Page 36 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger
LYSSA
T he fire burns low, the embers collapsing in on themselves with soft, sighing sounds.
A comfortable quiet has settled in the cave, a silence that is no longer empty, but full.
We sit side-by-side on a thick fur rug before the hearth, my shoulder brushing against the hard, cool bone of his arm.
The simple, casual contact sends a ripple of warmth through me.
Weeks ago, such proximity would have sent my heart into a frantic, terrified rhythm.
Now, it is the only thing that makes it beat steadily.
This is our new life. A quiet, domestic rhythm forged in the heart of a monstrous world.
By day, we explore the territory he calls his own, my guide in a wilderness that is slowly becoming my home.
He shows me which roots are safe to eat, which berries are sweet, and which caves offer the best shelter from the sudden, violent mountain storms. By night, we sit here, in the warm glow of the fire, and I tell him stories.
He still listens with that same, unnerving intensity, but it is no longer just the craving of a hungry creature.
It is the attention of a partner, of a soul who is learning to see the world through my eyes.
I look at him now, at the way the firelight plays across the harsh, alien planes of his skull-face.
He is a monster of legend, a being of impossible age and power, a monster who once took joy in the terror of my kind.
And yet, when he looks at me, his light is a soft, steady gold, the color of a love so profound.
I am filled with a sudden, overwhelming need to know more, to see past the monster and the curse, to find the faint, ghostly echo of the person he was before.
“Thorrin,” I say. “Tell me something you’ve never told anyone.”
The question seems to startle him. I feel him stiffen beside me, the casual ease of his posture vanishing in an instant.
The steady golden light in his chest flickers, a troubled, uncertain blue bleeding into the edges.
He has shared his loneliness with me, his guilt, his curse.
But his past, the long, gray expanse of time before he met me, is a locked and bolted door.
I have never dared to ask what lies behind it. Until now.
He is silent for a long time. I can feel the war inside him, the conflict between the instinct to keep his ancient wounds buried and the new, fragile desire to share himself with me.
I think he will refuse, that I have pushed too far, crossed a boundary I did not know existed.
I am about to take the question back, to apologize, when he finally speaks.
His voice is a low, gravelly rasp, a sound scraped from the very bedrock of his memory, full of an ancient, weary pain. “I was human once,” he says. “A long time ago.”
The words fall into the silence, each one a stone dropping into a deep, still well.
I stop breathing. Human. I try to imagine it, to picture this massive, skeletal creature as a man of flesh and blood.
With skin that could feel the sun, a face that could smile, eyes that could weep.
The image is impossible to conjure, yet the knowledge of it changes everything.
He is not just a monster born of a curse.
He is a man who was stolen from himself.
“I think…” he continues, his voice strained with the effort of reaching back across the abyss of centuries, “I think I had a sister. I can’t remember her name.
Only… the color of her hair. Like firelight.
And the sound of her laughter.” The words are fragmented, ghosts of a memory so old they have lost their shape.
But the grief they carry is as fresh and as sharp as my own.
A forgotten sister. A lost name. A stolen life.
The terrible, beautiful symmetry of our sorrows connects us in a new and deeper way.
We are two souls haunted by the ghosts of a family we can no longer touch.
My own grief, a constant, familiar ache in my chest, now has an echo in his.
We are not just monster and human. We are two orphans, lost in the same dark wood.
My hand covers his, my small, warm fingers a stark contrast to his massive, clawed ones. His light pulses, a soft, aching blue. “We’ll remember her together,” I whisper, and the words are a vow.
He closes his eyes, a strange, human-like gesture for a creature with a skull.
He leans into my touch, a slow, heavy surrender, the full weight of his ancient loneliness finally finding a place to rest. He is silent for a long moment, and then he speaks again, his voice a raw, vulnerable murmur against my skin.
“When you touch me,” he says, “the hunger listens.”
The words are a profound admission of the power I now hold, a confession of the terrifying, beautiful truth of our bond.
The beast inside him, the ravenous curse that has driven him for centuries, is now tethered to me.
I look at him, at the monster who is remembering how to be a man, at the predator who is learning how to be a partner.
He has given me his vulnerability, his trust. I must give him something in return.
I lean closer, my lips brushing against the cold, smooth bone of his temple. My voice is a soft, determined whisper, a promise that redefines everything between us.
“Then let me teach it what to crave.”