Hunger.
Hunger is what drove the snake. Hunger overpowered fear, overpowered worry, overpowered conscience. It literally could not remember ever having eaten, and it had lost count of the days it could remember.
Prey was everywhere. Prey was always everywhere. It could taste them in the air, see the grass twitch as they moved, sense the heat of their bodies in their burrows. But she had refused. She had refused until its muscles were weak and its thoughts were sluggish.
She could not refuse any longer.
There were many scents on the wind, but one in particular stood out. A bird. It did not know why the bird drew its attention. There was closer prey. More convenient prey. But she had picked that bird. As it drew closer, it became clear that the bird was spending its time on the ground. The snake had never seen a bird remain on the ground out here for long, so it must have been injured. An injured bird was as good as dead.
Fair game. Easy prey. No harm done. A full belly would last it weeks. Perfectly natural. Something would have to die so that it could live. It is a mercy. Survival was paramount. I have no choice.
The bird was quite a distance away, taking the entire night and a chunk of the morning to reach it. It had been by pure chance that the wind had been favorable enough to carry the scent this far. But she was willing to travel for this meal, even as her body screamed at her to stop. The golden grass was somewhat thicker here than elsewhere. Ideal as camouflage, and easier to stay entirely out of sight. As it approached. The snake noticed that there was a second scent mixed with the bird’s, more noticeable at this distance. A rodent of some sort. Must have been the bird’s own prey, or possibly something it had scavenged. That was how the world worked, after all.
It finally spotted the bird, laying on its stomach in the middle of all the grass, one likely injured wing stretched out to its side and various bits of leaf litter and other debris scattered on top of it. It blended in remarkably well, even up close. Unfortunately for the bird, its warm body lit it up like a torch against the cold grasses and dirt at this distance. It circled quietly, preparing to strike.
It would be easy. One bite, and it would be over. The bird would be paralyzed and dying before it even regained consciousness. And once it did, it would be unable to struggle. Unable to cry. Unable to express its suffering as she-
No. These were not the thoughts of a predator. Of a survivor. It was alive. The bird was going to die. It would stay alive. She would not hesitate any longer. It would-
EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
A loud, high-pitched scream filled the air. Too high pitched for the snake to even hear it. Rather, it felt it, the subtle buzzing of vibrations traveling across sensitive scales. The crow certainly heard it, however, leaping to its feet with a readiness that the snake never would have expected an injured animal to be capable of. Because it wasn’t injured, either. Instead, its outstretched wing had been covering a diminutive squirrel, the source of the rodent scent it had noticed earlier. The squirrel hadn’t been the bird’s meal, the crow had been sheltering it.
“Gray! Climb on!” The crow barked an order to the squirrel, the words impacting the snake like a slap to the face, drawing the world into a sharper focus that it had almost forgotten..
It could still strike. It was close. It was fast, faster than any bird could ever react. It would strike. It tensed its muscles, bared its fangs, and lunged… driving her fangs into the dirt by the crow’s feet.
No! Not people! I won’t eat people! The snake screamed within her own mind. It spoke! It was caring for another animal’s young! It! Isn’t! Food! It thrashed about in the dirt, whipping and rattling its tail wildly as she fought with itself to stay put and not strike again.
“Wait, are you…” The crow stared at the struggling snake in front of it, completely stunned by what it was witnessing. “You’re… not feral? Then why…” The crow paused for only a moment before springing into action. “Gray! Change of plans, stay back!” It leapt on top of the rattlesnake, putting its meager weight down on its head and neck. It wouldn't be able to pin the snake, but it had latched on at a point where the snake couldn’t bite it. “Calm down. I want to help.”
The declaration made the snake stop dead in its tracks. It was just like…
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“Hold still. I want to help!” The hare hopped closer to her twitching body, its concern clear as anything she had ever heard. “Forward-Strive, what is wrong?” She tried to talk, but she couldn’t. All she could do was open her mouth, which felt way too wide. Everything was a confusing haze. Her vision strangely blurred, her skin was cold and dry, she couldn’t feel her arms or legs. She could taste the air itself in ways she couldn’t comprehend. But when the hare got closer, it almost seemed to glow. It was warm. It was alive.
It was easy prey.
The snake was already in a position to strike, so it did. Its jaws clamped down on the back of the hare, the surprise of the attack seeming to stun it long before the venom did. It let go and backed up, prepared for the reprisal that often came from more energetic prey. But the hare never fought back. It didn’t kick, or bite, or claw. It just stared at the rattlesnake, betrayal and disbelief readable on a face that never should have been able to express such emotions.
“Why?” It asked, its voice a feeble, wordless squeak.
The snake tried to scream, but she didn’t have a voice.
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“Hey.”
Something prodded the snake in the side of the head, rousing her from the recurring nightmare. She was lying on a bed of flattened grass. The same grass she’d tried to ambush that bird in. Her head was throbbing worse than any hangover she could remember. She didn’t want to move.
“You’re malnourished and dehydrated, so much so that you passed out from the strain of struggling. You’re not going to be able to do anything until we fix that.” The crow croaked, and the snake felt something scrape against the ground in front of her. A cold, gray object slid into view. “Here’s some water. You need to drink it.”
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“Stay back…” The snake weakly shook the rattle on the end of her tail. “I’m… unsafe.”
“I’ve taken precautions. You’re in no condition to do much, and some clever twine usage should make it difficult for you to bite me.”
“What?” The snake tried to open her mouth, only to find her jaw stopped short by a loop of string around her snout, anchored tightly behind her wedge-shaped head so that it didn’t slip off. She could open her mouth enough to drink or eat something small, but not enough to properly employ her fangs. “Oh.” She lifted her head, struggling quite a lot for such a simple action, and looked at what had been placed in front of her. It was a makeshift bowl made of wet mud or clay. Slightly murky water filled it.
“Sorry that I couldn’t keep it cleaner. That clay stuff on the riverbank was the only thing I could find to hold and carry water in, and we don’t have time to let it dry, so the water is going to be a little muddy no matter what. It’s not toxic, though. I checked.”
The snake was barely paying any attention to the explanation, and just attempted to lower her head to drink the water. Doing so was difficult. Not because she was physically unable, but because the muscle memory and know-how behind it all belonged to it. She had to cede some amount of conscious control to do it.
Thankfully, it wanted to drink the water as much as she did. It lowered its head, submerging the end of its snout in the bowl and began steadily sucking down the water like the straw it essentially was.
“Now, as for food… This won’t be much, but it’s the best I could do.”
Lifting her head from the drained bowl, the snake watched as the crow pulled away a large leaf that had been covering something, and then nudged that something over to her with her beak. It was a dead mouse, still somewhat warm.
She hesitated. This is what she needed to survive. It was already dead. All she had to do was bite down, and let it swallow. But she still hesitated.
“Hey, I’m going to ask you a very blunt question,” the crow cawed and clicked, choosing its words carefully, “but I need to get this out of the way.” It took a deep breath in preparation. “You’re human, right?”
The snake froze, her disbelief and clear recognition being more than enough confirmation for the crow.
“I am too. You can call me Ink-Talon.” The crow hopped closer and extended a wing within reach of her tail.
“A handshake? Really?” All of her disbelief and confusion faded the moment they did something so blatantly insensitive. They were human, all right.
“An… approximation of one, but point taken. Sorry.” Ink-Talon retracted their wing sheepishly. “Do you have a name? Either a translation of your real one or one you’ve come up with?”
“I… No.” The snake shook her head. She could recall the name that the hare had used. She wished she couldn’t.
“That’s fair. There’s not much to prompt you to come up with one if you’re wandering the wilderness by yourself.” Ink-Talon’s gaze returned to the dead mouse on the ground between them. “You should eat something before we continue.”
“Right, just…”
“I know, it’s not exactly appetizing to look at. I struggled eating bugs at first, too.”
“No. It’s not that. I’m vegan.” The moment she hissed out the words, she realized just how stupid it must have sounded.
“Oh!” Ink-Talon tilted their head, as if the possibility had never occurred to them. “Oh.”
“...How did you bring yourself to do it? Kill that mouse?”
“I just…” The crow’s caws dropped to a near murmur. “I just focused on what needed to be done and… didn’t think about it until it was over.” They clearly didn’t like having done it, either. “But! I don’t think you should take the same approach…” They paused, planning their next question. “You weren’t the kind of vegan to insist that people keep their dogs and cats on vegan diets, were you?”
“No!” The snake rattled her tail. “Well, maybe at first. For a few years. But I learned better! It’s just as cruel to deny an animal its natural diet as it is to kill them unnecessarily.”
“Okay, well, now you are one of those animals. You’re inhabiting the body of an obligate carnivore, one you’re harming by refusing to eat. And I saw how you were behaving before. If you’re anything like the other reptile or the amphibian I know… It’s not just you in there, is it?”
The words hit the snake over the head like a sledgehammer, and she slowly let her body fall limp, rolling onto her side like a loose bundle of rope. She’d been so disturbed by the thoughts and instincts and desires of the snake intruding on her own that she’d treated it like another human being. Like some demon that was pushing her to kill and be cruel and not an animal trying to survive.
“Here. Just let it eat. You both need it.” Ink-Talon pushed the dead mouse up against her snout and then stepped back. “I’m going to go check on my companion. It didn’t need to see something so similar to itself being eaten at its age, so I sent it to go sort through some seeds for a meal. We won’t be far or hard to find, when you’re done.”
Eating the mouse was easy, once she actually let the snake do it. She could open her jaws just wide enough for it to bite down and begin the bizarrely elaborate process of swallowing. It technically was the same as how a human swallowed, muscles tensing and relaxing in sequence, but a human throat was a fraction of the length and made to take chewed food, on top of usually being assisted by gravity. As a snake, however, she got to feel the whole mouse move along her insides inch by inch before it eventually settled somewhere in her middle.
At this point, the snake wanted to rest in the sun and digest. It needed to recover its strength to hunt something more substantial. So did she, but she also didn’t want to be alone, now that she had the option. She would sun herself in the company of Ink-Talon and their “companion.”
Which way did they go? It would be easy enough to track them down, unless they just up and flew away. I just have to face a random direction to start and let it taste around for the scent. Okay, do your thing. Her forked reptilian tongue flicked out of her mouth and quickly retracted, delivering a bunch of information that she wouldn’t be able to make sense of without the context of the snake’s natural instincts. The scent was certainly noticeable there, and a little movement forward confirmed its direction, as it was immediately stronger in the first direction she tried.
And that was odd. Not on its own. It was a simple enough coincidence to occur, but it was strikingly similar to the coincidences that had brought her here in the first place. She had just arbitrarily decided to hunt some random, distant bird. It had been an objectively bad idea, given the distance, but she wasn’t thinking straight and just grabbed a scent at random to focus on, forcing herself into a singular mindset to try and overcome the part of her that refused to eat.
She could have picked any scent, there was no shortage of potential prey animals in these plains, and she hadn’t known that the one she’d picked belonged to a human like her. But she had, and she’d effectively won the lottery several times over in doing so. Even when she lost the scent along the way for one reason or another, she’d immediately found it again the moment she searched. And then just now, she’d picked a random direction to start her search, and rather than need to move in a circle to find the direction the scent was strongest in, she’d pointed herself at Ink-Talon. She didn’t feel like she had any innate sense of where they were. As far as she could tell, her lucky decisions had well and truly been arbitrary.
So it’s Fate, then? Sure, why not. The rattlesnake breathed deeply before starting towards the crow and squirrel. I’ve been turned into a snake in some bizarro alien grassland and forced to eat mice. Fate is hardly the most absurd thing to believe in right now. Let’s just hope you’re a good omen, crow.