It took the child nearly an hour to go back to where she had initially acquired the mushrooms, not that she had any hard concept of time yet. If she was to guess, it had probably taken maybe half the amount of time to get back to the location than it had originally taken to get there. There she waited, her skin patterns shifting slightly so that she blended even further into the darkness of the caves. Even a creature with magically enhanced eyesight like herself would struggle to immediately spot her, not that she really knew about that, as her pattern shift had been an entirely subconscious action.
The child waited, and waited, and waited some more. If it wasn’t for the fact that waiting long enough would almost certainly result in her getting to taste more meat, she would’ve long since left in search of more food sources. Or even just eaten more rocks to see if there was any difference between the rocks in the various tunnels and crevices. But the siren’s call of meat drove her to wait just that little bit longer, over and over again. And finally, her patience paid off. After waiting what was surely years but was in fact a mere twelve hours, she saw movement. It was a small rat-like creature that had adapted to the darkness of the caves, forgoing eyes entirely for a larger nose and whiskers. The child watched it snuffle around the tiny cave and stop where the mushrooms had been, as if it was processing the missing foodstuff. That moment of processing cost it its life, as the child sprang forward with a speed that would give soldiers nightmares and bit down on its retreating skull and crushed it. The poor creature barely even had the time to start pulling back before it was already dead.
As the flavor of blood, bone and gray-matter washed over her tongue, the child moaned in ecstasy. It was simply the best thing she’d ever experienced, not even the taste of meat in her memories could compare to the divine delight before her. Within moments, the entire creature was eaten and processed by her body. It didn’t even occur to her until afterwards that she should’ve tried to use her stinger to hunt, or at least on the corpse. There was also something at the back of her mind that she couldn’t quite place, the corpse of the creature had given her something, something she unconsciously knew about but couldn’t quite place it. Therefore, the only rational thing she could do was to eat more of its kind to see if that would give her the answers she sought. That decision had absolutely nothing to do with how good the meat had tasted, not at all.
The child ended up waiting in the location for another several eternities before the next creature showed up, sniffing heavily at the air. With the minimal airflow down this deep, the scent of death had lingered, even as minimal as it was due to the expediency with which all traces had been devoured. Once again however, it simply wasn’t fast enough to escape the grasp of the Cursed child. This time however, she tried to use her hands to grasp the rat-like creature rather than her teeth. It had the benefit of actually keeping the creature alive, for a moment at least, as her clawed hands weren’t exactly conducive to keeping something alive without excessive diligence. As the now punctured internals caused the creature to rapidly bleed out, which caused no amount of annoyance in the child. She had taken great efforts to restrain herself, and her prey had still died before she got to test what her stinger did. Stabbing the corpse with it didn’t seem to do anything either. At least it meant she could eat such a delightful morsel right away, which she promptly did. She went so far as to lick the blood from the stone surfaces it had splashed on.
This second creature was just as divinely tasting as the first, but it wasn’t giving her any more information about what was at the edge of her mind. That annoyed the child, whatever it was, it was right there she could feel it, but couldn’t understand it, much less use whatever it was. Sighing, she went back into her hiding location, hoping that the next creature wouldn’t pop under her delicate handling. Hopefully the next one would come along much sooner than the others.
The rat-like creature scurried along the tunnels to a new food source with its packmate. Two of their pack hadn’t returned from the area, and that meant danger, though this high up there shouldn’t be anything that two of the pack at once couldn’t handle. If they didn’t return, the pack would simply abandon these tunnels and search for new food sources, as it had done hundreds of times before. As they neared the location, they could smell it, blood and death. Their noses twitched as they silently communicated with subtle leg and nose movements, the slightly larger of the two would go first while the smaller would rush forward the second they detected movement towards the juicier target. It wasn’t the greatest strategy, but with the cramped nature of the upper tunnels and their few numbers, there wasn’t much more they could do.
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As they entered, their noses smelled the presence of their lost packmates, most certainly dead and gone, though they couldn’t smell a single spot of blood or bone. Which was concerning, as much as they could be concerned with such information at least, that was less important than the slightest movement of air their whiskers detected. That slight movement of air, a single shallow breath, was all the notice the pair received as something launched itself at the larger target. They hadn’t even noticed the creature, it had smelled like the stone surrounding them until it moved, then the smell of blood & death was all too prevalent. Exactly as they intended, the creature grabbed the larger one, hopefully it would need a moment to pierce their furred hide. Speeding forward, the smaller one launched itself at the arm of this new predator, mouth wide open to bite down onto the offending creature who had dared hunt their packmates within the pack’s territory.
It bit down, and was shocked to find itself unable to pierce the skin of this monstrous creature. Such a thing only happened when fighting something from the deep caverns, where the true masters of the underground ruled, not so close to the surface. Its teeth could crack small stones with ease, and could widen tunnels or even make new ones given enough time. And yet, there was not even a reaction besides this monster tilting its head towards it. The packmates knew their inevitable fate, and only hoped that the creature would be satisfied with the upper layers, as unlikely as that might be. The smaller one could only sense as something lashed out at it from the back of the monster and stung it in the neck, causing its body to lock up on it. Before the lull of unconsciousness fully swept over it, it watched through the air currents as its packmate was shredded with ease, as if the defensive pelt didn’t even exist. The worst thing was the feeling of something worming its way through its body in the last moments of consciousness.
The fact that two of the rat-like creatures came to this little cave, and so soon positively delighted the child. Not even one’s pitiful attempts at an attack dampened her mood, seeing as it couldn’t do anything to her. All this meant that she got to both test out her stinger and immediately eat more precious meat. After finishing her snack, which she noticed was mostly filling out the reserves her body seemed to be building up, she sat and watched whatever her tail had injected go through whatever it was going to do. After only a short eternity, an agonizing thirty minutes, she was finally able to see the visual process of what was happening. Small, but growing, worms had begun eating their way through the creature’s body while secreting some kind of fluid that helped to break it down. After another short eternity, the process was finished, where the delectable snack had been now sat four fat grubs that she could feel for some reason. It was so similar to the feeling at the edge of her mind that she almost assumed it was the same, before realizing that this was telling her these grubs were ready to be eaten, rather than something she simply couldn’t understand. Not seeing any reason to not eat new, probably delicious food, she immediately ate one.
The child’s disappointment was immeasurable, as there was no delightful taste, though at least the texture wasn’t bad. It was like eating a slightly more tasty rock, one of the less tasty ones at that. That disappointment lasted until she realized how quickly her body added the grub’s materials to her reserves, almost as if the grub had already processed everything. That opened up all sorts of new possibilities, namely, if she could get the grubs to eat the rocks for her so she didn’t have to waste her time eating something so tasteless if she ever needed the materials they provided. Deciding there was no benefit to leaving the grubs alive at the moment, she immediately downed the remaining three grubs and blanched at the taste. After the fungus and meat, she wasn’t sure if she could ever go back to such tasteless things as the grubs and rocks for any prolonged period of time. It would be far too torturous and cruel an existence, and that would never be her fate. She vowed that to herself, already knowing she would probably have to break it at some point. She had noticed after the repeated consumption of the various foods available to her that they all had differing amounts of certain materials she knew she needed. She only hoped the rocks wouldn’t have to become a staple of her diet after noticing that it contained far more of specific minerals than the other two foods she had eaten so far.
