23rd of Frost, 120.
He’d been there for some time, unbeknownst to him. There, in the long darkness of his unending sleep, there was a spark; a kindling in the fibers of his being. A sudden bout of tension overtook him; the softness of his resting body contracted and compressed before it finally broke in a violent spasm. It was suffocating, it clogged his throat and ached in his jaws. The muffle of a wail permeated the unending darkness and the world shook around him. Steadily, the black of his mind receded and a haze of murky blood red overtook all that he could see in the broken darkness of his mind.
The void sank at the center, and a pit formed in the bottom of his stomach only to build pressure in his head. He writhed in the hold of the darkness, barely able to move as the unseen force hollowed him out and clawed at the unseen inner walls of his being. A vast ocean of scents overtook his senses, painting all manners of images around him. There was food, plentiful nourishment in his midst just waiting for him to reach out and take it.
Anything to fill the abyss in his core was welcome. Though the offered meal was plentiful, it wasn’t without its price. He was caught in a maze, a hash of wire and string that wrapped and coiled his limbs, holding him back. With his claws and jaws alike, he ripped through and tore into the wires. The blood-red void rumbled with the distant wail of despair, but Arkash barely hesitated. Deep red, rich warmth plastered his front and ran down his throat. He gulped plentifully without fear of choking. Even when solids came into the mix, and he gulped down harder fragments of the wires that covered him, he halted not. Everything was welcome to his gullet, to the vast endless pit of his stomach.
The hold of the wires fell limp, and he was free to feast with abandon on what remained. Some parts were significantly harder to bite through than others, some chunks were larger and took more than a few gulps to force down completely. Never once did he feel full, satisfied. Instead, the chasm within him grew deeper, more empty. Power surged through his being as he ravenously tore through all he could and swallowed the remaining clumps of stringy, wet meat.
Nothing remained by the time his eyes came to burn away the visage of the void. In blurred splotches, a rusted, blood-spattered floor began to fill his view. He was on his hands and knees, and his throat was clogged with… A jumble of solids and squishies. After shutting his maw, he began to swallow hard around the meat and gulped down the various materials. It felt right, and the emptiness inside him demanded to be filled.
Some of the material threatened to ride back up his throat as the taste of copper roused in his palette, but he swallowed hard anyway and sent the meal hurtling to his stomach. One of his claws felt his stomach while he stayed there on all fours, and he hissed in protest when it failed to satisfy so much as a scrap of his hunger. It hurt. All around him were so many smells and sounds that thudded on the inside of his skull and threatened to steal whatever shred of focus he could muster. His body tensed, and his claws pulled at the loose scales of his stomach while his teeth bared in a shuddering, painful cringe.
Everything hurt; every sense worked boundless need into his veins. It set his teeth on edge and made his head pound as though his brain was clawing at the edges of his skull, trying to dig out. He stayed there, breathing, shaking, doing his best to weather the storm in his body…. To no avail. There on the ground, he began to sob and scream as the pain overtook him. He lost the battle of resolve and his mind was wracked with torment.
It had to stop; it was too much. He couldn’t bear to live in that way for a second longer. So, he surrendered to the hunger with a shriek of pain and despair before he kicked off the floor to run. There was more food nearby; maybe if he ate, the pain would stop? The aching void would shrink? He wasn’t sure, but he had to try. It was the only thing that his mind urged of him, it had to have some significance, right?
Before he could even touch the handle of the door, though, he was swept off his feet, and a strong hand wrapped his throat. He struggled and writhed in their hold. Vicious, aggressive flicks of his head tried to put his attacker in his vision to no avail. So, he lifted his claws to the arm around his neck and began to claw at their skin when something forced him to stay his claws. It was a smell, a smell so sweet that it stole all his attention and thought.
Another hand lowered before him, this one with a bright red gash in its palm. It oozed what he could only perceive to be honey, the nectar of the gods. The round pupils in his misty yellow eyes dilated broadly to force a thin yellow ring of his iris, and his jaws lurched forward on the tether of his neck in an effort to reach the offered blood. He watched as it dripped. The sound sent shivers down his spine as his mouth dripped copious volumes of drool in anticipation. He needed it. More than air, more than life itself.
“Gentle,” her voice came, soft and soothing. She was in his ear, behind him, holding him in place. Fayeth. Though he recognized her, there was still no inhibition to stay him from the sweet syrup of her veins. “Easy… Or you won’t have any,” she warned to deaf ears. Arkash didn’t just want her blood, he wanted her skin, muscles, tendons. He wanted the marrow of her bones. If he could just reach a little further…
But Fayeth was no fool, she’d lived a long time around the dranoch of Sil-Elaine, and knew of their appetites. She inched her palm just close enough to allow the rathor to reach with his tongue. Though he tried with his jaws and even pulled on her offered arm so desperately, she didn’t break or submit to his will. She held firm until desperation for anything at all outweighed the rathor’s greed, and he telescoped his forked tongue on the wound. The moment his taste buds pressed to the open gash, his shaking quelled. The void of his stomach was much more bearable, and his gaze faltered with rapidly blinking eyes.
The tension in his form melted away and his headache quickly receded. It was a miracle; he found such relief in her blood, such comfort and softness at the taste alone. He shivered again as he dragged his tongue through the crevice of her wound, and lapped as much as he could into his mouth, where he slathered it over the roof of his mouth and swallowed hard around the precious bounty he’d been given.
He was still cold, achy, and weak, but the comforting warmth of her body put him at ease. “Fayeth…” He spoke as he laid his head against her, nigh-euphoric. It was there that he began to regain his senses. The hunger was still present, but no worse than the gut-wrenching hunger pains of his youth in Lower Nivenhain. He’d faced starvation worse than his current state of being before, but never anything so intense as the maddening void when he first woke.
“Arkash…” She returned. “Are you coming around?” As she loosened her hold on his neck. Sensing the relief in tension, Arkash pushed himself from her form in a sudden fit of force and fell to the floor. His irises narrowed to pinpricks as he sniffed at the rusted ground desperately, and soon found the drops of Fayeth’s blood that had fallen from her palm. Quickly, he dove his muzzle for the deep red droplets on the floor and immediately scooped them up with his tongue. He continued to lick with abandon against the rusty surface, even when there was nothing left. There were the slightest remnants of her taste, and it was worth bearing all the filth of the world on his tongue just to sample.
When he began to cough from the amount of dust and rust in his mouth, Fayeth’s hand pulled the scruff of his jacket and lifted him from the floor to set him on his feet. His knees buckled in an effort to throw himself at that same spot on the floor, but she dragged him along anyway. His sharpened claws raked across the iron without grip as she pulled him along, then sat in a bundled bedroll of tattered rags and loose hay by the force of her hand.
While he sat there, he gripped his stomach and pulled at the scales there while he thought. After a moment of silence, he looked up at the dranoch with his misty-veiled eyes and asked “...Why am I alive?”
