I frowned at the completely empty stretch of land in front of Uncle Tare’s house. I had parked Fern right there, outside the door. And now she wasn’t here anymore. Fern did not just wander off like that. Clearly, someone had stolen her.

“Where is my horse?” I asked the two women that exited after me.

I received only confused responses from Meg and Reya. Apparently, neither of them was involved in the theft of my horse. This was worrying. I was neither coherent enough to ferret out the culprit, nor fit enough to walk off without my horse.

I was actually in such a horrible shape that even in the shade the morning sun was melting my hands a lovely shade of sunburn, my healing no longer even capable of keeping up with that.

Or my amulet running out of charge?

I fingered the thing, feeling out the energy embedded in the runes. There wasn’t much left, but still enough for another day or so. Then it really was my natural healing ability that had run dry.

And I’m forgetting my gloves.

Wow… took a long time for me to realize that.

Really, really out of it.

A stumbling detour to fetch my gloves later, the two women waiting for me had turned into three. The new meal was the Chicken-broth-blood, tasting of worry and far too little sleep. I squinted, trying to recognize more than her scent, but the early morning sunlight was already affecting my eyesight enough that all I could discern was that she was older than the other two and had dark-blonde shoulder-length hair.

“You must be tired child, working like that all throughout the night,” Chicken-broth pointed out. “We’ve got a room for you at our bunkhouse if you’d like to rest up. All your stuff is already there.”

So that was how they were doing this. There was a distinct difference between offering someone a room, and forcing it on them by stealing their horse and stashing all their gear in said room. I was far too weary to offer anything more than token resistance though, so all I managed was a very tired “Why?”

“It was Shae’s idea actually,” she admitted. “She arranged all of this just a moment ago.”

“Of course it’s Shae.” I sighed.

“Yeah, she’s a handful alright. Onar’s going to have another fit when he finds out,” She echoed my sigh. “As if we haven’t got our hands full enough already.”

I cracked a smile despite how much effort it took to emote right now. It was nice to know that Onar was being subjected to Shae’s delinquency just as much as I was. An added bonus was that smiling reopened the cut on my lip.

Mmmh… Blood.

My recollection of the trip to the inn was vague at best. Anything that did not involve hunger was vague, that is. I briefly considered biting Chicken-broth’s arm, but did not feel like a mouthful of cloth. She was sadly of average height, which made her neck too high up for me to reach. I tried jumping, was not up to it, and nearly tripped us both.

The room they gave me was spartan and far too big. With two massive beds, it could easily house a whole family. Yet its biggest disadvantage was the large south-east facing window. The morning sun streaming in through it painted a nice yellow rectangle on the beds.

And then there was the other thing. Actually accepting to rest here was the stupidest thing I had ever done. And I had done a lot of stupid things over the past couple of days. With how badly I had over-exerted on the healing I was defenseless, and all the people here that hated me knew exactly where I was. They wouldn’t even need hunters or the Inquisition to get at me anymore. Anyone that wanted to get rid of the monster could just walk in here and take care of me. I was so weak right now I wouldn’t be able to stop them.

I should have cared about those concerns. They should have worried me deeply. They didn’t. Not feeling up to much of anything anymore I simply rescued a blanket from the clutches of the sun and rolled myself into it in the darkest corner of the room. Then I let my thoughts drift away from me.

Hunger!

Hunger, hunger, food, hunger, food, food, food, hunger, hunger, food, hunger, food!

Food!

There was food in the common room below and it called to me, breaking through to my hibernating mind. My nose tracked the prey as it milled about on the ground floor. They were strong meals. Their blood sang a wondrous song of familiar and unfamiliar fragrances, all so delightfully filling.

I did not know exactly how much time had passed, but with the urge to feed this overwhelming my rest was over. If I didn’t get moving now, the hunger wouldn’t just be overpowering. It would be all there was left of me.

I forced my cravings down.

Down.

Down!

Out of thought. Out of mind.

There was no turning it off, never a turning it off, but I could tune it out, ignore it, pretend it wasn’t there. I had five normal senses, and a perfectly normal, rational mind. They were people, not food. I was still…

Hungry!

Starving!

I cracked open an eye. Light filtered into the room. The sun was up, mid-afternoon if I had to judge by the quality of the light. It was a shitty guess, my sense of time felt way off. At least I was fairly certain it was still the same day. If it were a new one then my hunger… I would no longer be thinking this rationally.

Suppressing a shiver I crawled out of my blanket-nest. Tried to crawl out. It was slow and clumsy work. My puppet-limbs did not cooperate. Every time I had almost unentangled a limb a new stretch of fabric blocked any further maneuvering. It was ridiculous, I was making no progress. All I needed to do was free my arms and roll out of the blankets, yet my arms refused to cooperate, the Metzus I needed to animate my body a struggle to wield. I might as well have been bound in chains.

Too weak. I need to…

Feed?

Breathe?

Breathing was a good start. I was usually good at keeping at least that going while I rested, but apparently not now. I forced air into my lungs, forced them to work. Then I focused on my heart. Very little of my body protested to the blood I was circulating through my veins. This was surprising because…

I nearly killed myself last night?

Body sort of healed then…

Still starving…

Starving was bad. Hunger was… everything right now. I had to fix that. There was food downstairs. I just had to get there.

No!

No, no, no!

They are not food.

I shook my head, tried to disperse the grasp hunger had on my thoughts. There was another way, a better way to deal with this hunger. It was going to be painful; I had far too little experience with it. Squeezing my eyes shut I resolved myself. I’d need to do it anyway.

I focused on the steady rhythm of my breathing, timed it to the beating of my heart. Then I let the motions involved in my breathing and my heartbeat slip away from conscious thought, gently slip away until they became a near-subconscious instinct. Once I had that going I loosened the reins on my senses.

Hunger. Hunger. Hunger!

Force it down.

Not their blood but mine.

I tracked my own blood as it pumped through my veins, followed it to organs that lay dormant, let my awareness seep into them along with my blood. Intestines, stomach, gall, liver, I felt them all as much as I could feel my own heartbeat.

I had so little experience with this. There was so much that could go wrong. I took a couple of moments to let the feeling settle, made sure I got it right. Then I did to those organs what I had already done to my heart.

As soon as I was done I strained my ears to listen to the blood circulating through my veins. Chewing my lip, I waited, worry stirring within me at every unexpected sound and twitch of a muscle. Only when minutes later still nothing had ruptured or exploded did I know that I had not screwed it up.

Gathering my courage I repeated the same process with several other systems, most of which I did not know of what they were supposed to do, only that they helped. A whole host of novel pains assaulted me. I worked through those as best as I could. As I forced more and more of my puppet body out of dormancy a new kind of hunger joined the first.

The plain, human hunger of an empty stomach.

It was a strange and weak desire, this craving for normal food, but it weakened the hunger for blood in turn. In many ways, the longing for human food I gained by animating so much of my body was a lie. It didn’t change what I needed to survive. All that simulating my digestive system did was make me capable of digesting things I ate. It did not mean that the digestion would grant me meaningful sustenance.

With the worst of the grueling work of animating my organs over with I breathed a sigh of relief. I was finally able to relax a little. Only a little. Lungs and heartbeat I could manage without much conscious thought. The same didn’t go for everything else. Dividing my focus between every little part of my vessel strained my mind, badly.

It had not taken me all that long to learn that I could perform this trick. But mastering it to the point where I could do what I had just done had proven another matter entirely.

My vessel was inherently magical, powered by the very Metzus it is composed of. Too little blood, too little Metzus, and I could not keep myself going. That was where my hungering came from. It was also why I couldn’t get myself out of the blankets earlier. Too little blood. Too much hunger. Too weak.

Anatomically I was also very similar to a human. That was where the trick came in. It allowed me to eat, to shit, to age, and grow. Most important of all, it allowed for a different way to sustain me, one with less hunger. Maybe I could someday even sustain my body the same way a normal person did. Hopefully. Eventually. There was a lot I still needed to figure out. For now, I could only manage a very meager facsimile. It sustained badly, but sustain it did.

As far as I had been able to figure out I was still missing certain vital, inherent body-chemistries. The lack of those meant I was slowly poisoning myself from the inside out. Yet I had gotten close enough that it cost less Metzus for my natural healing to counteract the poison than it did to sustain my vessel the traditional way.

This was how I coped with debilitating hunger. By brute-forcing the most elaborate lie of humanity. It would never be a replacement. It only kept me going just that little bit longer. I still hungered. I still needed to drink blood to survive, if a little less of it. But with so much effort spent on running my body the way normal people did, I did not need quite as much Metzus to animate myself. Less drain on Metzus, less hunger. It was as simple as that. I now hoped this trick would last me long enough to get out of this town before I did things I would later regret.

Finally feeling well enough to move, I extricated myself from the blankets, one barely cooperative limb at a time. Cramps and aches were everywhere, a side effect of what I had just done. It would get better.

Now if only I had a similar trick to get myself out of the clutches of this town.