The creature woke taut as a garrote wire, braced for the old compulsions: hunt, flee, bleed, repeat.
But today—
Today, the abyss hummed.
The dying one's song still thrummed in her marrow, a lodged shard of sound she couldn't dislodge. She lay motionless, listening:
— The drip-drip of moisture on stone (water or the cavern's weeping?).
— The distant creak of something buckling (death… or birth?).
— Her own breath, measured in slow drags (since when had she counted?).
Today, she would not hunt.
Today, she would see.
The tunnel narrowed until stone teeth gnawed her ribs. Then—light.
She spilled into a cavern wrong in its beauty:
The ceiling bristled with crystalline thorns, each tip impaling a glistening droplet—a thousand eyes weeping silver. The ground crunched underfoot: not rock, but the husks of glass-winged things, fragile as forgotten names.
A drop fell.
Cold. Cloying.
Rain?
She had no word for it, but her tongue darted out, starved.
The walls shivered. Not with sound, but with motion—hundreds of those translucent insects quivered in unison, their wings etching frost onto the air.
One alighted on her claw.
She stopped.
Six wings of living ice. A belly pulsing with drowned-light blue.
Is this life?
Or just slower death?
Before she could choose between crushing or cradling it, the thing took flight, scattering luminescent dust that dissolved like a last breath.
Beyond, the stone changed.
These walls weren't torn by chaos—they were marked.
Spirals cut deep as arteries. Claw-grooves in deliberate rows. Not wounds. Words.
She dragged her talons over the carvings.
Her bones vibrated, harmonizing with some ancient frequency.
This is a language.
Not of tongues.
Of teeth.
One symbol snagged her: three slashes intersecting—a claw halting a throat.
Her touch ignited a vision:
— Fire. (She knew only that it devoured.)
— Voices. (Not screams—songs.)
— Pain. (Ah, this was familiar.)
She recoiled. The abyss wasn't just a pit.
It was a mausoleum of stories.
At the chamber's heart: bones. Arranged.
A skull stared upward, its hollow sockets aligned with a crack in the ceiling where the darkness grew thin.
Among the remains:
— A fang bound in black sinew (offering or oath?).
— Stone beads strung on gut (adornment or tally?).
— A slate smeared with soot and fingerprints (art or epitaph?).
She lifted the fang.
The world lurched.
— Grass under bare feet. (Feet? She had claws.)
— Juice bursting from something round and sweet. (Fruit? Food wasn't sweet.)
— Laughter. (Hers? Theirs?)
She dropped it.
These weren't prey bones.
They were a person's.
Fear coiled in her gut—not of dying, but of having once been more.
Then—light.
A trail of phosphorescence smeared across the stone, a fallen star's wake. She followed, claws painted ghostly blue.
Poison? Nectar?
She licked it.
Neither sweet nor bitter. Alive.
The taste burned—not like blood. Like remembering.
She found it floating in a pool:
No teeth. No claws. Just pulsing, translucent flesh.
When she prodded it, the thing shuddered, emitting a sound deeper than the abyss itself.
She flinched—but the noise didn't hurt.
It thrilled.
This time, she pressed gently.
The creature changed. Gold radiated from her touch, its body singing in hues.
A game? She lacked the word, but her chest fizzed like vent-bubbles rising.
For the first time, she didn't want to kill.
She wanted to know.
She pinched off a fragment.
No blood. Only a tremor as it drifted away, trailing brighter light.
The piece in her palm throbbed. Warm as sunbaked stone (sun? What was sun?).
She ate it.
Her arm remembered.
Where the creature's ichor smeared, her skin shifted. Gold bloomed under her scales, luminous as the thing she'd stolen from.
She turned her limb, mesmerized.
Is this me? Or is it her?
No matter. She craved it.
Rubbing the ooze across her chest, she shivered as her body ignited in wildfire hues. A sound bubbled up—laughter?
The humans came then.
She didn't flee.
One leveled a spear. His companion sneered: "Just a kharis larva. Not worth the bolt."
They left.
She didn't understand their words.
But she saw their colors.
Red in their cheeks. Blue tingeing their lips.
She looked down at her own gold-smeared claws.
Could she wear their hues too?
That night, she didn't hunt.
She sat among the glowing creatures, observing how the bioluminescent algae dyed them violet, then green.
Slowly, she raised her golden arm.
Mimicking their dance.
The abyss had given her its first gift:
Not prey. Not pain.
A question.
As sleep took her, she dreamed in colors she'd never seen.