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I nearly choke on a piece of steak but manage to catch it before it cuts off my airways, coughing it up. His sincere question catches me off guard.
I nod through fits of coughing.
He looks around the massive, alien cavern, taking it in.
“You’re going to teach me how you cook food,” he tells me. “I don’t want you to starve.”
I want to object that I have no means of starting a fire in this cavern, but for my own safety, I’m going to have to figure it out. I know better than to be on the other end of one of his temper tantrums.
One hour later, he carries me to the floating platforms above. His scales are sharp to the touch, but I grab onto them, hanging onto his back as we ascend through the cavern. The greenery up here reminds me of the trees outside.
Without much effort, he lifts one of the pieces of tall greenery - a pink, stump-like structure with moss-like leaves that branch off - from the soil, carrying it down to the cavern floor below before retrieving me.
To my relief, he gets the fire going with little effort, simply breathing on the log with a deep, throaty roar.
“Now,” he tells me. “Show me how you cook.”
10
ZYRANTH
We stand together in the wet cavern, the reverberations of monsters calling out before them. They’re all potential meals, but I feel I might be risking her safety by staying here.
Is this woman domesticating me? I clutch her waist, afraid to shatter her in my large claws. I feel her shudder against the alien touch of my flesh, far more cold and scaly than her mammalian skin.
The last embers of the fire burn out. This environment is not hospitable to a cooked meal. She has taught me much, but a strange exhalation leaves me when she gingerly handles the raw flesh and organs of the chiroptera, this cavern’s most safe and abundant food source.
“Was that laughter?” she asks me.
Her voice betrays a hidden sense of comfort, and her comfort puts me ill at ease. I do not want her to be comfortable with me. Even as she stands near me, my stomach gurgles, longing for more than the strange taste of these cavern beasts or these tiny snacks.
For her own safety, I want her to take the sensible reaction and flee. But running away from me also creates the risk that she will expose herself on the surface to her captors. And in spite of myself, I still really want to taste her and don’t want to rob myself of the experience.
But there is also something deeper within me, clutching at my innards, longing to be free. It’s part of me I don’t understand and don’t want to acknowledge.
I turn my back to her, hoping that she’ll understand the message. I want to rip into her to set an example and teach her to fear me, but as she bites into the cooked flesh of the creatures I killed, I also feel a deep sense of protectiveness toward her. I want to punish anybody who would dare harm her.
“Why do you have to ruin the moment?” she asks me. I feel a profound sense of fear emanating from her, even as she treats me as one of her equals.
She should learn to be more honest.
“You should get some rest,” I growl at her. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
I feel her fragile, human hand on my shoulder, and I whirl around to see her looking up at me. I snarl at her, baring my fangs. I want to snap her hand, and I clutch it tightly in my claws, breathing heavy enough to blow out the tousled layers of messy hair covering her forehead.
“I don’t want to sleep,” she tells me. “You can keep me here all you like, but you can’t control what I do – how I live.”
I growl, clutching her hand tighter. I stop short of snapping the bone, watching her wince in my claws, subject to my whims. But she stares up at me, though trembling, in clear defiance to me.
I cannot allow this challenge to my will to stand. She will fall in line with me.
My wings beat, sending gales through the cavern that crest over the waves of the still spring. The boletus which dimly illuminated the surface from below have expanded over the waters from their tastes of elven blood, now brightly shining like the minerals on the walls and looming monstrously in the background.
As I take to the cavern ceilings with her in my grasp, then dive deeper into the recesses of the cavern, she struggles against me, kicking into me and desperately trying to free herself.
We pass chiroptera of colors ranging from red to brown to even pink or luminescent, bounding forward. Perhaps if she weren’t fighting me so desperately, she could enjoy these scenic environments, but her fear is elevated to a high point and my eyes are not interested in taking in the sights.
She feels warm in my grasp, and my barbed tongue salivates, feeling so close to tasting her. I pry into her with my claws and feel the blood dripping freely, her torso punctured.
