Hunger

The heat was a hammer. It beat down from a sky the colour of a hot-forged blade, striking the cracked, ochre earth until the very air shimmered. We tasted it—a mouthful of dust and baked stone, thick and cloying. In the distance, the mesas wavered, their stony flanks distorted by the tyranny of the sun. This was the world, and the world was an oven.

Lesser things hid. They cowered in the thin, sharp shadows of skeletal trees or burrowed into the cool dark beneath rocks, their lives a long, patient wait for the mercy of dusk.

We did not wait. We did not hide. We are the pack. We are Tyrinveth.

The heat was just a texture of the hunt. It was a weakness in others, and their weakness was our strength. The thought was not a single voice, but a chorus resonating through a hundred minds, a single will worn by a hundred bodies. Hungry. It was a physical presence within us, a vast, echoing emptiness passed down from the ancient, buried darkness that gave us form. Our purpose is the only truth: We hunt. We kill. We feast. We grow. The pack is all.

There.

The scent, a fragile thread in the tapestry of smells. It was almost lost beneath the loud odours of hot rock and dry rot, but our noses, a hundred instruments working in concert, isolated it, amplified it. It was the scent of life. Old. Brittle. The edges frayed with decay, like a sun-bleached rope about to snap. But it was life, and life is meat.

We moved as a tide of purpose flowing over the land. We poured through the petrified forest, a river of lean muscle and sharpened intent. Our paws made no sound on the parched earth. We were a promise of violence, silent and absolute. Each of us, a dagger. Together, an arsenal.

The scent led to a hovel, a crude wound of mud and stone gouged into the shaded side of a cliff. Its doorway was a dark maw, a patch of ignorance in the blinding glare. The scent of prey was stronger here, thick with the musk of sickness and resignation.

Weak. The chorus was a low, rumbling sneer in our shared mind. Prey should have the decency to be strong. The chase should be a test. The kill, a reward. This smelled less like a reward and more like… leftovers. Still, meat was meat. The hunger demanded it.

We flowed into the doorway, a deliberate flood of bodies filling the small, stifling space. Our collective eyes, a hundred pairs of burning crimson, fixed on the creature. A human male. He lay on a pallet of dry reeds, his skin thin as parchment over a rack of bones. His chest was a fragile cage, and each breath rattled within it, a sound like pebbles shaken in a clay pot.

His eyes, cloudy pools of stagnant water, fluttered open. They found us. They saw the sea of red fur, the forest of sharp teeth, the impossible number of us crammed into his tiny world.

And he did not scream.

His heart rate, a faint drumbeat we could all hear, did not quicken. The scent of terror, that sharp, delicious tang that heralds the chase, did not bloom in the air. He simply watched us, and in his gaze was a profound, unnerving stillness.

This was wrong. This was an insult. The hunt is a dialogue, a song between predator and prey. The prey sings a chorus of fear, a melody of flight. The predator answers with the rhythm of the chase, the final note of the kill. This creature refused to sing his part.

"He does not fear us," rumbled from a dozen throats at once, a discordant harmony of guttural confusion. "Why does he not run?"

The old man’s lips, cracked and dry, parted. A sound like scraping stone emerged. "There is nowhere left to run."

Unacceptable. The thought was a sharp, angry spike. There is always somewhere to run. The world is the hunting ground. To stand still is to deny one's nature. It is to deny OUR nature.

We began to circle the cot, a restless vortex of bodies. We tried to provoke him. One of us, a dagger in the front rank, let out a sharp, high-pitched bark. Another scraped its claws on the stone floor, a sound designed to fray the nerves. We let our snarls rise in volume, a symphony of promised pain. We filled the air with our scent, the musky, metallic odour of living weapons.

He simply watched. His weary gaze drifted over our many forms, but it felt as if he wasn't seeing a pack of hounds. He was seeing one thing. One will. One end. A small, faint smile touched his lips.

"The pack," he whispered, the word a final exhalation of steam. "It is better than the heat."

And then, he closed his eyes.

Rage. The fury of a blade that meets no resistance. He had denied us the chase. He had stolen the sweetest part of the kill. He had offered himself up like spoiled fruit, not a prize to be won.

He will not dictate the terms of his end.

The decision was instant, unanimous. The dialogue of the hunt had failed. All that was left was the final, brutal statement.

The pack will feed.

We did not hesitate. We were a wave, a crashing, tearing force that fell upon the cot. There was no sport in it, only grim necessity. The kill was an act of correction, of restoring order to a world this creature had tried to unbalance.

It was swift. The snap of brittle bone was a sharp counterpoint to the soft tearing of flesh. The scent of hot, coppery blood finally, blessedly, overwhelmed the stale smell of decay. It was the perfume of life, the wine of our existence. We were a whirlwind of focused violence. Each of us took our due, as is the right of the pack. We shared the kill, and in that communion, the bond between us, the very fabric of our being, was reaffirmed and strengthened. His meager life force flowed into us, a tiny trickle into a vast reservoir, but it was enough.

When it was over, we stood panting, our muzzles slick and crimson. The gnawing hunger was quieted, replaced by a low, humming satisfaction. The old man was gone. In his place were only clean, white bones and a dark stain on the reeds. He was part of us now. His strength, what little he had, was now our strength. The pack endures.

We lapped at our muzzles, cleaning away the evidence of our meal. The hovel was silent, save for our breathing and the insistent drone of flies, latecomers to a feast already concluded. The oppressive summer heat flooded back in, but it no longer felt like a hammer. It felt like home.

We turned as one and flowed back out of the shadowed doorway into the searing Al’vhis light. Our shadows stretched long and sharp behind us. The kill had been unsatisfying, a chore rather than a celebration, but it was done. The pack was whole. The pack was fed.

The world waited, vast and teeming with life. With prey that would run. Prey that would scream. Prey that would give us the gift of a proper hunt.

We raised our heads, a hundred muzzles pointed toward the shimmering horizon. The hunger would return. It always did. It was the engine of our existence.

Where next? the chorus asked, eager and sharp.

And as one, we began to run. We were the pack. And the hunt was eternal.