The Monster exited torpor as the baleful sun vanished behind the great object in the sky. It did not know what that object was. You and I would call it a planet. The Monster was cunning, but it was not intelligent. It grew by eating, and none of the inhabitants of this moon could comprehend the concept of a tidally-locked moon orbiting a gas giant or the glorious magnificence of the white sun reflecting off of the large rings of that giant, even at night. That illumination was simply an inconvenience and a challenge.

But while The Monster did not understand what a planet was, or a moon, or the intricacies of orbital dynamics, it knew that night was when it hunted. Night was when it fed.

It had traveled far in search of better prey. Most of its kin, although it would only consider them competitors, lived on the other side of the planet, where night was only lit by the small dots of stars, and where the unskilled could more easily find prey. But The Monster was old. It had killed and eaten not only tens of thousands of prey animals, but hundreds of challengers encroaching upon its own domain, and even some of its own children who refused to seek new hunting grounds when commanded by their progenitor after splitting from the mind controlling The Monster’s biomass.

This side of the moon always faced a titanic gas giant, sized midway between what humans on Earth would recognize as Saturn and Jupiter. The increased warmth of the radiation emitted from the planet, and the illumination from both the rings, positioned on a plane perpendicular to the orbit of this unnamed moon, and the giant itself, helped larger and more vulnerable animals persist. It was those animals which The Monster sought, the beasts which ate plants much like Earth grasses and ferns and grew fat from their bounty.

The Monster saw its chance. A certain type of herd animal with six legs and around the size of a boulder had wandered away from its family, seeking a scent it recognized as belonging to a particularly delicious kind of fruit. Happy chuffing noises came from the trunk of the beast as it waddled happily towards its intended meal, moving thick legs hurriedly in a cadence much like that of a lizard as they thudded heavily into the ground.

The Monster had seen this particular beast leave its herd. Herd animals were always challenging prey. They had been the only truly worthwhile prey for a time it could not quantify. All large animals on this unnamed, beautiful moon traveled in herds for combined safety, and it knew that hunting lone game was a practice of the young, fast, and desperate. Of course, the sole exception were the members of The Monster’s kind, for they held an arrogance unbounded by the concerns of their prey. The only predators which hunted its kind were others of its kind.

While The Monster could infiltrate the herd, all of the animals on this moon had an excellent memory for faces, and would instinctively kill any solitary member of any animal species they came upon, including their own. And while The Monster was deadlier than any of its prey, it could not withstand the aggression of prey when they knew there was a predator around.

So, it stalked the herd, and it waited for a time to pick off an individual they’d know and recognize. That time was now. As the beast waddled happily behind a rocky outcropping, The Monster changed its flesh. It had previously taken the form of a winged flier, one of a kind of truly massive beast which sought dead flesh and always followed large herds of animals, waiting for one to die and be consumed by the scavengers.

Deciding to strike, The Monster stopped producing the scent pheremones it had used to lure the herbivore towards its doom.

Its body was bulbous, although that was of course not The Monster’s true form. Large, hairless, batlike wings retracted into a torso they previously held up, as did the head and legs. A line of flesh rapidly split down the scaled torso of what had so recently looked much like a gigantic plucked vulture. The body of what was obviously The Monster split down its length to reveal a fleshy cavern, lined with spikes, and an oddly shaped fleshy limb flung from its back to launch it off the side of the rocky outcropping, dropping entirely silently towards the unsuspecting herbivore.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

The poor animal, confused at its inability to find the fruit it wanted so greatly, did not feel its death. The Monster was primarily an ambush predator. It could fight quite well if it was found - and it had been found many times throughout its ageless existence - but there was no reason to risk a confrontation. The still-scaled gaping maw of flesh and terror wetly plopped upon the herbivore and the ground itself with a muffled, wet plop. Several spikes penetrated the nervous system of the poor animal, killing it before it could even begin to thrash, and the fleshy sack began to contract.

Shortly, the happy chuffing noises resumed, and the herbivore happily waddled back towards its herd, happy after its meal. He was one of the young, and his father, always watchful for danger, trumpeted his return, hurrying over to entwine their trunks together in greeting. Of course, it was not really the nameless herbivore, but The Monster in the form of its latest victim - but it was happy to play the part, even going so far as to emulate the mind and memories of its prey to better blend in, perfectly matching their behavior.

Time continued on. Day turned into night, and night into day, as the creatures traveled on their instinctual circuit. Finally, on the third day, the pack of herbivores exited a strange forest of wide-trunked, treelike, conical-shaped plants, covered in thin branches with needle-like leaves. They moved across a sloping, grassy plain towards their destination - a mountain pass which the stolen memories of The Monster’s latest meal told it were a path leading to the next set of grazing grounds on a circuit these herbivores followed. It was fending off the amorous advances of a juvenile female who had recently gone into heat when suddenly, a strange light flashed in the sky - lightning. Thunder boomed across the landscape as bolt after bolt started hitting the ground around the her of animals, and they huddled together out of instinct.

Lightning was one of the only fears of The Monster and its kind. Their bodies were incredibly durable and would not be killed by the natural electrical discharges of the local storms, but they did inhibit the kind of incredibly detailed muscle control required to form their mass of muscle and pulsating digestive tissue into a close copy of another organism. If hit by enough electricity, The Monster knew that it could not maintain its form, and the herbivores around it would discover that one of their number was far, far worse than a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

But it could do little. The instinctive response of this kind of animal was to drop flat to the ground when confronted by lightning, and it was forced to do the same as several bolts slammed into the ground near it. It knew that this was unusual. Much like storms on Earth, lightning on this moon was usually widely distributed across large areas, but several bolts had fallen quite close to the herd. And then, it happened.

The Monster, taking the role of one of the younger members of the herd, had been in the center of the formation of herbivores when a bolt struck the ground nearby, leading to trumpeting bleats and spasms from the creatures around it. Unfortunately, the bolt struck near enough to The Monster that it was unable to maintain the integrity of its form entirely, and one of its six thick, trunklike legs shifted coloration. It knew that it was enough, as the eyes of the creature which was the mother of its most recent prey went wide in obvious alarm and an angry, trumpeting scream echoed towards the heavens.

This herd was large, composed of dozens of individuals. While The Monster knew that it could easily kill any member of the herd, it could not kill them all. Abandoning its subterfuge, The Monster became a dervish of speed and destruction as it grew sharp spines and whiplike appendages, trying to grab any surface it could to fling itself towards the safety of cover. Unfortunately for The Monster, it was on grassland, and the strength of the herbivores added up to a fight it could not finish. Quickly, it was broken by tusk and hoof and tail even as it killed several of the inferior creatures around it.

As its awareness of the world began to fade, another bolt of energy flew from the sky, impacting on the last intact eye of The Monster as its guts and blood stained the ground. It knew no more, and the herbivores trumpeted in triumph as the strangely intense bolt left little behind but a scorch mark on the ground. Comforting each other, they huddled around their dead and began chuffing in a combination of emotions we would recognize as grief and relief, but The Monster did not know any of this. It had unwillingly departed this moon, and it did not expect to wake.