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He’d been here for a while, wherever here was. Here, where the sky was inherently wrong with its blazing red sun and bloody moon. Here, where the rock and soil could be crimson or pitch. Here, where the trees grew gnarled and twisted. Here, where the creatures bayed at the moon and slept as the sun baked the ground. Here, where he’d become something less than human.
He didn’t know what he was, what he had become. All he knew was that he had become more animal than man; his hands and feet grew claws, he sprouted a whip-like tail with a spade tip. He felt grotesque, like his charcoal skin was filthy. And yet his appearance wasn’t the worst experience, no matter how horribly the transformation had agonized him. The instincts had clawed at his insides, at the inside of his skull. He had wandered endlessly, fighting whatever he had crossed with his claws and fangs alone. Wandered until he had found a new spot, one that didn’t mirror the area of his death. He had used his hands to dig through stone into the mountainside, just kept digging as his new instincts made him feral. Dug and dug until he had created a tunnel and cave, smoothed it over with some sort of dark magic; he’d made himself a den, safety.
Others tried fighting him for what he had made for himself; his territory, his den. The den he had dug with his bare fucking hands. Stone wasn’t supposed to be pliant, it wasn’t supposed to crumble in his fists. It should have made him bleed. He’d fought each and every one of them, ripped out their throats with his teeth and buried them. It should have horrified him. It didn’t.
Landing in this strange plane of existence had been awful, the agony had nearly killed him again . But the biggest surprise had been his voice. He’d never had one; and yet his ears had rang with the sound of his screams tearing from his throat. He couldn’t bring himself to try and speak any more, not without his throat feeling scraped raw. Not without cringing at the broken sounds escaping him, the animalistic hisses in his throat and the growls rumbling deep in his chest.
Death was such a fucking cheat, he wasn’t supposed to be here. It was supposed to be over.
But it wasn’t. He was here, in this backwards realm with blood and flesh in his teeth; hunting with claws and fangs, with earth and flora heeding his every call. In life he would have revolted at such a thought, at killing something and tearing into it with his teeth as it still bled. Now it made him hunger .