Page 3 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger

THORRIN

I feel her coming long before I see her.

A subtle shift in the forest's rhythm, a tremor in the ancient silence that only I can perceive.

The air, once still and cold, now carries the faintest trace of her scent—woodsmoke, clean linen, and the uniquely human smell of warm blood pulsing just beneath fragile skin.

For weeks, this scent has been a torment, a temptation I have learned to resist. It is not her flesh I crave. Not anymore.

It is the sounds she makes. The soft cadence of her voice, the sharp intake of her breath when she is startled, the musicality of her laughter that I have only heard in the echoes of my mimicry.

These are the things I hunt now. I crouch in the deep shadows of my clearing, a space I have claimed for this strange new ritual, and I listen.

My chest, a cage of bone and regret, glows with a faint, hungry red.

The hunger is always there, a low fire that never truly dies, but her presence changes its nature. It is something I cannot name.

For five nights, I have called to her with the voice of the mother she lost, a cruel trick I learned centuries ago to lure prey into a false sense of security.

But with Lyssa, the cruelty has curdled into something else.

I use the voice not to deceive her for a kill, but to draw her close enough that I can listen.

I am a collector of sounds, a connoisseur of emotions I can no longer feel myself.

I hoard her words, her whispers, replaying them in the suffocating quiet of my lair until they are worn smooth as river stones.

Tonight, my patience wears thin. The nightly ritual is no longer enough.

The distance between us feels like a chasm, and the need to close it is becoming an obsession.

I want to see the emotions on her face as she speaks them.

I want to watch the way her eyes light up when she tells a happy story, or the way they darken with a grief that feels so beautifully, achingly familiar.

A new thought, sharp and dangerous, slices through the fog of my longing.

What if I used a different voice? Not her mother’s, not some forgotten victim’s, but her own.

The idea is both thrilling and repulsive.

To turn her own sound against her, to reflect her own soul back at her from the empty sockets of a monster—what would that provoke?

Terror, certainly. But what else? I feel a flicker of something that might once have been curiosity.

It is a risk. It might drive her away forever.

But the need to see her, to witness her reaction, overrides the caution learned over centuries of solitary hunting.

She is closer now. I can hear the snap of a twig under her bare foot, a profound vulnerability it makes my claws extend into the frozen earth.

She stumbles into the clearing like a fawn breaking cover, a fragile creature.

The lantern she carries is a tiny, defiant star, casting a halo of golden light around her that makes the darkness in the clearing seem deeper, more absolute.

Her nightdress is thin, offering no real protection, her feet are bare against the snow.

Foolish. So beautifully, recklessly foolish.

I remain perfectly still in the shadows of an ancient pine, a predator melded with the night.

From here, I am just another configuration of darkness, another shape in a forest full of them.

I watch her, my non-existent breath held tight in my chest. She stops in the center of the clearing, her head turning slowly as she scans the trees.

The lantern light trembles in her hand, revealing the fine tremor in her fingers, the wide, searching look in her eyes.

She is terrified, yet she came anyway. This strange, breakable creature with a courage that makes no sense.

“Mother?” she whispers, and the sound is so full of desperate hope it feels. The red glow in my ribs flickers, and for a moment, I am tempted to answer in that same stolen voice, to give her the comfort she so desperately craves.

But the new, sharper need wins out. I want to see what lies beneath her hope. I want to see the moment it shatters.

As she takes another hesitant step, the moonlight finally finds me.

It spills over my shoulder, tracing the curve of my skull, the sharp line of my jaw, the empty sockets where eyes should be.

I see the exact instant she registers my presence.

Her intake of breath is sharp, a blade of sound in the stillness.

Her body goes rigid, the lantern slipping from her nerveless fingers to land in the snow with a soft hiss, its light suddenly muted, choked.

The hope in her eyes doesn't just fade; it dies, replaced by a pure, primal horror that is the most exquisite thing I have seen in a century.

This is what I am. A killer of hope. A thing of bone and nightmare.

She knows. She finally sees.

I take a slow, deliberate step out of the shadows, letting the moonlight paint the full horror of my form.

Eight feet of terrifying skeletal mass, exposed bone and sinew, with a heart that burns with cursed light.

I let her see it all. I want her to understand the true nature of the thing that has been calling to her in the dark.

I open my mouth, and the voice that emerges is not my own gravelly rasp, nor the soft cadence of her mother.

It is a perfect, chilling mimicry of her own voice, laced with the terror she is feeling right now.

“Lyssa.”

The scream that tears from her throat is a masterpiece.

It is not the shrill, panicked shriek of simple fear.

It is a cry of someone who has not just seen a monster, but has had her most sacred memories defiled by it.

The sound echoes through the silent forest, pure and sharp and beautiful.

A ravenous craving consumes me for the emotion she is pouring into the night.

I want to bottle the sound, to keep it, to listen to it in the lonely dark of my lair.

She doesn't freeze. She bolts. An explosion of motion, she turns and crashes back into the underbrush, fleeing with the desperate, blind panic of a creature who knows death is at its heels.

I watch her go, a dark shape swallowed by the deeper darkness of the woods.

The urge to pursue her is a primal command that screams through my bones.

My muscles tense, coiling for the chase.

It would be easy. She is slow, clumsy in her terror, leaving a trail a blind thing could follow.

But I remain still. This hunt is different. The prize is not her body, not the warm blood that would offer a fleeting moment of relief from the curse. The prize is her return.

A strange, unfamiliar pang resonates in the hollow space where my heart should be.

Loss. I feel a sharp, aching sense of loss as the sound of her flight fades into the distance.

The clearing feels empty now, the silence she leaves behind a thousand times more profound than the silence that came before.

The scent of her terror; a perfume that should be intoxicating, but it is mixed with something else now—the scent of her, uniquely her, and its sudden absence makes my chest worse than ever.

I let her go. I let her run back to the false safety of her village, back to the world of light and warmth.

I let her go because I know, with a certainty that settles deep in my marrow, that she will be back.

The lure has been set. She has seen the monster now, she has heard it speak in her own voice, and the mystery of it will be a hook she cannot dislodge.

She will be consumed by questions, haunted by the need to understand.

And that need, I sense, is even stronger than her fear.

I step over to where her lantern lies sputtering in the snow. I reach down with one clawed hand and carefully right it, the small flame flickering back to life. A beacon. A promise. I will wait. And when she returns, the real conversation will begin.