Novem crouched in the tall grass with his belly flat to the ground, completely still except for the tiny inconspicuous twitch of his nose. The soft content smell of his prey wafted towards him on the warm humid breeze. He had been watching this god for several months now, it was so small, so fuzzy, and so very very cute. He licked his lips. It was going to be delicious.
He had been waiting so long, not because he was a bad hunter, the opposite, really. He had been waiting because killing it too quickly would be boring, and that was something he refused to indulge. Being bored was an awful hobby. And living forever required at least one hobby.
The soft little rabbit god munched contentedly, its second more alert head sniffed the breeze, perhaps scenting him. Novem tensed, the pads of his paws pressing a bit more firmly against the ground, and claws flexing out to bury slightly in the mossy soil. He wasn’t ready for a confrontation. Novem had hoped for a more dramatic encounter, something with a little thrill and flair. Maybe something utilizing his godly, astral body. He hadn’t quite worked out the details yet. Inspiration had yet to strike, and he was loath to engage prematurely. When the second head looked the other way Novem retreated, for now.
It wasn't usually necessary for gods to eat, but this god seemed to enjoy it. Novem could relate. It wasn’t often that he reverted back to his own origins and hunted as a cat, but he was feeling a bit nostalgic after his last failed capture.
He had taken a full decade slowly pursuing a song god that took the form of water reeds, playing quiet windy reed songs to her patch of pond when the wind swept by her just right. He had played the part of a fishing cat for the hunt. He would pretend to hunt ordinary boring fish and the occasional frog from the underbrush nearby in order to observe her covertly. It took him several years to realize that he was drawing out the hunt because he had liked her delicate voice rather than for any god snaring reason. As such, instead of devouring her as was his custom, he had made a deal. Well, an extortion. He had generously given her his own voice in exchange.
It was frustrating at first, realizing that trading his voice for hers ment that he had to talk in order to hear it. And it was even more annoying to him that it meant others could enjoy the dulcet tones of his objectively exquisite voice. But he had come to optimistically appreciate how it would contribute to future hunts by putting his marks at ease, when he should choose a more subterfuge style hunt. And after getting back to his roots with the rabbit god at hand, he resolved to put his voice to use and find something more… ambitious.
Novem ambled leisurely through the forest, enjoying the smattering of sunlight that made its way through the old eucalyptus canopy and the rich musky mint bouquet. This forest was quite old, with plenty of black peppermint, blue gum, dawn redwood, and sequoia, which meant plenty of felled trees covered in moss. Quite good for surreptitiously stalking prey but more acrobatic for the regular casual pedestrian. Which was Novem’s preferred mode, casual, unaffected, cool.
The difficulty of navigating such a range of heights was compounded by Novem’s lack of depth perception. He had lost an eye some centuries ago in a rather high stakes game of cards. Though primarily solitary beings, many gods enjoyed the occasional get together to catch up, exchange news of their particular domains, and above all, party. It was not infrequent that one would wake up missing something, whether just memories, or, in Novem’s case, a whole eye. He was sure the news of his abysmal loss had spread quite far by now. Gods were above all else, terrible gossips. He frowned as he was forced by the terrain to either leap over a felled tree or wriggle underneath in the narrow and herbaceous space beneath. Very undignified. He elected to make the jump, and getting his weight firmly beneath him with shimmy, he lept.
He had been playing cards with that absolute clown of a god, Noctua, the self proclaimed god of dreams. Who he was just sure had cheated. Noctua was notorious, even among gods, beyond even Novem’s own notoriety as a god eater. And really, it made sense. Novem’s proclivity for notoriety would be something he inherited from his father. Where Novem simply ate gods, Noctua ate dreams, which was far more cruel and destructive in Novem’s opinion. Which never stopped Novem from partaking in the spoils when Noctua debuted his dream wine creations at their godly get togethers. But still. Morals. Or something.
Their familial feud spanned several centuries preceding the eye enucleation issue, when Noctua had tried to feed Novem wine fermented from his own dead dreams from before his godhood. Novem hadn’t held it against him when Noctua had forced him into existence, but feeding him his own decaying dreams was just rubbing his ill received godhood in his face. It wasn’t that he hated being a god, exactly, it was more that he had been perfectly happy not being one. And that Noctua’s transformation of him was exceedingly traumatic. He had done his best to block out the whole experience.
But back to the cards. And the eye losing. Sikac had been playing as well, the fool, which had probably influenced his decision to bet something so capriciously. Sikac always managed to bring out his innate sense of superiority and arrogance. That, and the delicious flask of dream wine that Noctua had brought, brewed from the dreams of a morning glory with notes of moon beam, he said. That skeezy bastard.
Zsa Zsa had been there too, the terrifying and crotchety old piebald deer witch-god, which really limited the likelihood that Noctua had cheated. No one liked to get on her bad side. But still one could never be too sure, with gods. They were a fickle and temperamental bunch, himself included.
The slight path he had worn through the trees became easier after a point as he had deemed it far enough from the rabbit god’s haunt that he could be less careful and mark a more prominent trail. The moss path gave way to more compacted dirt, with ferns and anise and wild flowers framing his path. The occasional whirl of bird wings and the warble of bird song drifted overhead.
Novem found Sikac where he had left her some days ago, rooting around happily in the brush beneath a behemoth of a rainbow eucalyptus for truffles. Sikac had achieved godhood by eating a mushroom contaminated with god seed and came to the somewhat understandable conclusion that eating mushrooms was the key to her longevity. The misconception had amused Novem so much that he had done absolutely nothing to dissuade Sikac of the idea, and in fact frequently came to observe Sikac’s daily search with much hilarity. Sikac, of course thought that Novem’s visits were an indication of friendship which Novem had also neglected to dissuade her of. She had been rooting around by this particular tree for almost a century. Novem himself was fond of this tree as well, having made a very comfortable perch in it. It obviously had nothing to do with Sikac’s presence there. The small painted wood pig grunted happily, presumably finding a treat and smacking her lips contentedly.
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Novem quietly ascended a slim blue gum nearby that was doing its best to shoot upwards in the meager sunlight filtering down from the canopy, before leaping with a flourish to the tree Sikac was huffing beneath.
‘How are the mushrooms today?’ Novem called down to Sikac. A happy shiver ran down his spine hearing the beautiful lilting vibrato of what was now his own voice. He didn’t mind sharing his voice with Sikac, for whatever reason.
With a very undignified squealing grunt of surprise, Sikac tilted her head back, eyes squinting with the strain of bending her short neck in a direction unfavorable to her anatomy.
‘Hmpf! They’re truffles, not mushrooms. They’re different, special.’ She grumbled huffily.
‘Of course, of course’ Novem soothed, ‘they’re different, special, magical mushrooms.’
Sikac eyed him beadily. Squinting as if to ascertain his sincerity. Of course Novem couldn't leave her thinking for too long. She might hurt herself.
‘I’ve been scouting the new target.’ He offered quickly.
‘Oh? The rabbit? You’re not going to change your mind halfway through and do another trade are you? You wouldn’t stop whining about it for months after that last one. What was her name, Leuret?’ Sikac inquired half-heartedly, going back to nosing around in the detritus, what might the faint tinges have been jealousy in her tone.
‘Her name was Lauliet, not that it matters, and no. I haven’t decided yet.’ He was quickly regretting this line of conversion. His sense of superiority and cool unaffected manner were quickly collapsing. His tail flicked agitatedly. ‘And I don’t whine. Rude. I was going to share with you, consider yourself uninvited.’
He was hardly going to share with her. He had coaxed her into trying one of his captures a couple decades ago, a savory bluefin god that had been particularly difficult to wrangle, as he had to wait for it to transform into a sort of waddling fish and venture ashore. She had been exceptionally skeptical and only taken the tiniest bite before promptly spitting it out with theatrical disgust. It was objectively delicious. She had asked him with great distaste how he could stand to eat the flesh of other gods - it was practically cannibalism. He had snarkily countered that he was an obligate carnivore and that hunting was therefore in his nature. And it was. Or at least, it once was. Before he was a god. Perhaps he liked being reminded of his life before, when he had purpose. Maybe it was nostalgia that made the meat taste so good. And it would be good. Rabbit meat was delectable.
He had been having trouble coming up with an approach for the rabbit god, mostly because it kept darting in and out of what appeared to be wormholes. Well, rabbit holes, given there was a rabbit moving through them. At any rate, rabbits and holes and inexplicable distortions of spacetime were involved in some way.
From his observations he had so far picked up from the conversations between the heads that the two were a mother-daughter pair, Yanus and Yuno, though which was which was unclear to him. He wondered idly if it came up a lot for them, needing to distinguish which was which, or if they preferred to be collectively referred to by one name or the other. It seemed like a challenging condition, to be two entities within one form. Though, he supposed, he had experienced something similar, at his own god-conception.
It had been centuries ago and despite repressing it as best as he could, the details were still in painfully sharp definition. He had been quite happily dead, haunting his favorite tree perch as a half sentient ghost, when he had been violently thrust back into his own mostly decayed corpse and stitched inside with a god bone needle by none other than Noctua.
He had the sneaking suspicion that it was not all his own ghost inhabiting his body, that Noctua had forced several other cats ghosts into his sad, battered remains, and what he thought of as himself was some sort of patch work, emergent consciousness. It was an uncomfortable, disconcerting feeling, not knowing who or what were the parts that made you up, let alone the nasty sticky feeling of being forced into meat. Rotting, decaying meat. With the last stitch and a final triple knot to hold the ghosts in and cinched his fate, he had felt it. The surge of life. The agonizing searing electric burn of undead synapses, forced to bear unexpected signal.
He still was unsure what exactly had prompted Noctua to create him, though there was a high chance that it was just to see if he could. Becoming a god was a gorey, cannibalistic procedure. It usually took god seed - flesh from another god, and kin sacrifice to make a new god, but his conception demonstrated just how flexible those conditions could be. He could only assume that the number of deceased cats had fulfilled the kin condition, and the bone needle Noctua had sadistically left inside him, piercing his heart, fulfilled the requirement for god seed. It twinged sometimes, like a weakly magnetized compass needle, pointing him endlessly towards Noctua, lest he ever forget his origins.
He wondered if the bone needle was one of Noctua’s own bones. He viciously hoped it hurt when he removed it. It was unlikely though, on both counts. Noctua orbited the planet as the second smaller blue moon, though he frequently took a human form, as homage to his favorite dream subjects. His entire moon being was god seed, from some ancient galactic god. Novem suspected that it might even have been the cannibalization of this god by Noctua that had led to Noctua's own independent godhood. He seemed the type. It was difficult to die, as a god, but consumption by another god seemed to do the trick. He hoped to some day eat Noctua.
‘Come down, I have something for you for your rabbit hunt.’ Sikac called up to him, drawing his attention back to her. Curious, he gingerly made his way down, claws catching unpleasantly on the ribbon like fibers of the bark. Sikac had never shown a great deal of interest in his hobby before. He jumped the last couple feet, landing directly in front of her. He looked to her, checking to see if she was adequately impressed. She looked very focused, and not on him. His tail twitched, mildly miffed.
With a deep guttural sound, she coughed and spit something out. She looked at him, proudly. ‘I made it for you!’ She went on, apparently not noticing his appalled expression. She nosed out from the bile what looked like a large bead that glittered prettily, if one ignored the mostly digested fungus encasing it. It really was pretty, a large dark opal with lizard-skin-like iridescence flickering in a mesmerizing lattice of color. It was so pretty that Novem briefly forgot his disgust. ‘It’s an eye!’ Novem’s disgust resurfaced.
‘You need one, and I, there is so much soil on my truffles, and so much silica, and it's just, well, I kept it clenched in my stomach until it was the right size!’ He was surprised she knew what silica was, but when one’s hobby was soil and its inhabitants, it seemed reasonable that one might.
‘How…thoughtful. Why don't you hold onto it for me?’ He managed. She didn’t seem to hear him, approaching quickly with the eye held delicately between her teeth. Before he could escape back up the tree, she had managed to push the eye up against his empty socket, carefully avoiding grazing him with her short tusks. He could feel it take root, burning away the skin and tissue and sizzling as it affixed with his optic nerve, sending an overwhelming cascade of connectivity back into his brain.
And suddenly everything was different. It was disconcerting, how disparate it was from his natural eye. How much more. So many more shades of green and mosaic shadows of indigo, brilliant purple patterns on silky flower petals, trees vibrating subtly with textured bark in exquisite definition, and the rich gold of the sun beams bearing down from the canopy filled with tiny leisurely drifting dust motes. And strange bizarre apparitions, like faint ribbons of opaque silk suspended in the air, pulsating softly.
‘My truffles effect time, I’m not really sure how it will work with your eye, but it should do, um something?’ Her uncertainty did not inspire confidence. But the eye. It was beyond anything he could imagine. It was beautiful, fracturing time and projecting it into space. He could see the random walks of Sikac’s past forages in the loam, he could see the swooping trajectories of various birds, even the slow steady growth of moss up the trunks of trees, and the furling and unfurling of fern fiddleheads. Incredible.
‘This is the best gift I’ve ever received.’ He murmured, before remembering himself, and adjusting his tone to the self-assured drawl he usually used in his conversations with Sikac. ‘It will be very helpful in hunting Yanus.’ He said primly. Sikac looked annoyingly pleased with herself.