Page 8 of Monster's Obsessive Hunger
I press her back against the rough bark of an ancient pine, trapping her between the unyielding wood and the hard planes of my own body. I move against her, a slow, grinding friction that is both torment and ecstasy. Her legs, as if by instinct, wrap around my waist, pulling me tighter against the heat of her core. The sensation is electrifying. Through the layers of our clothes, I can feel her softness, her heat, and it is driving me to madness.
My light is a chaotic storm of purple and red, of desire and the ever-present hunger, now twisted into something new. I am on the absolute edge, a precipice of sensation I have not known in a thousand years. I want more. I want all of her. The urge to take her, to claim her completely, is a physical violence inside me. But the image of her, broken and bleeding in the snow, flashes in my mind. With a ragged growl that is torn from the very depths of my soul, I pull back. I stumble away from her, my whole body shaking with the force of my restraint, leaving her panting against the tree, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock, fear, and a burning, mirrored desire.
12
LYSSA
The memory of last night is electric in my blood. I move through my day in a daze, the world muted and distant. Every mundane task is overlaid with the ghost of his touch, the phantom pressure of his monstrous body against mine. The line between fear and desire has been erased, leaving behind a thrilling, terrifying landscape where the two are one and the same. I am no longer just a girl who tells stories to a monster. I am a woman who has willingly pressed herself against the abyss and found it staring back with a hunger that mirrors her own.
I know I will go to him tonight. The question is no longerif, buthow. Our strange ritual has changed. It is no longer just about voices and memories; it is about the charged space between our bodies, the unspoken promises made in the language of touch. I want to bring him something, an offering that acknowledges this shift. My gaze falls upon the small, leather-bound book on the shelf beside my bed. It was my mother’s, a collection of old poems and verses, its pages thin and soft from years of her turning them. It is one of the few pieces of her I have left.
To share this with him feels like the most intimate act I can imagine, more intimate even than what we shared last night. I am not just giving him my voice; I am giving him the words that shaped my mother’s heart, and in turn, my own.
I arrive at the clearing earlier than usual, the setting sun painting the snow in shades of rose and violet. My heart is a frantic pavo in my chest, a mix of nervous anticipation and a deep, resonant longing. I expect to find him waiting as he always is, a silent, patient statue in the shadows. But he is not still. He is pacing at the far edge of the clearing, a caged predator wearing a path in the snow. His massive frame is coiled with a tense, agitated energy I have never seen in him before. He moves back and forth, his claws extended, gouging shallow furrows in the frozen earth. He hasn’t seen me yet, lost in whatever torment is driving him. I clutch the book to my chest and hesitate in the shelter of the trees, a cold knot of apprehension tightening in my stomach. Something is wrong.
I take a breath and step into the clearing. “Thorrin?”
He freezes mid-stride, his skull-face snapping toward me. His light is a turbulent, chaotic storm of deep purple and angry red. He looks trapped, tormented. He doesn’t speak, just stares at me, his hollows burning with a desperate, wild light. He is actively avoiding my gaze, his skull tilted so that his sockets are fixed on the ground somewhere to my left. The gesture is so profoundly unlike him, so full of a shame I cannot comprehend, that it frightens me more than his stillness ever did.
“I brought something,” I say, holding up the book. “I thought… I could read to you.”
He says nothing, just resumes his pacing, a relentless, agitated rhythm that sends waves of anxiety through me. I refuse to be deterred. I settle myself on a fallen log, arranging my cloak around me, and open the book. The pages are fragile, and I handle them with a reverence that feels like a prayer.
“This was my mother’s favorite,” I say to his restless form. My voice is soft in the frozen air as I begin to read, the ancient words of the poem a strange counterpoint to the barely contained violence of his movements. It is a poem about a love so vast it mirrors the sea, a love that is both a safe harbor and a drowning tide.
Usually, my voice soothes him. It stills his monstrous form and turns His light to a warm, contented gold. But not tonight. Tonight, the words seem to agitate him further. His pacing becomes faster, his claws digging deeper into the earth. The beautiful, romantic verses feel like stones I am throwing against the iron walls of his torment, and they are having no effect.
The tension becomes unbearable. My voice falters, the words catching in my throat. I close the book. “Thorrin, what is it?” I ask, my own fear making my voice tremble. “You’re frightening me. Talk to me.”
He stops his pacing and turns to finally face me full-on. The chaotic light in his chest pulses violently, and the raw anguish in his posture is a wave of despair that washes over me from across the clearing.
“I used to hunt your kind,” he says. The confession is brutal, stripped of any attempt to soften the blow. “Not like the others. Not for their voices. Not for their stories.”
I stare at him, my blood turning to ice in my veins. I don’t understand. He has only ever shown interest in my voice, my emotions. He has never shown the simple, physical hunger for flesh that defines his kind.
“Then why?” I whisper.
He looks away, his skull-face a mask of self-loathing. “Because it felt good,” he admits, the words scraped from the deepest, ugliest part of his soul. “Their terror was… a kind of music. The snap of their bones, a satisfaction. I didn’t just feed the curse, Lyssa. I reveled in it. I was a connoisseur of fear.”
There it is. The monster I have been romanticizing, the lonely creature I have been pitying, is so much worse than I ever imagined. He is not just a victim of a curse; he was a willing, joyful participant in its cruelty. I feel sick. The beautiful, intimate world we have been building together crumbles to ash around me.
“But with you,” he continues, his voice breaking on the words, “it is different. The moment I heard your voice, that old cruelty… it tasted like poison. The hunger is quieter now. It is… changed.” He finally forces himself to look at me, and his hollows burn with a desperate, pleading light. “But it is not gone.”
He takes a step closer, his massive frame radiating a dangerous, unstable energy. “I need you to understand. The creature that built a collection of bones is not gone. The monster that savored the screams of the dying still lives inside me, sleeping. Your presence has lulled it to sleep, but it is not dead.”
He stops just out of arm’s reach, a towering figure of bone a and terrible, honest warning. His light is a deep, menacing red, the color of blood and danger.
“There are parts of me,” he says, “that you should still fear.”
13
THORRIN
She is gone, and the silence she leaves behind is a physical weight. The clearing, which was alive with the color and warmth of her voice only moments ago, is now just a pocket of cold, empty moonlight. I stand motionless, listening to the last echoes of her footsteps fade into the vast, indifferent quiet of the forest. The air still holds her scent, a faint trace of woodsmoke and clean wool, and I breathe it in like a dying man’s last gasp. It does not soothe me. It only sharpens me.
The ache inside me is a terrible thing. It is not the familiar, gnawing emptiness of the curse’s hunger. This is a sharper pain, a more focused craving. Her stories, her laughter, her presence—they do not simply fill the void within me; they have reshaped it. Now, the hollowness has her exact dimensions, and without her here to occupy it, the feeling is unbearable.
My clawed hands clench, the talons digging into my own palms. I need to move, to hunt, to do something other than stand here in this haunted silence. I rake my claws through a drift of snow, the frozen crystals spraying into the air. The physical act provides no release. There is a restless, agitated energy coiling in my limbs that has no outlet. She has seen the ugliest part ofme, the cruel predator I was, and she did not run. Her courage should be a comfort, but instead, it is a torment. It makes her more precious, more vital, and the thought of losing her is a new kind of terror that makes the physical hunger seem like a minor inconvenience. Her presence is a strange sort of poison. It soothes the old pain while creating a new, more potent addiction. A single drop of water to a man dying of thirst. It does not quench; it only reminds him how much he needs to drink.
