Weekly Writing – April 13 2024

No one else would ever know that he had screamed. It was no comfort.
The pain came from every side as he screamed, the jaws came, and that was no comfort, but it meant there was no time for him to struggle. No need for him to try to compose himself and take the agony piece by piece.
They took him piece by piece, but they did so as a pack. His hand was gone at the wrist, gulped down that first wolf’s gullet, before he could decide that he’d made a mistake. His left leg was shaking like a seizure between the teeth of two others, and then there was only gushing, unsurvivable agony where it had been.
The pieces blurred together. He was being taken away and pain put in his place, hollowed out under the ribs as pain poured to fill the void. They tore out and swallowed his flesh and runework together, and there must have come a point where he lost consciousness as a man. Not enough of him left, flesh or blood or composure, to keep it. But he never stopped hearing the crunching, gristling, ripping sounds, wet swallows, satisfaction rumbling in the chests of the creatures that were consuming him.
He never lost himself completely. He must have drawn the runes right after all. He blinked, and though he had heard the crunch of his skull between jaws as powerful as a landslide, he could see.
The dusk painted itself before him in blunted sepia clarity. In dulled colours and sharpened lines, every shiver of leaf and shadow clear to his eyes.
His many, many eyes. He saw that dying day and rising night from a dozen angles, nosing at the ground or tilted towards the haphazard quilt of forest canopy and sky. He saw the bloody pit of soil in the centre of the circle where he had lain.
He saw no shred of his own body left, beyond the stain that couldn’t be licked away from the soil. Mesmerized and maddened with hunger by the working, they had consumed him utterly, flesh and bone and spell.
He could taste himself on their tongues. Smell the hot reek of his disembowelment in their breath. He could feel the sure weight and dense, massive power of their bodies the same way he had once been able to feel his fingers, and he flexed his hold over them the way he would have his devoured hands.
And the pack turned as one, in more perfect accord than ever before, to run. His will rode with them, on them, in them, weaving like black thread between the trees, away from the now-meaningless place where he had died.
Would they describe it as a great working? Would they say he had been unafraid?
That, too, felt meaningless and far behind. The forest was ahead, and better quarry than his meagre body. The moon was climbing to meet him, to shine for the first time on his immortality as that free and wild confluence of bodies. As long as they ran and hunted, feasted and bred, as long as the bloodline of those who had feasted on him ran unbroken, his will would live sovereign over them.
His pride swelled to a howl in their throats. With pain and fear already as distant to him as they might become in history, he ran collectively through the night.