“My partner isn’t here yet. He hasn’t brought my prey, this is unusual.”

It was what Joraane thought that morning at about 6 or 7 in the morning, it was strange for that man to not be here with her.

Joraane had known him for about 15 years now, quite literally all of her life, and even though she always felt like the man, her partner was inadequate in some respects, forgetting to feed her was not one of his failings, which was one of the reasons why she always thought of him as an equal, family even.

Joraane thought for a few hours about him, she thought many things, she looked around, she slept, she paced and she thought. She thought a lot, that she had recently noticed, somehow she felt her thinking was never enough, her partner always did things, he moved fast, decisive, he made changes fast, moved things from a place to another and did things in what Joraane had noticed aligned with a certain order in chaos.

As if he knew what he was going to do 10 steps before he did it.

She somehow noticed how he was much more suited to thinking than her, because compared to her shallow thinking, it seemed as if her partner’s head span many, many times faster than hers.

Too bad he was just so… childish, so sheltered.

She disliked that from him, but at least he wasn’t dead, which showed her that at least he wasn’t useless.

He also did keep her alive so far, which was something that clashed with the image that she held of him.

Joraane remembered how when he was younger and smaller his parents would feed him some sort of sludge, no meat, no blood, they did not take him on hunts, and she never saw him bring something he himself had caught.

Weak.

It was always someone else that brought prey for him to eat or to feed her, and even the times that he did bring anything, she knew, he did not kill his prey, someone else did, she knew because she saw his hands.

They never had blood in them.

He had never killed anything but flies, mosquitoes or insects, that she knew of.

This probably meant that he was lacking in boldness, however it was good that he had her.

As of late she had taken to looking at him as if she was looking at an idiot, and it surprised her that he had noticed more than a few times, looking at her trying to understand what she was conveying, or at least doing an attempt at it.

Since then she had started to try to communicate with him using her eyes, to… mixed results. It bothered her that he did not manage to pick up her meaning, she was sure that with her wisdom and strength, she and her partner would without a doubt become the apex predators of this land.

The thought tickled something inside of her, but she put the strange feeling aside, she did not like strange things, as cautious as she always had been.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

As she thought this, she perked up hearing the creaking of a door.

He was finally back

she sighed lowly after seeing Joshua bringing her prey, though she did not hunt it, she still quite enjoyed the sensation of a lower lifeform, even the ones already dead, being consumed inside of her, it was the best way they had to contribute to the cause of her continued existence and they should feel honored.

The man had white things on his head, she noticed. She believed humans used those when they were injured. Or at least he did once before, one of the few times she had seen him hurt.

The man talked to her with a silly face ignoring the clear wound in his head, and gave her it. A rodent this time. Very well, her partner had pleased her, yet she wondered where he had been, perhaps he had a rough hunt this time.

As he gave her the prey, she noticed a slightly vacant expression in Joshua’s face, to which she shot him a strange glance, what was he thinking about? he looked far away as if looking into something she could not see and fortunately he seemed to notice her silent query. To which he shot her a smile and brushed it off.

So… had he understood her question and ignored her or had he not gotten it at all?

This was a daily thing with them these days, but Joraane usually didn’t mind. Except that this time, when he went away she noticed something strange.

She hadn’t noticed immediately when he entered, but he smelled of something strange, something she had never smelled before.

Maybe it wasn’t a smell per se, it was just a feeling in her tongue, slightly cool and prickly at the same time

A bit like how salt tasted, just ever so slightly itchy, well, that example would be fitting if salt was combined with pure and unfiltered energy, so pure that Joraane felt afraid she could burn herself.

But somehow Joraane’s instincts told her that the smell was good for her, that smelling it more would be beneficial somehow to her.

She wished for it, she instinctually craved for it.

Her eyes followed the man as he went to the ledge that the man called a “balcony”, something she could not pronounce nor cared to.

He produced from a bag made from a see-through material that she believed she had seen before, and from it the man took what seemed like a small plant in a structure of a red stone like material.

Strange, but then again, the man had been strange since he came home.

A while passed and she kept watching his every move trying to figure out what he pretended. She knew him and he was always pretending something, always with a purpose to his movement, always, she just knew it, and his face told her that this was different than the usual mundane activity, this was important.

“What is he doing?”

For a while she saw him close his eyes and make strange faces, and she had a feeling, somehow she felt that she understood slightly what he was doing, but, no that couldn’t be.

It was a dark day, darker than the usual, the clouds were dark grey and even though she usually couldn’t see the sun at this hour from her vivarium, she just knew that there was no trace from it in the sky, and it was something good, because she was sure she wouldn’t be able to see this in a brighter day.

Feeling the closest feeling that a snake could feel to shock, she saw as if the air around the plant started to become lighter, as if emitting a weak but visible light, if only for the current conditions of the sky.

Was her partner doing this? She had never heard of a creature capable of manipulating light like this, were her eyes playing tricks on her? Perhaps she was getting old…

No way, her eyes had always been the most remarkable part of her sensibilities, perhaps only surpassed by her ability to detect smell.

No, she was not wrong, her partner was doing this.

She observed him for what seemed like hours, taking in the phenomenon as much as she could.

Joraane was not good at thinking, but she was not an idiot, quite the opposite, she somehow knew that even if she couldn’t compare with her partner, she was still, remarkable for one of her kind, perhaps because she didn’t do much more.

Still, something told her, she had to observe this, it was critical.

So she did so.