Celia had thought that falling out of the sky inside the bowels of a giant eel that was currently being cooked alive would be scarier. That she would be screaming. Or just outright petrified with the sort of fear that guaranteed death brought with it. But she was wrong. She was also learning that she apparently responded to the fear of death with intense rage. Something she wasn’t sure was good or bad.
She just knew she was more determined to eat the eel more than ever now. If only to spite whoever it was that had both saved her and partially doomed her to experience one of gravity’s favorite parlor tricks. But that would only come after she survived.
If she survived.
And that was the thing. Survival was not a guaranteed fact. It was just a possible reward if she played her cards right. And the first one that needed playing was evasion. The insides of the eel had become a hot death trap. Fire burning the floors and the walls, heat bursting somewhere upwind of her and flooding it’s body with something that smelled a mite bit toxic. Stomach acid, barbed insides, and all other sorts of biological hazards. The sort of stuff that Celia assumed existed within her as well, if only to a limited degree. And that made her feel sympathy for just about everything she had eaten thus far.
Though, in her defense, she had never eaten them alive and didn’t plan on starting. The only plan she had in mind right now, was one of motion. Claws diving down, nails biting through a pool of blood and into tissue lined floor. Her ascent suddenly slowing, gravity’s hold on her decreasing just enough to give her time to think.
She threw herself downward. Barreling through the fire in animalistic movement, eyes squeezed shut as she passed the flames. Then she found herself a wall and cut out a small section of it, just barely big enough for her to fit into. And then Celia did something her senses almost physically retaliated against.
She got into the wall pocket.
It was wet, kinda squishy, and was disgusting on a fundamental level. But it was also cooked by the flames that had passed it by. At least enough so that Celia's stomach got the better of her and…
She was eating it. Metal maw parting through the cooked flesh with an impossible ease. Teeth, tongue, and every inch of her mouth sharpening the more she ate. And the more she ate, the more she wanted to eat. Slowly working her way through the leviathan, mouth becoming more than just a mouth.
Soon it was naught but a maw made for eating. Steel spreading from it over her face. Over the rest of her body. Her entire form converting into a thing of absolute sharpness and hunger. She needed to eat. Cut and eat.
Rip and tear at her meal until it was done.
Chunks torn away by hands of sharpened iron. Movement made a sword, slicing between tissue and all connected to it. Bones were ground done and made brittle. Scabs of flesh were chipped away at, ground down with a thousand cuts, ripped apart. Seasoning for her meal. Blood was boiled in her presence, the bite of her hunger such that it radiated heat. Gluttony burning within her.
But it made no chef of her. No agile thing. There was nothing noble about it. She was just a maw. A thing that devoured, lacerated, grew more ever edged by the satiating of her appetite. A crystallization of what was happening to her. Of the twisting of her being, of what it meant to be human and not, drifting further and further away from the Celia she once knew.
And a part of her both dreamed to embrace it and at the same time break away from it. To feed the beast and see it complete, eager to find where the edge might take her. Afraid to let go of the woman late for work, who was never on time, who complained to her dad too much, and was always afraid she’d end up like one of her older relatives who still had that spark of genuine kindness burning within her.
It was fracturing her. The choice of it. The begging, longing, needing, wanting, draining choice.
She had to let go. Had to hold on. Had to drift. Had to fly. Ocean below, sky above. Desperate singularity singing between her bones, demanding, demanding an answer. One beyond the woman and beyond the parasite. It ached for sublime partition. To see her sundered and made whole of one half.
She denied it.
Revealed!
[(Hidden{REDACTED}) Tumor of the Benign Giant]
Growth achieved!
Classification advanced!
Classification: (lesser) Feastling - Changed - Feastling
Designation Advanced!
Designation: Newspawn Hybrid (Beyondling) - Changed - Trueborn Hybrid (Beyondling)
Nature Gained/Born!
[Tumor of the Benign Giant] - Catalyzed - [The Hunger Pained, The Self Fractured]
Acquiring fuel for Idealization!
She read the screen, failed to understand it, and then Celia ceased to be. Not in ruin, and not in death. Her non-existence was brought about by something far more sinister, and far less forgiving. She was undone of her own self. Destroyed for lack of being the perfect she wanted, the perfect her heart ached for. The very idea of who she was made less than atoms in the face of what she could/want/should be. Utter and total. Flesh parting from mind and mind from flesh. Every treasured iota of an idea measured against another and another and another. Each clash eliminating that which could not support the strength of where she could’ve/should’ve been.
Until there was nought but two ideas left. Two wholes of what Celia could be. The predator, dominant, bestial, a thing of pure hunger with all the cunning of a snake. Or there was the other. A her who was who she was, a cage around a beast keeping the monster within, always hungry but never satisfied.
Both were cages of their own unique make. One where the beast was free but a beast in all its simplistic glory. The other where she was still her, but trapped by the truth of a monster within. Two choices that warred against one another, demanding she choose. That her hand fall to one side and that their grand contest brought to an end.
Celia chose neither, and shattered again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Until something new was born.