The Hunger I Carry

From the beginning, I was taught to run from torches. To hide from the sharp end of pitchforks. To keep my head low and my steps quiet. The world told me I was dangerous, and perhaps they were right. But what I feared most was not the villagers—it was myself.

Inside me, there is a hunger. It whispers when I am alone. It grows stronger each time someone screams at my face, each time they spit at me, each time a stone finds my skin. Hurt them back, the hunger says. Make them pay.

And perhaps, if I gave in, I could. I am strong enough to tear down their walls, to silence their jeers forever. But if I do that, then I become exactly what they always believed I was.

I did not know how thin the line was until I met Elara. Until I gave her life, and with it, the same darkness that gnawed at me.

The Monster Within (Body)

I was not born as you are. My first breath was not drawn into warm lungs, my first sight not of a mother’s face. I was crafted—stitched together from fragments of lives I did not live, memories I did not own. The lightning gave me breath. The screams of my creator gave me consciousness.

They called me monster.

And perhaps they were right. My body is wrong, pieced from dead men’s limbs, my face a grotesque parody of humanity. Yet inside me was a heart that beat with longing, and a mind that craved gentleness. I wandered forests, riversides, ruins, searching for a world that would take me in. Always I found only fear. Children cried at the sight of me. Dogs barked. Villagers raised torches.

I had no name, so I gave myself one in secret: Ashar. It meant “hope” in a language I found in a torn book. I clung to it, because if I could be named, perhaps I could be real.

I. The Companion

Loneliness is a hunger that devours from within. Years passed, and I grew tired of speaking only to wind and water. So, I searched for a companion.

When I found her, I did not mean to steal. She was a young woman, lifeless in the river’s current, drowned by accident or despair. Her hair fanned about her like reeds, her lips parted as if in unfinished prayer. I could not let her be taken by worms. I lifted her from the river, carried her into the cave that was my shelter, and I did what my creator had done to me.

Stitches. Sparks. Breath.

Her eyes opened, clouded with confusion. I had not expected her to awaken with screams, but she did not scream. She stared at me with terror, yes, but also with recognition—the recognition of one broken thing seeing another.

“I… what am I?” she whispered.

“You are like me,” I said. “Alive, but different. Do not fear. I will protect you.”

I thought I had given her a gift. I thought I had saved her.

But I had cursed her.

II. The Reflection

Her name, she remembered faintly, was Elara. She did not thank me. She did not hate me. She only sat in silence, fingers tracing the seams of her resurrected body. Some nights she asked questions in a trembling voice:

“Do they see you as dead?”

“They see me as worse than dead,” I answered.

“And do you see yourself?”

That question burned. Did I? I wished to be gentle, kind, human. But my hands were clumsy. Once, when she wept, I tried to comfort her and left bruises on her arm. She shrank from me after that.

I could not bear her fear. It mirrored what I had always fled from in others.

I realized then: I had made her into the very thing I loathed in myself.

III. The Darkness

There is a point at which grief becomes fury. My creator abandoned me. The villagers hunted me. And now even the one I tried to save despised me.

“This is all my fault,” I whispered one night, staring at the jagged hands I had sewn onto her. “I made you suffer. I make everyone suffer.”

Elara’s eyes glowed faintly in the firelight. “You wanted to help. But you gave me your curse. Why could you not let me rest?”

Her words pierced deeper than any pitchfork. My silence was my confession.

She fled soon after. I woke to find her gone, the imprint of her body still warm on the cave’s earth. Rage and sorrow boiled together in me. I wanted to tear the forest down tree by tree. I wanted to shred the sky. But more than anything, I wanted her back.

I followed her trail through mud and rain. Each step echoed with the truth: she would rather face the cruelty of the world than the kindness of a monster.

IV. The Transformation

I found her days later, in the village square. She had not hidden. She had revealed herself.

The people gathered around, horrified at what she was. They raised their torches, as they had for me. But she did not run. She lifted her arms and cried out:

“I am what you made me! Not him—you! Your cruelty drowned me long before he revived me. Your scorn will kill him as it killed me. Which of us, then, is the monster?”

I froze in the shadows, unseen. My chest ached with something strange—pride, fear, shame.

The villagers did not listen. They surged forward. And she, who had once been soft and fragile, turned on them with strength she did not know she had. She hurled one man aside. Another’s torch became his own death as she crushed it in her fist.

Her eyes caught mine across the square. They were not pleading. They were condemning.

“This is what you gave me,” her gaze said.

And I understood. In saving her, I had not lifted her from death. I had only passed my curse into her veins.

I had turned her into what I always hated.

V. The Choice

That night, as the village burned, I stood on the edge of the chaos. Elara tore through the mob, her strength unstoppable, her screams filled with grief that curdled into rage.

I had two choices. I could join her—embrace the fury, let the world burn, take revenge on every torchbearer who had ever chased me. Or I could stop her, stop myself, end this endless chain of horror.

For once, I saw clearly: the monster was not in my face, nor in my stitches, nor in my name. The monster was the hunger inside—the hunger to make the world pay for my loneliness. If I fed it, it would devour everything, beginning with Elara.

I stepped forward, into the firelight.

“Elara!” I cried. My voice shook the night. “It is me. Stop!”

She turned, eyes wild, face streaked with ash. “You did this to me! You!”

“Yes,” I said, my chest breaking with the truth. “This is all my fault. I thought I was saving you. I was only saving myself. But I will not let the darkness win—not in you, not in me.”

Her hands clenched into claws. She lunged.

And I did the only thing I could. I held her. Not with rage. Not with force. I wrapped my arms around her thrashing body, let her strike, let her scream. I whispered, “I am sorry. Forgive me. Rest.”

Slowly, her fury ebbed. Her strength faltered. She sank into my chest, trembling, sobbing like a child.

The villagers fled. The flames died. And in the silence that followed, I knew: I had chosen not to be the monster.

VI. The Aftermath

Elara never forgave me fully. How could she? I had stolen her rest, thrust her into torment. But she stayed with me. Perhaps because she had nowhere else to go. Perhaps because broken things cling together, even in resentment.

We wander still, she and I, through forests and ruins, neither human nor beast. People still call us monsters. Children still scream. But sometimes, when the wind is quiet, I hear her murmur in her sleep, “Ashar.” My name. My hope.

And I wonder if hope is not in being loved, but in refusing to let the monster within decide who we are.

Closing (Inner Darkness Choice)

The hunger is still there. It always will be. Every time I see fear in another’s eyes, every time I hear the word monster, it stirs inside me, begging to be fed. But I know now that the darkness only wins if I let it. The choice is mine, every moment, every day: to destroy or to hold fast. To surrender, or to resist. And though the world may never forgive me, I will not forgive the monster within.