or yellow with contentment.
It is a brilliant, blinding white—the color of a star being born, the color of a soul being ripped apart.
It burns for a single, searing moment, so bright it seems to suck all the other light from the clearing, and then it gutters, dimming back to a turbulent, sick-looking mix of red and green.
The display of raw, unfiltered emotion is too much.
It is too intimate. To feel joy so intensely that it becomes an agony he cannot bear…
I feel a sob rise in my own throat, a mixture of awe and a terrible, aching pity.
I have touched something ancient and broken inside him, and I don't know if I have the strength to bear witness to it.
I can’t stay here. Not tonight. The connection between us has become too raw, too dangerous.
I stand up on trembling legs, my own heart aching with a confusing sympathy for the monster who finds my happiness a torment.
He doesn’t turn as I back away. He remains frozen, his hand over his heart, a statue of ancient grief silhouetted against the moonlight.
I turn and walk away from the clearing without another word, my own soul shaken. I don’t run. It feels, somehow, like a betrayal. I walk back to the village, leaving him alone with the echoes of a little girl’s laughter and a pain so profound it can turn a monster to stone.