Page 4 of Monster’s Obsessive Hunger

LYSSA

I don’t sleep. I’m not sure I will ever sleep again.

The moment I slammed my bedroom door shut, I shoved my heavy oaken dresser in front of it, the legs scraping against the floorboards.

It’s a foolish, childish gesture. A piece of furniture will not stop the thing I saw in the woods.

I know this, yet the illusion of a barrier is the only comfort I can find.

I spend the night huddled in the farthest corner of my room, wrapped in a quilt, my back pressed against the cold plaster wall as I stare at the window.

Every gust of wind sounds like its approach, every creak of the old house the scrape of its claws.

The image of the creature is burned into the back of my eyelids.

I see it every time I blink: a towering silhouette of bone, a nightmare given flesh.

But it’s the details that truly haunt me.

The skull-face, bleached white under the moon, with empty sockets that were not empty at all but held a flickering, crimson intelligence.

The glowing heart, a grotesque lantern pulsing with a life that felt ancient and wrong, its light painting the snow in shades of blood.

Most of all, I hear its voice. My voice.

The perfect, chilling mimicry that took my name and turned it into a weapon against me.

He didn't just frighten me; he violated something. He took the sacred, private grief I have carried for five years and wore it like a mask. The hope that my mother might be out there, the desperate love that drove me into the woods—he twisted it all into a lure. A bitter, coiling shame mixes with the terror. How could I have been so foolish? How could I have allowed my own sorrow to blind me so completely? For five nights, I thought I was communing with my mother’s spirit.

In reality, I was being stalked by a monster, my own grief a dinner bell calling a predator from the shadows.

I feel a wave of nausea and press a hand to my mouth, my body trembling with a fresh wave of horror.

The room feels like a cage, but the world outside feels infinitely worse.

There is nowhere to run when the monster knows your name and can speak it in your own voice.

The next day passes in a blur of muted terror.

I move through the house like a ghost, avoiding Clara’s worried questions and the heavy, pitying gaze of my father.

I can’t tell them. The words would sound like madness.

There’s a skeletal creature in the woods that speaks with stolen voices.

They would lock me in my room for my own safety.

They wouldn’t understand that safety is an illusion I can no longer afford to believe in.

The world is full of teeth, and I have seen the things that wear them.

As dusk settles over the village, casting long, menacing shadows from the eaves of the houses, a familiar dread begins to build in my chest. I retreat to my room, but I don’t bar the door this time.

Some part of me needs to know. I sit on my bed, staring at the window, waiting.

The sun dips below the jagged peaks of the Causadurn Ridge, and the forest becomes a solid wall of black. And then, it comes.

Lyssa.

My mother’s voice. It’s softer tonight, more hesitant, as if it knows I am afraid.

It doesn’t sing the lullaby, just whispers my name with that same aching tenderness.

My heart lurches, a painful, frantic rhythm against my ribs.

Fear and longing are at war within me, a battle so fierce it leaves me breathless.

I stay put. I clutch the quilt in my fists and stare at the dark glass of the window, refusing to answer, refusing to follow.

But I listen. Gods help me, I listen until the voice fades with the last of the twilight.

That night, I finally fall into an exhausted, dream-haunted sleep.

I am back in the clearing, the snow cold beneath my bare feet.

The creature is there, its heart glowing a furious, hungry red.

But this time, when it speaks, it mimics my deepest fears in My voice.

You’re alone. No one is coming for you. You will die in this forest, and no one will even find your bones.

I try to run, but my feet are frozen to the ground.

The dream shifts. Suddenly, I am a child again, safe in my mother’s arms. The scent of her—of lavender and warm bread—is so real I can almost taste it.

She is laughing, her head thrown back, the sound a perfect, untainted melody.

She hums the lullaby, and the sound is not a lure but a blanket of pure, uncomplicated love.

The memory is so vivid, so warm, it feels more real than the waking world.

I wake with the first pale light of dawn, the ghost of my mother’s laughter still echoing in my ears.

The terror from the dream of the creature is still there, a cold stone in the pit of my stomach, but the warmth of the memory that followed has changed something.

It hasn’t erased the fear, but it has ignited something else alongside it: a fierce, burning resolve.

The dream didn't just remind me of my fear; it reminded me of what I had lost, and why I had been willing to risk everything in the first place.

That creature, that monster used my mother’s voice.

It desecrated my most precious memories and turned my love into a weapon.

The violation of it makes my hands clench into fists.

But it is also the only new thing, the only clue, in five years of agonizing silence.

The town gave up on her. The world gave up on her.

But this thing in the woods… it knows her.

It knows her voice, her lullaby. It knows me .

I swing my legs out of bed, the cold floorboards doing nothing to cool my veins.

The fear is still there, a constant, chilling companion.

My heart pounds at the thought of facing that creature again.

But the questions are louder than the fear.

Why me? Why use my mother’s voice? What kind of monster doesn’t hunger for flesh, but for memory?

For emotion? I cannot let it go. I cannot go back to simply waiting, to being the "cursed girl" who listens for ghosts. I have to understand.

I dress with a purpose I haven’t felt in years, pulling on thick woolen trousers and a sturdy tunic.

The clothes feel like armor. I look at my reflection in the small, cracked mirror on my dresser.

My eyes are shadowed from lack of sleep, my face pale, but there is a spark in my gaze that has been missing for a long time.

It is the terrifying, exhilarating light of determination.

I am afraid. I am so deeply, bone-chillingly afraid.

But for the first time since my mother disappeared, I am no longer lost. I have a path, and it leads back into the dark.