Page 27 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger
LYSSA
D ays and nights blur into a monotonous cycle of pain and healing.
The elven chamber is my world, a cage of cold stone and sterile silence.
A low fever takes root in my healing body, leaving me weak and shivering beneath the thin, silken sheets.
Elira is a constant, a quiet presence, a shadow in a high-backed chair.
Her care is not gentle in the way my mother’s was; there are no soft reassurances, no humming of lullabies.
Her kindness is a practical, almost brutal thing.
She forces bitter, restorative elven teas between my lips, ignoring my grimaces.
She changes the bandages on my shoulder with efficient, unsentimental movements, her fingers probing the bite mark with a clinical detachment that is somehow more unsettling than simple cruelty.
During the worst of the fever, when my dreams are a tangled mess of snow and blood and the chaotic light of Thorrin’s heart, I feel a cool hand on my forehead.
I blink my eyes open to find her beside the bed, brushing the damp, sweat-soaked strands of hair from my face.
Her touch is surprisingly gentle, her expression unreadable in the dim, crystalline light.
In that moment, she is not the furious woman from the forest, nor the cold, clinical healer.
She is something else, something closer to an ally.
I find myself studying her in the long, quiet hours.
She is a fortress, built of a strength I can only begin to comprehend.
She survived the dark elves, survived being claimed by a Waira, and has somehow forged a life in this desolate, monstrous world.
She is my future, a possible version of what I might become if I am strong enough to endure.
The thought is both terrifying and strangely comforting.
I am not the first human to walk this path.
The gratitude I feel for her is a quiet, aching thing, a fragile seed taking root in the barren ground of my recovery.
She is not my friend, not yet. But she is the only person in the world who might understand.
In the deep, silent hours of the third night, when the pain in my side has dulled to a persistent, grinding ache, Elira finally speaks of more than just my healing.
I am awake, staring at the way the crystal light makes strange patterns on the obsidian ceiling, when her voice cuts through the stillness.
“Kaerith broke three of my fingers the first time he touched me with anything other than restraint,” she says.
She holds up her left hand, flexing the fingers in the dim light.
“He was trying to give me a flower he’d found.
He didn’t understand his own strength. He was so horrified by what he’d done, he disappeared into the mountains for a week. I thought he’d left me to die.”
I turn my head on the pillow to look at her, my heart aching with a sudden, sharp empathy. Her story is not my own, but the melody is the same. The accidental violence. The monstrous guilt.
“Waira love is not a human thing, Lyssa,” she continues, her gaze fixed on her own hand, on the memory of her own pain.
“It is not gentle. It is not safe. It is a possessive, all-consuming thing, a hunger of the soul that is just as dangerous as the hunger of the curse. It will not tame the monster in him. It will only… redirect it. The beast that once hunted strangers will now spend all of its energy hunting for ways to keep you, to protect you, to own you. And sometimes, it will break you in the process.”
She finally looks at me, her eyes dark with the weight of her own hard-won wisdom. Her next words are a cold, sharp splash of reality, washing away the last of my romantic, girlish notions.
“You’re not healing from a wound,” Elira says, her voice leaving no room for illusion. “You’re recovering from being claimed . What he did to you was not just an accident. It was an anointing. The first of your scars in a life that will be full of them if you choose to stay with him.”
Her words are a chilling, brutal truth. They reframe everything.
The violent, passionate encounter in the clearing was not just a moment of lost control.
It was a fundamental act of possession, an indelible marking of my body and soul.
I am not just a girl who was hurt; I am a creature who has been claimed by a predator, and my life, my very being, has been irrevocably altered.
Tears well in my eyes, hot and thick. They are not tears of self-pity, but of the overwhelming, terrifying gravity of the path that lies before me.
I could leave. The thought is a clear, simple path in my mind.
I could heal, thank this strange, fierce woman for her help, and walk away.
I could find my way back to the world of humans, find a quiet village where no one knows my name, and try to build a life from the ashes of the one I lost. A safe life. A normal life.
But the thought of that life is the thought of a gray, colorless world.
A world without the impossible, chaotic beauty of his heart-light.
A world without the profound feeling of being truly, completely seen.
A world without Thorrin. The thought of leaving him to his guilt, to his ancient, crushing loneliness, is a pain far sharper, far deeper, than any broken rib.
I look at Elira, my voice thick with tears but firm with a resolve that feels like it’s being forged in the very core of my soul. “I don’t want to run from it,” I say.
Elira holds my gaze for a long moment, and I see a flicker of something in her expression—not pity, but a kind of grim, weary respect.
She understands the choice I am making. She has made it herself.
She looks away, toward the cold, dark stone of the wall, and her shoulders slump just a fraction, a silent acknowledgment of the heavy burden I am choosing to carry.
“Then you’ll need to learn how to live with it,” she says.
A final verdict. The words are not a comfort, but they are a truth, and in this strange, monstrous world, truth is a far more valuable commodity.
Not some foolish girl who was broken by a beast. I will be a survivor.
I will learn to live with the storm, to dance on the edge of the blade.
I will learn to love my monster, not in spite of what he is, but because of it.