Page 2 of Monster's Obsessive Hunger
“You’re fading, Lyssa,” she says. “You look right through me when I speak. It’s like you’re not even here anymore.”
I want to reassure her, to lie and say I’m just tired, but the words won’t form. How can I explain that I’m listening for a ghost? That her voice, so solid and real, is just noise that gets in the way of the only sound that matters? She would think I’ve finally gone mad. Sometimes, in the deepest hours of the night when the house is still and my own reflection in the windowpane looks like a stranger, I think she might be right.
I spend hours pressed against the glass, my breath fogging the view of the skeletal trees. Is this grief? Has my sorrow finally become so vast it has learned how to speak? I press the heels of my palms into my eyes until I see bursts of color, trying to force the sound away, but it’s no use. The voice is woven into the very fabric of the night.
On the fifth night since I first whispered back, the voice changes. It’s no longer just my name, a simple, haunting call. Tonight, it sings. A lullaby, soft and sweet, the same one my mother used to sing to quiet my childhood fears. It’s a melody so deeply buried in my memory that hearing it now leaves me gasping with a pain that is half-grief, half-wonder.
Hush now, little one, the moon is high,
The stars are watching from the sky…
Tears stream down my face, hot and silent. This is too much. Too real to be a trick of the wind or a phantom of my own broken mind. The wind cannot remember a lullaby. My own grief, vast as it is, could not conjure a melody so perfectly. It’s her. She’s out there, somehow, and she is singing to me.
My resolve, worn thin by sleepless nights and the constant ache of longing, finally shatters. I can’t live like this anymore, a prisoner in my own home, caught between the world of the living and the world of a ghost. I have to know. Even if the truth destroys me, it has to be better than this torturous uncertainty.
My movements are slow, deliberate, as if I’m in a trance. My trembling hands find the old oil lantern on my dresser, the one we haven’t used since father could afford tallow candles. The flint sparks, a tiny star in the oppressive darkness of the room, and the wick catches, casting a warm, flickering glow that pushes the shadows back. The light feels like courage.
I don’t bother with shoes. The cold of the floorboards against my bare feet is a sharp, grounding sensation, a reminder that I am still alive, still part of this physical world, at least for now. My nightdress is thin, offering no protection from the mountain’s chill, but I don’t feel it. There is a fire now, a desperate, burning need that eclipses all other sensations.
I unlatch the door to my room, the soft click of the mechanism sounding like a gunshot in the silent house. I move through the sleeping home like a ghost myself, down the narrow stairs, past the kitchen where the phantom scent of my mother’s baking still lingers on the coldest nights.
The main door groans in protest as I pull it open, the sound a mournful sigh that seems to echo the ache in my own soul. Cold night air rushes in to greet me, carrying the scent of pine and damp earth and the promise of answers.
The lantern light cuts a trembling, golden path across the frosted ground. Beyond its glow, the forest waits, a wall of impenetrable black. The voice is stronger out here, clearer, weaving through the trees like a silver thread, pulling me forward.
Come now, little one, don’t you cry,
Mother’s here to sing you a lullaby…
My bare feet touch the frozen earth, and I don’t flinch. The pain is distant, unimportant. I take a step, then another, leaving the warm, familiar world of the village behind. The lantern sways in my hand, its light a fragile shield against the immense, waiting darkness. I am barefoot and shaking, armedwith nothing but a flickering flame and a love that refuses to die. I follow the voice. I walk into the woods.
3
THORRIN
Ifeel her coming long before I see her. A subtle shift in the forest's rhythm, a tremor in the ancient silence that only I can perceive. The air, once still and cold, now carries the faintest trace of her scent—woodsmoke, clean linen, and the uniquely human smell of warm blood pulsing just beneath fragile skin. For weeks, this scent has been a torment, a temptation I have learned to resist. It is not her flesh I crave. Not anymore.
It is the sounds she makes. The soft cadence of her voice, the sharp intake of her breath when she is startled, the musicality of her laughter that I have only heard in the echoes of my mimicry. These are the things I hunt now. I crouch in the deep shadows of my clearing, a space I have claimed for this strange new ritual, and I listen. My chest, a cage of bone and regret, glows with a faint, hungry red. The hunger is always there, a low fire that never truly dies, but her presence changes its nature. It is something I cannot name.
For five nights, I have called to her with the voice of the mother she lost, a cruel trick I learned centuries ago to lure prey into a false sense of security. But with Lyssa, the cruelty has curdled into something else. I use the voice not to deceive herfor a kill, but to draw her close enough that I can listen. I am a collector of sounds, a connoisseur of emotions I can no longer feel myself. I hoard her words, her whispers, replaying them in the suffocating quiet of my lair until they are worn smooth as river stones.
Tonight, my patience wears thin. The nightly ritual is no longer enough. The distance between us feels like a chasm, and the need to close it is becoming an obsession. I want to see the emotions on her face as she speaks them. I want to watch the way her eyes light up when she tells a happy story, or the way they darken with a grief that feels so beautifully, achingly familiar.
A new thought, sharp and dangerous, slices through the fog of my longing. What if I used a different voice? Not her mother’s, not some forgotten victim’s, but her own. The idea is both thrilling and repulsive. To turn her own sound against her, to reflect her own soul back at her from the empty sockets of a monster—what would that provoke? Terror, certainly. But what else? I feel a flicker of something that might once have been curiosity. It is a risk. It might drive her away forever. But the need to see her, to witness her reaction, overrides the caution learned over centuries of solitary hunting. She is closer now. I can hear the snap of a twig under her bare foot, a profound vulnerability it makes my claws extend into the frozen earth.
She stumbles into the clearing like a fawn breaking cover, a fragile creature. The lantern she carries is a tiny, defiant star, casting a halo of golden light around her that makes the darkness in the clearing seem deeper, more absolute. Her nightdress is thin, offering no real protection, her feet are bare against the snow. Foolish. So beautifully, recklessly foolish.
I remain perfectly still in the shadows of an ancient pine, a predator melded with the night. From here, I am just another configuration of darkness, another shape in a forest full of them.I watch her, my non-existent breath held tight in my chest. She stops in the center of the clearing, her head turning slowly as she scans the trees. The lantern light trembles in her hand, revealing the fine tremor in her fingers, the wide, searching look in her eyes. She is terrified, yet she came anyway. This strange, breakable creature with a courage that makes no sense.
“Mother?” she whispers, and the sound is so full of desperate hope it feels. The red glow in my ribs flickers, and for a moment, I am tempted to answer in that same stolen voice, to give her the comfort she so desperately craves.
But the new, sharper need wins out. I want to see what lies beneath her hope. I want to see the moment it shatters.
As she takes another hesitant step, the moonlight finally finds me. It spills over my shoulder, tracing the curve of my skull, the sharp line of my jaw, the empty sockets where eyes should be. I see the exact instant she registers my presence. Her intake of breath is sharp, a blade of sound in the stillness. Her body goes rigid, the lantern slipping from her nerveless fingers to land in the snow with a soft hiss, its light suddenly muted, choked. The hope in her eyes doesn't just fade; it dies, replaced by a pure, primal horror that is the most exquisite thing I have seen in a century. This is what I am. A killer of hope. A thing of bone and nightmare.
She knows. She finally sees.
I take a slow, deliberate step out of the shadows, letting the moonlight paint the full horror of my form. Eight feet of terrifying skeletal mass, exposed bone and sinew, with a heart that burns with cursed light. I let her see it all. I want her to understand the true nature of the thing that has been calling to her in the dark. I open my mouth, and the voice that emerges is not my own gravelly rasp, nor the soft cadence of her mother. It is a perfect, chilling mimicry of her own voice, laced with the terror she is feeling right now.
