Vigor Mortis

“This is a Lark’s story, content yet seeking more…”

“Shut up.”

“The Lark... flies... far for she... loves naught but to explore...”

“Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

“No,” I say, turning my head in the direction of the noise. It’s a good sound, ‘no.’ Refusal. Negation. Denial. A sound that means things. Easy and fun to say. When I started losing the hard shell around my body, at first I was afraid. I still am a little, but at least a mouth like this makes the noises much easier to make.

And besides, my teeth are as sharp as ever.

I return to practicing the fun sounds, to the irritated groans of my two favorite meals. I don’t understand most of what they’re saying, but I’ll remember it. Someday, I’ll figure out what the sounds mean, and then I’ll know.

“This is all your fault,” the loud one hisses.

“I’m sorry,” the beautiful one answers. “I figured out a numbing spell, at least. Are you feeling better?”

“Fuck you! Figure out a plague spell and kill us already!”

“I… I’m sorry,” the beautiful one says again. The loud one usually says ‘Claretta’ at some point when speaking to it. Likewise, the beautiful one will say ‘Fulvia’ when talking to the other. Never the reverse. Most sounds are said by both, or not said often enough for me to tell. Those are different. I wonder why.

The loud one is horribly, horribly annoying, but particularly delicious so I need to make sure it lives. Sometimes I try to make it shut up— I even tried binding its face in webs— but the beautiful one tends to start making horrible noises too when I do things like that. It rather defeats the point of keeping it if it doesn’t make the healing sounds, so I have to stop.

Oh, well. This is easily still the most wonderful part of my short life. Truly, it can’t get better than this. Not unless I manage to collect more of these interesting creatures. Soon I tire of practicing noises, crawling over the beautiful one to rest on its belly. Warm and soft, I quite enjoy descending into torpor on it. These strange creatures tend to lose awareness when they rest, which seems silly. How did such creatures survive before they had me to protect them? I let my eyes close, thoughts drifting off and heartbeat slowing. The relaxing bob of my sleeping spot as it inhales and exhales inevitably causes my mind to wander...

The first movement, the first feeling, is a fall. Adrenaline rising, heart pumping, the thing which does not know to call itself me feels the drop. The tumble. The instinctive fear, without apparent cause or context. Only an inexplicable knowledge that sometime soon, there would be a—

Crunch.

Pain, horrible pain. Crashing endlessly, head over heels, more falls and more crunches follow. Broken and bruised, the beast that would one day recognize itself to be me vomits fluids from its lungs, gasping its first painful breaths. Eyes blink open, liquid gunk and blood getting wiped away as I take my first look at the world. A massive mound of stacked black ovoids lie before me, cracked and smashed. Many still fall, some surviving the trip to the ground largely unscathed, but others impacting on the mound and shattering, disgorging some kind of black creature that stirs a new instinct within me.

Hunger.

I try to leap towards my meal, only to have pain shoot through my body as one of the limbs I’m apparently supposed to use for the purpose fails to function. It’s twisted and leaking in ways quite unlike the limb opposite to it. I feel no desire to care about this in the slightest, simply noting it before dragging myself over to my meal. It squirms and oozes, a long, black carapace with many twitching, spindley bits extending off of it. I enjoy the sight of motion. It whets my appetite. Leaning over the creature, I open my mouth wide and bite down, crunching through chitin and savoring the delicious, juicy prize within. Pleasure fills me as I swallow, but is gone in an instant. My hunger is unabated. Bite after bite, I tear into my prize as it writhes beneath me, relishing the intense joy of the meal for instant after instant, mouthful after mouthful. The experience only makes me want more! Caught in frenzy, I eat and eat until suddenly my teeth sink through flesh and feel no joy in the act.

I look down, indignant and furious. More than half my meal still remains, and I am still hungry. Yet I feel no desire to eat it! I take another bite, experimentally tasting and swallowing… but there is nothing. The creature does not move or resist. It is now dead, and for some reason no longer contains what I was eating it for in the first place.

Examining the creature, I notice it is the same dark color as both myself and the ovoid from which it dropped out of. Despite our identical color, however, I look nothing like the other creature. Where it is somewhat cylindrical and many-legged, my body has a much different shape, and only six limbs. Yet did I, too, hatch from an egg like this? It seems likely I did. I remember tumbling out of something, after all. Perhaps one of the cracked, black things above me?

Sure enough, many of the others begin to hatch, dispensing dark-colored yet wildly different creatures that I somehow know are fresh and full of the beautiful, joyous something that I must eat. I try to pounce on one again, and to my belated surprise, it works perfectly this time! My broken limb now looks the same as my others. Eating must have fixed it! How pleasant.

Teeth tearing into my prey, I resume gorging myself, shuddering at the delicious splashes of satisfaction that briefly overwhelm my endless hunger with each swallow. Yet this meal is feistier, seeming inclined to bite back. I yelp in surprise as its teeth sink into me in turn, gouging a bleeding chunk from my forelimb in much the same way I’m doing to it. Hmm. So we are similar, even though we look different.

Not that I spend much time thinking about it. Prey is prey. Wrestling this struggling food to the ground, I take more bites from its belly as I hold its face in the dirt. Such wonderful flavor! I—

Pain shoots through me from behind. Another one of my kin is attacking me as well! I kick furiously, trying to shake it off. I am eating! Leave me be! My angry jabs don’t dissuade it in the slightest. It’s a hulking thing, standing on two back limbs and swinging sharp forelimbs that threaten to cut straight through my chitin. I’m forced to turn my attention to fighting it… and when I do, my former meal bites at my leg!

Slowly, I come to the realization that many, many inky-skinned creatures are emerging from eggs around me, screeching and fighting and bleeding and gnawing… two more head my way now, even.

My belly cares not. Stay and fight. Stay and eat! Hissing furiously, I throw myself into the fray, biting wildly at my enemies. My food! All is food! I will consume them to the last! One of my limbs is sheared clean off, but I tear into my target with vigor. Another joins me, stealing my meal, and yet another leaps on top of me, knocking me from my prize and tearing open my leg with their teeth.

Suddenly, I’m the one being eaten. A powerful limb holds my head down, my teeth snapping in vain as large chunks of my body are torn out, black blood dripping from the serrated fangs of my tormenter. I have to eat them back! I must, but I cannot move! No matter how I thrash and flail, I cannot free myself! Again and again, teeth tear into my side. Pain and fear join my hunger, and something beyond mere flesh is torn from me with every bite. Soon, I will also lack what makes me a proper meal. Soon, I will also stop flailing and fail to move. No, I don’t want this! I refuse!

Two more of my kin jump on the one eating me, knocking it away. The three of them engage in a flurry of deadly teeth leaving me a moment alone. So many, many more of us rush down from the rapidly-hatching pile of eggs. I turn over, one limb missing, blood oozing from a half-dozen absent hunks of flesh. Yet still, my hunger screams at me to join the fray! I refuse it. I must refuse it. I do not want to become empty of the thing that brings joy. I do not want to cease moving.

Crawling desperately, I stagger across the ground, splashing the brown and green terrain with black. Panicked and frightened, I move as far as I possibly can, panting gasps of air as my burning body refuses to travel a single step more. Where do I go? What do I do? I’m so hungry. So very, very hungry…

Something twitches, and my eyes lock onto it immediately. A many-legged thing, like my first meal, suspends itself in the air, hiding in a nook of brown above me. It is not black, matching instead the colors of the large, brown-and-green things around me that do not smell like food. This new creature crawls slowly towards me on eight legs, though I cannot see what it crawls on. Perhaps the air itself, though air has never given my legs purchase. This seems profoundly unfair, and so I decide to eat it.

I do not move, because moving causes me pain and my meal seems inclined to approach me. Ever so slowly, I watch it get closer. Ever so slowly, it places itself in range to be consumed. Eventually, it lunges for me. I lunge back. My lunge is better.

Delicious, delicious, delicious! This thing tastes far better than my kin! Gleefully, I tear into it, though it survives barely a few bites before its flavor becomes foul. I’m not disappointed by this for long, however, as many more like it descend down around me. I’m afraid, as the last time I fought outnumbered it brought me into this state in the first place. These creatures are barely half my size, though, and the other one I just ate was quite weak. More importantly, I really don’t like all this black liquid I’m leaking. I don’t like it at all. I want to eat some things so it stops falling out.

...Also, I’m hungry.

I’m always hungry, without exception. The pain, the need to gnaw and feast never leaves except for the barest moments when I swallow prey. Even now, the infinite emptiness rages within me, demanding I kill both my prizes. I will not, though. The loud one and the beautiful one are special. Far better tasting than the eight-legged creatures, although I have to admit I much prefer the webs I became able to make from devouring them than this… softness I’m getting from my current prizes. I ate the eight-legged creatures for many sky-grounds before acquiring my favorite traits of theirs, to my great surprise and delight. These four-limbed creatures taste better, but their traits are… less desirable. Ah, well. I like them anyway.

Stretching, I rouse from my rest, that constant ravenousness driving me to move again at last. I suspect I will not need to go far for a meal, however. My traps have caught many targets, hung and waiting for my jaws. As I crawl off my bed, however, the armor around my forelimbs cracks and crumbles, sloughing off onto the ground. I screech in surprise, though the experience isn’t painful, at least. Underneath my old arms are new ones, my four front limbs now each tipped with five tinier limbs. These are… the structures the beautiful one used to have before I bit them off.

“No!” I complain, scowling as I flex my new limbs. “No, no, no!”

“Hhn?” the loud one groans, peering my way. “Oh, fuck, it has hands.”

I scowl. Hands. These soft, wiggly limb-tips are going to be terrible for injuring prey! They’re already uncomfortable to walk on, although thankfully my hind limbs have been getting better and better at balancing my full weight. I try to extrude my webs and, to my great relief, it seems each of my new limb-tips have a tiny spinnerette. Hmm… I won’t be able to make the webs as thick as I had before. Perhaps I can just use multiple thinner webs together? I will figure something out.

Growling, I stagger as I try to stand on my hind limbs alone. They’re getting stronger, but something about them still isn’t quite right. I wander off with the assistance of my hands then, wincing as sharp rocks in the dirt press into them in ways I would have previously ignored. It’s not long before I see something squirming in one of my many traps, and I happily free one of its limbs so I can better get my mouth around it.

Limbs aren’t the tastiest part of a creature’s body, but that mostly doesn’t matter. As soon as the creature dies, it loses all flavor. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is. I can’t eat something when it can no longer move. So I’ve… experimented. I’d rather have more bites than just one good one, and biting off the extra dangly bits first always seems to be the best way to keep my prey twitching as long as possible. When I take out the central bits with all the weird meat inside it tends to make the prey no longer move, and then it tastes awful.

Many more ground-skies pass over like this, with my time spent listening to the beautiful one’s noises while the loud one complains, soaking in every last sound they make while I nibble away at their ever-regrowing extremities. Today, water streams from the eyes of the loud one as I feast on it, something that hasn’t happened in quite a while. I wonder what it means. Am I making them drink too much?

“I don’t remember,” the loud one whispers, its voice odd. Perhaps affected by the eye-water?

“What? Fulvia?” the beautiful one turns its head to look at its companion. “What don’t you remember?”

“Their names!” my meal moans. “I don’t remember their names!”

“Whose names? Fulvia? Fulvia, listen to me! Look at me, please!”

“Claretta I can’t feel it anymore! It’s eating me but I can’t feel it!”

“Fulvia, I've already cast the numbing spell. Remember?”

The loud one has been continually getting more and more annoying, and frankly its taste is also getting worse. Perhaps the beautiful one’s songs aren’t enough to keep the flavor. I may have to kill them after all.

...I don’t want to do that.

I move to the next budding limb-nub, the beautiful one halting its less interesting noises in order to sing what made my favorite meal… well, the beautiful one. The loud one is losing flavor, but I don’t want to kill it. Would I want it if it has no flavor at all? Hmm… I’m not sure. I’m just not sure.

I finish my meal, walking over to and curling up on the beautiful one again. The pair of them remind me of flowers. I still remember the first time my life stopped being a constant fight for food and survival. Once I had eaten whole nests of the eight-legged creatures and had no other food to consume or flee from… I took a look, for the first time, at the world around me. At the beautiful yellow sky, the brown and green ground, and flecked among all of it the patches of vibrant color that captured my attention. They, too, I could not eat, but I loved them anyway. Yet whenever I tried to move one, to take it with me, it would lose its beauty just a few sky-grounds later. Is that why the loud one loses flavor now? Did I move it too far?

Oh, another thought. Maybe the beautiful one could heal flowers?

“Fulvia,” the beautiful one murmurs. “Fulvia, please say something.”

Only silence answers it. The loud one sleeps. It’s been doing more of that lately, too.

“Fulvia. I’m sorry. I can’t give up on you. Please. Please don’t leave me.”

Water starts leaking from the beautiful one’s eyes as well.

“Fulvia. Please. You’re all I have.”

I rise up, curious now. Walking forward on my greatest prize’s chest, I place one of my tiny hands up high on its cheek, patting at the water.

“Hhuat” I ask, “Fullvauh?”

The beautiful one’s eyes go wide, locking onto me immediately.

“What did you say?”

I don’t quite understand. Confusion for confusion, I think?

“What... Fulvia?” I repeat, taking more time and care with the sounds.

“T-that’s Fulvia!” it answers, motioning its head towards the loud one. I point that way as well.

“Fulvia?” I confirm.

“Yes! Yes! Oh god, you’re not just parroting! You understand! Please! Let us go, please!”

I tap the beautiful one’s mouth with my hand until it stops making noises. I don’t know what all that means! It sounds like Fulvia is a term for the loud one, though. Interesting. So if I’m guessing right...

“Fulvia,” I say, pointing at the loud one. Then, I point at the beautiful one. “Claretta?”

“Yes!” it answers. “I am Claretta!”

Ooh! That was the first time the beautiful one said ‘Claretta!’ I think I’m onto something.

“Fulvia,” I say, pointing to the Fulvia. “Claretta,” I say, pointing to the Claretta I’m standing on.

The Claretta’s eyes are alight with… something. Its face is twisted in an expression I hadn’t seen before.

“Yes, yes that’s right! That’s Fulvia, I’m Claretta!”

It motions at the Fulvia when saying ‘Fulvia’ again! I’m right, I have to be!. So next, I point at myself.

“What?” I ask.

The Claretta says nothing, its face moving into a new expression again.

“What?” I demand again.

“I… don’t know,” the Claretta answers.

“Fulvia, Claretta,” I say, pointing at them. Then, back to me. “Idenno?”

The Claretta moves its head back and forth.

“No, no! You’re… I don’t know.”

Oh, it’s using ‘no.’ What I’m saying isn’t right.

“What?” I ask again, pointing at myself.

“I don’t know!”

But that’s the thing the Claretta just said is wrong! Ugh!

“What!” I demand, teeth bared. “What! What! What!”

“Lark!” the Claretta blurts. “Your name is Lark! I-if you want! Do you like that?”

What? ‘Larkyrnamislarkihifyewantdyoulaiktha’ is way too long of a thing to call myself! This food is crazy. Just the first part, though…

“Lark,” I repeat, tasting the sound. The sound I’ve come to love more than any other. The music of the beautiful one.

I am Lark! A new kind of warmth fills me, compelling me to bare my teeth in a much different way. I feel so good!

The Claretta had been singing about me all along!