Chapter Text
In mammalian oral anatomy, the canine teeth, also called cuspids, dogteeth, eye teeth, vampire teeth, or fangs, are the relatively long, pointed teeth. They developed and are used primarily for firmly holding food in order to tear it apart, and occasionally as weapons.
Glossary:
- Cycle - a year (four seasons)
- Phase - a day. 7 total, each a different color marked by the daily shifting of chamaeleons' skin. An 8th color, black, signifies the end of a phase.
Constellations Referenced:
- Fox - Vulpecula
- Wolf - Lupus
- Hunting Dogs - Canes Venatici
- Serpent-Bearer - Ophiuchus
- Chamaeleon - Chamaeleon
- Dragon - Draco
- Peacock - Pavo
- Lion - Leo
- Water Snake - Hydra
- Great Dog - Canis Major
- Hercules - Hercules
Vulpes Shrines are said to appear only when weary travelers need them most, golden lantern light of long dead priests slicing through the pitch black, effortless and holy. Safe havens from the ravenous shadows built of stone and blessed by starlight. Yet you don’t feel safe, not even after three phases beneath the watchful gazes of the stone fox statues, fingers clenched around the scabbard of your sword, paranoid with the mad idea if you were to let go it would vanish from sight.
Beyond the steps of the shrine, past the semicircular halo of lantern light beckoning with its siren song of peace, the chirps of crickets blend with the groaning of tree branches shifting and swaying in the wind. You throw loose pebbles out there sometimes, listening to each individual impact upon the fallen leaves, their crackling uncoiling something taut in your chest.
The stars hide behind clouds, hoarding their precious light all to themselves. You wonder if humans learned selfishness from them, or if it was the other way around. Regardless, you stopped looking up for guidance a long time ago and the stars abandoned you long before that. Now any problem you face can usually be solved with a swing of your sword.
Pulling free your weapon from its scabbard, you lean back against the shrine’s stone wall, chilled against your shoulders where your sleeveless top doesn’t cover, and trace your fingertips over the constellations engraved on the iron blade. The familiar shapes of the Fox, Wolf, and Hunting Dogs—predators of great strength and cunningness—were said to bless the sword’s master with their protection. The stars have lost your faith in them, but maybe there’s some truth in the lines of the old legend. You have found shelter in a Vulpes Shrine, after all, and some things are just too precise to be a mere coincidence.
Three phases is the longest you’ve stayed in one place in at least three cycles. You’ll leave soon, restless spirit already acting up something fierce with the urge to move. That’s been the routine as long as you’ve been on your own. Wake up, eat if you’ve got something on hand or scavenge if you don’t, then pick a direction and start walking, your lantern light illuminating the unknown path ahead. You bathe in rivers sometimes, dig up root pearls for trade if they glow bright enough to catch your attention, but usually your phases aren’t much different from one to the next.
It’s the middle of the summer season, the warmest time of the cycle. As a child you used to glare up at the Dragon settling into his corner of the sky once the spring constellations dipped behind the horizon, knowing soon after the air would turn sticky as the temperature rapidly rose.
Summer is also a reminder of the community you lived in five cycles ago, joining their ranks in the middle of a heatwave. Four dozen people squeezed together in a tiny settlement called the Marrow, sharing supplies and companionship. You found it nice there, sleeping in the same bed, seeing the same faces, but even the nicest of things eventually wither and fade to black. Buried deep within you is a time capsule of memories full to the brim and achingly empty all at once. When you can’t sleep you think about taking a shovel to yourself, letting unspoken contritions and nostalgia eat you alive, but you made a promise to live. And your lantern light burning bright is proof it’s still kept.
Overlapping with the honey gold fluorescence of the shrine’s twin flames, your own blue lantern light appears to glow green, casting flickering shapes upon the wall reminiscent of overgrown ivy vines. Your eyes had trouble adjusting when you first arrived, so used to nothing but blue and black and the faint iridescent gleam of starlight the past few phases you’d nearly forgotten just how vibrant other bursts of colors could be.
A couple of traders have shared with you rumors of a city bathed in every color known to man, as radiant as ten thousand lantern lights combined, bustling with life and hope. Nothing more than a fairytale for children, you’d dismissed with a scoff of derision. There’s no such thing as hope. Not in a realm where darkness reigns eternal and a snuffed out lantern light means instant death.
“Bet you guys believed in hope.” You look to the mouths of the fox statues, lantern lights of the shrine’s dead priests firmly held by stone teeth. History says the pair willingly sacrificed their souls for the creation of these sanctuaries centuries ago. What history doesn’t say is if it hurt, if they cried in their final moments, or if it’d been as gentle as falling asleep. “Do you regret your choices yet? How many sticky-fingered fools have tried prying your souls out of those jaws to strengthen their own power?” You aim your sword at the base of the nearest lantern light, constellations blazing gold. The muscles in your arm twinge, reacting to the energy prickling in the air.
“Don’t have to worry about me though.” You lower your weapon back to your lap, cracking a wry grin. “One soul’s troublesome enough keeping care of, I don’t need the extra headache. Or the craving for bloodlust. Or the whole smoke metamorphosis thing soul eaters have got going on as fun as that looks. Really I’m the best kind of visitor ‘cause once I’m gone it’ll be like I was never here at all.”
You’ve always had a knack for being an easily forgettable person. Even when you’d had people who cared about you, it’d been easy to become a wallflower amongst them, slipping into the background unnoticed and overlooked. And now that you’re on your own, it’s become both a blessing and a curse. Good for getting out of uncomfortable situations, sure, but you’d be lying if you said sometimes you didn’t feel more like a ghost than a human. It’d be nice to be known, you think, at least by one other person. Someone who could point you out of a crowd and confidently say, “That’s Moss.”
It’s been five cycles since you last heard your name. Five cycles since you had a conversation that wasn’t haggling with a trader over the price of herbs or root pearls. Four cycles since you last prayed. Two cycles since you’d stumbled upon another destroyed settlement much like the Marrow complete with heaps of soulless corpses food for the worms.
Sooner or later humans will become an extinct species. You doubt any of them will glimmer amongst the stars. They’ll either die with their lantern lights devoured or become a soul eater themselves. It’s a sad fact of life: desperate people in desperate times are known to perform desperate, unspeakable acts. The hunted becomes the hunter, unrecognizable to their own kin.
Returning your sword to the leather scabbard attached to your belt, you tug your rucksack closer to use as a pillow. It’s lumpy and tattered, stitched up and taped together more times than you can count, but you wouldn’t trade it for anything in the realm. With sleep comes dreams of old friends haloed in soft lantern lights, smiling and joking around, oblivious to death skulking out of the pitch blackness on soundless paws.
They never stood a chance.
The fervent flame of your lantern light engulfs the surrounding ring of standing stones known as the Perobury Circle in a gleaming veil of blue as the twinkling eyes of the Serpent-Bearer watch on from above. The tallest of the pale gray stones towers over you, marked by a collection of scarlet handprints smudged and splintered by the elements and passage of time. You trace their outlines with your eyes, pausing at one noticeably smaller than the rest, stomach clenching. Hard to believe there are still children out there. Even harder to believe you had been one yourself once upon a time.
Shaking your head to clear it, you inhale a deep breath, the scent of wet grass thick in the air from the earlier shower. The pitter-patter of rain had woken you from your sleep, sounding eerily similar to whispering within the quiet of the shrine. Puddles formed where droplets slithered in through the tiniest of cracks in the ceiling yet you’d miraculously remained dry.
The Chamaeleon tail hanging from a cord around your neck burns cherry red. It bobs against the middle of your chest while walking, nestled close to your heart, stirring up old memories of your mother who used to loop the chain of her own Chamaeleon tail pendant around her fingers when she prayed to the stars.
“Red’s a warning, yellow’s a fresh start, blue’s for mourning and pink’s good for the heart,” she used to chant, a silly old superstition about what each cyclical phase of the color-changing lizards meant. It’s a widespread belief the small creatures were created by the eponymous constellation in an effort to help humans establish routine. Regardless of whether or not that's true, wearing a tail pendant is the norm of the realm. “Purple brings a gift, green reveals a friend, orange goes by swift and black announces a phase’s end.”
Trekking out of the woods has stained your boots with mud, slick against the damp terrain. A wash in river water will have them looking good as new again. Your lips twitch in an aborted grimace as you touch the side of your neck where a jagged scar peaks out from beneath your collar, wishing the same could be true for you. Stars know you’ve tried—scrubbing the skin until it burned worse than fire, submerging yourself in the depths until your lungs screamed and your chest felt on the brink of bursting open, dirtying the water with your sins—but nothing worked.
You’re not oblivious to the emotional baggage you carry. Trauma’s sunk its poison deep into your brain, invading every thought like a parasite, frenzied in its hunt for something you can’t name but crave worse than oxygen. And every once in a while you get this…pull, an insistent tug beneath your scarred flesh without a clear direction to follow. Most of the time you can tolerate the sensation, gritting your teeth and carrying on, but every so often it’s damn near unbearable to take another step, forcing you to a standstill until the feeling gradually passes.
Trauma is as sticky and ensnaring as a tar pit, there’s no denying it, but. What if your damaged psyche isn’t fully to blame? What if the pull is a side effect of the fateful encounter that spared you from the brink of death five cycles ago? What if the indent of teeth is more than an ugly bite like its appearance suggests? Or has survivor’s guilt rewritten history in your mind, the truth wiped out for the sake of the raft of sanity you cling to?
Regaining consciousness in the immediate aftermath of the wretched end of the Marrow had felt like an out of body experience. Numbing shock enveloped you, ears stuffed with cotton and each breath a shuddering heave, struggling to process the misfortune you had awoken to. Macabre details stood out amongst the ruins, carved into your brain for cycles to come: the stench of decay burning your nose, a swarm of flies buzzing the most disturbing tune in synchronization, broken and gutted lantern lights discarded like trash. And most chilling of all, the scattered, unmoving bodies of your companions with faces so frighteningly expressionless, like their torn out throats and exposed intestines hadn’t hurt in the slightest. In that moment, they were almost completely unrecognizable to you. It was only much later, once your hands could hold your own lantern light without trembling, your aching neck finally registered, the gravelly voice of your savior and the promise you made to him rushing to the forefront of your thoughts.
You should’ve died, but because of the unknown reasons of a stranger you were spared. And if that wasn’t already disconcerting enough to wonder about, there is the additional, far more unsettling fact you don’t believe he was human—not completely at least, if that’s even possible. Not with those teeth. You swear every waking moment the realm seems to change, becoming a little more bizarre, a little more inhospitable…it’s hard to tell anymore reality from delusion.
Maybe the simplest explanation is you’re just dreadfully terrible at coping with loss.
You exhale a sigh, surprised by how loud it sounds. The abrupt silence that has fallen upon the standing stones occurs to you then, even the soft breeze has ceased tousling the grass. Your spine subconsciously tenses, fingers twitching with the impulse to draw your sword, but timing is everything, and you hesitate to strike too soon. Slowly your head turns, the tiniest of movements, casting a peek over your shoulder at the edge of blue aura provided by your lantern light. Darkness greets you, but it wouldn’t be the first time someone’s concealed themselves in the shadows to sneak up on you. Or something.
Your fingers spasm again, reaching before you can change your mind—
A large undefined shape barrels into you too quickly to react, knocking you off your feet, head colliding with a nauseating smack against the stone of handprints before you fall to the ground. You grunt through clenched teeth, blinking harshly against your swirling vision, blood oozing from the split in your forehead, and yank your sword out in one agitated move, stabbing at your enemy with more frenzy than finesse.
The resultant ghoulish shriek of pain triggers your heart into overdrive, immediately scrambling into a crouched position, all too aware of your lantern light dangling from your rucksack within easy snatching distance. From a certain perspective, the creature can be mistaken for a large dog or wolf, with a mouth full of sharp teeth and four massive paws. But a closer look reveals its unnatural opaqueness, out of focus no matter how hard one squints, with tendrils of ashen smoke exuding from its nebulous body, burning without a flame or kindling, staring down its prey with unblinking, smoldering white eyes.
Soul eaters are known to hunt in packs, another likeness to wolves, yet this one’s alone, amber ichor pooling beneath its injured leg. It looks sick, you think critically, if soul eaters can even get sick, frothing drool dribbling from its panting mouth. The thought barely has a moment to stick before those fangs are snapping at you again.
You bring your sword up to block, the crunching of teeth around the iron blade shoots vibrations down your arms. The muscular bulk of the monster and its momentum forces you down onto your back, claws scratching at your clothes, tearing fabric and grazing skin. Your lips curl into a snarl, jaw clenched, aiming a kick at its underbelly. For something so fumelike in appearance, your boot connects solidly, eliciting another high-pitched whine as it staggers sideways.
You make an attempt to stand, only for your breath to catch at the throbbing pain along your ribs, spots of blood staining your shirt where the claws pierced deep. It’s been awhile since your last serious injury, long enough to forget how awful scratches fucking sting. The Serpent-Bearer’s probably laughing at you right now, plotting for an infection to finish you off if the soul eater fails. Which is looking less and less likely.
Driving your sword into the damp soil, you force your protesting muscles to work, pulling yourself unsteadily onto your feet. Your torso aches with the effort, a hiss escaping through gritted teeth, but still your fingers remain tightly clenched around the handle. You’re not going down without a fight.
And then everything changes in the span of a blink.
The scar on your neck abruptly flares up in agony, white hot pins and needles, sending your hand flying to the spot. Your choked gasp is muffled by the thunderous roar of a second soul eater bursting out of the darkness from behind you, twice as large and marred with amber scars of previous fights, totally ignoring your presence whilst hurtling itself at the other monster without hesitation.
You can only stand there, stunned beyond measure, watching in disbelief as the bigger soul eater mercilessly tears into the smaller one, savage and sadistic with each deliberate snap of its fangs, not letting up until the yelping cries of pain are replaced by the sickening gurgling of blood bubbling and spewing out from a severed throat.
It’s one of the most brutal displays of violence you’ve ever witnessed. And you can’t make heads or tails of it, unable to understand why a soul eater would turn on its own kind so gruesomely.
A ball of light explodes out of the dead soul eater’s dissolving remains, perfectly spherical and blazing yellow. A soul, you realize, eyes widening, from a previous victim. It hovers in the air for a moment, free of its confines, and then in a flash is seized by powerful jaws. Swallowed and absorbed by a new host like it’s a piece of meat. Stars above.
Your breath hitches when those white pinpricks snap onto you. Ichor drips from the victorious soul eater’s stained snout, a lengthy tongue flicking out for a quick taste. You adjust your grip on your sword, unable to ignore those pointed teeth, but the monster makes no move to lunge or attack. Instead it merely sits, like a trained dog, legs blurring into the smokiness of its murky body. Staring noiselessly all the while.
Your scar pulsates intensely again, like something’s trying to claw itself out. Or, maybe…
You stiffen, heartbeat quickening as the soul eater bares its teeth in the semblance of a wicked grin, stretched extra wide at the corners, seemingly aware of your dawning horror.
Maybe your scar remembers how it came to be.
Your childhood cycles were spent constantly moving around, much like the nomadic lifestyle you live now, except you had your parents for company. They did their best to keep you safe, you know that now with the benefit of hindsight, but back then you hated them for refusing to establish roots, preventing you from having a home or any friends. You thought they had made up the myth of soul eaters to scare you into behaving right up until you saw the aftermath of a successful hunt. A couple and their young child in a ditch, devoid of any expressions, chests ripped open and lantern lights destroyed. You stopped hating your parents after that.
It didn’t do much good though. Didn’t prevent you from learning the harshest of truths when a gang of thieves led by a man with a cackling laugh and the stars of the duplicitous Water Snake tattooed like a ribbon wound around his wrist murdered your parents in cold blood, then stole all your supplies except for the filthy little rucksack you carried—people could be monsters too.
Defenseless, grief stricken, and all alone, the Marrow was paradise when you’d found it. A safe landing ground to crash onto—literally, the grass was the softest you’d ever known, spongy and verdant. There was a lake not too far a walk, full of fish and a lure for woodland animals looking for a drink. Scrappy dwellings were built side by side, cobbled together with wood, stone, and turf. The people of the Marrow were like that too, scrappy drifters cobbled together from all edges of the realm.
The community became your new family, teaching you everything your parents hadn’t lived long enough to share. The best uses for poisonous plants and what baits work best for different types of fish, how to haggle without pushing too many buttons and what signs indicate a cave is occupied or abandoned.
You learned how to let loose around a fire pit, stomping your feet and howling the wrong lyrics of ancient songs. You learned to speak new languages, soaking up every word and phrase like the absorbent ground beneath your feet.
To celebrate your birth season, you were given a sword of iron and stars. Your greatest treasure, far too perfect for someone as damaged as you, challenging you to become strong enough, worthy enough to wield it with the respect it deserved.
For a while you’d had a place to call home. For a while you believed you’d never know the pain of loneliness again.
The sky had been cloudy when the attack happened, blocking out the starlight and deepening the umbra surrounding the Marrow. A bad omen, if one believed in those sort of signs, but you hadn’t (and still don’t), neither had anyone else in the community. You doubt believing would have changed anything though. The Marrow was always doomed to fail. Yet another fact you know now with the benefit of hindsight.
There was no time to sound the alarms when the soul eaters invaded. They came all at once in a manic rush, unsolicited bad dreams you couldn’t wake from. The terrified screams came next, then absolute chaos. Every man for himself.
Fire sparked in the midst of panicked scrambling, smoke and ash clogging the air, burning your eyes. You tried to reach your dwelling, where you’d left your sword amongst your meager collection of belongings, a mistake you’d never make again in the cycles to come, but your seared lungs betrayed you, screaming for oxygen that didn’t exist. You collapsed in the dirt, wheezing harshly, vision blurring in and out of focus, the handle of your miraculously still-intact lantern light clutched in a weak grasp. The blue gleamed bright as the Great Dog’s white head, cutting through the maelstrom, impossible to miss, straight away catching the attention of a soul eater and luring it across the dividing distance.
Tears streamed down your dirty face, so pathetically vulnerable, indefensibly watching the monster’s approach, one wispy paw in front of the other, purposeful in its even walk, unbothered by the ongoing drama.
As its jaws parted, you anticipated your death, quick and violent. With a shuddered breath your eyes fell closed for what you believed to be the last time.
But death hadn’t come. Instead there were sounds of a scuffle: growling and grunts, shifting of dirt beneath feet, the gnashing of teeth. You clung to consciousness by a mere thread, eyelids impossibly heavy as if glued to your face, and even though the touch of hands rolling you onto your backside sent a jolt of surprise and pain through your limbs, you couldn’t summon the necessary strength to confront the stranger.
Not even when he sunk his teeth into your flesh. Not even when he commanded, voice as low and ragged as a canyon, “Promise me you’ll live. Promesa.” (Promise.)
With your final hazy seconds of awareness, in the motion of tipping into the calm blackness of oblivion, your dry lips had croaked out a vow—I promise—unknowing the significant role those two words would play for the rest of your life journey.
An adrenaline spike gives you the needed strength to lift and ready your sword. The soul eater’s cheek-splitting wide grin remains, unaffected. Your heart beats faster than a panicked jackrabbit. It unsettles you more than words can express, being unable to determine if this specific monster of all damn creatures is indeed your savior or if you’ve finally lost the plot. But you can’t risk dropping your defenses. After all, everyone knows the only kind of harmless soul eater is a dead soul eater.
You lunge, blade aimed to strike, only for the soul eater to dematerialize, ghosting over you in a flood of thick smoke. Numbness swallows you whole, dunking you beneath a frozen lake and holding you there. It doesn't last long, over in the quiver of a heartbeat, there and gone, warmth returning and senses rebooting.
Maybe that’s why it takes you an embarrassing long moment to realize there are distinctly human hands on your stomach, holding you from behind against a solid body with fingers pressing lightly, yet purposefully on your wounds. A warning of no sudden moves. You bite the inside of your cheek, yet a quiet hiss of pain still manages to escape.
“You made me a promise to live,” the growl rumbles against your ear as fingers curl into the holes of your shirt, touching the bleeding marks beneath. “Recklessly endangering yourself is not how you keep your vow, idiota.” It isn’t the words that have you freezing in astonishment, but the voice, the man’s low, husky tone identical to the one from your memories. It is him. Your savior from the Marrow.
How is that possible? A soul eater assuming a human shape? Are they all capable of such a feat, or is this one unique somehow? Your thoughts spin, the threat of a headache blooming at the back of your skull, each new question generating new fears. But…
He’s actually real. A living, breathing, physical being—not just a voice with teeth—rescuing you from danger for a second time without any explanation as to why.
You don’t even realize your grip has tightened until there’s another deep growl from behind, vibrating through your ribcage.
“I’m not the enemy here, Moss.”
The sound of your name cuts deeper than any weapon or claws or teeth.
That’s…
That’s not possible.
You should feel something akin to happiness having your deepest longing granted, to be recognized after all these cycles of anonymity. But your survival instincts drown out the potential joy, snarling in your head louder than any beast—everyone who ever knew you is worm food.
There is absolutely no reason for this soul eater masked as a human to know your name.
You slam your head backwards against his face, the immediate startled grunt that follows confirms a successful hit. His hold loosens just enough for you to shove your way to freedom, a flare of pain igniting from your torso, angry with the harsh movements.
Your attempt of whirling around is hindered by the burning hitch in your lungs, nearly losing your balance. Stars, you’re as coordinated as a fish on land flopping about desperately. You barely detect the flash of motion in your peripheral vision before you’re slammed into by a wall of muscle and smoke, sword knocked from your grip as you crash onto the wet grass, pinned on your back beneath his weight.
“¡Basta!” (Enough!) he orders, his massive, rough-skinned hands clamped tight around your wrists. He looms over you, straddling your waist, white eyes devoid of irises reflect lantern light, narrowed in a mean, glowing glare. “You’re going to injure yourself worse than I can heal you, then we’ll really be fucked. So. Quit. Moving.”
Heal you? Yeah, right. Soul eaters were only good at tearing people apart, not fixing them.
But looking up at him, with the shine of lantern light throwing light upon his broad frame, enabling you to see his face at last, a wave of surprise washes over you. If not for his solid white eyes, he could truly pass as an ordinary man with dark unkempt curls that haven’t seen a comb in several cycles, a crooked nose and mustache wet with a trickle of amber ichor from your hit, there’s more of it smeared on the tendons of his throat and stubbled chin beneath scowling lips. A fearsome scar razes through his left brow and eye. A mark from a battle too close for comfort. You’re quite familiar with those.
The claw scratches on your torso will definitely scar and add to your collection. That is, if they don’t cause a nasty infection first. They’re throbbing in earnest now with every breath, too furious to be ignored. The soul eater can no doubt smell the seeping blood, but he remains motionless on top of you, staring and waiting for you to yield. Nothing about this makes sense. Why would a soul eater continue to come to your aide time after time? Is this some kind of extensive trick to lull you into a state of trust then rip your organs out when least expected?
“Why did you save me?” you finally ask, warily searching his face for any semblance of a clue.
For a long moment, there’s only the watchful, heavy silence of a predator and its prey facing off. Those white eyes resemble infinite pools, so dangerously luminous in the pitch black, almost hypnotic in their allurement. Could be mistaken for fireflies bobbing in the dark from far away. Up close…not so much.
“I’ve been tracking that slippery cur for five phases,” the soul eater answers without losing any gruffness. Does his voice naturally sound like he’s been gargling with rocks? Or is it a side effect of appearing human, equipped with a throat that only knows the scraping, guttural notes of barks and growls? “I should’ve stopped him before he got so close.”
“You didn’t stop him. You ate his soul.” The retort tumbles out stupidly, like he needed the reminder of what just transpired, and judging by the downward twist of his lips he also finds the comment idiotic.
“La comida es poder. (Food is power.) Only an idiot would pass up a hard-fought meal,” he replies with a flippant shrug. “Starvation isn’t just a human condition. I know you know what it’s like to be hungry—the kind of hunger that gnaws a hole in your stomach, screaming for scraps, taking control of every thought until even your own flesh starts looking delicious. You think my kind are vicious monsters?” He leans in, breath hot on your face, nose to nose. “Considerate bendecida de que nunca has visto a una manada hambrienta.” (Consider yourself blessed if you've never seen a hungry pack.)
The manner in which he speaks to you—like he knows you, has watched you—makes your body bristle all over with unease, invisible quills sharpening defensively.
“Why,” you ask again, sharp and venomous, “did you save me?”
“Do you kill all your foes with a sword or just my kind?” His non sequitur upends your thoughts and the lack of immediate response results in another swirl of smoke, weight lifting off of you as he disappears and reappears a foot away, stooping to retrieve your fallen weapon.
You scramble in an effort to stand, but your efforts are hindered by slick boots and clumsy hands, unable to get off the ground. That sword is your most valuable possession, you can’t lose it, not now, not to someone like—
Your thoughts and movements freeze when the hilt of your sword is suddenly thrusted out towards you. Your eyes slowly track up along the iron until they lock with his impassive expression, unchanging even when you quickly snatch it back.
You’re at a disadvantage down here on the ground injured and looking up at him, but you can still ram the blade through his chest. Can still fight until your very last breath. The soul eater’s eyebrows quirk up, perhaps guessing your train of thought or maybe he hears the acceleration of your thudding pulse. Other than that though, as the seconds tick past one by one, he doesn’t move. Not even a blink.
Your instincts insist he can’t be trusted. But it’s getting harder and harder to listen to them as pain and fatigue set in further, pleading for a break.
“Dijiste que podías curame,” (You said you could heal me) you say quietly, skepticism lingering in the flick of your eyes over his figure, noting his outfit for the first time. Black combat pants with knee pads, and a distressed brown leather jacket over a torn shirt darkened with splotchy stains you don’t want to think about the origins of. He doesn’t have a bag with him. Those pockets can’t hold many supplies either. “…pero ¿cómo?” (but how?)
¿Hablas mi idioma?” (You speak my language?) There’s something deeply unsettling about the way he bares all his teeth in a pleased grin. “Interesante.” (Interesting.)
“Estoy llena de sorpresas,” you retort. (I’m full of surprises.)
He exhales sharply through his nose in what might pass as a laugh. “Don’t stab me.”
What.
Before you can question him, he’s no longer human. The transformation is effortless, a special kind of gracefulness nothing else in the realm could ever successfully mimic, as ominously silent as the stars above. Then slowly, almost ridiculously so, the soul eater takes a step closer, making known each tiny, minuscule movement to prevent spooking you, like you’re the unpredictable one here. You’d laugh if you could remember how in that moment, struck breathless by the sudden emergence of six long, slender, branch-like limbs unfurling from the backside of his body enshrouded in hazy, swirling mist.
You have no idea what you’re witnessing or what’s happening, emotions fluctuating between terror and fascination with each skip of your heartbeat. The bristling you’d previously felt returns tenfold, wide eyes watching the silhouette continue to stretch and elongate, reaching up as if to touch the boundary between land and the cosmos. Yellow light blooms into existence at the ends of the tendrils, bright and searing, and you immediately duck your head with a wince, eyes squeezing shut.
Flashing spots of yellow and red blossom on the insides of your eyelids until the light gradually changes, softens somehow, if it’s even possible for such a thing to be gentle. But when something nudges the cut on your forehead, you can’t bite back your shriek, neck popping at the quick speed you look up.
“Stars above,” you curse hoarsely, a tremble racking your frame, because those are lantern lights hanging from the soul eater’s unraveled protuberances. One dangles far too close to your face for your liking, an odd humming emanating from the ancient looking lamp, spherical in its design.
You knew soul eaters devoured souls—you’d seen it up close and personal, heard the crunching and swallowing, the slurps of tongues. But you never fathomed this outcome. The cruel manipulation of lantern lights, beautiful and tempting in their power, camouflaging the very same predators that ripped them from their true hosts. A radiance so soft no one could detect the sharp glint of fangs until death was unavoidably imminent.
White eyes blink at you. The tendril near your face lowers, hanging over your wounds, and it’d be easy, so quick to cut it with your sword, freeing the lantern light for a precious few seconds before you met your demise for enraging the beast, but…
But the soul eater asked you not to stab him. Aside from his overall irritable countenance, he hasn’t made a move to truly attack, not even with the ample amount of opportunities to do so. Maybe he’s the exception to the norm. One of a kind. Maybe, like the dogs his kind tend to resemble when they haven’t sprouted additional extensions, there’s potential for loyalty, a bond to be struck.
Or maybe you’re wrong on all accounts, your mind is quick to rebuttal, and you’re just a fool clinging to wishful hopes. The constellations have never adorned you with such good luck after all.
You exhale a long, shaky breath, forcing the muscles in your arm to relax bit by bit all the way down to your fingertips. Only then does sheathing your sword no longer feel like one of Hercules’ twelve labors. Instead it just feels like one of the biggest mistakes of your life, ranking up there with the time you misjudged a river’s ferocity and nearly wound up taking a fatal nosedive over a waterfall.
Still, despite the long list of good and logical reasons why you shouldn’t, you find yourself nodding in tentative agreement to whatever permission the soul eater appears to be waiting for. You’ve really done it now, sticking your head straight into the wide open jaws of a beast, gambling on the strength of his self-control and the honesty of his word. There’s no turning back from here.
White eyes blink again, a subtle shift in the smoke you think might be an answering nod. The five lantern lights remain held aloft beyond reach, fanning out reminiscent of the Lion’s impeccable mane or the Peacock’s shimmering tail feathers, and it’s undoubtedly impious, comparing a creature of death to the divine, but you can’t bring yourself to care much about that when the sixth lantern light sets fire to your body without warning.
And that isn’t meant metaphorically or poetically or theoretically. Actual flames ignite with an audible whoosh and bright flash of orange-white light. Surprisingly the urge to scream doesn’t accompany it, neither does the sensation of excruciating pain one expects with cauterization. There’s no heat, no noxious fumes of smoke, just the erratic dance of fitful embers ghosting delicately over your skin. So gentle you wouldn’t even know what was happening if you weren’t watching it wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
The flames choke out as quickly as they originated. A pause follows, mentally gathering yourself, forcing your fingers not to quiver as they tentatively poke and prod at the holes of your shirt before realization hits like a brick, yanking the hem of your shirt up. Your lips part in a soundless gasp because what the actual fuck. The wounds are gone, including the gash on your forehead you discover. Not even the faintest hint of a blister to prove you were ever attacked at all.
Blinking dumbly for a few seconds, you swallow before slowly directing your gaze back up to the now-human-disguised creature halfway illuminated by blue lantern light, evenly meeting your stare.
“What are you?” You whisper, still touching your stomach, ignoring the nervous fluttering of butterflies within.
He stands with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket, an eerie display of faux casualness which only increases your discomfort. “A soul eater,” he says plainly. “Spawned from a single choice. The only choice that matters in this cursed realm: to either bite or get bitten.” His voice is unnervingly bland, each word drips in your ears, drowning your brain in something sticky, sickening. “No lo dudé. (I didn’t hesitate.) After all, what’s the point of having a mouth full of dogteeth, if not to use them to our own advantage?”
The question is rhetorical, but it burrows deep, a thorn piercing the cavity of your ribcage. Tastes like coppery blood in the back of your throat.
You draw yourself up on your feet at last, sword and lantern light jostling, loud in the still air. “Is that why you bit me?” You challenge. “For an advantage?”
Silence answers your questions, a long, drawn out pause that threatens to wrap a noose around your neck. You refuse to let it, cutting yourself free with a derisive scoff and a turn of your head. It’s been a long time since you last had a conversation, you forgot how tiring they can be, parsing every word for double meanings, the silences too. There’s something there though, in the way he knows your name, how he chooses when to answer your questions and when to change the subject, that provokes your curiosity, teasing you to stick your neck out further. But you know better than to lean into rabbit holes this dark and deep. Whatever’s at the bottom is guaranteed to be ugly.
You know better, you do, it’s just—
“What are you called?”
The soul eater tilts his head. “Didn’t we already establish what I am?”
“I meant your name.”
“A loud and complicated mess,” he says dismissively. “You would butcher it.”
“Oh, entonces asi es,” (Oh, is that how it is) you quip, arching an eyebrow. “You somehow know my name without me ever telling you it, but yours, of course, is complicated. What a load of Bull shi—”
An earsplitting bark sends you stumbling backwards, simultaneously mimicking the rattling boom of thunder and the harsh grating of metal-on-metal. You swear it stops your heart cold, body split between fight or flight, paralyzed in indecision, every nerve ending sensitive and alert for impending danger.
“What the fuck,” you wheeze, restarting your internal system, blinking dumbly at the soul eater who has the gall to huff a laugh. Such an incredibly human sound it nearly makes you flinch. Of course giving you a damn-near heart attack would be hilarious to him.
“I told you,” is all he offers as an explanation once his chuckles cease, eyes crinkled at the corners. “Loud and complicated.”
You stare. That horrendous noise…was his name?
“You must’ve had a different name,” you insist, arguing for reasons you don’t quite understand yourself, digging a deeper hole you should really leave behind, “back when you were human.”
That wipes all traces of humor from his expression.
His stance shifts, no longer at ease, a sharpness drawing his shoulders back. “That name is a muzzle tied to the past. A reminder of the weakling I once was,” he says. He makes a fist, smoke swallowing it whole like a snake before dissipating, flesh returning. “I won’t give you my name, Moss. I won’t answer to it.”
You barely refrain from shivering at his stone-cold declaration. Fine, if he wants it that way…
“Lo que digas, Pero.” (Whatever you say, Pero.)
He blinks, uncomprehending. “¿Qué?” (What?)
Your eyebrow reflexively arches again. “Well, I’ve got to call you something, don’t I?” Gesturing at your audience of standing stones, you add, “Seems pretty fitting in my opinion.”
He doesn’t express approval of the designation, but he doesn’t outright protest it either. You sense an unspoken agreement has been reached. And in doing so, you’re struck by the abnormality of this whole encounter. You’ve just named a soul eater of all things, like he was some sort of pet you could tame and take home with you.
“That sword is magnificent,” Pero says, yanking you from your thoughts.
You cast a cursory glance down at the mentioned weapon then meet his gaze again.
“You didn’t have it with you back then in the Marrow. I would’ve remembered seeing it.”
Your spine straightens, bite mark tingling, an unconscious reaction you can’t stifle as your memories leap back to the bloodbath. It’s one of your greatest mistakes, leaving your sword in your room, utterly useless in the fight against the invasion. There’s a tightness in your throat when you reply, “I thought we were safe.”
You don’t elaborate. You don’t need to, Pero’s quiet hum is confirmation he understands what remains unspoken. There are no true safe havens in this realm, even the shrines have their own creeping shadows in the shapes of thieves and vandals. Only naive fools and children whose eyes have not yet opened to the violence swarming in the dark believe sanctuaries exist.
Your eye-opening moment should’ve been the merciless deaths of your parents. You should’ve learned then to never let your guard down, not around anybody, but the lesson hadn’t stuck until the Marrow, until Pero’s teeth scarred it on your body forevermore.
“Soul eaters didn’t always hunt down our meals in packs,” Pero murmurs abruptly, another topic shift turning your head upside down. “We once were scavengers, preying only on the souls of those not long for this realm. The fatally wounded and gravely ill.”
You listen with furrowed brows. That doesn’t match your personal experience. As long as you’ve been alive, soul eaters have not come across as picky about who they choose to slaughter. If such a past like Pero describes is true, you’ve never met anyone old enough to recall it. Pero has the appearance of a man in his forties, but you quickly have the nagging inclination that he's much older than his looks imply.
“In the middle of a spring season when humans were healthy and food was scarce, a woman appeared to us. Called herself Tao Tei. She was like us, no longer human, but she was also something…greater than us. Una diosa. (A goddess.) Her voice creeped into our heads like fog, whispering to us ideas and hunting strategies, urging us to unleash a wildness we didn’t know we caged within ourselves. Because of her encouragement, soul eaters became what you know us as, Moss.”
Monsters. Heartless, bloodthirsty monsters.
You wonder what this Tao Tei woman looks like. A vivid image forms in your head of wild billowing hair, a hunched spine, and features so sharp they’d gauge out your eyeballs if stared at too long. Or maybe it’s the opposite, and she’s a figure of beauty, sweet like a fly trap, unsuspecting until it's too late to flee.
“Over time, Tao Tei’s selfishness grew, expecting more from us.” A scowl crosses Pero’s face, exhaling sharply through his nose. “For every soul we hunted, she demanded one for herself. And if we failed or denied her, that whisper in our heads became a scream. The torture she inflicted…Nunca olvidaré. (I will never forget.) She manipulated our instincts, her own personal toys to bend and break. I thought there was no resisting her. But then I was sent on a hunt to the Marrow,” his voice remains carved in stone, but his expression does something strange, softening around the edges, “and I saw a blue lantern light blazing right through the chaos, and everything just stopped. Like the realm itself froze solid. And for the first time since Tao Tei took control, the only voice in my head belonged to me.”
The memory of when you’d first laid eyes on Pero rushes to the forefront of your mind, remembering the intense focus he had for your lantern light. Never once glancing away as he stalked towards you, triggering an overwhelming sense of dread. A predator’s gait, you’d thought at the time. But could you have been wrong? Could the smoke and despair have manipulated your judgement so much you completely failed to notice any sign of Pero’s own internal crisis?
Self-doubt runs circles around your brain. But another thought soon chases after it.
What if the only thing manipulating your judgement is Pero? Trying his hardest to convince you of a version of events that never occurred in order to soften some of your long-nurtured distrust against him.
Round and round the conflicting sentiments plow on. No conclusion to be reached.
“I’m sure you know blue lantern lights are rare.” There’s a subtle flicker in his gaze giving you the impression he’s looking at the blue flame now, though the lack of irises makes it hard to be certain. “They burn stronger than any other color. Legends say blue lantern lights are assigned by the stars to people with great purposes, but all I know for fact is that when one shatters, the soul becomes incredibly volatile. If its ascent to the stars is interrupted in any way, it will explode, killing everything in its radius, even my kind are not immune. We avoid harming anyone carrying a blue lantern light; it’s an instinct so deeply ingrained even Tao Tei can’t convince us to attack unless we’re sick with starvation. El riesgo es demasiado grande.” (The risk is too great.)
The other soul eater from earlier comes to mind, recalling its odd behavior, and you realize now it must have been acting out of hunger when it came after you. You’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, crossing paths in a moment of starving frenzy. The one had been unpredictable enough to fight, you really should consider yourself blessed it wasn’t a starving pack instead.
And as for your lantern light, well. You can count the total number of times you’ve seen a blue flame on one hand, and nothing sticks out as extraordinary about them in your memory, just simple wanderers like yourself. Legends are supposedly exaggerations sprouting from seeds of truth, but you’re disinclined to believe there’s any particularly great purpose to be found in your future. The stars certainly haven’t given you any signs you’re a favorite of theirs.
Either the legends are false, or you’re a fluke that slipped through the cracks.
“None of that explains why you bit me,” you say at length, refocusing. “Dime la verdad.” (Tell me the truth.)
“Your ability, shielding me from Tao Tei’s mind tricks, I didn’t know how it worked. There were too many ifs—if it was only temporary, if I had to stay close to you or if once I left the Marrow I’d be controlled again,” Pero replies, rubbing absently at the dried ichor crusted in his mustache, and he’s several steps away but somehow he seems intimately close, carving out a secret nook for you and him alone. “Biting you was impulsive, sí (yes), but I had to bind us together. Anywhere you went, I would know to follow.”
He’s staring at the bite mark now, and you’re staring at him, speechless.
“I haven’t heard Tao Tei’s voice ever since,” he admits, a quiet confession you want to crumple up and stomp beneath your boot. “All the extra noise, the scrutiny and manipulation, it’s gone.”
Every waking period since the Marrow’s end you’ve torn your brain apart speculating why you were bitten, what must’ve been going through your savior’s head at the exact moment of his decision. Laid out like this, you see Pero’s fear and his selfishness, thinking only of himself in the heat of the moment, but worst of all you see your deep-seated suspicions are confirmed. The bite isn’t just a bite at all. It’s a binding chain impervious to the effects of time or distance. Pero has tied you both to each other in an inescapable knot of his own making, using you as a shield in his fight against a mind-controlling madwoman, irreversibly plotting your life path in an entirely new direction.
He spared you and doomed you all at once.
Your chest feels so tight it hurts to draw a breath. And Pero, he’s just watching with those eerie fucking eyes of his that your nails itch to tear out of his skull.
“So, what, you’re just going to keep playing knight in shining armor and expect me to be grateful? ¿En serio?” (Seriously?) you ask sharply, sneering. The audacity of this wicked mutt. Permanently intertwining your lives without a lick of consent—you’ve had recurring bad dreams kinder than this fate. “And what’re you gonna do when I finally croak, huh? Become Tao Tei’s puppet again?”
A surge of smoke seeps from his fists, coiling around his arms in a shadowy haze before dispersing. There and gone.
“The only thing I expect from you is to come with me.”
Anger buzzes through you like lightning, white hot and raging. “Come with you?” you echo, all jagged words and hurled spit. “Fuck no, you seflish prick. You can’t just show up after five fucking cycles with your ridiculous sob story and expect anything after what you fucking did to me with those stardamned dogteeth you threw away your humanity for. Soul eaters are the bloodiest butchers of the whole realm. ¡Los odio a todos! (I hate you all!) Why the fuck would I ever willingly go with you anywhere?”
Unbidden tears sting at your eyes, held back by sheer stubborn force as you stare down the soul eater. His shock at your outburst is subtle, just the faintest twitch of his brow and the slight parting of his lips. Rejection probably doesn’t happen to him often. How good it feels then, reacquainting him with the feeling.
An eternity of silence seems to stretch before Pero finds his voice again, an accelerant provoking the fierce heat of your glare. “Te equivocas.” (You’re wrong.)
“I—”
“¡Silencio! (Silence!) Soul eaters aren’t the bloodiest butchers in the realm, not anymore,” Pero cuts you off unrepentantly, and your heartbeat stutters at the new declaration, dread stealing the reins from anger. “Tao Tei craves the power of the one thing soul eaters can’t successfully hunt for her: blue lantern lights. She’s begun creating a new army to serve her—stronger, faster, better than all of my kind combined. They’ll come for you, Moss, it’s only a matter of time. I’m just trying to delay the encounter long enough to rip Tao Tei’s head from her shoulders.”
That’s not possible, you want to protest. You’re making up lies to fuck with my head. No, no, no! I won’t believe it.
Over and over your life has fractured into pieces, leaving you to stitch yourself back up into some semblance of a person. When your parents died, you thought there was no recovering—but life went on, and so did you. When the Marrow was destroyed, you thought the pain would never cease—but life went on, and so did you.
And now here’s Pero, crash landing into your life like a meteor, obliterating everything familiar in his wake, no stable land in sight to regain composure. Life will keep marching ever onwards, for better or for worse that much will always remain a constant truth, but you…you aren’t incorruptible. Some wounds are too big and run too deep to be fixed. What chance do you have to survive against Tao Tei and her army?
Bite or get bitten.
Your gums hurt thinking about it.
“The only way to stop Tao Tei is to kill her,” Pero tells you, the blunt and honest truth. “And if I’m going to succeed in hunting her down, I need you alive and by my side.”
You shake your head, breath rattling on an exhale, thoughts spinning meaninglessly.
“I didn’t ask for your protection. I didn’t ask for any of this,” you begin, throwing out a hand, gesturing at nothing, at everything. “You do see how crazy this shit is, don’t you? You attacked my home, helped kill everyone I loved, and left me with a hole in my neck; now suddenly you show up out of the damn blue telling me my life’s in danger and I’m supposed to follow you? Just like that?” You laugh, dry and humorless. “What’s to stop me from shattering my lantern light right now and leaving you behind?”
Pero watches you with eyes empty and indefinite yet deeply penetrating, cutting right to the bone. The silence stretches long enough your anger intensifies, sizzling in your blood, and you subconsciously clench your hands.
And then he sighs, head hanging slightly, looking tired and worn out, like he feels just as fed up with everything as you do.
“The same thing that’s kept you going all this time, I guess. Your promise to live,” Pero says, perhaps the gentlest you’ve heard him sound, still blunt as a hammer. It subconsciously soothes something lodged deep inside you though, shoulders marginally relaxing their tense points beneath your clothes. “Trust me or don’t, that’s your choice, Moss. And if you think I’m thrilled about our situation, estás equivocada de nuevo.” (You’re wrong again.) His tone then hardens once more, a fierce and solemn oath. “There are three absolute truths you can be certain of though: Tao Tei will not stop coming after you until you’re dead, I can’t kill her without you, and I’ll fight the stars themselves to keep you breathing.”
You’ve camped out in the center of the Perobury Circle, staring up at the vast celestial sphere, head cushioned by your bag. For once you don’t feel judgement from the stars. You don’t feel much at all, actually. Your self-appointed soul eater protector stalks the terrain in your peripheral, flickering between the stone gaps, there and gone, there and gone, every once in a while tilting his nebulous head, listening to sounds beyond your range.
Your Chamaeleon tail’s long faded to black, the end of another phase, but your thoughts are too loud to sleep, mulling over events recent and old, no memory left untouched. Part of you wonders if you never woke up from the shrine, that Pero’s an elaborate creation of your subconscious trying to explain the unexplainable, because Pero…he’s someone like none other.
He’s challenging every preconceived notion you hold about soul eaters, revealing hidden depths you thought them incapable of. It was an impulse to distrust him upon sight alone even before you learned his backstory. A backstory you’re not even sure if you believe. Then again, once upon a time you hadn’t believed in the existence of soul eaters either.
The ripple effects of Pero’s selfish choice in the Marrow are still revealing themselves like the multiple layers of an onion, impossible to ignore or forget, but a part of you, larger than you’d care to admit, can’t help pondering what you would have done if the roles were reversed, and you’d been the predator controlled against your will and he’d been the prey with the pretty blue lantern light. Could you have let him go so easily if he’d made all the pain end? Or would you have also acted out of an impulsive desperation, a need for freedom from a cruel master, and sunk your teeth in deep?
The answer, to your chagrin, is not so clear cut.
Bite or get bitten. Four words lodged in your brain you can’t shake loose.
You’ve been bitten—and despite everything thrown your way, you’re still you. That must mean something.
Pero made his own choice, embracing the fangs of a beast, but aren’t your own teeth sharp as they are? Haven’t you bared them at your enemies without thinking, satisfying the primal instincts simmering in your bloodstream?
If Tao Tei’s real and she’s coming for your lantern light, then you must decide what to do about it. Running’s an option, it’s what you’ve done since the Marrow. But this time you’ll be running from an army dedicated to your demise, waiting for the precise moment your guard slips up. There will be no peace of mind. No moments to pause and catch your breath. You won’t be living anymore, merely surviving phase to phase until either death snuffs out your lantern light or Tao Tei harvests it.
Bite or get bitten.
Fight back or run away.
Your tongue runs over your dogteeth, a decision reached.