To Eat the Predator
The Earth of the Ninth Era breathes like a dying animal, slow, wet, and too loud in the quiet. People pretend it’s normal. They pretend the ground isn’t pulsing under their feet, or that the sky doesn’t peel open sometimes just to look at them.
Rhae’Va doesn’t pretend.
She’s small, and already tired. There’s a bite mark on her ribs that never heals. it aches whenever the world shifts, like the scar remembers something she doesn’t. Like it’s waiting.
Most nights she wakes choking on air that isn’t air, heart clawing at her bones. A dream again. A mouth again.
Teeth… too many, too soft, too gentle...
( Come back. )
She never remembers the full dream. Maybe she doesn’t want to.
At the academy where children learn how not to be eaten by whatever lives beneath the streets they treat her like she’s just another quiet kid with bad sleep.
Fine. Let them think that. Let them stare.
But the city knows her. The walls twitch when she walks by. Pipes throb like veins holding their breath. Sometimes shadows follow her too closely, stretching long and hungry behind her shoes.
Something is searching for her. Something old. Something that already had her once.
And somewhere inside her. deep, bone-deep. something answers back.
Not with fear.
With recognition. With hunger.
Because the truth she never says out loud is simple and sickening,
She’s not sure she’s the prey. Not anymore. Maybe she never was.
Neuronie · Horror
Neuroniea year agoCommented