Page 4 of Monster's Obsessive Hunger
Suddenly, he emerges. Not with a sudden crash, but with a fluid, silent grace that is all the more terrifying. One moment there is only a deep shadow beneath a towering pine, the next, he is there, a shadow of nightmare coalescing from the darkness. He is just as horrifying as I remember—the towering frame, the skull-face, the terrible, glowing heart pulsing a slow, steady crimson in his chest. He stops near the clearing, half in shadow, half in the moonlight, and simply watches me. The silence stretches, taut as a bowstring. This is a test. My fear is a wild bird beating its wings against the cage of my ribs, but I force myself to remain still, to meet his empty sockets without flinching. I will not run this time.
The seconds tick by, each one an eternity. The creature and I are frozen in our standoff, predator and prey, the space between us charged with a tension so thick I can almost taste it. My arm begins to ache from holding the lantern aloft, but I don’t lower it. The light is my shield, my declaration not to be consumed by his darkness. The crimson glow in his chest is steady, pulsing with a rhythm that feels measured, almost contemplative. He isn’t moving to attack. He is simply… observing. Waiting for me to make a move.
When he finally breaks the silence, his voice is not the mimicry of my mother, nor the chilling echo of my own. It is something entirely new.
“You came back.”
The sound rumbles from deep within his chest, a low, gravelly rasp like stones grinding together at the bottom of ariverbed. It is a voice that has not been used for conversation in a very long time, rough and resonant with disuse. It is undeniably his own. And it is more terrifying than any mimicry he could have produced. This is the true voice of the monster, stripped of all artifice. The sound itself seems to suck the warmth from the air, and a violent tremor runs through me. My knees feel weak, my resolve threatening to crumble into dust.
I want to run. Every instinct, every fiber of my being, screams at me to flee, to turn and crash through the underbrush until my lungs burn and my legs give out. But I force myself to hold his gaze. The flickering embers in his sockets seem to brighten, to focus on me with a new, unnerving intensity. He has revealed a piece of his true self, and now he waits for my reaction. I take a shuddering breath, the cold air searing my lungs, and clutch the knife in my pocket. My voice, when it comes, is a trembling whisper, but it is my own.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
It is the most profound lie I have ever told.
6
THORRIN
"I'm not afraid of you."
The lie is so pure, so beautifully crafted from terror and defiance, that it almost feels like a truth. I watch the human, Lyssa, as she stands in the center of my clearing, a small, trembling flame against the vast darkness of my world. I can smell her fear. It is a sharp, clean scent like ozone before a storm, a perfume that should trigger the basest parts of my hunger. Her heart is a frantic drum against her ribs, a rhythm that usually sings of a coming feast. Her knuckles are white where she clutches the useless little knife in her pocket. She is a creature made of fear, yet she stands her ground and offers me a lie as a shield.
Something shifts within me. For centuries, prey has only ever offered me pleas or screams. They beg for their lives, offer bargains they cannot keep, or simply break under the weight of their own terror. None has ever stood before me and attempted to build a fortress out of a falsehood. The novelty of it is… fascinating. It is the reason I used My voice. Some long-dormant instinct told me that the mimicry had served its purpose. The lure had worked; she was here. Now, the hunt had changed. Thiswas no longer about luring prey. This was about understanding it.
The crimson glow softens, the violent pulse of hunger easing into something more measured, more curious. I take a slow, deliberate step out of the shadows, letting the moonlight trace the full, horrifying truth of my form. I want her to see all of it—the skeletal cage, the skull-face, the cursed, burning heart. I want her to understand the choice she is making by staying.
“All living things feel fear,” I say. It feels strange to use it, the vibrations resonating in my hollow chest in a way that is both alien and deeply familiar. “It is a gift. It keeps you alive.”
She flinches at the sound, but her gaze remains locked on the holes which were once my eyes. I see the war in her eyes—the primal urge to flee battling a powerful, dangerous curiosity. She is trying to make sense of me, to fit me into a category she understands. Monster. Predator. Killer. But my stillness, my conversation, defies the simple labels. I can see the moment her terror makes room for a sliver of fascination. It is a start. I decide to offer her another piece of myself, a thing I have not given to another living creature in longer than human history has a name for.
“My name is Thorrin.”
The name hangs in the cold air between us, a strange and heavy thing. It feels foreign on my own tongue. For centuries, I have been nothing but ‘the creature’, ‘the monster’, ‘the thing in the woods’. To be Thorrin again… it is unsettling. Lyssa’s eyes widen slightly, the name a shock that momentarily overrides her fear. A monster with a name is no longer just a force of nature. It is an individual. It can be understood. And to be understood is to be vulnerable.
“Why?” she finally whispers, her voice shaking but clear. “Why did you use my mother’s voice? Why lure me here just to… talk?”
I struggle to find the words. How do I explain a craving I barely comprehend myself? The curse The Keeper laid upon my kind was one of eternal, gnawing hunger. For centuries, I believed it was a simple need for flesh and blood, a physical craving to be sated with a kill. But the relief was always fleeting, the emptiness always returning, vast and absolute. Loneliness is a word for creatures who remember connection. I am a hollow thing, a vessel of unending want.
“The hunger is… more than a need for meat,” I begin, the words rough and clumsy. “It is an emptiness. A silence. When I mimic a voice, I can… taste the feeling behind it.” I see the horror dawn on her face, and I press on, needing her to understand. “Your grief was… strong. Complex. It tasted of love and loss and a pain so deep it was almost beautiful. It filled the silence in me, for a little while.”
I watch her process this. The revulsion is plain on her face—the idea of her most private sorrow being a delicacy for a monster is a violation of the deepest kind. But beneath the horror, I see that sliver of fascination again. I have presented her with a riddle. I am a predator who feeds not on life, but on the echoes of it.
“I call it… feeding differently,” I finish, the phrase clumsy but accurate.
“You feed on voices?” she asks, her tone a mixture of disbelief and dawning comprehension.
“On the emotions they carry,” I correct her. “Pain. Fear. Joy.” I gesture vaguely with a clawed hand. “They are all… flavors. They quiet the hunger in a way blood no longer can. But your voice…” I pause, the next admission costing me something. “Your voice is different. It doesn’t just quiet the hunger. It makes me feel… less hollow.”
A new kind of silence settles over the clearing. Lyssa stares at me, her mind clearly reeling from the impossible truth I’vegiven her. A monster that doesn’t want to eat her, but wants to… listen to her. The concept is so alien, so far outside the bounds of any story she has ever been told, that her fear is momentarily eclipsed by sheer, unadulterated curiosity. What kind of monster doesn’t want her blood, just her voice?
I see the moment she makes her choice. It is a subtle shift in her posture, a firming of her jaw. She is still terrified. I can smell it. But her curiosity has won the battle, at least for now. I decide to press my advantage, to make the request that has been clawing at the inside of my skull for days.
“Speak for me,” I say, the words a low rumble. “Tell me something. A story. Let me hear your voice without the flavor of fear. I want to know what… contentment sounds like.”
She flinches, the request as intimate and violating as a physical touch would be. I am asking her to willingly offer up a piece of her soul for my consumption. I expect her to finally turn and run, the strangeness of my demand the final push she needs to flee back to her world of light and logic.
But she stays. She looks down at the lantern at her feet, then back up at me, her gaze steady. After a long moment, she takes a deep, shuddering breath and begins to speak.
