XV - She Who Hungers
The light of sunset filtered through the trees, casting long shadows over me as I lay bonelessly on the sullied ground and recovered.
Yes, it had been the right decision to have Jacob take me to the wooded hills on the outskirts of the city before continuing the experiments that I'd started a scant few hours prior. Without even opening my eyes, I could tell that what I'd done here would've had disastrous consequences had I stayed in their home.
Merging my bodies into one had felt awesome in the truest sense of the word, thrilling and terrifying in equal measure. It felt like the first time I'd ridden on a horse, a decade and change ago. Specifically, the moment where the horse had taken off in a gallop, and all I could do was hold on as hard as I could, with wind whipping through my hair and all illusions of control shattered, and hope I wouldn't get thrown free of the saddle.
In the end, I didn't get flung free of either saddle, thankfully. My loss of control, in both cases, came down to a lack of experience. Now, though, I'd had a taste of this power, sampled its essence, and I felt confident that next time, the reins would not slip through my fingers.
Of course, if a vocal part of me had her way, 'next time' wouldn't be for a good while yet.
With a groan, Tabitha tried to get up, only for her hands to slip on the slick, squamous surface below her and send her falling back again with a wet splat onto something that throbbed. She took a deep, steadying breath, air heavy with the stench of iron and bile filling her lungs. That breath left in a satisfied hiss as gnarled hooks and barbs erupted through the skin of her palms with sprays of blood that were swiftly lost in what already soaked the ground. She slapped her hands into the ground, which twitched as the sharp bits dug in, and levered herself up into a sitting position. As Acacia did the same, Tabitha looked around at what my combined form had wrought.
What had once been a small clearing surrounding a moss-speckled outcropping of gray stone had been torn up and ravaged. I saw more than one tree that had been torn down or outright uprooted, their trunks showing fresh scars of having been savaged by tooth and claw, deep gouges that oozed sap. And what parts of the clearing hadn't been broken and scattered were outright gone, replaced by large, irregular patches of living flesh and bone.
Some of the patches were covered in uneven, piebald skin, while others had muscles and fat and organs of all flavors exposed to open air. A partial rib cage quivered, pink foam bubbling up where the enclosed lung, still laboring to cycle air, had been violently pierced. A multitude of eyeballs, clustered together like soap bubbles where they didn't outright fuse and flow into one another, stared sightlessly every which way. Many massive, molar-studded tongues were clustered together in an almost floral arrangement, flopping and scraping weakly at the ground and each other. A mostly-human arm, thin enough to prominently display its twisted, malformed bones, projected out from a featureless expanse of skin, its six-fingered hand hanging limply from its wrist with the weight of a half dozen kidneys, dangling one to a finger like overripe fruit. Other limbs bore similar crops, ready for the plucking: lumpy, pulsating, unidentifiable masses. Blood oozed and spurted from vessels that had either been torn or simply failed to fully form, pooling in every nook and cranny. All that and more forced me to quickly shove my capacity for disgust down to its most minimal level and make a note to myself to reverse that later.
All of it was alive, though I wasn't sure how long that would last. I couldn't do anything with it right that moment, but some part of me knew with absolute certainty that while my bodies had been one, I'd been able to manipulate the flesh like it was an extension of myself. I'd also been able to incorporate it into my body, both by direct absorption and integration, and by more traditional, if heavily accelerated, consumption and digestion. Which explained why the ground was pock-marked with gristle-lined craters, some of which bore what were undeniably the marks of some very large teeth, and why my bodies felt so much heavier than they had earlier today.
I'd gorged myself. Indulged in a supreme act of auto-cannibalistic gluttony. I'd more than doubled my mass in the space of just a few minutes, but Tabitha and Acacia still looked the same, from the outside at least. But the strange spatial warping that let me compress flesh for convenient storage while still keeping it alive and usable did nothing about weight, and I didn't want to have to deal with being, on average, well over four hundred pounds to a body by my estimate.
Jagged incisors tore through my soles for traction on the blood-slick ground as my bodies ponderously pushed themselves to their feet. I took another look around as I thought about what to do with the scene. Even if I hid all the flesh, there wouldn't be much I could do to conceal the fact that something had happened here. But the flesh was the main point of concern, that and the felled trees, so I could probably get away with pushing them all really deep into the ground, then shape the surface into an approximation of how it looked before. Yeah, that could work. Hopefully. As for my excess mass…
Tabitha and Acacia brought their hands to their abdomens, claws from their middle fingers plunging through the skin below their navels and slicing their bellies open. My innards moved aside as masses of flesh and ingots of bone poured forth to pile at their feet, loud squelches and cracking sounds filling the air as whatever spatial magic nonsense my shard let me do wore off. By the time the flows ceased, I'd expelled as much biomass as I'd gained in this excursion, each mound waist-high on my bodies. The incisions my bodies had made closed up, and I had the two move to the edge of the clearing, retracting the points sticking out of their palms and soles as I did. Personal cleanup turned out to be as simple as shedding the outer layer of my skin, hair included, and tossing those sheddings into the mess while regrowing my long copper curls. At the same time, thick tendrils of stone reached out to pull the felled trees into the clearing and break them into more manageable chunks. The edges of the clearing lifted up to force all the gore and broken wood into a ball, which I sent down into the earth, passing through the soil to leave it encased in bedrock. Other fragments of my mind fixed up the surface as much as I could, and by the time the sunlight started to truly fade, I was already dressing in the clothes I'd shed and stashed prior to this little experiment – luckily for me, at a safe distance.
As I made the trek back to where Jacob was waiting with his car, my mind wandered over the memories of the experience. Memories of the glistening red flesh, the euphoric rush, and the deep, pervasive gnawing in my belly underpinning it all. Each of my public personae had their own cape identity, so I should give my combined form a name as well.
Ah, well. Something to ponder as I walked, even as I listened to the chorus of crickets and frogs and other such wildlife with smiles on my faces.
.o.o.o.
The sun had long since dipped below the hills when I emerged from the trees. While I'd improved my night vision quite a bit, I only had the meager light of the barest sliver of a crescent moon to work with, so I mostly just followed the ridge of stone I'd made under the soil when coming into the woods. Thankfully, no one else was around to watch me blunder blindly through the brush.
A chain-link fence stood between the trees and a little park, beyond which lay my destination. A cursory sweep with both eyes and powers showed nobody around, which made sense, given the late hour, but it didn't hurt to check. An absentminded-seeming, and wholly unnecessary, wave of Acacia's hand accompanied a flex of power that parted and peeled back a portion of the fence, and another gesture had it return to its whole state after she and Tabitha had passed through.
Jacob's car was right where I expected, the man himself lit up by the interior lights as he read a book. He was hunched over a bit in his seat, sending occasional furtive glances around, and I could feel the vibrations as his leg jittered in place. My brows furrowed a touch at that, but continued my approach in a deliberately unstealthy fashion.
He jumped in surprise once he spotted Tabitha and Acacia, then put his hand on his chest and visibly took a deep, calming breath. The distinctive vibrations of unlocking doors rang through my power, and moments later the two of me were ensconced inside. "Hey," he said, placing a scrap of paper in his book to mark his place and setting it aside. He turned the lights off, started the engine, and we were off. "Did you two run into any trouble out there?"
"Hmm?" Tabitha, in the passenger seat, blinked in surprise. "No, nothing troublesome. Why do you ask?"
"Well, um…" He hesitated, then shook his head. "Just, a while after you went into the woods, I heard this, this awful… I guess shriek fits the best? It was loud, certainly, and there's no way a human could make a sound like that. And you didn't stay out there all that long, but once it got dark I was worried that something might've gotten to you. You heard it, right?"
Tabitha met Acacia's eyes in the mirror. "Uh, no, we didn't hear anything like that. But I think… well…"
Jacob looked askance at Tabitha for a moment before returning his eyes to the road. "How could you not hear it? I'm pretty sure people in the nearest houses could hear it through the walls."
"It was us," Acacia blurted out, then cringed. "Uh, probably."
A pregnant silence reigned in the car, its oppressive aura of awkwardness bearing down hard on me, for a good minute. In that time we passed a couple vans going the other way that looked suspiciously like the PRT van I'd ridden in earlier. Fuck, I was meeting with them again tomorrow. Fun.
Finally, Jacob asked, "How?"
I let out the breaths I hadn't realized I'd been holding. "So, ah, when we were dropped here, we found that the assholes who did this to us had written a note on our left forearms," Tabitha said. "Part of the note outlined the general nature of our powers, and that included a hint that we could combine our bodies into one for a power boost. Testing it out somewhere there wouldn't be a risk of hurting anyone if anything went wrong is why we asked you to bring us out here. Which, thanks again for that."
"Yeah, don't worry about it," Jacob replied absently, clearly processing what had been said. "Did anything go wrong? Is that what the shriek was about?"
"We kind of, well, lost control," Acacia grimaced. "Made a big mess before we could make her stop."
"'Her'?"
"Yeah, it almost felt like there was someone else in the driver's seat, and we had to direct her actions or else she'd act on her own. She's definitely made for combat, I'll say that much. Best case, we won't have to use her often, since, y'know, we'd prefer to fix stuff rather than fight."
"Right, I understand." Jacob nodded. "So, if your combined form is like that, do you need a name for it? Sorry, her?"
"I think we've decided on a name, though we won't be spreading it around if we can help it," Tabitha said. "But yeah, going with the vague theme of our own cape names, Fionnuala and Morven, and from how it felt to be her, we'll call her Ocras."
"... That mean something?"
"Yeah." Tabitha wet her lips. "Hunger."
