Chapter Text
In the southern sea, endlessly lurking in the greenish waters and only rearing its head once a year, is a giant rock.
It’s not an ordinary rock, though hardly anyone would mistake it for one. In its bowels there burns a fire, one that feeds not only on coal, but on fresh, dripping meat. It will not allow this fire to ever burn out, it will do anything to satisfy its eternal hunger.
There’s a creature, a strange creature no other animal has ever seen. It looks almost like a whale, but whales are solid, tangible animals; this creature, however, is unstable, its skin melting and moving around like mud after a three-day rain.
Every once in a while, it swims up to the Hungry Rock, opens its formless mouth to reveal a lifeless body of a small animal inside, and gently lays the little thing onto the cold stone. Then it swims away. No one has ever seen where its lair is, if anywhere.
The small animal is then taken in by a mole. At least, out of the whole animal kingdom, this warped, distorted beast resembles a mole most of all - but its front limbs are much longer than a mole ever should have, its body is thin and fragile, and its fur, if it ever had any, has long fallen off. It’s blind, like all moles, and inspects the tiny creature with its limbs and sensitive nose.
If the creature is too small, too veiny, too bad-tasting, the mole throws it into the raging sea right then and there. Otherwise, it cradles the cub in its front limbs and shambles deep into the narrow passages within the rock. There it takes care of every little animal it has ever collected, fattens them up, makes sure their meat is juicy and fresh enough for the fire in the Hungry Rock’s belly, and then…
What happens then, few animals know.
But there is at least one - a tiny kitten, with a short, thin tail and grey fur that looks almost blue in the dim lighting of the rock’s innards. His front paw has a shackle on it, which he himself cannot tell where he’d gotten; if his memory was still intact, he’d know that once upon a time, in another world, he used to live in a tiny metal cage, and this shackle is the only thing he kept from that time…
But no animal that ends up in this world remembers anything about the past. From the moment you put your paw on the soil of the Nowhere, you belong to it only.
The kitten has managed to outsmart the warped mole, to escape into the lower levels of the Hungry Rock. But now, he starts to wish he’d never come here - the lower caverns are spacious, but flooded, still water making everything around him cold and damp. Not to mention the smell of rotten algae and decomposing fish…
His fur is wet, clinging to his skin uncomfortably, he tries to shake or lick the water off, but fails. He resorts to jumping from log to log, clinging to the thin sickly trees that somehow grew there - anything to not touch the water, where he’s already seen more than a few leeches about his size.
And he’s heard a roar, too. He doesn’t know which animal it belongs to, but that only makes him more terrified; after all, moray eels normally don’t roar, right? This one does, the giant, old, rotting moray eel, which has been eating half-decayed fish for decades on end - and oh, how fresh is this kitten, how tender and juicy his meat…
He sneaks past the eel while she’s sleeping. He doesn’t want to be eaten, isn’t that the fate he’s trying so hard to avoid? His fur would stand on end, if it wasn’t so wet, and he’s cursing the Hungry Rock in his thoughts. After all, it’s not just him who’s trying to survive - he knows there’s been other little animals, and all of them suffer as much as, if not more than, he does.
There, above him, tiny claws are scraping against the cold stone. It’s dark around the little animal, but then she takes the firefly into her teeth - and it becomes clear that she’s a fox, a scrawny fox cub with dirty yellow fur.
The firefly is a friend of hers - or at least, that’s how she would classify it. In reality, she caught it once, tore off its wings, and put it into her fur to light her way. Foxes are awfully resourceful, after all.
So now she’s crawling through the inner workings of the rock. Through the narrow wet passages, that seem to be awfully small for the creatures that inhabit this lump of stone. What could be the purpose of—
Oh.
She sees them.
Tiny little things, even smaller than she is. With grayish-white fur and a skittish attitude.
Mice.
Of course. Of course. They must be the ones who gradually, day by day, gnawed at the rock, making passages where only they could fit, to hide from the predators of the Hungry Rock.
She thanks them, in the only way a fox could thank a mouse - by not eating them, but instead lightly nuzzling them. Some of them, she even plays with, using her barely alive firefly.
It’s all she can do, really, to not eat them. To not give in to the instincts. Last time she ate, it was a half-eaten pinecone, thrown to her by a little squirrel - the kindness given to predator by prey surprised her enough that she took the meager gift without complaint, even though usually she’d never eat a pinecone, what is she, a chipmunk?
She craves meat, fresh, juicy, dripping with blood. Distantly, from her previous escapades, she knows that the same hunger is shared by the Rock itself and by its inhabitants. But she’s yet to meet the rest of them.
When she does, she will forget about being a predator, at least for the time being - because she will be prey. Prey to the unseen beast living in the pile of stones and rubble that accumulated in the mole’s lair. Prey to the butchers of the Hungry Rock, two giant bears, that take bodies of all animals that are given to them and tear them apart, to dissect the skin and bones from the meat. Prey to the hungry, bloated hogs, that stumble blindly into the rock’s open maw and eat, eat everything they can see, meat and fish and the pale grass that grows in the cracks of the stone.
And above all that, her hypnotic purr resonating through the whole rock, lies a puma - a mountain lioness, in other words; part of the Hungry Rock as much as it is a part of her. She looks into a puddle of water, muddy and almost non-reflective, and purrs, grooming her silky fur.
What can a tiny kitten, or a fox, or indeed a squirrel, do against the monumental lump of wet stone that calls itself the Hungry Rock? What can they be other than another little portion of meat for the eternal fire that keeps the rock alive? It cannot sustain itself only on the coal that the mice provide it with, out of fear for their own lives - it needs meat, forever, always, in a cycle that has gone on since this world began, since the first predator hunted and ate the first prey.
Or perhaps, there is another reason why such violence exists in this place between places? After all, other worlds have animals hunting animals, too, but always for survival only - never for the sole purpose of killing and eating and consuming.
Such thoughts echo in the head of the fox cub, who crawls through the mole’s impressive collection of nuts and feathers and skulls and all kinds of trinkets from outside. She ponders the overarching reason - mainly because she knows what it is.
She’s been there. In the Pale Forest. The twisted, leafless trees, the fog, the rain. The animals, faceless and scentless, and the black rock on the horizon.
She calls it a rock in her thoughts, because no wild animal can ever comprehend what it is. A tall, black, perfectly rectangular thing, with a strange opening near the ground - a creature from a more civilized world would’ve called it a door. It looks like it didn’t come from this Nowhere, because that’s the truth - it’s alien to this place, to the little fox, to the—
No. She will not think about him. She cannot - something in her stops her from remembering him too clearly. The same something that tugs at her stomach and tells her to go and hunt for some meat, once again, not caring that the last time led to her being caught.
So she does exactly that.
Firefly in teeth, ears raised, eyes focused on every single detail, the fox makes her way through the Hungry Rock. She has the same goal as every animal in history - to survive.
But not everyone reaches this goal.
She will.