“FUCK!” Jude yelled.

“What the hell?!” Iris exclaimed.

The cavity in the midsection of The Devourer, where all the veins converged, glowed bright red, and that’s when they noticed the red shard embedded in the creature. The veins had sprouted from that. They had, in fact, blown the bottom half of The Devourer off and spread across the land to engorge on the last semblance of natural life in the vicinity.

Now, the veins were rushing back to the beast, surrounding him in a cocoon of bloody, throbbing red. They acted as a shield that would protect the beast within until its evolution was done.

The situation was exasperating to both Iris and Jude. They knew, instinctively, that if The Devourer was allowed to evolve, they would have no chance.

“We have to destroy that thing,” Jude said.

“You think we can?”

“Your daggers might be able to get through, and we already know you can cut through them if you coat whatever you use in your panacea. I don’t have anything I can use. So, it has to be you,” Jude announced reluctantly. “As soon as it comes out. You back up, and I’ll handle the rest.”

“I can help on the second part too, y’know.”

“I know. I just don’t want you to get hurt. Not even a little. Besides, you gotta heal me through the fight.”

“Fine, but if you can’t handle it alone, I’m jumping in.”

“Deal.”

Every pulse of the veiny cocoon sounded a hum through their bodies and sucked the air around them. The sight of it made them choke on their breaths.

They kept talking to each other as they approached the cocoon in hopes of maintaining their sanity in that situation.

“This is… a nightmare,” Iris said “I can hear it struggling inside that thing.”

It was true, they could hear the gurgling of The Devourer from within the cocoon. It sounded like a drowning beast.

“I don’t think this was supposed to happen yet,” Jude said.

“What do you mean? Why?”

“Why would it happen now? We are supposed to survive, but the scenario is spawning an impossible boss? No. I’m sure this wasn’t supposed to happen yet.”

“But why is it happening then?”

“It’s possible, and this is pure conjecture on my part, that all those people it killed the first night were enough energy to trigger the evolutionary process. Maybe it was even starving before that since the Fae had gone into hiding. Would The Devourer even be a boss monster if it died of hunger?”

“It does make sense. Thinking about it, what if the shard had been meant for the Fae instead, and The Devourer simply got to it first. Maybe whoever did this didn’t even know The Devourer existed.”

“You don’t think it was those things that brought us here?” Jude asked in surprise.

“There are just too many questions, and thinking about the history of that specific Fae clan… They have too many enemies. What if some of them learned of the Kaleidoscope.”

“Mythrini?” Jude asked. The Fae weaver was the only one to roam to other kingdoms. It was possible that he had done something that had brought unwanted attention onto himself.

“Yeah. I’m not ruling out the fact that the things that brought us here are involved. They have to be somehow, but I’m sure they would know about The Devourer. If this was a trap for the Fae, it was sloppy.”

By the end of that sentence, they came face to face with the cocoon.

Iris took out her vials of panacea and bathed her daggers in them. Then, she drank one of them and gave the other for Jude to drink. She felt that whatever was coming out of that cocoon would be some kind of rot being, so they had to be prepared.

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She looked at Jude, who was right next to her. They nodded at each other, and she plunged both of her daggers into the cocoon.

Unlike before, when the veins on the ground had had no reaction to being cut, a puff of rot cloud sprayed out from the wound. Had they not been prepared for it, and had Iris not been there, the intoxication would’ve been immediate, and their organs would’ve crumbled from within them. But Iris’ panacea kept them completely protected from corruption, so she kept cutting.

The night The Devourer found the shard, the impact of it against the ground had awoken it early from its slumber. The Devourer existed much in the same way as the Anhangas for the forest. While the Anhangas were who birthed the forest, The Devourer brought death, but death was necessary. Living things die, and so, The Devourer rose from its slumber only when the forest had grown fat and needed culling. But not that night. That night, The Devourer felt a pull from the thing that had destroyed part of the forest. When it got to the point of impact, it saw a crater, but within that crater was a single red shard no bigger than a human hand.

When it saw the thing, The Devourer craved it. The shard felt like a part of The Devourer it had never known to miss. It had to have the shard. It had to eat the shard. It was not whole anymore, and it had to be whole again.

So, The Devourer bounded toward the shard, grabbed it and ate it, but as soon as it did, everything changed.

The Devourer lost all sense of understanding of its place in the natural order of the forest. It just hungered and hungered and hungered, and the more it ate, the more it hungered. A madness had overcome it, and the madness oozed from it to overcome the forest in the form of the rot. As the embodiment of Death, The Devourer had transformed the shard, empowered it even further. What had been meant to kill a few, would now kill all.

Blind hunger drove the beast for days and weeks, and it was never sated. Eventually, it stopped finding things to hunt, and the hunger grew even more. Everything within the beast ached for sustenance, but it found none, so the shard started taking from The Devourer, and the beast started losing weight.

Eventually, due to the lack of energy, it regained some of its thoughts and resigned itself to disappear. However, that same night, a group of people bumped into the dying beast. They looked at it in disgust and made a ruckus on how to deal with it, thinking they would receive a prize for felling such a creature.

One of them got too close, and with the first bite, the hunger flared stronger than ever. There was so much food. It ate, and it ate until there was nothing left.

The energy regained allowed The Devourer to rush through the entire forest that night in search of more of that food, and it found more. It found so many and it ate so much.

When daylight started breaking through the leaves of the forest, The Devourer returned to its cave, where it slept. During that sleep, however, something within it grew twisted. It was the shard.

It had gained so much energy from the new food that it started changing, growing. It took a week, and it caught The Devourer entirely by surprise, but one day, when the beast was sleeping, it awoke to a searing pain in its abdomen. The cracking and twisting within it made the creature below. Rage. Cry. Eventually, its skin split, and its innards flopped onto the ground, and from its open abdomen, veins of throbbing red rushed out in all directions.

After The Devourer became numb to the pain, it started to feel the veins sucking the life off the forest, corrupting it further. And still, all it could feel was hunger.

Getting through the thick agglomeration of veins was taking a while, but eventually, Iris exposed a hole into the cocoon. When they looked inside, they saw the veins twisting The Devourer’s body, piercing it while injecting whatever they were carrying into the beast, and every pulse made The Devourer more deformed.

“Can you make the hole bigger?” Jude asked.

“This took me so long… But there’s no other choice but to keep going.”

“Just make it big enough so I can put both hands in it.

“You have a plan?”

“I do.”

“OK. A two-handed-sized hole coming up.”

Iris continued to stab at the cocoon, and the process itself was using nearly all of the panacea they had left. It was the only way to prevent the cocoon from closing back up.

Eventually, she made the hole the size Jude wanted.

“Done,” she announced.

“Good. Do you have any panacea left?”

“We have one vial, and there’s no water around here to make more.”

“One will have to do then,” Jude said and extended his hand to take it.

Iris placed the vial on Jude’s hand and watched as he opened it and poured the liquid into both of his hands, as if he were using liquid soap, to coat his gloves.

“Stand back, please,” he requested, and she did.

When he thought she was safe enough away, Jude placed the palm of his hands against the walls of the hole Iris had created, set his feet against the ground in a manner to make sure he could keep his balance when exerting a lot of force and pulled hard.

Iris watched in astonishment as Jude attempted to pull the cocoon apart with shear strength. In her mind, the whole thing had started to become hopeless, but Jude kept forcing the thing to come apart, and eventually, it did.

Every cut that Iris had made in the cocoon ripped open in a line while Jude ripped the whole thing in half. Blood went everywhere, and a massive rot cloud covered the entire area. The halves of the cocoon fell to each side of the beast, but only when the rot cloud had started to fade were they able to see what had come out of it: an abomination.