Hunger.
That's all that it felt. Endless, mind numbing hunger. While it did have its brief moments of lucidity, they were only just that: brief. Any form of hatred it felt for the little girl was gone now that it could eat. Much like the others, it broke the small bones to get at the marrow. Yet this was a small portion and left it dissatisfied. Then again, it was always dissatisfied. Nothing could ever fully sate its hunger. Even if it were to eat a hundred little girls: a thousand; a million little girls, it would still not sate it. It was hunger made flesh. It was the personification of famine. The hunger that should not be.
It took its long sharp claws and licked the blood off of them, trying to get every single morsel off. When the beast ate, it was content. If it could continue to shovel hoards of food down its mouth, it would have the vain hope that it could get full. Yet there was not enough food in the world to satiate the hunger of the beast. Its punishment would never allow it to have that peace.
Divine punishment is often attributed to a situation like the one it suffered. When we think of such a punishment, we think of Sisyphus who tried to cheat death and as a result must spend all of eternity pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it fall down again and watch all of his hard work roll away. There are plenty of Divine punishments that can be found in the bible. Lot's wife disobeyed the order to not look at Sodom and Gomorrah as the cities faced God’s wrath, and was turned to stone as a consequence. Cain was cursed to walk the earth watching his own children murder each other to understand how God felt when Cain murdered his brother Able. Even in the beginning when Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they were forever punished and doomed all of mankind to die.
But perhaps the divine punishment the abomination would feel a close kinship to would be that of Tantalus of Greek mythology. Tantalus and the creature shared the same cause for their punishment as well as a similar outcome. Tantalus murdered his son Pelops and served it to the Gods. As punishment, Tantalus was placed in a pit where there was a tree of fruit and the pit filled with water. He was given a ravenous hunger and thirst. Every time he tried to eat the tree, it would always be snatched away from him as the tree stretched higher. Every time he tried to lower his head and drink, the water that filled his pit would drain. He would always be so close and always too far, never again quenching his hunger or thirst.
The beast felt like this every single day since it committed its terrible sin. Sometimes people do something so awful, so unspeakably evil that Hell can not simply wait to claim the sinner. Sometimes Hell comes to them. And whether you chose to believe in it or not, Hell is a real place, and it's insatiable.
The creature still hungered, and it moved on to find another meal. It was starving; the pain it felt in these moments was agonizing. It was in a state of constant misery and pain, only held back as it shoved food into its mouth, and yet when food was given to it the satisfaction the meat gave it lasted for a fraction of a second. It was like the most vicious kind of addiction.
One would be hard pressed to imagine that the loathsome creature was once human. In a time when the first men came to what would later be called America, this thing was once a man himself. It was an age that most people can not even remember: when the people were only recently one people before they went their separate ways; when the land was young and barely had any men on the dirt; a time when myth and history were the same thing.
It remembered that it once had a family and a thriving people. But there was a terrible winter, and desperation brought people to dark places. The reason why God forbade Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of knowledge was that the tree granted them the knowledge to know what good and evil were. Since then, man has had the ability to know the difference between good and evil and twist the meanings.
We’ve all been there, have we not? We justified our actions despite knowing that they are wrong. Perhaps you had to lie to someone because you believed that telling them the truth would be more painful to them. Maybe you are a businessman who goes down a dark and terrible path of ruining other people’s lives because when you started, you were trying to provide for your family. Perhaps you fought in a war and told yourself that the enemy were nothing more than monsters —the type you tell your children to be afraid of at night— and seek to slay them while your enemy says the same thing about you.
It's easy to point at your actions and say that they’re not as bad as someone else's. Afterall, you’re the protagonist of your own life story, are you not?
Such was the case for the unnamed tribe that envied the creature's former people. They had suffered greatly in the winter. When the unnamed tribe saw its people, they were envious. Its people had plenty of food while the unnamed tribe had contended with the winter and lost. They were starving and desperate. Like many scenarios, they began to rationalize what they had to do. Who could blame them? It was either the unnamed tribe or this wealthy tribe that had plentiful food. They rationalized that the people were greedy and selfish. They claimed that there was more than enough food for both tribes while in truth there was only enough for one.
Desperate people do desperate things, but the unnamed tribe took things too far. They didn’t just raid the village, they slaughtered everyone. It was a surprise attack early in the morning, and all of the people were slain while still in their beds. Their tents lit on fire and their screams echoed in the night. Only one of the people survived. He survived by pretending to be dead, laying among the corpses of his friends and family. The unnamed tribe left and never spoke about the evils again. The tribe they killed would never exist, and never had existed. Eventually some of them split off into multiple branches and evolved into something new. One of those tribes became the Cherokee. The Cherokee had no knowledge of any of this. In fact the unnamed tribe and the Cherokee are so different that it would be like trying to compare apples to a lizard rather than an orange. At least an orange was still a fruit.
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When they were gone, the man who would become an abomination tried to survive for his people. He promised his family that he would live so that the memory of his people would live on. Unfortunately for him things grew from bad to worse. The winter would get harsher with each passing day.
At first he tried to hunt, yet many of the animals had fled and hid away for the winter. The ones that he managed to find, he tried to kill but failed. He wasn’t the best hunter, and it showed. Every failed hunt was met with either a near miss or interrupted by something more intimidating than himself. He had no idea how to properly fish with a spear, and the raiding tribe took away the nets for their own uses. He tried digging under the thick layer of snow just to eat the grass like a common deer, yet just as quickly vomited it up.
He held out hope for someone, anyone to help him. He wandered out of the village —never straying too far— to find some food, yet all of his attempts were in vain. The hunger simply kept growing and it became more unbearable with each passing moment. He held on for as long as he could, but his mind soon began to slip. He could hear the voices of his loved ones calling to him and telling him to eat. They told him it's what they wanted. On the final day, it was so terribly cold and he was so hungry his stomach had rebelled against him. He began to waste away and became frail and skeletal as if he were dead already.
He couldn’t take it anymore. With what wood he had left, he took an arm from one of the victims. Ironically the winter cold had preserved the food long enough. He cooked it as one would have cooked a freshly caught fish. Once the task was done, he held the severed arm in his hands. The smell was so tempting to him. Freshly cooked meat right in the palms of his hands, yet he hesitated. He could feel his mind reeling back at the horror he was about to do. The shame he would feel over the evil he would commit in this act of desperation.
He had this one chance to rid himself of the foul thing once and for all. To throw the arm away and resolve himself to this fate. Yet in the end, the hunger won out and he took of the fruit thereof and did eat. It filled him and warmed his belly. He could live. But what he didn’t know is that he was dead already the moment that cut of meat slithered down his throat. It was a gradual change. At first he only ate when he was hungry, eating enough until his body got better. Yet he would get hungrier sooner and it took more to fill him up.
At night when he slept he felt as if his brain were about to shatter his skull like an egg and crawl out of his head. The pain he endured was monstrous. He would slam his head on rocks just to rid himself of the pain or pass out, but be unable to kill himself. He was already banished from death at that point. The hunger continued to grow until it was all that he could feel.
He decided that it was a waste of time to cook the food and ate it raw, ripping the flesh from bone with his teeth. It saved time in what would be spent in eating. His skin turned pale, yet the cold affected him much less now. The gnawing hunger became his only concern. His body twisted and contorted. The snapping of bone and the ripping of flesh brought on debilitating pain, yet the hunger was even worse than anything. Some of his flesh began to necrotize and came off like peeling a banana, yet even this was like a warm summer’s kiss compared to the ravenous hunger.
His fingernails fell off one by one and were replaced by talon-like claws. His bones stretched unnaturally long like pulling the threads of a tapestry until the entire thing became undone. All of this took the course of months on his own, never realizing what he was turning into. Around the final months it looked as if something were wearing his skin like a cheap mask. His face was taut like a drum as something was prepared burst through his face. When he tried to eat a leg, his lips got in the way, so he simply ripped them off of his face and ate them along with the leg. Eventually his jaw split from his chin and up to just under where his ears were. It was a new mouth that had come to replace the old mouth.
The old human mouth was small with obsolete teeth that were unable to rip flesh from bone as effectively. This old mouth would morph into the creature's nose and resembled that of a skeleton’s nose hole. The new mouth was wider and rows of teeth that would fill a wolf with envy. It could open wider and put more food into its maw without trouble.
His legs broke and fixed themselves to be digitigrade like that of a wolf. When he stood fully erect they were straight like a man, and he could stand tall, but he found that it was easier to switch between two feet and four limbs.
At long last the antlers breached through the skin of the forehead and adorned on its brow like an eldritch crown. Its old eyes simply fell out of the sockets and were replaced by new eyes that were sunken into the eye holes. They could see things more clearly, especially at night. The skin on its face hardened and became bone, the only trace of its human face became a warped reflection. It picked up what was left of its old eyes and consumed them too.
What was left of the lone survivor was buried deep within the back of the creature's mind. It would be forced to witness the horrors of its wretched existence every once in a while. It was a constant losing battle between what remained of the man’s soul and the all consuming hunger that ravaged his body. Physically any trace of humanity was gone save for the vaguely humanoid shape. It was like a demon was wearing human skin in order to mock humanity; to point at its simpering apes that God created and laugh at them for their own hubris and stupidity.
Once the last bits of food were gone, it tried to break the bones to eat the marrow, yet it found nothing. It wandered off into the woods and caused misery to the rest of the land. It consumed everything that wandered across its path. It devoured beasts whole and coughed up what it couldn’t eat. It wandered in the forest and ate everything it could just to rid itself of the endless hunger.
It never aged and eventually found itself in the woods near New Hope. The village was only the latest victim in this long line of savage hunger that feasted upon the fear of its victims. Over the years that it lived, it gained a new name. It was not the first of its kind, but it was an ancient creature that had many tales told about it. A name that stuck into the minds of the natives forever more. Given the unique languages throughout the tribes there were numerous spellings of it, yet many of them had the same name.
One word was the name of the beast. One word.
Wendigo.