Page 88 of Citrine

Her rage tastes even better than I hoped.

"You will make a fine hunter, female. You already possess the madness for it."

She raises a single finger at me without turning and moves to the corner. I feel proud of what I have accomplished and turn around to guard her and think… so much thinking.

She isn't quite ready yet to make her first kill, but she shows early signs of the needed violence.

39

Eli

"You survived. You are not as weak as you used to be," he calls back as I see his tentacles disappear.

Is that really supposed to be some sort of consolation? I really want to strangle this alien, but he just fought through an entire horde to save my life.

And it was freaking hot as hell. Dammit.

The least I can do is just let him say what he wants. I'm tired, too tired to say anything to him, even if I could.

For now, all I really want to do is just… breathe.

The cave looks much more inviting than it did before. It isn't as dark, and this time I get to take a closer look at the blue-glowing snails, just as curious as always about their differences. It seems shell patterns might be universal. Interesting.

They are eating the green and red algae coating the walls of the cave, which is just big enough for me to move around a bit, even with Wroahk's massive body set up at the entrance.

Probably there to block me getting out as much as to block anything getting in. I lift a lip and snarl at him. He doesn't look impressed, then he moves away from the cave opening.

My stomach grumbles, but I'm not even sure what to feed it anymore.

The world has gone mad. No, I have gone mad. Every single day I wake up, I find that I have been stripped of everything that made me the woman I used to be.

I really thought that since Wroahk is an intelligent creature, it would mean that I can still eat whatever I want and not indiscriminately kill like he does. Clearly, the change was physiological, even down to what I can freaking eat.

I can no longer maintain a vegetarian diet. Everything I thought I knew about myself, gone in the span of a few days. This transition is not just stealing my body, it is stealing my life.

It doesn't matter how much food I shove into my mouth. It won't stay down, no matter how hard-headed I want to be.

He's watching me again, even though I thought he left. He can probably see forever in the water, the bastard. I feel his eyes on me, never changing, never moving.

It's infuriating. I can't understand why it has to be him. He's the monster that threatened to eat me the first time he saw me. Now, I don't even understand what he wants.

Except I know that what I want is him.

Diablos.

This isn't helping.

Calm down, Eli. Breathe.

Breathe through what exactly? My nose? My lungs? My gills? I've been using all three of them completely normally, like it's how I was born.

It's too quick, too fast, too weird.

The tentacles in my hair, dammit. I don't actively see them, but I know they're there. It's like this thing where you are constantly looking at your nose, but your brain won't let you see it unless you focus on it. In this case, if I instruct them to move… they stretch out and touch along the cave rock behind me.

I shudder. It's like having eight more arms, except with different ways they interpret sensation.

I shiver, then feel a slight change in temperature. Are they temperature regulators? That's just a guess. I don't know much about this body and Wroahk doesn't seem to be curious about the mechanics of his.

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