Monster
From the Tales of The Seekers
The Tales of The Seekers is a collection of short stories set in The Seekers universe. Feel free to comment so I can improve them. If you want to learn more, please do read my published books in the same universe: The Seekers: Soul-Ties, Kirin, and Perrin Peters. And if you don’t want to buy my books but still want to support me, I’m on Patreon. And if you prefer one-time payments, you can Buy Me A Pizza or a Coffee.
The narration is brought to you by the one and only Anthony Michael Malec.
Content warnings: Body Horror, Self Harm
“Shhh!” En whispered, struggling to hold Ai’s mouth shut.
Ai tried to shake her killer off, tried to get free of the hands that grabbed her, but En’s grip was tight. Blood, pouring out from Ai’s throat, running down Ai’s body, down En’s arm, and then dripping on the cold, stone floor, was glistening in the warm, yellow light of the dropped torch. She never heard how En came from behind. All she knew was the sharp sting of the cold steel.
En’s nostrils took in the wonderful metallic scent of the bitch’s blood. FINALLY! Her heart raced, her lungs took in deep breaths of fresh catacomb air.
Don’t die too fast, you motherfucker! Let me enjoy this. Even pieces of shit like you have their uses. Oh, your fat ass is heavy, but it probably means you’re close to snuffing it. Please, just hold on a little bit longer…
“Ai? En? There you are!” Nil’s deep voice came from behind, echoing from the stone walls.
Shit, not now!
~*~
Why did I agree to this? What was going on inside my head?
Pondering these questions, golden-feathered Sanda Zyn and her Pinna brethren had entered a cavern in the White Mountains to search for metal layers in the rock, so they could mine them.
They could’ve paid a Saxum to feel the stone and lead them straight towards gold, silver, or other precious minerals, but the whole point of this expedition was for it to remain secret. Pinna’s strong wings got them this high up the mountains in no time, whereas all other species, even the Venadari, would have a hard time reaching here.
The claustrophobic, low-ceiling cavern went on seemingly for ages. The smoking torches cast long shadows, evoking dread of the unknown into the explorers’ hearts. The path forked, then forked again, and then they reached the “vestibule” as red-feathered Myat Lwin called it.
It was a huge, bendy corridor connecting a hundred paths, which reminded Sanda of a giant centipede. Clearly handmade, it turned the place into a catacomb, not just a set of caverns. The high, smooth, rounded walls seamlessly morphed into the ceiling; yet every several meters, the ceiling and walls had a protrusion that visually divided the corridor into equal sections.
“Only the Demons could’ve built this monstrosity,” green-feathered Yadana Thant said as her head swiveled in every direction. “Only they had this lack of aesthetic appreciation.”
They split up to explore the paths, making no more than a hundred steps into them. No close dead ends were found, so they had to examine each and every route. The coin flip decided the first one.
It twisted, and it bent. The scratching of their claws against the stone floor started to drive Sanda insane until something caught her eye.
~*~
Clack-clack-clack. Clack-clack-clack.
No, it wasn’t the water droplets hitting the stone. En has heard the drops seemingly for a hundred years. The walls and floor in her prison used to be smooth rock, but the markings from her nails had made the rock rough until there was no more room to mark a new sleep cycle.
She picked up her long, white, dusty hair from the floor and ran towards the grill of her cage to look around. Feint shapes of colorful magical orb-thingys still hung high in the air in every cell, lighting up the place just enough to see the corpses of whatever creatures they were. Thick and long, snake-like, dark, glistening bodies had mouth-like gapes all over them. The bodies had long protrusions of leg-like appendages, and a large, round head with two wide, upside-down mouths on both sides of it.
Most of these monsters lay lifeless between the cages, but not the final one. The monster with Ai’s face coiled in the neighbouring cell, looking at En with eleven eyes full of hatred. The feeling was mutual. At least in this new shell, she didn’t look as vomit-inducing as before.
If only Nil had come a minute later, allowing Ai to bleed out. If only En had the strength to overpower Ai fully and sever her spine. If only Ai didn’t touch one of the monsters while being dragged away…
“Hey, I see some light!”
The echoey voice came from the corridor. The language was unmistakable, even though it had evolved over the years. Pinna. What were they doing here?
“Get me out of here, please!” En cried, trying to pronounce the Pinna words.
Making herself seem weak and desperate, she stared at five Pinna explorers carrying big backpacks, various weapons, but also pickaxes. Their colorful feathers shone in the warm light of torches and the cold light of magical globes inside the cells. Their long claws on the legs left scratches on the stone floor as they stepped over the bodies of the monsters. Since the Pinna had their eyes on the sides of their beaked heads, they had to stare back at her while keeping their heads half-turned.
“Are you…” asked a red-feathered Pinna, examining En from head to toe, “a Viri?”
They turned to one of their companions for confirmation.
“What is a Viri doing all the way here?” asked a golden-feathered one with a higher voice. “Judging by the length of your… whatever they are called, you’ve been here for a while.”
“Yes, yes. Please let me out of here! I lost count of how many years I’ve been trapped in here.”
“Don’t believe this bitch!” screeched a distorted chorus of voices.
The Pinna jumped, eyeing the Ai-faced monster in the cell. The myriad of mouths all over her long body were opening and closing in disarray, leaking out glistening, foul-smelling black ooze. Both mouths on the head were also opening while the whole head bobbed like a hideous toy. The glistening appendages were jerking and moving, making fleshy sounds.
“Let me out and leave her here to rot!” Ai continued, and her eleven eyes flashed. “The fucker almost killed me! If not for this weird magic, I wouldn’t have lived to expose her for what she really is!”
The Pinna took a few steps back, looking at each of us, unable to make a decision.
En raised her white, dusty eyebrows, looking at the Pinna. “Look at the size of that thing!” she pleaded. “Its ‘arm’ is as thick as mine, and it has dozens of them! There’s no way I could’ve even tried to kill it even if I wanted.”
Now, the Pinna looked at her more often than at Ai.
“Still,” said one of them with a deeper voice and a redder beak. “Why are you here? Who locked you up?”
Oh, Nil, you shitface. You didn’t know what to do with us, so you went back to the village to find the Chief. You never came back, so I hope the predators got you along the way.
“It doesn’t matter why they’re locked up. We can’t leave them here forever!” A golden-feathered Pinna exclaimed. “Look at the layer of dust on the floor! No one has been here for ages. How are they even alive? We must get them to the village where they can be tried again, and if they are guilty of something, they’ll get a proper sentence, not eternity!”
The Pinna consulted one another in hushed voices while En’s brain tried to figure out what to do. Ai must die, but how? What if she escapes? What if she uses her new body to kill everyone? Nil and his buddies had really struggled to lock her up in the first place.
“Okay.” The green-feathered Pinna grabbed the key from the wall hook and headed towards the prisoners. “No sapient creature should endure such life.”
“Let me out first!” En cried with a pounding heart. “If I fail to convince you to live that monstrosity locked up, you’ll just let it go. It’s not like I can make you live it behind.”
Enraged, Ai’s horrific form jumped to her many “feet” and all but crushed into the metal bars, making the wide-eyed Pinna recoil away.
“O-Okay,” the Pinna managed to turn back to En and unlock her cell.
Almost tripping time and again over her overgrown hair, En rushed into the darkness of the corridor, waiting for the Pinna to join her.
“Look at it!” she whispered, pointing at the huge, centipede-like creature in a cell. “You can’t let it roam freely!”
The yellow-feathered Pinna nodded. “We won’t, if the Chief wills it. But we must give it a more comfortable life than a dark, lonely prison.”
En threw her hands into the air. “Talk some sense into them!” she addressed the other Pinna.
The red-feathered one gently places their clawed hand on En’s shoulder. “It’s alright. We have weapons. We’ll bring you safely to our village.”
Shit! Fuck!! Damn it!!!
En’s mind raced to find a solution. Any solution. Could she kill Ai on the way to that village? But what if she fled? And how would she go about killing that huge body?
No…
En took in a deep breath, recalling the battle between Ai-the-monstrocity and her people all those years ago.
Her heart was pounding.
It’s the best way to make sure…
A droplet of water hit the floor somewhere.
The only way indeed…
She yanked a dagger from the closest Pinna and rushed away. The corpse on the floor! She dropped to her knees, touching the monstrosity, and pushing the dagger into her own heart.
~*~
WRAAAAAAAH!!!
The cacophony of blood-chilling voices shook the catacombs. Her voices. The terrified Pinna recoiled back, but not fast enough. She rushed forward. Her long, sharp appendages slashed the air and flesh. The hot blood poured into her multiple mouths.
Delectable!!!
She sliced and diced left and right, up and down, until no movement, no sound was coming from the shredded bodies.
Panting and secreting ooze, En turned around, trying to get used to this monstrous new body.
Fuckin A!!!
Ai was still inside her cell, sending rays of hatred with her eleven eyes. En looked around and found a bow of one of the Pinna, miraculously intact, lying in the huge pool of delicious blood. She managed to grab it, operating her new insecty appendages. Then, she figured out how to draw it, aiming at Ai’s head.
No. It would be too easy.
Who knows, maybe a rescue party will come for these Pinna. They would give Ai a new hope of being rescued, only to have that hope crushed by her “claws.”
En’s mouths grinned in a sinister smile. Shit, life has never been better!
Huh…
Her eleven eyes spotted her old body lying on the floor. A typical Viri female with overgrown white hair and dark-gray skin. Well, more beautiful than most, despite the chest wound, but still, quite ordinary. Yet, there was something else.
As En searched the depths of her new brain, if this body had it, she realized what this new tough was.
The Pinna were quite good, but what did Viri taste like?
She moved in slowly, closely studying her old, still warm body.
As one of her teachers said back in the day, one shall know themselves to know the world.
The “claws” split the flesh. The blood poured from the wounds, but slowly, for there was no heartbeat. Moving from the legs up, En methodically studied and tasted each part, each layer, and each organ, savoring the one-of-a-kind experience and storing it in her memory.
When she finished, only some viscera and sucked-clean bones remained.
“You’re a fucking monster!” Ai’s weak voices came from the darkest corner of her cell.
En’s mouths grinned wider than ever before.
“Yes, I am! Oh, yes, I am!”
The End
Anton Anderson, 2025
If you want to visit another part of the catacombs in the White Mountains, you should read my first fantasy novel, The Seekers: Soul-Ties.
This story was written for the Power up Prompt #6 hosted by Bradley Ramsey.
Excellent work here, Anton. Loved how you used the elements of the prompt, but adapted it to fit in your universe. The standout element here was the body horror for sure. The descriptions of the creatures were absolutely gnarly in the best way possible.
I think your content warnings were good, but maybe a little too specific. You want to warn people who may be sensitive to the topics, but at the same time you don't want to give away key elements of the story.
In this case, I think saying Content Warning: Body Horror and Self Harm would be perfect, but that's just my personal approach. Great work here!