Weird?

Something… wrong?

Funny?

No.

Was… wrong…

Verbs.

Verbs, verbs, verbs!

Still weird…

Sticky?

Something…

leaking…

Out of my ear…

Shaking?

Something was shaking me. It was the Pepper-blood. No, the Reya. Food has names, I reminded myself.

Pepper-blood taste like pepper?

Hungry.

I was hungry and the Pepper-blood meal was trying to steal my food.

“Vale! Give me the leg, Vale.”

It looked terrified and upset and was leaking almost as much as I had been leaking. Someone once told me that frightened food tasted better. I did not know if this applied to leaking food as well.

“Listen to me. You can. NOT. Eat. The leg.”

“Not?” I stammered.

The words made sense, only I did not know why.

Work is done?

Why no food?

Something was missing, and I was missing something.

Food made everything better, right?

Why was the Pepper-blood denying me my food?

Not letting me eat was a very stupid thing to do right now. Hunger was clawing at my mind, making it hard to think, and the Pepper-blood was making it worse.

No, the Reya. Food has names.

Mind going in circles.

My… mind?

Something leaking out of my ear…

Leaking…

out of…

my ear…

Mind!

…

Oh!

I let go of the amputated leg and reached for my ear. There was something sticky caked on my cheek and tangled in my hair that I did not want to think about. Was struggling to think about. Was struggling to think about anything.

Struggling? What struggling?

Do this before?

I tried to piece together my memory, tasted the air in an attempt to get any kind of bearing.

The food-thief Pepper-blood. At the wall. Delightful, spicy fear.

The greasy, warty, Oil-blood. In bed. Disgusting agony of sickness, richly slathered in honey.

The Lemongrass-and-cotton-blood. On the ground. Sweet, sleeping delight of a dessert banquet.

Wildflower-girl and Not-quite-yeast and ahuizotl?

No. That before. After now.

Only after was a swamp with…

Stuff leaking out of…

My mouth?

I sucked in a strand of drool that was leaking out and chewed my inner lip.

“Uuuuh…” I tried to formulate a question. “Wha happen?”

Verbs.

Verbs, verbs, verbs!

Coherency was lacking.

At least my tongue isn’t…

Optional?

The Pepper-blood… the Reya was backed up against the wall giving me a funny look that I only noticed when I stopped focusing on the sweet-metronome beat of her heart pounding through the vein in her neck.

Funny, but not two of her?

Hungry!

The frightened meal glowered at me through tear-stained eyes as my gaze roved from her face back to her neck.

Eat. Food. Starving.

There were a million aches and pains all throughout my body that would not heal because I was starving and I thought my brain was one of them. I needed food. But not Pepper-blood Reya. I forced my gaze away from her neck once more and pushed myself out of the chair.

For some strange reason my… hand…

Skin… not stick glued to chair?

My legs collapsed.

Weird. Not supposed to happen.

Legs and arms should stretch funny.

I tried to get myself to be something else than a vague, collapsed… droopy… heap on the ground.

Droopy?

I was not droopy, just weak and starved, and having trouble keeping my memories from interfering with the present. I needed. I needed…

Food?

Coherency?

I needed to take things one step at a time. Flopping on the ground I tried to wriggle my arms into a configuration that would support my weight. Once I’d managed that I began working my jaw and tongue. Both would be needed for words.

“Uhhh… Reya…” I panted, finally having gotten my arms underneath me and my tongue into a semblance of non-optionality. “Ahhh… I…” I had to pause, remind myself there were verbs, find the right verbs, get them in the right places, figure out all the other parts that made up a sentence. “…I think I may have magicked out my brain.”

“You think!” Came the absolutely scathing reply.

It took a while to turn the words in that reply into concepts. Then a little while longer to recognize the concept as… Sarcasm? Cynism? Something like it. Identifying the intent behind a tone of voice was good. It meant I was getting my mind back together.

Worse was that it meant my guess was correct. I did not even want to know what had happened while I was mentally indisposed. By the amount of drooping, sticking, leaking, and stretching lodged in my mind I had a sinking feeling it involved significantly more bodily horrors than I had wanted to subject either Reya or Meg to. I may have also swallowed my tongue somewhere along the way. That I could talk either meant it had regrown or that I was imagining things.

“What did I do?” I wondered aloud, more to myself than to her.

“You healed the man,” she responded.

“Um…” I knitted my brow and looked from her to Uncle Tare and back in confusion. He was… fine? Bandaged, amputated, much less about to die than earlier, almost edible even.

Have I done all that while… ?

I gave Reya a questioning look.

“We will not talk about the other things. Ever!” She declared.

That bad then.

“Meg?” I searched for the russet-haired woman. She looked delicious even asleep on the ground.

“She’s fine. You are lucky she was out cold before…” she gagged. “Before y–” she retched and dropped the leg.

Food!

Starving… not good… try not to eat people.

“Sorry,” I muttered, chewing my lip bloody and suckling on my own blood. “Wasn’t supposed to be this bad.”

Wait… out cold?

I took another look at Meg, Reya’s words jogging my fragmented memory just enough to piece some things together. Meg had not taken to the gruesome healing procedure well. After my… second? …third? …casting of healing magic, Reya had given her something to soothe the stomach. It hadn’t helped. Meg had fainted shortly afterward anyway.

My fault she’s like this.

Should have let her leave.

Should have forced her to leave.

While my mind worked on that I somehow managed to maneuver my feet in a position that would hopefully allow me to stand. I had been trying just that, to little success. The very strings of my own Metzus, needed to manipulate my puppet body slipped right out of my grasp every time I reached with them. I needed more, thicker, and sturdier strands, but there was so little of me left that I feared losing control somewhere else.

“Do you need help getting up?” Reya offered me in a tone that made it clear that stepping in to help was the absolute last thing she wanted to do right now.

“Yes, but don’t come any nearer,” I warned, after swallowing the blood that had pooled into my mouth, and momentarily diverting Metzus from my legs back to my face so I’d be able to answer coherently.

I was quick to agree with Reya’s reluctance to come near me. Drinking my own blood meant I was not in a state to tolerate anyone close to me right now. It was nothing but a stopgap measure, a temporary placebo to get my mind off of drinking people dry. I doubted it would hold up if someone were to present their neck to me right now.

Reya heeded my warning and kept her distance. I renewed my focus on standing up. With some perseverance, I managed. Even then the room swayed and I needed to steady myself with a hand on the chair. In a way, that was good. It meant I had reclaimed enough control over my body to manage legs and arms at the same time.

“I um… think I need to lie down for a bit,” I tried, feeling adventurous enough to try legs, arms, and mouth at the same time.

“A fine plan,” Reya agreed with me, then nodded towards Uncle Tare. “But maybe you can do that somewhere else. He needs his rest.”

I offered her a jerky nod, then stumbled out of the bedroom one unsteady step at a time. This made Reya backpedal into the living quarters and around the table. Only when I was firmly out of the way did she return to the bedroom to wake up Meg. I suckled some more on my lip while she did that. Only when Reya mentioned to Meg that it was morning and time to get up did I notice the soft orange glow filtering in through the windows.

How?

Just how much of a hole in my memory do I have?