There is not a word for what I truly am. I am claws and teeth, hunger, cruelty and rage. I am the thing that consumes and is not consumed. I exist within a large egg. In the beginning it was white but with the passing of time it now looks more like a gray stone or boulder. Mostly I stay within the egg. I sleep. I do not dream. I wait. I wait for blood to drink and meat to tear and bones to crack open and suck the marrow from. You ask me where I am? You ask how I can go undiscovered. The trick is simple. No one cares about a big rock in the desert or in a stream in a field or all the places this land around me has shifted into. Well they don’t care until they bleed.
I was there when the land was new. I watched the critters crawl from the vastness of the sea. They were more like the slugs of later days than fish. They had what was not quite webbed feet and not quite flippers. They were hilariously repulsive. I ate one then. It resisted only for a moment. Its blood tasted salty and pure. I can still taste it now if I try. After I had a few of those early land dwellers I closed myself back up within the egg. I waited in the dark.
Ages passed. I hatched from time to time and drank my fill of mortal blood. It was the blood of man and its ancestors. It was the lifeblood of the thinking beast. It was glorious. Death was my gift both to give and prosper from. Today I emerged from the egg. The world around me was metal. There were silver flashing towers dotting the horizon;even the ground was hard and cold as iron.
The air tasted empty. It crept up my singular nostril giving only the impression of absence. Time passed in a sickening silence. A figure appeared from the emptiness. It was in the shape of a man or woman or one of the lesser angels but it was none of those things. It shined in the light like a silverfish.
I struck at the thing with my thirsty tentacles. There was the shock of lightning through my body as the being attempted to fight back in some strange manner but ultimately it went limp and succumbed to my strength and might as so many before had. This was right. I ripped open its cold hard neck. There was fluid just as I expected but it was different. It was a deep blackish green. It burned and smoke. Still it took me several seconds to release the thing and give up. The flavor though awful was superior to nothing which was my only alternative. Still it is poison to me and it would do. For the first time in eternity I don’t know what to do. I can sense this world is lifeless. The thing which I attacked and now understand is not alive twitches at my feet. It shouts commands in a cold and unemotional voice. I will not “Repair the device.” I destroy. I kill. That is my role. I will wait for blood even if there is none. I have no choice but to be the monster. Someone surely must play the other part eventually. I will wait. I must wait.
Matthew Gleason is a cryptid from West Virginia. You can find them on Twitter or Facebook as Matthew J. Gleason writer.