Chapter 408 - Epilogue 2 - Hungry Are The Wolves (Patreon)

So! I did, in fact, break my consistency streak. That sucks!

Had some real bad trauma last week. Some... some stuff came to light in a friend group of mine that BOY HOWDY was toxic and bad about boundaries and blah, blah, blah. Suffice to say, twas nasty. Five days later, I am back, a little off-schedule and a little delayed, but present nonetheless.

Onward we go.

_________________________________________________________________________

Don’t- there. Don’t tear it. You’ll need to stay still for it to set. Otherwise it’s just going to keep breaking. 

I know it hurts. I know. The pain is important. It’s telling you what you need to know. It’s teaching you about what’s going wrong and what can be done better. It’s helping you to remember what you’re experiencing, and tells you why it’s important to. 

Feel this. The way the limb is shaped. The sign and form of it. The detail. Take your time. Think through every part of it. Piece by piece. The outside, down to the meat, down to the bone, up to the veins, out to the nerves. I know you don’t know what those words mean. Listen to my Intent. You know what I’m saying. The words are illusions. They don’t teach you the lessons that pain can. 

There. Do you have it?

Good.

—

There there. Hold still. It won’t set right if you don’t stay still. Don’t tear it. Don’t flail. You’re too strong for that. 

Yes, you can scream. That’s ok. Let it out. It’s very cathartic, the first time you get scream-lungs, I know. Don’t let it overwhelm you, though. Keep hold of what you need. 

Good. Now, feel how it doesn’t work right anymore? Find the pieces that are out of shape. Describe them to yourself. The meat, the bone, the bits, just like before. Tell me what changed, and how. 

…

Alright. You’re doing excellent. It takes time to learn. Longer still to master. Most of us find our way to this by starting sooner, but a transformation like yours requires more care. It’s easy to build it wrong and find yourself weakened, trapped, lost. Easy to take you, then. Easy to leash you, skin you, take what makes you you and make of it a trinket or a weapon. The more you learn, the more you’ll be able to do. 

We take their form so we can better understand them.

We understand them so we do not underestimate us. So they do not reap or enslave us as they have so many. 

Focus on the pain. Listen to what it’s teaching you. The lessons it’s telling you to learn. 

Good.

Now fix the limb. We’ll start again when you’ve gotten it right.

- A hooved spirit beast speaking to a snake on the nature of change and transformation.

____________________________________________________________________

The world is busy lately. And loud. 

It’s not exactly comfortable for the average reptile. Most of her kind tend towards keeping quiet, ambushing as needed, moving through the world in precise, methodical ways. Mostly. Sometimes things are confusing and you need to bump it with your nose a lot, but that’s the exception. 

But now everything’s all at once and loud and ugh. 

She’s grown past her origins a lot. Most things like her never get this big, or this good at being in multiple places, or this good at using elements like prickly-heat and clouds and airs. Most of them are just good at slimes.

Not that she isn’t good at slimes. She’s the best at slimes, and anyone else who is better is obviously not as good at slimes as they think if they think they’re better than her.

But even with all that growing, something in her grumbles and groans at how everything has been going lately. When was the last time she had a meal she could stay and digest for a few years? When was the last time she took a nap in a nice cave, one of the ones with a little lake full of fish if she wanted a drink at night? When was the last time she found a mate to wrestle with, even if they ended up disappointing, or found a proper rival to spend a few decades killing?

All the simple pleasures in life. All put on hold so she can do dumb loud busy stuff.

She slithers over a little hillside, moving gently so as not to break the little nest that the walkers (humans, stupid name) have put on it. It wasn’t here when she crawled by just a few decades ago, but that’s the nature of the little ones. Birds and the ape-types do the same thing, randomly building and then destroying things. 

Not randomly, she reminds herself. They’re doing it for their reasons. Busy loud dumb reasons. People reasons, which is a stupid way to say it because she’s a people now (or so people tell her) and she doesn’t do any of that stupid stuff. Building weird little hut-things. Not even a proper nest- no mountains around it, no nice shadowy valley to wriggle into, just weird little empty shapes! 

The hillside falls back behind her as she slithers past, climbing through and then under some of the trees. They’re bright blue in this area, with leaves that double as mouths, snatching at passing bugs and making babbling sounds that are almost like words. There are other little people-nests spread throughout it, and she mostly ignores them. Used to be, she’d stop by some of them and just watch, and sometimes they’d all try to run away or leave her some of their food, which was smart of them. Now, she barely has time to snack on some of the offerings she passes by, moss-covered stone carvings of her that they made just recently (barely a few centuries!) filled with occasional treats. 

Through the babbling trees, past the little hill-peoples, she finally starts to smell the thing she’s been looking for. 

At the edge of this forest, there’s a mountain, like a thin, twisted needle shooting up into the sky. It goes up, with dozens of clouds that orbit around it, kept close by some of the flying creatures that make their home. The spire is bigger on the inside, and she can sense some rivals in there, some other hunters and beasts strong enough to match her. 

She comes up to the base of the spire, where the trees abruptly end and the smell of the Qi rapidly shifts into something more acidic, louder, proud and staring down and out at a world around it. 

This is a proper nest. 

Whether the mountain was here before the beast that has taken up residence, or if they formed it themselves, she doesn’t know or care. The world is full of places like this, hidden by the density of the Overgrowth and the size of everything. In a hundred days of slithering, she knows there’s a valley that goes so deep into the ground that things start to get cold, then hot again, and the heat wriggles and moans and drags away liquified bits of things. In a dozen days, she could reach the range of plateaus that used to be hooves, each one large enough to crush her in a single step, all fifteen of them standing in a strange formation that makes it hard to leave. Back the way she came, she passed through a lake that got bigger the further one went into it, so that you had to go backwards to get out, and if you kept going, it became big enough to swallow every horizon- and then things began to swim up from below. 

Just like with all of those, she curls up at the edge of where the Qi changes. Where a new ruler has established a nest. 

An Apex of their own worlds. 

The spire, barely a mile wide but so tall she cannot see the tip, stands there, echoed by the thunderclouds that surround it and the flapping of vast wings. 

And eventually, something emerges. 

It comes out from around a bend. Like the pinched spiral that is this mountain-needle is open, has space within it, and one need but come around the side to find an open pathway deeper into it. 

Its wings flap in sequence. One, then the other, then another, a long, slender body, too thick and warm and mammalian to be a snake, but longer than she. It looks almost like a finger, each wing-point a joint, each joint another part of the same winding, too-long body. 

The wings go faster the further back it is, like the time inside the spiral is denser than outside, making an infinite roll of thunder, punctuated by massive, booming explosions of sound from the wings further out. 

The tip of the finger-tendril-winged god opens, and it is a mouth, and the teeth and tongues at the back move faster than the ones at the tip.

It forms a hundred thousand thousand sounds, which, by the time they reach where it touches the world, form a trumpet noise, infinite and thundering.

Intent turns that formless sound into something with meaning. 

Hungry Spiral Grows Inside Out

She rises up, lifting her head, just enough that her branches start to open wider, start to spread from her central form. She grows up, and out, antlers and tree-limbs and coral growths all a lesser example of how she multiplies and expands outward. 

She is smaller than the beast of the spiral, her weight upon the world slightly its lesser, but hers glows with the smell of toxin and burning and acid and choking and roiling madness of poison and sickness. 

Flame-Scale Of Many Branches

Smoke rises from her, toxic, venomous, her flames as real as the fluid that rests in her fangs, evolved and cultivated to join them together. 

The spiral beast hesitates. It could consume her, crush her, twist and unmake her as viciously as the spire it calls home- but not without pain. Not without suffering. Not without intaking the very same weapons she now threatens it with. 

She sends out a pulse of Intent.

No Fight. Come With. Hunt Together.

The spiral twitches, and the way it twitches faster further back on its body makes the front of it move, shivering and vibrating at a speed that’s hard to track. For something the size of a mountain itself, something larger than most landmarks ever get, it’s a disconcerting motion. The air heats up several degrees, the static build-up making the thunderclouds around the spire rumble and drizzle.

My Territory. Leave.

The message is inlaid with dozens upon dozens of different ideas and intentions. Confusion at the request, hunger towards the intruder, anger at the perceived challenge, a desire to protect itself and its territory, its frustration with being disrupted. 

Sakihebi stays where she is. 

Not Safe. Challengers. All-Place. All-Place In Danger. All Place Fights. Challengers.

The spiral shivers, and the world groans with it. 

Not My Fight. No Challengers. My Territory Is Secure.

Secure For Now. Not For Ever. Challengers Come. Kill Together. Hunt Together. 

Sakihebi pushes all she can and all she understands outward, into the “words” she transmits with poison and writhing shape and hissing tongues. 

Join The Pack. Hunt Together. Or Die Alone.

The spiral makes a sound which, in another form, might be a laugh. 

I Am Strong, it says, and there is something beyond just Intent there. There is hints of that deeper comprehension, which is Dao, which is True. Not all the way, but still. 

There is Strength in every movement. In every moment. In the sheer scale of this thing, in the scope of it and every action it takes. 

Sakihebi does not care. It has seen worse before, and likely will again. Strength, and Time, and Scale, and whatever else that it is or understands is not enough against the world. She knows better.

And so she speaks in a language with no lies. 

You Are Not Strong Enough.

The body inside the spire moves again, a hundred thousand actions multiplied again and again until they reach its exterior tip. That extension of it, already almost as wide as the spire and longer enough to wrap around it a dozen times, whips against the world and reality and existence, and the friction and static of it and the explosions of it whipping against the air turn the space of its territory into a storm of dust and lightning and heat. 

I Am Stronger Than You.

Sakihebi feels a moment of genuine amusement.

You Are Not Strong Enough.

The flesh within the spire moves, and the Spiral, with all its flapping wings, whips at her.

The incoming wave of pressure ignites. The incoming wave of force and air hits like an explosion. 

The flesh behind it hits like a blow from the Heavens themselves. 

Sakihebi feels most of her branches come apart, flesh unraveling at the sheer force of the strike. The pure heat and energy of it fuses into plasma, overcoming her flames, turning smoke and ash into just as much carbonized matter.

Some of her poisons make it through. Some of her toxins and the comprehension she has burn the world in spite of the heat, not with it, and when the Spiral’s tendril retracts, it does so with a slight discoloration on its surface, a piece of flesh rapidly necrotizing away. 

It is a tiny piece- but in spite of the power of the spirit beast, it does not heal right away.

From the severed tip of her spine, Sakihebi blossoms.

A serpentine head, slender and beautiful and clad in flames as venomous as before, emerges from out of the stump, a hundred more branches spreading out from her and joining. Recursive spinal columns, all of which are the pointed tips of her head, only one of which is the pointed tip of her head, all of them aflame and unbothered by the attack. 

They Are Harder To Kill Than I Am, she says, and the Spiral tastes existence and knows there are no lies. 

Tricks Are Not Enough, it says as a rebuttal. 

Strength Is Not Enough, she replies. 

The Spiral recoils. It sends out Intent as communication not on purpose, but simply by the way its mind weighs upon the world freely with every thought it has. 

Sakihebi tastes confusion. Tastes denial of her claims, refusal. Tastes the fact that she is near its level of power, and speaks, and thus is not a fool, and has not lied. 

If I Refuse? It asks. 

I Leave You To Die, Sakihebi says, a little annoyed. You Are Alone. The Pack Is Never Alone. I Have Better Things To Do Than Talk To You.

In hisses and flickering flame, in pulsing toxins and gaseous fumes, she speaks no lies. 

The Spiral hesitates. The core of its body, hidden much, much deeper into the too-thin spire, moves fast enough that parts of the mountain start to glow, overheated by its movements and how they multiply in condensed time. The storm clouds around it burble and glow with flickering lightning. The lesser beasts of its domain fly as far or as high as they can, seeking to avoid the thinking of the divine beast within the recursion of the landmark.

In the outside world, Sakihebi waits less than a minute. She’s not interested enough in boring busy stuff to try and figure out how long it takes inside the spire for the Spiral to come to a decision.

But it does. 

I Do Not Leave To Hunt, it tells her.

I Don’t Care. Other Person Will Come For The More Boring Talk. Bye.

A hundred additional recursions of her tail / head / spine fall out of existence, and her “central” body drops back to the ground from where it was standing. Without another word, she just starts slithering off.

Busy busy busy. Busy all the time. When was the last time she just lounged around some little pets and let them bring her food and scare off anyone who bothered her? She doesn’t even remember. And that’s only mostly because she really doesn’t care about remembering very much.

She hisses, and the sound carries enough Intent and Dao that the babbling leaves on the trees curl up into themselves and combust or melt into toxic waste. 

The things she does for people. Ugh. 

Behind her, her spine extends for a few hundred days worth of slithering. 

Behind that, her other branches continue to spread.

Busy busy busy. 

But when the world itself asks you very nicely to do something because you are the bestest, most special Beast in the whole world, and you’re going to get so many goodies out of it and you get to kill all the bad guys that are stupid and annoying?

Ugh. 

She hisses in annoyance, heading towards the next biggest landmark, tracking the scents of Qi and power through the Overgrowth. 

Busy busy busy. But at least the Pack is growing.