Page 21 of Monster's Obsessive Hunger
The cold inside is absolute, a physical presence that seeps into my very bones. The air is stale with the scent of old kills and a loneliness so profound it has become the bedrock of this place. My gaze falls on the wall beside my sleeping furs, on the two initials I carved there in a fit of possessive desperation. L. K. The letters are a stark, white scar on the stone, a testament to a claim I no longer have the right to make. The sight of them is a fresh torment.
I cannot bear the silence. I cannot bear the emptiness. If I cannot have her here in flesh, I will have her here in spirit. The need is a frantic, clawing thing inside me, a desperate attempt to ward off the encroaching gray void. I find a sharp-edged piece offlint, its point perfect for carving, and I turn to the wide, blank expanse of the cave wall. If this place is to be my tomb, then it will be one that tells her story.
I begin to carve. My claws, which have only ever been instruments of destruction, now become tools of a desperate, reverent creation. I etch the words of the first story she ever told me into the cold, unyielding stone. The tale of the small, woundedpavo. The work is slow, painstaking. The scrape of flint on rock is the only sound, a funereal rhythm in the suffocating quiet. I am not just carving words; I am carving my penance. I am making her memory a permanent part of this desolate place, just as she has become a permanent part of me.
As I work, I speak the words aloud, My voice a strange and clumsy vessel for her memory. I mimic her tone, the gentle rise and fall of her cadence, trying to recapture the magic of her telling. But when I come to the parts where she laughed, the sound that comes from my throat is a grotesque parody. It is not the bright, warm yellow of her joy. It is a hollow, broken thing, tinged with the deep, aching blue of my own sorrow. The mimicry is a failure. It is a ghost without a soul, an echo in an empty chamber. The sound of my own loneliness mocking me in her perfect, stolen voice is a new and exquisite form of torture.
I finish the first story, the words a rough, pale script on the dark wall. My work is clumsy, amateurish, a child’s scrawl compared to the elegant, living thing her story was. I step back, and my gaze falls on a crumpled piece of fabric her tunic. The one she was wearing the night I broke her. It is stained with dirt and with the dark, faded patches of her blood. It is the physical proof of my failure, the shroud of the beautiful, trusting thing I almost destroyed.
I cannot bear the sight of it. It is a poison in this place, a relic of my own monstrous nature. I snatch it from the floor and carry it outside into the cold, unforgiving night. With my bareclaws, I tear at the frozen earth at the base of a silent, watchful pine. The dirt is hard as iron, but my grief gives me a strength that is born of desperation. I dig a shallow pit, a grave for my own unforgivable sin. I place the tattered, blood-stained fabric within it, and I cover it with stones and snow. It is a burial. It is a funeral for the part of me that is too dangerous to be near her. As I place the last stone on the small mound, a whisper escapes my lips, carried away on the sighing wind.
“You deserve a gentler monster.”
I speak the words into the wind, a final act of letting her go, a sentence I have passed on myself. I expect only the indifferent silence of the mountains in reply. I am a beast of the dark, and the dark, alone. That is my penance. That is my fate.
But a different voice answers, quiet but clear, carried on the frozen air from the edge of my territory.
“I don’t want a gentler one. I wantyou.”
I freeze. My non-existent heart seizes in my chest. It is a trick. A phantom of my own tortured mind, my obsession finally given its own voice. It cannot be real. I turn slowly, my entire being a single, taut nerve of disbelief and a hope so fierce it is a physical pain.
She is there. Standing at the edge of the clearing, a small, dark figure against the vast, white expanse of the snow. She is wrapped in a thick, dark cloak, her face a pale oval in the moonlight. She should be miles away, in the warmth and safety of Kaerith’s home. She should be healing. She should be as far from me as possible.
But she is here. She has crossed the dangerous, frozen wilderness. She has come back to me.
The sight of her, the scent of her, shatters the cold, desolate peace of my self-imposed exile. She takes a hesitant step forward, into my territory, into my world, and my entire being seems to crack open. The dim, sick green of my guilt isconsumed by a sudden, violent, blazing flare of gold. It is the color of wonder, of a miracle I did not dare to ask for. She is real. She is here. And she has chosen to return to the very monster who broke her. The agonizing weight of my guilt does not disappear, but for the first time, it is met by a hope so powerful, so blinding, that I feel I might be undone by it all over again.
34
LYSSA
The journey back to Thorrin’s territory is a long, cold walk into the heart of my own fear. Every step is a deliberate choice. My side throbs with a dull, persistent ache, a constant rhythm that reminds me of the stakes. Elira’s knife is a heavy, solid weight at my hip, a symbol of the hard-won wisdom she has given me. I am not the same naive girl who first stumbled into these woods chasing the ghost of a lullaby. The forest has scoured away my softness, and Elira has given me a spine of steel to replace it. I am no longer just prey.
When I reach the border of his lands, I do not hesitate. The markers—bleached bones and the skulls of his kills—are a grim, familiar sight. They should be a warning, a sign to turn back. Instead, they feel like the landmarks of home. I step across the invisible line, a willing trespasser returning to the domain of her monster.
The air here is thick with his scent—that deep, musky smell of ancient stone and solitude, but it is laced with something else now. A sharp, raw grief that seems to cling to the very air. I follow it, my boots crunching in the deep snow, my breath pluming in the frigid air.
I find him near a small mound of freshly disturbed earth and stones at the base of a pine tree. His back is to me. He is a looming silhouette of despair, his massive frame hunched, his head bowed. He is so lost in his own torment that he does not sense my approach. He is speaking, his true voice a low, gravelly whisper that the wind almost steals away.
“You deserve a gentler monster,” he whispers to the cold, empty air. It is a farewell. An act of letting me go that is tearing him apart. He believes he is doing the honorable thing, exiling himself from my life to keep me safe. He is a fool. A beautiful, noble, broken fool. And he is my fool.
“I don’t want a gentler one,” I say. “I want you.”
He freezes. His entire body goes rigid, a statue carved from shock and disbelief. He turns slowly, his movements jerky, uncertain. When his skull-face finds me, the cinders where his eyes had been are a dim, sick green, flickering with confusion. He thinks I am a ghost, a hallucination conjured by his own grief. His light, which has been a dull, miserable glow, flares with a brilliant, startled gold.
“Lyssa?” he rasps, my name a question, a prayer.
I do not answer with words. I begin to walk toward him, my steps even and sure in the deep snow. I do not stop until I am standing directly before him, close enough to feel the cold radiating from his bones. He is trembling, a fine, violent shudder that runs through his entire frame. He is a mountain on the verge of an avalanche, and I am walking willingly into its path.
I raise my hand, and he flinches, a small, pathetic movement from a beast of such immense power. He expects me to strike him, to punish him. Instead, my palm comes to rest gently against his ribs, directly over the turbulent, glowing heart of his being. The light pulses under my touch, warm and alive and so full of a pain I can feel in my own soul.
His gaze is locked on mine, the fires in his sockets a maelstrom of confusion and a hope so fierce it is almost a terror. I give him the truth, the only gift I have left to offer.
“I’m not here because I have to be,” I say. “I left a warm fire and a safe bed to walk through a frozen wilderness to find you. Ichosethis.” I press my hand a little harder against his chest, willing him to feel the certainty in my touch. “I chooseyou.”
My words, my touch, my choice—they are the final blow. The monstrous strength that holds his massive construction together seems to dissolve. A sound, half-growl, half-sob, he collapses. He drops to his knees before me in the snow, his entire body shaking, his skull-face bowed in a gesture of absolute, profound surrender. It is not the submission of a defeated predator; it is the capitulation of a soul that has been granted a mercy it never believed it deserved.
I do not move. I keep my hand on his chest, a steady, grounding pressure, an anchor in the storm of his emotions. The light beneath my palm is a chaotic swirl of color—the gold of wonder, the blue of a sorrow so deep it has no bottom, the fierce, protective white of a love he does not know how to name.
