To the Gills

Chapter 1 - Gills

The fight was over. Gills dropped out of the sky, and his spur sunk deep into the Unknown's neck. Something in it seemed to pop, and it began to scream and jerk as life left it.



Gills didn't turn away this time, didn't detach himself and flee. Something had been nagging at him, clawing at his brain in the hours and days where he was Ryou, not Gills. Something itched in the back of his throat, in the pit of his stomach. He saw it in half-remembered dreams as he lay in bed, twitching and groaning and recovering from the gruesome task of transforming and killing an Unknown. He could feel it in his own weakness, in the way his skin would crack and slough off after a transformation. Gills knew he was lacking something vital, but in his waking Ryou-hours, he had been telling himself he didn't recognize what the craving was for.



This time, before the fire claimed it, before its halo fully shattered, Gills threw the Unknown to the ground. The craving burned bright in him, and this fight, this kill, all of it had felt like the prelude to something greater. He could no longer deny that he knew what he wanted. He knew the feeling of his jaws watering, and he knew the groan of hunger in his belly. Something in him needed the Unknown to be gone, not just dead.



The dying beast grunted and slavered in pain-driven madness. With barely a flinch of his extended leg, Gills drove it to its knees. He unsheathed his spur from its shoulder, and with heel, pushed it supine. He cocked his head, a moment of insectoid curiosity, and then with a motion so sudden as to be lost in the blink of an eye, Gills fell upon his still-twitching prey.



Claws, seizing and holding. Jaws aching, muscles tightening, biting and biting and biting. Skin giving way around him as easily as parting curtains. Clear, thick blood slopping down the angles of his face, splashing over his shoulders. Every time his jaws opened he buried them in flesh, shearing through fur and cloth and fine jewelry as he guzzled the slurry of the creature's insides. The Unknown, still barely alive, shoved at Gills with a trembling hand, but it was too weak to do anything but offer its hand into Gills' waiting jaws. It moaned and screamed, its voice growing weaker until all it could do was gurgle around its punctured, half-eaten lungs. Gills ate without pause. He ripped away hunks of living meat, jerking his neck to tear the flesh, sinking his claws and wrist-spurs in to hack away at the body before it could vanish in fire. It was a drunken frenzy, it was a mindless instinct.



It was what Gills needed.



He ate and tore and snapped and swallowed until he could feel the plates around his middle starting to tighten. He ate until his carapace felt like a tourniquet, until his frenzy grew heavy and slow. He ate until he was drenched in blood, until the fire burning in him dimmed, suffocated under a mountain of flesh.

But still he ate. He slurped at bone, lapped at entrails, picked strips of skin out from between his finger-plates. He would eat until he could no longer do so. He would eat until the Unknown burst into flame, until it cleansed itself from the earth with its final death.



He had to eat. He had to feed. He had to fill himself with blood and meat and power, to fill the place in him that was lacking, to press Unknown flesh into the gaps in his being, to keep his strength and body renewed. He had to-