C’thaami.

It meant ‘glutton’ in Old Caeri—in our tongue before the Coalition standardized Common among the allied realms. I remember my mother scolding me with it once, when I’d used my first allowance to stuff myself full at the baker’s store. ‘Eat too much, and the Ancestors will tear a hole in your stomach,’ she’d told me. ‘The food will leave you as you eat. They will make you c’thaami; always hungry; always thirsty.’

I believed it for years, being the gullible kid that I was. Her words made me eat carefully for every meal, taking care not to anger the spirit of the Ancestor dwelling in my blood. After all, mother was always right back then. That was how I felt. Even until now.

Because of her, the habit of eating only as much as I needed to always stuck with me. Up until I grew into my teens and away from superstitious belief.

A body only needed so much food, after all.

But it seemed that wasn’t true for my new companion.

We’d been traveling together for a few days, and over that time, I watched C’thaami tear into the swamp. Its black tentacles were constantly moving, plucking things along the ground and absorbing them into its mass. Every time it ate something, it shuddered in happiness, letting out these strange, warbling cries. It looked like a bottomless pit of oil, slithering forth to eat everything that caught its interest.

I pursed my lips as it plucked a bird’s nest from a tree. It downed the eggs and the nest, twigs and weeds all. Then a cricket, resting on tallgrass. Insects and snakes and fish fell into its belly without mercy.

Was this even okay?

I’d somehow stopped it from draining the color out of the things it passed through, but the eldritch abomination refused to listen when I told it to stop eating. Frankly, watching it do so constantly was making me nauseous. Just imagining myself eating a fraction as much as it did made my gut shudder and twist.

C’thaami swallowed a patch of fruits from a tree with a wet schlorp.

“Tasty! Good!” it said, speaking my voice. Or a distorted version of it. It was creepy, frankly, the way that there was a subtle undertone of animal growls and croaks mixed into it. Just similar enough to sound like mine, and simultaneously alien enough to send shudders down my back. But what could I do? It wasn’t like it had any other voices to try and replicate.

I turned my eyes to it as we trudged through the swamp.

“Don’t you get tired of eating things?”

“Eat good. Not tired!”

“Just try not to eat too much, okay?”

“Eat much? Okay!”

No, no. Do not eat much. That was not okay.

But C’thaami was already moving again. I watched the black mass sprout more tentacles, shooting out at terrifying speeds to latch onto different things. It peeled bark from trees and ripped roots from the soil. It slurped up the water and devoured the ground and sucked in the air. Like some miniature black hole. C’thaami shot off, warbling in excitement, and I paled.

“Wait, wait! No!” I ran after it, waving my arms. “Stop, C’thaami! Stop! Heel!”

Thankfully, it seemed to listen to my commands. C’thaami stopped and drew the tentacles back inside itself. Slowly, the mass of inky goop and eyes slithered back towards me, blinking curiously.

“Eat much no? Stop?”

I nodded, “Stop eating. Yes.”

C’thaami seemed to deflate, pooling down in that pouty way it did, “Eat good.”

“Yes, eat good,” I said, slowly, pushing stray tentacles back into it. “But only sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“Yes. Not always.”

It pooled further, clearly upset. I watched the black mass on the ground stare at me with narrowed, accusing eyes. I sighed and held up three fingers.

“You can eat again later. Three times a day, okay?”

The eyes narrowed further. I hesitated.

“…Five times a day.”

“Okay,” it said, before some of its tentacles started wriggling towards me. C’thaami blinked its many eyes. “But I ride Rowan back.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Again? Giving it an exasperated look, I turned and offered C’thaami my back. Sometimes, it felt like I was the thing’s pet, with how many things it could get me to do with a bit of nudging. But really, it was either entertain its demands or let it do as it pleased. Which was to eat and eat and eat. After all, it was a wonder that C'thaami listened to me at all. If I let it loose...

I shivered.

The Ancestors would boil my blood from the inside if I let this thing devour the swamp.

“Fine,” I said. “Just don’t try to eat my hair again.”

I heard C’thaami worble in excitement, and the eldritch abomination immediately slithered towards me. It latched onto my leg and crawled up to my back, wrapping itself around my shoulders like some living backpack of eyes and void-black flesh. C’thaami was strangely weightless when it did this, although I was more than aware of the weight it could bring out of itself. It seemed to have control of even that. Right now, it felt like a cold blanket over my back, barely noticeable if not for the little shifts and writhes of its many tentacles. When it tackled me for slimy tentacle hugs? It was like trying to wrestle with a boulder.

If this thing decided to eat me for real, I think I'd rather just sit down and let it do as it pleased. I really didn't want to be on the receiving end of C'thaami's predatory instincts. I'd had enough of being chased, thank you very much.

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Still, I couldn't deny that I kind of enjoyed having it around. There was just something exciting about dancing on the razor's edge with an entity like this.

I glanced back at the eldritch monstrosity in question. C’thaami, despite its lack of a face, was surprisingly expressive. Its eyes shone as they wandered, taking the world around it in from atop my shoulders. It seemed to enjoy looking at the world from so high up, flicking its eyes everywhere like that. It was cute in that terrifying, monster-puppy way. Kind of like wanting to pet a wild draken.

Dangerous? Yes. Cool? Definitely. But was it smart? Ancestors, no.

I smiled wryly at that. I wonder what Father would think if he saw me now, giving some terrifying creature a piggyback ride in the middle of nowhere like this.

He’d probably just laugh at me.

“The best way to approach a hostile animal is to try and feed it. Beasts are better than people in that regard; they don't hunt with a full stomach. Or so he'd say,” I muttered, smiling. "How do I apply that advice to a creature that's always hungry?" I shook my head in amusement and brought the bansuri to my lips again. Galesong carried me above the trees and let me walk and hop over the thin leaves as if they were solid earth. I looked ahead. Far, far ahead.

The dead Ancestor Tree in the distance was getting closer, now.

Caereith had a vaster horizon than most other realms, stretching seventy-three kilometers out when viewed from an open space. It made watching the world from a high point especially enjoyable. But more than that, it made big things all the more majestic in comparison to the world around it.

I stared into the distance, watching the Ancestor Tree climb up into the sky. The wood on it was calcified—turned into a substance that was more reminiscent of bone than bark. It looked like a gargantuan marble pillar from where I was, blossoming into a million leafless branches that speared into the clouds. The sun shone on one side of the tree, and it cast deep shadows against the world on the other.

Despite how far I could see, it still astounded me how I could still only see half of the whole thing. The top half of it peered over the horizon, and the rest of the tree flowed farther down, out of sight, digging into the soil with its titanic roots. Looking at it like this, I understood why these things were worshiped in the past. Back when they were still living, thinking things. I wondered what it was like, to speak to something so ancient. To something perhaps older than the Fae.

Over the hours, C’thaami and I got closer to the tree, and it began to dominate the horizon. It got wider with every mile I traveled. Vaster. The nearer I got to the tree, the more its size became apparent to me. I was almost lost in my wonder looking at it, playing a distracted Galesong into my instrument.

Until I spotted something else in the distance, that was.

I stopped atop one of the trees. I felt a shift of movement behind me, and my many-eyed passenger directed all of its eyes to me.

“Why stop?”

“I just spotted a familiar face,” I said. “And not one I particularly like.”

Saying this, I narrowed my eyes at the scene below us. Beneath the treetops, in an area of the swamp where the water was deeper than most, there was a collection of yurts and grass huts. The stilted houses sat over the water, where little fish-headed goblins gathered around an altar half-submerged into the water.

The altar depicted an ugly woman with spider-like proportions. Her hooked nose and long fingers were familiar to me even from afar, and I readily recognized even through the shoddy craftsmanship that it was a statue of the Hag.

And there, standing in the middle of the congregation of fishmen, was the glekk that sold me out to the old crone.

He wore a long grass cape, and on his head was a crown woven from animal bones. Its people looked at it in reverence as it gurgled into the air, the motions of its hands retelling a story. I watched it put a rock with a leaf glued to it down in front of the altar. And then a single, blue feather next to it. I frowned.

Were those supposed to be me and Venti?

I watched the glekk garble out glucks and glacks over the course of its story, and then an angry gurgle.

Around him, the rest of its kind gasped. The glekk motioned to the statue of the Hag behind it, its arms clasped in what looked like prayer. It shot up and raised a fist into the air. It roared a battle gurgle into the sky.

And then it kicked the poorly made representations of me and Venti off the altar.

The congregation cheered.

“Bastard,” I muttered, watching the fanaticism in the other glekks’ eyes. They looked like they were staring at a descended primordial from the stories, expressions awestruck and hopeful, as if the idiot in front of them would usher them into a new age.

He was using me and Venti to grow a cult. And it was working. I leaned on my back foot and clicked my tongue.

Damn it. I can’t believe I was actually a little impressed at the backstabbing little git.

That didn’t mean I was going to let the charade continue, though. I jumped down from the tree and descended, muttering under my breath, channeling a weak Galesong into my voice. I was getting better at it, now. Although it was still weaker than my normal song. Regardless, even the weakened version allowed me to float down silently from above.

Below me, the glekk bastard kept preaching to his tribe, puffing out his chest and beating it with a fist. He was so preoccupied with himself that his followers ended up noticing me first.

The cheering stopped. They stared at me as I landed behind him without a sound.

I squatted down to the small monster’s level and laid a hand on his shoulder, smiling with my sharp shark’s teeth. “I can’t help but notice that you chose a particularly ugly rock to represent me,” I said, and it froze. The glekk turned its head. It found me and the thirty-seven eyes of an eldritch abomination staring back.

He paled.

I had to admit, the fire-crackle warmth of schadenfreude in my chest at that moment felt good. I saw the glekk warriors around the altar raise their spears, but there were only five of them. A manageable amount. Even for me. Knowing this, the glekk leader motioned for them to stand down.

They obeyed, and the leader turned to us.

“Rock-thing!” it cried, stiffening as I tightening my grip around its shoulder. “Y-You live!”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Strange, how that happens. Do you know where my bird is?”

He paled further, “N-No!”

“Okay, then,” I nodded. “Let me paint you a picture. Venti is north, captured by your stupid Hag god, and—”

One of the glekks gurgled in anger, interrupting me. He rushed the altar with a spear, and just as I was readying myself to punch his face in, a black tendril lashed through the air and swept the warrior up from the ground. C’thaami wrapped the tendril around it and lifted it up, up into the air, as the glekk gathering around us screamed in terror. C’thaami crawled off my back and manifested its full form.

Black tentacles and eyes filled the altar. They crawled and gushed and spilled into the lake all around us.

Huh.

I blinked at the sight. I guess having a terrifying eldritch beast on your side was more useful than I thought. My alien friend looked at me, “Eat! Can?”

“Can,” I started, and then raised a finger to stop it. “But wait! Eat later.”

C’thaami wriggled out a pouting motion with its tentacles, but otherwise obeyed. Around us, the village of glekk was frozen, watching with pale faces. I almost felt bad for the ugly things. But almost wasn’t quite there. I grabbed the tribe’s new leader by the scruff of the neck, and I lifted him up as I rose to my full height. He struggled in my hand, flailing his limbs. Crying out garbled protests.

I shot him a glare. He shut up.

“Alright, you slimy shits! Listen up!” I nodded and called out to the glekks. They flinched as I pointed a finger at their king. “This idiot sold me out and thought it was a good idea. Now my bird’s gone. Do idiots you know how that makes me feel? It makes me unhappy.”

I strode down from the altar and into the water, towering over the three-foot-tall monsters. C’thaami slithered after me. Each of its eyes watched a member of the tribe with eerie, alien focus. I threw the glekk king behind me like a wet rag, and C’thaami caught him.

I clapped my hands at the rest of the tribe and nodded.

“Give me anything of value that your tribe has!” I said, swinging my bansuri and pointing it straight at a random glekk. It flinched, met my eyes, and I slowly moved the bansuri to C’thaami behind me. “You see my friend? It’s really hungry right now, and I don’t know how long I can stop it before it starts eating. And you know what happens to glekk who don’t give proper tribute? They get munched!”

The glekks cowered under the stare of the writhing void horror; the monster of the darkest abyss. A moment of silence passed, and I glared at them.

“So? What are you waiting for? A cult pamphlet? Get going!”

I swiped a spear from a nearby glekk and threw it to C’thaami. It caught the spear and its mass opened up to reveal its maw full of teeth. The spear went inside with a snap, a crunch, and a gulp.

That was all the encouragement that the tribe needed.

They screamed and rushed to give their new god tribute.