Chapter 38
Feast
Thrush
The chase had led me high in the sky to a castle on a floating isle. I had been ambushed there. The stone of the castle entrance hall had been chalky white when I had arrived.
Margaux lay face down, fully healed and unmoving, at the end of the hall. 12 other bodies were strewn around the hall. Half of them were barely alive. Groans and trembling agony echoed off the scorched castle walls. Shards of stone layered the long running rug between pairs of repeating columns. Ice shards stuck to the walls like arctic crystals. Icy vapors misted from their facets. An eerie green glow pulsed from a floating green orb. Hundreds of blade-severed swords lay like a layer of broken mirrors in a shallow spill of hot blood. Ethereal ash drifted in the pulsing green light. A man’s scream turned high into a shriek of agony.
And I was everywhere all at once. My blood ran with others’ blood. My body was divided into limbs and smears of gore. My bones were streaks of speckled white in the carnage.
Nightream Eternal!
My thought was disembodied. Yet, with those words, I felt a mass, the center of a mass—my mass! From my smeared and butchered body, dreambon seeds began to sprout.
Someone wailed and then fell into mutterings. “No, no, no, no. no…”
The sprouts grew thick and grew leaves and grew branches and grew fruit. And as the multitude of dreambon plants began to take space, the roots and branches began to crawl over debris. Every pulse of green light burned the leaves of the dreambon plant, but the plants grew faster and persisted. The roots and branches crept along the castle floor like blind hands. They wrapped around my decapitated head. They wrapped around my scattered intestines. They wrapped around my lower jaw and tongue. They found every smear of my body and dragged it all back into one piling ball of horror. I hardly recognized myself. I was like one of Francis’ meatballs.
I—that meatball—began to purr. With every purr, I began to feel more and more whole. My organs came together and turned from smeared gray to dark red blobs. My bones healed from splinters to whole pieces of my skeleton. Slowly, I began to evolve from a meatball back into Thrush form. I grew legs. I grew a belly that slurped up the knot of my spilled intestine. My ribs let in a vomit of gore and then they caged it all in. Flesh and skin and fur covered my bones. Dreambon roots and branches left my body. Then I had arms. Then the meatball turned into my head. Suddenly I could breathe again. I could see again. I could taste again. I felt hungry again! But that hunger was tempered by rage! There was an image in my heart, and it was of little Boggo coughing and wheezing in the cozy coopered bucket-bed Barnacle-eyes had made for him.
A system prompt came up in my mind. The Ravenous notification blinked.
Satiation 31%
“Eternal Ends.”
The dreambon plants withered. All the fruit stayed intact and hit the floor with thuds that dropped apples would make.
Margaux was still unmoving. How could she even lift a finger when she had been chased for weeks on end without sleep, without food, with only dwindling supplies and occasional help? She was breathing, I could hear it. Her heart was beating once every 10 seconds, I could hear it. She was crying, I could smell the salt.
I took a step toward her.
A man sitting against the scorched wall to my left groaned and then said, “Run, Margaux!”
The healer whose legs were broken and who lay against a column wearily said, “Her heart is barely beating. She’s more than exhausted. She’s run down to death.”
Another man who was putting all his strength into stopping the flow of blood from his stomach whined in pain. He spat. “Evil creature!”
“I’m so sorry, Margaux,” the first man said.
Then a 4th man came to, further up the hall, and he wailed in agony when he saw his shredded lower half. His cry of agony tilted into a scream of horror.
I walked through the carnage, right by the first of Margaux’s companions, the one on the left. When the fight had begun, he sent over one hundred thousand throwing stars at me. More than half had gone straight through me. The other half impaled the castle walls and brought down a shower of stone fragments.
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The healer leaned back and obliquely cast healing magic into the body of a 5th adventurer. That companion fell into seizures and gagged on his own tongue. After his seizure, he lay back. Tears streamed down his face. He whispered. “I’m sorry, Margaux…” Then his head lolled to the side and pain no longer showed on his face.
“Opias!” the healer shouted. “Opias! Stay with me!”
I strode past the man who had called me an evil creature. He had wielded 32 swords at once against me. I stepped upon those shattered blades, and they cracked like glass beneath my immense weight. He was in the middle of my path.
“Let me live!” he said.
I kept my eyes on Margaux as I stepped over him. I found another man hiding behind a column. He had been the one who conjured the ethereal serpents. Their ashes still floated like dust through the air. He could no longer use his arms and he shook violently. His eyes rolled over to me. As though from a throat clogged with shock, he said, “Stop! She did nothing wrong! She’s an angel! Demon! Margaux, run!”
Margaux wept loud and long, and it sounded like a howl.
I continued forward and stepped into the epicenter where the firestorm had started. It was a black spot of castle stone that had melted into obsidian. The man was dead, but he had turned the battle into a fiery hell for over an hour.
The man of one hundred thousand throwing stars said, “Margaux! Please! Help her, healer!”
The healer responded with whispers. “I’m out. I’m out of mana. I have nothing left.”
The green light began to pulse again from the floating orb. Everyone in the vicinity took poisonous damage. My fur warped like it was wet with acid. My ear closest to the orb collapsed. I purred to heal it, and strode by the healer. I passed by the man who mastered arctic magic. He lay frozen in death.
As I moved past the floating green ball of pulsing poison, my ravenous notification blinked rapidly. I strode right up to Margaux’s prone body. Her breath came in slow, labored rasps. The castle stone beneath her face was wet.
Satiation 30%
STARVATION
My mind fell into a quiet trance while my belly took over. My jaw fell open. The flesh of my cheeks ripped apart. My tongue rolled out onto castle stone. My body took a pulse of poisonous damage from the still floating green ball. I turned to it and rushed toward it. My bottom jaw slammed up and I gobbled the ball. It bore a hole right through the roof of my mouth and nose. But then it was half its size. I chomped it again, it melted a hole in my tongue, and then it snuffed out. I felt my body purr as my jaw snapped open and snapped shut on repeat. I ate the castle stone at my feet. My fangs carved a chunk of it out like it was as soft as smoked meat. My jaw kept snapping open and closed. I felt my Satiation rise, but I knew I wouldn’t regain control of any faculty until it reached 40%.
Satiation 32%
I was out of control. I bit into the stone columns like a frenzied dog at a bone. The clash of my fangs turned the stone to chunks and to dust. My tongue shoved it all down my throat. I ate the man, who once wielded arctic magic, in three bites: legs, torso, head and arms.
Satiation 34%
I ate the melting crystals of ice on the wall. I snapped up the charred furniture along the wall. My foot smashed through the ribs of a corpse and my jaw scooped it up.
Satiation 36%
I bit through another column and gobbled up the screaming healer behind it.
Satiation 39%
A cry commanded my attention. I turned toward the end of the hall and ran toward the sound that came from Margaux. The bottom of my jaw scraped against the floor. Debris was swept into my maw. I rushed her like I was one giant piranha.
The moment my tongue hit the soles of her boots, My lips fell like a bunched, wrinkled curtain around her ankles. I sucked her legs into my mouth. She was silent as I chewed. She must have been too exhausted to feel anything. She hung from my lips like her limbs and body were willow leaves. I swallowed the chunks of her legs and snapped my head back for my next bite. I bit through her thighs with great crunches. She hung like she was dead, but I could hear her heart beat faster.
My tongue worked the chunks of her thighs around and I swallowed them. Her body twisted and turned as my tongue moved it to one side of my mouth, then the other. I slurped her body in and bit through her chest. Her ribs snapped a number of times while I chewed. Her guts showered into my belly like a chunky, hot deluge.
Satiation 40%
Ravenous
I immediately regained control of myself. I chewed slowly and swallowed. I sucked her arms in, and then her head. I paused. Her hair draped between my fangs. Her hair was long and it brushed the scorched castle floor. I burped around her head and an exposed elbow bone. I slowly slurped her down my throat. Her hair slithered between my fangs and brushed my gums. I turned and looked upon the carnage.
The man who still bled from his stomach rocked back and forth in torment. His tortured visage was frozen in breathless pain and sorrow.
He whined something that was more spit than word. Then he said, “A curse upon you! I vow to rid the world of your kind!”
My belly rumbled and I rubbed it. “I feel something. Something special.”
“I will do everything in my power to crush you! I have friends in high places. Fable rank friends! They will deal with you! Bastard monster!”
My belly gurgled. “…Something very special is happening! My appetite! It’s returning! I feel better already!”
I sat down. The stone of the castle sank beneath my weight. I felt hungry again! Margaux would never hurt Boggo again! To celebrate, I began eating all the tasty things in my inventory. I didn’t have a lot of smoked fish left, but I had a ton of unsmoked fish. I ate fish until my Satiation reached 60%. I ate furniture made with sweet wood like maple and birch. I ate metals that tasted like iron. I ate dreambons until my Satiation reached 80%. I drank whole barrels full of Hawkin’s beer until my Satiation was at 96%. I munched on a few of last year’s leaves.
During my feast, I changed. Fish scales grew on my chest, my palms, and my face. My digits became wooden like saplings. I felt rust colors fill the sponges of my eyes.