Page 17 of Monster's Obsessive Hunger
Glimmering crystals are embedded in the rock, casting a cold, sterile blue-white glow that illuminates a room devoid of any warmth or comfort. The air is thin, smelling of strange, astringent herbs and the faint, crackling scent of ozone, like the air after a lightning strike. This is an elven room. Sharp angles and cold beauty, and it feels more alien and unnerving than Thorrin’s bone-strewn cave ever did.
A flutter of panic tightens my chest. Where is he? The last thing I remember is his desperate flight through the snow, his guilty, terrified presence a strange and powerful comfort. I push myself up, my muscles protesting, the ache in my sidesharpening to a clear, insistent throb. The movement is painful, but it is manageable. I am alive. I am healing.
A figure shifts in a high-backed chair, a shadow detaching itself from the deeper gloom. Elira. She has been watching me, her posture still, her gaze sharp and unreadable. There is a cup of steaming liquid in her hands, but she makes no move to offer it to me.
“You’re awake,” she states, her voice flat, devoid of warmth. It is not a question.
My voice is a dry, rusty croak. “Where is he?” It is the only question that matters. “Where is Thorrin?”
Elira takes a slow, deliberate sip from her cup, her dark eyes never leaving my face. The silence stretches, a calculated pause designed to unnerve me, to assert her control over this situation. I refuse to look away, meeting her hard gaze with a fragile defiance of my own. I won't intimidated. Not when it comes to him.
“You’ve been unconscious for a full day,” she says finally, her tone still cool and clinical. “The magus says the healing took. You were lucky. Another hour in the cold and it wouldn’t have mattered what he did.”
“Where is he?” I repeat, my voice stronger this time. I won't deflected.
She sets her cup down on a small stone table beside her, the clink of ceramic on stone the only sound in the sterile room. A faint, contemptuous smile touches her lips. “Waiting,” she says, the word laced with disdain. “Outside the gate. Like a starving dog at the door.”
Her description of him, so cruel and dismissive, ignites a protective fire in my chest. She sees him as a pathetic, slavering beast. She doesn’t know him. She doesn’t understand. I struggle to sit up further, ignoring the sharp protest from my ribs.
“He is not a dog,” I say. “He saved my life. He brought me here, to you. To his enemies.”
“He is the one who broke you in the first place,” she counters, her voice like ice.
“It was an accident!” The words tumble out of me in a desperate, breathless rush. I have to make her see. “He doesn’t… he’s not like the other Waira. He doesn’t feed on flesh. He feeds on voices. On stories. I was telling him stories, and he listened. He never tried to hurt me. He was lonely.”
The word is simple, pathetic truth that feels like the key to the entire, impossible puzzle. I watch her, waiting for her to scoff, to tell me I am a naive fool who has mistaken a predator’s trick for a soul.
But she doesn’t. Elira’s hard gaze wavers, just for a second. She looks away from me, her eyes fixing on some distant point on the cold stone wall, and a flicker of some old, painful memory crosses her features. The mask of the hardened survivor cracks, and for a moment, I see the girl she must have been, the girl who was also claimed by a monster in the dark.
When she speaks again, her voice is different. The sharp, contemptuous edge is gone, replaced by a quiet, weary resignation. “So was Kaerith.”
The admission is a profound and unexpected offering, a bridge of shared understanding thrown across the chasm that separates us. She understands. She has seen the same monstrous loneliness, the same desperate, alien need for connection in her own Waira. This is not forgiveness for Thorrin, not by a long shot. But it is a glimmer of empathy. She is not just looking at a foolish girl who fell for a monster. She is looking at a reflection.
Tears I didn’t know I was holding back well up in my eyes, blurring the cold, sterile room into a swirl of blue light and shadow. The relief is so profound it leaves me weak. I am notalone in this. There is another woman in this world who knows what it is to love a shadow beast such as he; to find a heart in his hunger.
Elira looks back at me, her expression softening into something that is not quite kindness, but is no longer pure hostility. It is the weary, knowing look of a veteran speaking to a new recruit in a war that never ends.
“Rest,” she says. “You are safe here for now. We will talk more when you are stronger.”
She stands and leaves the room, leaving me alone with the quiet hum of the healing magic and the echo of her words.So was Kaerith.For the first time, I feel a sliver of hope that is not just for my own survival, but for a future I might share with Thorrin. If this fierce, strong woman could find a way to build a life with her monster, then maybe, I can too.
27
LYSSA
Days and nights blur into a monotonous cycle of pain and healing. The elven chamber is my world, a cage of cold stone and sterile silence. A low fever takes root in my healing body, leaving me weak and shivering beneath the thin, silken sheets. Elira is a constant, a quiet presence, a shadow in a high-backed chair. Her care is not gentle in the way my mother’s was; there are no soft reassurances, no humming of lullabies. Her kindness is a practical, almost brutal thing. She forces bitter, restorative elven teas between my lips, ignoring my grimaces. She changes the bandages on my shoulder with efficient, unsentimental movements, her fingers probing the bite mark with a clinical detachment that is somehow more unsettling than simple cruelty.
During the worst of the fever, when my dreams are a tangled mess of snow and blood and the chaotic light of Thorrin’s heart, I feel a cool hand on my forehead. I blink my eyes open to find her beside the bed, brushing the damp, sweat-soaked strands of hair from my face. Her touch is surprisingly gentle, her expression unreadable in the dim, crystalline light. In that moment, sheis not the furious woman from the forest, nor the cold, clinical healer. She is something else, something closer to an ally.
I find myself studying her in the long, quiet hours. She is a fortress, built of a strength I can only begin to comprehend. She survived the dark elves, survived being claimed by a Waira, and has somehow forged a life in this desolate, monstrous world. She is my future, a possible version of what I might become if I am strong enough to endure. The thought is both terrifying and strangely comforting. I am not the first human to walk this path. The gratitude I feel for her is a quiet, aching thing, a fragile seed taking root in the barren ground of my recovery. She is not my friend, not yet. But she is the only person in the world who might understand.
In the deep, silent hours of the third night, when the pain in my side has dulled to a persistent, grinding ache, Elira finally speaks of more than just my healing. I am awake, staring at the way the crystal light makes strange patterns on the obsidian ceiling, when her voice cuts through the stillness.
“Kaerith broke three of my fingers the first time he touched me with anything other than restraint,” she says. She holds up her left hand, flexing the fingers in the dim light. “He was trying to give me a flower he’d found. He didn’t understand his own strength. He was so horrified by what he’d done, he disappeared into the mountains for a week. I thought he’d left me to die.”
I turn my head on the pillow to look at her, my heart aching with a sudden, sharp empathy. Her story is not my own, but the melody is the same. The accidental violence. The monstrous guilt.
“Waira love is not a human thing, Lyssa,” she continues, her gaze fixed on her own hand, on the memory of her own pain. “It is not gentle. It is not safe. It is a possessive, all-consuming thing, a hunger of the soul that is just as dangerous as the hunger of the curse. It will not tame the monster in him. It will only…redirect it. The beast that once hunted strangers will now spend all of its energy hunting for ways to keep you, to protect you, to own you. And sometimes, it will break you in the process.”
