I’m sure my eyesight, my natural sight anyway, is sharper. My hearing is keener. My legs have more spring and my body is as hard as rock. My meal revitalises me in a way I don’t anticipate; I go from a bag of busted and broken pieces to whole and hale in one night of eating and a deep, dreamless slumber.

  The corpse of the beast is gone when I wake, though whether it has been taken by some scavenger or the architects have snatched it from me, I cannot decide. I swim for a while, basking in my nakedness and the feel of the warm rising cycle light with a new appreciation for the shell I inhabit.

  Done with swimming and still as naked as the day I was plucked from a birthing cocoon, I stand in the middle of the flat ground before the cave and spread my arms out to my sides. I lean my head back and I howl. In truth it is more a yelp followed by a cough before I try again and manage a passable yowl. Still, my mood is nothing short of incredible.

  I smile, bend my knees, and launch myself into the air straight upwards. Wind rushes by and it is an eternity before I fall back to the packed earth and the crunch of dirt beneath my bare feet. It’s exhilarating. I leap again and again until my breath comes short and still I laugh. I’ve never felt more free and powerful and close to myself. Good food and a great night of sleep, maybe it had to come after a beating so severe I could barely walk to feel so great. Experience the depths to appreciate the heights, I suppose.

  I rub a hand across my face and feel roughness. I blink. I’ve never been able to grow hair on my face before; I thought it wasn’t something that would come to me. Is this another gift of ascension?

  I frown.

  I raise my hand again. My left. I’d forgotten to bandage my wound that morning; too elated and ready for the day to worry about trivialities. There it is. A wound. But not fresh and new; an old wound, scarred and gnarled like something from an age ago. The flesh has grown back over the hole in which I could see bone. The muscle has returned. It is as whole of a hand as I could have hoped for and…I hadn’t noticed.

  I swallow. The day is cooler. “Why am I naked? What am I doing?” I mutter to myself as I gather my clothes and scamper back into the cave. I dress behind the plant curtain and curse myself for the extravagance that had overtaken me.

  “Blazing madness. What was I thinking? What if Oran…” I don’t finish my sentence but the thought careens into its conclusion. What if Oran had come while I was frolicking in mad ecstasy?

  “Is that how it will be when I eat?” The architects don’t answer. They never do.

  I punish myself for an hour or so until boredom overcomes my morosity and I venture once more beyond the curtain. I’m too energetic to stay cooped inside the shelter so I set out to burn more energy.

  I run. First it is a jog back and forth across the open ground; with each step I study the feeling of movement, each tensing of my muscles, every push against the packed dirt and each judder through my bones as I land. Then I’m running. The little area is constraining so I run fast and hard away, up and down slopes and sliding down enscarpments. I contain my whoops, barely, but bound from rock to rock, uncaring of the creatures I spook with my passing.

  I clear gaps at which I’d have balked a day before; my legs are springs to throw me forward and my eyes trace my path. My new eye literally traces my trajectory even before I make jumps it shows the curve, updating in real time as I fly across the voids between ever more distant ledges and rocks.

  Finally, I stop. I’m half-winded, which isn’t a bad state for having run halfway across a segment. I sit on a rock and look out. I’ve chosen a high hill and a flat rock to sit on that gives me a good view in all directions. I spin slowly to take it all in. Every hill and valley, every rocky ravine and scrubby outcrop. A red and brown scape dull enough to pass me by but so teaming with live and energy just beneath its gritty surface.

  There are three herds of those great trunked beasts that I can see; there might be more beyond hills and hidden in the valleys and gorges, but these I watch. They lumber, slow and steady towards groups of trees. They tear them, split them, suck the marrow from their bones and trundle to the next. The architects must replace the trees in null for the rate at which the beasts feast on them would have the segment stripped bare in five cycles.

  The closest group tramples and trumpets; they’ve eaten their fill and now some smaller creatures are looking for scraps beneath their feet. One poor thing is crushed beneath massive feet and lies as a sodden rag, its blood soaking into the parched soil.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  There he stands. The monstrous Monarch of the trunked creatures, shoulders taller than his brethren and yet, in the tumult, he drifts apart until he walks alone, fixated on a tree in the middle distance to him but directly below where I now sit.

  My heart skips, my mouth waters, and I quiver with possibility.

  “I should wait.” I whisper to myself, already rising into a crouch. “I don’t have a weapon. I’m not going to do much with my bare hands.”

  I long for a sword. Gleaming. Sharp. Balanced to perfection as I twirl and whirl in a vortex of death. That would be wonderful. But I don’t have a sword. I don’t have a claw or my old metal bar or anything that could penetrate into the thick skin of the great beast.

  It closes on me with a plodding, implacable pace.

  If I can’t pierce its hide, then I’ll need to do the next best thing. Hit it with a big rock. Thankfully, I am surrounded by rocks both large and small. I’d learned with the lacerations of my flesh that they could fling them at me so I would repay the favour in kind.

  I step to the edge and scan the terrain below me; his path will take him close below me but there are no rocks to toss of a size that would bother him. I keep looking. Beyond, just the other side and up a steep hill from where I stand, is a field of boulders. Between me and my prizes is a gap a hundred meters wide down which the Monarch of trunks treads.

  “He’ll see me if I run across.” I cock my head and ponder. “Is he still angry? I think I would be if someone hit me between my legs.” But what if it didn’t matter if he saw me. What if I wanted him to chase me?

  I smile and know if I saw my grin in the dark I’d be afraid that something had come to eat me.

  I stand. I’m no longer trying to hide my presence from him. The opposite. I slide down the slope and into his path and wave my arms. “Lo, beast! Do you see me? Come on you big stupid lummox!”

  He’s far enough away that he doesn’t notice me at first. He takes five more steps before my scent reaches him and my cries pierce his thick skull and lodge into his mind. He quickens with a trumpet of anger, surprise, and anticipation.

  My blood is fiery now. I run towards my prized place. Above me looms the cliff, shorter than the one I’ve just descended at just twice the size of the trunked creature. I reach it three heartbeats before he does; it’s enough time to turn, to look him in his tiny, beady eye, the one that is left, and leap higher than I ever have before.

  The world passes beneath me on a breath of wind and…slam! The Monarch crunches into the wall of the cliff with a sickening crack but it isn’t only the sound of its body crumpling under its own weight, the effort shakes the very foundations of the segment and the rocks, so precariously balanced on the rim of the cliff, begin to tumble.

  I’m not yet used to my new found strength so my jump takes me on an uneven trajectory. I fall onto the Monarch as the boulders land around me. I scramble back, then to the side, then I roll and tumble and fall until the ground rushes up to catch me with sudden finality. Something crunches. My shoulder, I think, but there’s no time to wallow in pain.

  I bound back to my feet and rush away as the thumps continue. “Yes!” My plan worked. Two dozen boulders, bigger than the ones he threw at me, have fallen onto his head and shoulders. He’s a mass of blood and torn flesh. His tusks are broken and his trunk trapped between rocks. Worst, he’s on his knees beneath the weight of half a mountain.

  “I saw you! I took you down!” I whoop and leap like the madness has returned and revel in my victory. The rest of the herd is still far away, too far to help their hapless leader.

  I grin as I swagger towards him. My shoulder aches but is such a small thing in the face of my celebration. It’s quiet now as I approach. He’s breathing but it’s shallow, his chest rises and falls as he tracks me with that one eye, too small for his face and dull with pain.

  I squat beside him; I’m two arm’s lengths away as I tilt my head to the side so we see one another. “Is this what you imagined when you woke up this morning? I’m nothing compared to you.” I hold my hand out and turn it over until my palm faces up.

  “How many people have you killed with those tusks of yours? How many people hit on your hide with their bare hands while you gored their insides out?” I clench my fist. “I’m not sad, you know. I’m not sad that I killed you. That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? The architects put you here just like they put us here, in this sector, in this segment, on this dirt. Did you fall from a cocoon too?”

  I laugh at the thought of a cocoon large enough to envelope a beast of his size. “I wonder what you’d dream of inside?” I sigh. “What am I doing? You don’t understand me…I’m going to eat you after this. Not the whole of you, obviously, but just a morsel. My mouth’s watering just thinking about it. Blazing sun I wish I had some fire. It’s a jest, really, that the architects gave me flame the first time I ate flesh but have held it from me since. They must have a sense of humour.”

  The Monarch doesn’t smile with me. It’s in pain but the feeling is fading. I can see the dim light that sparkled in his eye dissipating as we speak. I speak. I stand, brush off my new clothes that I’m so proud of, and step close until I can lay my hand on his skin.

  “You’ll help me walk the path to heaven, Monarch. You’re part of something now.”

  It is so quick that I don’t realise what has happened until I’m crushed against the rock face. The Monarch isn’t dead enough. The stones had wrought their dark designs but not quickly enough. It is my hubris that bubbles blood on my lips. That sees my legs twisted back in ways they should never have known and blackness creeping into my vision.

  He smiles then.

  Maybe it is a rictus grin; maybe it is a reflection of my hubris. All I know is the darkness falling and the accusing eye of a dead king.