When he first came to be there was nothing but an unsated need clawing at him and darkness. Then came touch as his body formed and the clawing need turned to a hollowing pain in his middle. The need shaped his form, one build for the Hunt. It gave him long strong limbs for the never-ending chase, claws to rend and capture prey and food, sharp teeth and too many mouths to devour all that he could. It felt powerful yet weak from the Hunger that clawed at his insides and the darkness remained in spite of him being fully formed now.
That was easily explained as he had no eyes for some reason and sharp tooth mouths had taken their place. His hearing wasn't much better off as he had no curving flaps of skin and cartilage to capture sound but at least there were no toothy maws to hinder it further. Something told him that his sense of touch was off too however, he couldn't really tell how as he had nothing to compare it to. He let his mind linger on that thought as he gingerly prodded and pinched at the wrinkled, sagging skin that covered his body and made up the majority of the large sensory organ. It was an equally strange mix of hanging off his bones and clinging to them and he could feel all of his bones under it like he was some starved to death creature. Which wasn't that far off considering the clawing hunger it had awoken with.
Speaking of which.....
His final sense was the sharpest of all of them, telling the creature a great many things about the place it was in. Most of what he could smell was identified in his mind as being 'not food' but there was a faint paltry few that it could identify as being 'food'. He literally followed his nose to the nearest and largest source of one of the 'food' scents it could detect, fumbling his way over to it in his blindness until one of his clawed, long fingered hands brushed against a still form laying on the floor. The creature cautiously nudged and prodded his perspective meal, making certain it wasn't going anywhere before digging in.
In his eagerness to feed, he nearly loss a few of his many fangs on the body's hard bones on his first bite. The bones still broke in its powerful jaws, but he had learned a valuable lesson and was a bit more cautious in his feeding. He kept the softer tissues and joints for his teeth while using his hands to break apart the larger bones into more easily swallowed chunks. He made quick work of the body in spite of him learning another, foul lesson along the way when he came to the body's insides.
He powered through the unpleasant discovery though, the hunger clawing at his insides clamoring for every scrap of fuel he could give it. Before long, the lifeless remains had disappeared down his various gullets and he was licking himself clean of the residue his messy eating had left behind. The body he had devoured had taken off the edge of his all-consuming hunger, but he still wanted more.... He needed more.
His ever-pressing hunger even urged him into hunting down and digging out the fresher, moving morsels in the walls of what he learned to be an enclosed space of some kind. Once he had cleared out the insides of the place of 'food', he ventured to the place beyond its protective walls. The 'Outside'.
The change from being in a sheltered space to the boarder of one that was not was a bit of shock to him at first, causing him to freeze for a moment. His limited senses couldn't feel any boundaries like he had when he was 'inside' and there a cool wind nipping at his exposed body as he 'stared' out of the shelter out into the world beyond. The wind brought with it new scents of 'not food' and the more appealing ones of 'food'. It was the latter that motivated him to venture further out into that vast empty space whose only boundary that he could sense was the ground beneath his hands and feet.
A feather light warming touch from above blanketed his body as he followed one of the scents to one of the larger sources of ‘food’. He found it sprawled against the outside of one of the shelters as unmoving as the first one he had eaten. It was a bit different than that one though, less fresh and with a slightly different shape. It had a smaller frame over all but the part that held the foul parts of the body was distended far more than the first one.
Curious, the creature cautiously prodded at bulge with a claw before sinking it into the stretched flesh when nothing happened. That was enough for the foul gases of decay to burst forth from the body to give him another unpleasant lesson, this time about the freshness of ‘food’ type items. Unfortunately for him, that wasn’t the only lesson the still body was going to give the creature.
He felt something in the air shift and flow towards the body while his own was busy trying to heave out its previous meal from the smell. The food wouldn’t come out for which he was grateful for, but the nausea still left it unable to swallow and drool dripped from his numerous maws from the ordeal. While it had been doing that, whatever had been shifting towards the body did something to it and the creature could hear the crunching squelching noises from it over his gagging.
The body moved, changed, and eventually disappeared from his limited senses during that time and was replaced by something that moved…. And wailed at him before surging forward. The starved creature snarled wetly back and defended himself – angrier that his potential food had been stolen from him than afraid of what this new thing might do to him.
It was a short yet brutal fight for the pair as their fangs and claws were set against each other. The first creature had the upper hand though as he had already had a chance to eat and adapt to his newly formed body. He was stronger too and eventually overpowered the newer one bite by bite until there was nothing left.
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Well, almost nothing. The newborn creature was mostly tasteless and made from a barely identifiable mix of goo and bones. Eating it didn’t fill his belly any or curb the gnawing hunger in his gut either, but it did have other lasting effects. He felt stronger after consuming it and that strength came with a kind of undefinable weight that he couldn’t quite define other than it being there.
There was also a new consciousness inside of his head with thoughts and feelings that were not his own. The other mind was still howling at him but now that noise came with meaning. Pain. Hunger. Suffering. Fear. Just to name a few of things inside of that torrent of emotions. The victor shoved back at the torrent in anger and annoyance and tried to get the other to stop but that only ended up with mixed results and not ones he was looking for.
In his frustration, he tore at the torrent of formless thoughts and emotions, trying to get it to stop by taking them away from the other. To his surprise, that did work and soon all that was coming from the other was a mix of mild fear and confusion. He was confused as well, and it took the creature a moment to get his bearings and take stock of what had happened.
That’s when he realized his actions had borne more than his intended results. He felt oddly light for one and for another his seemingly endless hunger had ebbed by the smallest of margins. His efforts and interactions with the other consciousness also gave him something of a vague and nebulous understanding of… various things.
The creature took a few moments to sort things out inside of his own head before moving on. This included getting the other settled enough to leave him be and his new knowledge helped with that. It showed the creature that gentleness and patience would be more effective here rather than intimidation or violence.
Once the other was pacified, the still starving creature went on to search for more ‘bodies’ and ‘critters’ to consume as ‘food’. He came across more things like the one he had fought and ate them as well. Each time they appeared, the body they came from disappeared but with each one’s consumption came clarity, snippets of knowledge, and the odd feeling of having the smallest sliver of his ever-pressing hunger disappear even though they did nothing to fill his physical belly.
Fortunately, there were other bodies that weren’t bloated, and he was able to become ‘full’ in a sense. His hunger hadn’t left it though, but it doubted eat anything more for a while. He also felt sluggish and slow now with a full belly and he knew that made him vulnerable to being attacked by stronger things.
He sought out a resting place in one of the larger structures that his newfound knowledge called a ‘barn’. It found a pile of relatively dry hay that had been partially spoiled by rodents and other small creatures living in it, but it was big enough for the creature to hide within. The pungent smell of the rodents also helped him to disguise his own feeble scent and give him the occasional tasty snack he couldn’t resist as his burrowing stirred them up. As for the hay, it was thick enough to easily keep out the chill drafts that riddled the building as well as trap in warmth to make things a bit more comfortable for the creature while it rested.
As he rested and digested his meals, he found that he really didn’t sleep or feel the need to. Yes, he was lethargic and what not, but he was still conscious of what was going on around himself unlike what ‘sleep’ was. At least according to the knowledge, he had gained.
Still, he was content with what he had, and his semi-conscious state let him keep an eye on things, including the consciousnesses he had collected during his search for food. Both he and they had quickly learned that the creature that had eaten them wasn’t the only one they could interact with. They could also interact with each other and the creature spectated with mild interest, letting him learn more from them just by watching.
They also paid attention to him in return but whenever they asked him a question, the creature never had any answers for it. They were understanding of this in sense, accepting that he wouldn’t have any due to him being less than a day old. Perhaps not even half of that yet. He wasn’t even certain how long or even how he had even come to be. All he knew was that there was nothing then he simply was, like opening one's eyes for the first time.
His answer for his beginnings drew their curiosity and further attention and with it, came more knowledge as they taught him about the world, he came to exist in. Many new words, thoughts, and ideas were given to him by the consciousnesses which he came to know as ‘souls’. He was also able put names to other things like ‘house’, ‘home’, and ‘barn’ to the different shelters he had been going through. ‘Village’ and ‘family’ came next, quickly followed by ‘adults’, ‘parents’, and ‘siblings’. There were more along that line, but he couldn’t really grasp them as he had nothing to compare them to.
From there, the ideas got bigger and more foreign since he lacked the same set of senses general experiences as they had. He vaguely understood what the ‘sun’ was but ‘light’ and ‘dark’ eluded him still. Then there was ‘land’, ‘forest’, ‘field’, and related things the creature had yet to experienced but now knew he would probably recognize them to some extent once he had encountered the items.