Page 23 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger

LYSSA

T he world is a fever dream of swirling snow and jolting motion.

I am floating, carried through a landscape of blurred, skeletal trees and a sky the color of a fresh bruise.

The pain in my side is a dull, distant sun, a constant source of heat that I drift around.

Time has no meaning. There is only the rhythmic crunch of snow, the whisper of the wind, and the voices.

They come and go like fragments of a dream.

Sometimes, it is the sharp, authoritative voice of the woman, Elira, cutting through the fog with clinical commands.

"Keep pressure here." "Her breathing is shallow.

" At other times, I hear My voice, a strange, disembodied sound, whispering that everything will be alright.

Then, most beautiful and painful of all, I hear my mother.

She is humming the lullaby from my childhood, her voice a soft, gentle melody that weaves through the sharp edges of my pain and offers a moment of impossible peace.

In a brief flash of clarity, I understand.

It’s Thorrin. He is walking beside me, a looming shadow of silent misery, and he is using his mimicry not as a lure, but as a desperate attempt to comfort me.

He is throwing every voice he has ever learned at the wall of my pain, hoping one will stick.

The effect is bizarre, a disorienting chorus of ghosts from my past and present.

It should be terrifying, to hear My voice coming from a place outside of myself, but in my delirious state, it is a strange, profound comfort.

The voices are an anchor, a thread of sound connecting me to the living world as the dark tide of unconsciousness tries to pull me under.

He cannot touch my wound or offer words of healing, so he is trying to mend my spirit with the only tool he has: the echoes of those I have loved and lost.

The pain recedes, and the world dissolves into a soft, warm haze.

I am a child again, small and burning with fever, tucked into my straw mattress.

The room is dark, save for a single candle flickering on my bedside table.

My mother is here. Her hand is a cool, soothing weight on my forehead, her presence a solid wall against the frightening shapes the shadows make.

She is humming that lullaby, her voice a low, comforting vibration that I can feel in my own bones.

“It’s alright, my darling,” she whispers, and the sound is the purest comfort I have ever known. “I’m here. I won’t let anything hurt you.”

I look up at her, but her face is a blur, a featureless oval of shadow against the candlelight.

I can’t see her smile, can’t see the familiar kindness in her eyes.

But I can feel her love, a palpable warmth that is more real than sight.

In the center of her chest, where her heart should be, a soft, golden light is pulsing, a gentle, steady rhythm that matches the cadence of her humming.

Her hand, so cool and soft on my skin, begins to change.

It feels larger now, the fingers longer, tipped with something hard and smooth like polished stone.

It is still gentle, but it is no longer just a human hand.

It is something more. Something ancient and powerful.

The voice that murmurs my name is hers, but underneath it, there is a deeper resonance, a gravelly rasp like stones shifting at the bottom of a river.

The figure beside my bed is both my mother and a towering creature of bone.

The love that radiates from her is both the gentle care of a parent and the fierce, desperate protectiveness of a monster.

In the strange, fevered logic of my dream, this is not a contradiction.

It is a perfect, seamless fusion. The two greatest protectors I have ever known—the mother who pulled me from the ice and the monster who pulled me from the darkness—have become one and the same.

The comfort is absolute. I am safe. I am cherished.

I am loved by a creature with my mother's voice and a monster's form, and in this dream, it is the most natural thing in the world.

A sharp, violent jolt tears me from the dream.

The warmth and safety vanish, replaced by the biting cold and the sharp, grinding pain in my side.

I am back in the snow, back in the endless, jolting journey through the forest. The comforting presence from my dream is gone, and I am filled with a sudden, sharp sense of loss and a terror so profound it is a physical ache.

The voices have stopped, leaving only the sound of the wind and the heavy, rhythmic crunch of footsteps in the snow.

I am lucid enough now to know who is carrying me.

The hard, unyielding bone of Thorrin's arm is beneath my back, his massive frame a living shield against the elements.

The memory of the dream is still vivid, the feeling of his hand and my mother's hand as one.

The desperate need for that comfort, for that impossible fusion of love and protection, is an overwhelming force.

The figure from my dream is gone, but one half of it is still here.

I have to let him know I am still here. That I am still fighting.

That I do not blame him. I gather every last shred of my strength, pulling it from the deepest, most hidden corners of my being.

I force my lungs to take in a breath that feels like swallowing glass, force my lips to form a shape, force a sound from my throat.

“Thorrin.”

The name is a bare whisper, a ghost of a sound, almost lost in the sigh of the wind through the pines. It is so quiet I am not even sure I have said it aloud. But he hears it.

He stops dead, his entire massive frame going rigid.

The swift, relentless forward motion ceases so abruptly that the world seems to lurch around me.

The silence is absolute, shocking. I feel his body tense beneath me, a statue carved from sudden, desperate hope.

Slowly, he turns his skull-face down to look at me.

In the dim, snowy light of the forest, I see the glow in his chest, which had been a dull, sick green, flicker violently.

And then, in the very center of the despairing gloom, a tiny, hesitant spark of warm gold appears.

It is a small thing, a single ember in a sea of darkness, but it is there.

It is a sign that he has heard me. That my voice, even at its weakest, can still reach him.

That the bond my subconscious forged in the fever dream is real.

He holds my gaze for a long, breathless moment, and I do see not a monster, but a soul in agony.

Then, with a new, more desperate urgency, he begins to run again, plunging us deeper into the saving dark.