My throat is parched and raw. I can’t sing a single second more, no matter how hard I try. No matter how much biomancy I toss at myself and the surviving members of my team, it doesn’t matter if we don’t have water.

It’s been almost two days since our capture. The black-toothed monster had happily allowed me to heal my team and prevent them from bleeding out, but it supplied neither food nor drink. A slower, more insidious killer than the web-spinning freak torturing us was going to take hold soon: dehydration. All of us are low on fluids from nearly bleeding out multiple times. I can feel myself passing in and out of consciousness already; it won’t be long until our deaths.

The bastard prods me, trying to get me to sing. I would if I could, but it’s simply not possible. My throat no longer works. As if to provide extra incentive, the damned creature bites into Ivan again. He chokes down a scream, and I know he’ll die this time. My voice doesn’t work, and I’ve long since lost both my arms. Magic is beyond me, now. I have to try anyway, but the choking croaks that escape my throat are powerless. The creature looks at me as I try to save my teammate one more time, its expression shifting from gleeful expectation to irritation to finally something almost resembling fear. It doesn’t want to lose its playthings, huh? At least Ivan gets to hurt it that way before he dies.

A low, sad consolation that is. Fuck. Fuck! Ivan, I’m so sorry. I wish I could tell him, but I can no more speak than I can sing. I’m so, so sorry.

The monster hisses at me, leaping over to smack me with its forelimbs as I fail to save my friend and ally. It doesn’t understand, does it? For all its cleverness, it really doesn’t understand that we have to eat and drink? I barely even register the pain. It’s not like the damn thing is eating me.

As Ivan starts to die, Fulvia does her best to thrash around, to make one final last-ditch attempt to do something. How she still has the strength I don’t know. I suppose she’ll probably last longer than the rest of us now, with her stronger body. There’s nothing the woman can do, though. Even if she could break the webs, she only has one arm… and no legs. We’re doomed here. We’ll both be joining Ivan soon.

A particularly hard blow from the monster strikes me in the head, and I pass out. I wake up to the feeling of something wriggling over my face. The monster has, in a somewhat macabre display of poetic justice, found a small nestweaver and trapped it in threads. It shoves the still-struggling creature at my face. I’d laugh if I could. So it figured things out after all, but wants me to eat that? I’m hungry enough to give it a shot, but I can hardly get my teeth around a giant bug and expect to bite through it. I try anyway, desperate for even the barest hope of life, but my teeth can’t pierce the spider’s flesh. The monster, growling, stabs the nestweaver to hold it still, but what I care about is that it makes the arachnid bleed. Disgusting, beautiful green fluid drips into my throat, and I greedily try to catch every drop. As usual, my team’s shared nightmare watches with too-intelligent eyes.

The moment I’ve gotten all I can from the spider, a thread shoots out of each of its front limbs, tethering to Fulvia and I. Ivan, now clearly dead, is left to rot as we’re dragged across the ground to unknown parts of the forest. Unable to see where we’re going, I only hear the occasional spat between our torturer and other monsters. I don’t know if I want the little horror to win in order to buy us a little more life, or to lose so we can finally be killed by whatever bested it.

We’re dragged and dragged until suddenly my heart leaps up my throat, hope filling me. The back of my head touches something cool and wet, soaking my hair. The beast rolls me over, dunking my face in water. I panic for an instant, considering the irony of drowning while I die of dehydration. I lack the strength to lift my head, after all. Another shot of webbing, though, and my head is forcibly pulled out of the lake’s edge, giving me some much-needed air. The small monster stands above and between Fulvia and I, looking almost like a carriage driver holding our reins. I choke a laugh at the comparison shortly before my head is dropped back in the water. I drink, fighting with my self-control to not swallow too much at once.

A few more rounds of this and we’re dragged back away from the water and rolled onto our backs once more. The monster leaves, returning with corpses. More nestweavers, their missing legs indicating they were once fellow victims. It tries to get us to eat those. I do. Who cares if I get an infection from the meat? What’s a possible death in the face of a certain one? Besides, at least it’s not Ivan’s body.

Days pass, the monster learning to feed and water us like the cattle we are. My voice recovers soon, but I do everything I can to not let the beast know. The phantom pains in my missing limbs will only get worse when the monster adds my last leg to their number. I sing when it’s gone hunting, trying desperately to push our bodies back into a usable form before the monster catches on, but the damn thing is too clever by half. It finds the stubs of growth coming from our shoulders, greedily gnawing them off before going directly for our last remaining limbs. I sing as loud as I can, trying desperately to drown out the sound of Fulvia’s bones being shattered between those horrible jaws.

“Claretta!” Fulvia begs. “Claretta, stop! Please!”

Stop? No. I can’t do that. We have to keep hope. We have to try to escape, try to survive to be rescued.

“Claretta! I— aaaagh!”

Her words are cut off as the monster takes another bite. I’m looking up at the sky, unable to face my friend while it happens. I just sing. Sing, sing, sing. It’s what I’m good at, what I love.

“Just let the Watcher take me, Claretta!” my last teammate screams.

“I… I’m figuring out a spell for the pain!” I insist, halting my spell just long enough to say so. “We won’t feel it forever, and—”

“Shut up! Shut up and let me die!”

Squeezing my eyes shut, tears wetting my face, I ignore her pleas, resuming my song and forcing her body to stay functional. She rages and curses at me, but I only have ears for the song.

Many more days pass. I don’t know how many. A dozen, at least. I’m now convinced the monster never sleeps. Not just as a paranoia-induced nightmare, although I certainly have no end of those, but it literally never sleeps. It rests, sometimes, sitting motionless and staring at something or another. Its pure black eyes never stay closed for long, though, always watching. When it’s not busy engorging itself on our flesh, I often watch back.

The dark creature is growing. Visibly so, even over the spattering of weeks I’ve known it. When standing on its hindlimbs before, I doubt it could have made it to my waist when we first met. Now it would probably reach my belly button. Its spider-like limbs are thickening, changing slowly in length and shape. Most terrifying of all, however, is its head. The bug-like features are shifting, its large, wide-spread eyes focusing more forward and shrinking in size. Its mouth has lost the vestigial mandibles previously around its face, shifting to imitate the rounder form of the humanoid skull. Bits of chitin slough off the monster’s head day by day, revealing a humanoid nose that reminds me very, very much of Ivan’s.

It notices me staring, grinning widely at me. The teeth of a monster contrast the face of a child. It is uncannily wrong, still only halfway through whatever macabre transformation is taking place, but it grows more and more familiar every day. What is this creature eating when it gnaws at us? Our flesh, or our very humanity?

I look away, going back to singing. I’m far too tired for a magical song, having spent my energy at that for hours earlier today. Properly fed and watered, though, I do not need to worry about straining my voice. I can, after all, heal any damage sustained from singing… by singing. And singing is all I can do to chase away the constant torment of reality.

“This is a Lark’s story,

“Content yet seeking more.

“The Lark flies far for she

“Loves naught but to explore.

“From islands high she sees so far,

“Searching still for something new.

“But the Lark can’t fly above the sky,

So down and down she flew.”

I learned the song in church, but at its heart I always felt A Lark’s Story is a song for hunters. A song for the ever-restless, the ever-seeking. A song for people like my team who would risk their lives in the forest beyond all sanity, who would fight impossible odds against ever-more-dangerous circumstances for no reason beyond the restlessness in our souls. Singing it has always given me hope, and I pray to the all-seeing Watcher that it gives Fulvia the hope she needs too.

Yet while the church encourages prayer, it teaches us to know better than expect those prayers to be answered.

“Thisssss… issss… alahkstorah…” the dark beast sings along, its screechy, horrible voice menacingly off-key. “Cunnntent yeh seekee mooooh…”

I stop singing, the monster padding back onto my belly with that horrible, horrible grin on its face. It lies down to make itself comfortable, head resting on my chest as it continues its butchery of music.

“Tha Lark fais fahfosee… loves nahbuh toesplore…”

“You’re not the one that’s supposed to like it,” I whisper helplessly. For the first time, the idea of singing disgusts me.

This thing has taken even music from me.

“Sssposed t’laikt?” it copies, eyes sparkling with glee.

“It’s learning from us, Claretta,” Fulvia moans. “You have to let us die.”

“Fulvia, I won’t just roll over and give up,” I answer, though the words come out as less confident than they should. “They’ll have dispatched another team by now. We have to—”

“It eats you less!” Fulvia screeches back, glaring at me with a mad look in her eyes. “You don’t even watch, you cowardly bitch! Look at it! It fucking likes you! The rest of us? It tests things. Ivan was first. It’s pushing how much torture it can get away with before we die, and it likes you because you help it! YOU HELP IT! YOU’RE ON ITS SIDE, YOU BITCH!”

I want to protest, but before I can the beast leaps up. Back arched, it hisses furiously in Fulvia’s direction, its teeth bared in threat rather than smile.

“Don’t like me yelling at your favorite pet?” she taunts. “Come bite my throat out already, you piece of shit!”

It leaps over to her, biting through her chitin armor and spitting it out before tearing into the side of her ribcage. I start singing as Fulvia screams, stopping the bleeding as quickly as I can while the monster savors and swallows its morsel. Thrashing and roaring at it, Fulvia continues to incite the monster through her pain until it gets fed up, pressing a thick forelimb down on her throat and cutting off her airway.

“W-wait! Stop!” I beg it, cutting off my song. “You’re choking her!”

I don’t know if it’s because I stopped singing, if it noticed the desperation in my tone, or if it somehow understood… but the monster turns to glare at me for a moment before obeying. Fulvia’s body gasps for breath, her instinctive will to live overpowering whatever suicidal madness held her for now. I go back to singing while the monster bites into many of Fulvia’s bindings, tearing through webbing and armor alike. It seems to have noticed that our clothes aren’t part of our body. Chewing it off, the dark creature detaches and upends Fulvia’s breastplate, filling the inside with webbing before curling up within to rest.

Fulvia starts to sob, her occasional quiet hiccups contrasting the complex melodies of my healing music. I feel her trying to resist my spell, but she’s so weak I push through it without any trouble.

“Fuck you, Claretta,” she whispers hopelessly. “So much for consenting to treatment.”

I just keep singing. The wound isn’t terrible, and to a mix of pride and horror I’m getting quite good at treating monster bites. Only when I’m done ensuring she’ll live do I answer.

“I’m sorry, Fulvia. I just… I don’t think you’re sound of mind when you say those things.”

“I’m not!” she cries. “I’m not at all. Don’t you feel something missing when it eats you, Claretta? I swear, it’s biting more than flesh. Please, just let me keep my dignity before I die.”

“You’ll keep your dignity,” I promise. “You won’t die either.”

“Liar. You’re worse than it. At least the monster doesn’t pretend to be doing me a favor.”

I flinch, unable to respond. Leaning over from its new bed, the dark creature from Hiverock takes another bite out of Fulvia’s body, swallowing it whole.

Once again, I start singing.