For about ten minutes, Cate sat on the ground, surrounded by white bones. She was covered in blood, but it was not her own. All around her, there wasn't a single drop of blood. Even the bones were dry and without a piece of flesh.
"Can I still call them skeletons if the bones are no longer connected?"
These were the kinds of thoughts that passed through her mind.
She continued chewing whatever was in her mouth. She had an idea about what she was eating, but did not want to acknowledge it yet. She felt that she could not handle this truth, and so she sat there in silence, chewing peacefully. There wasn't any other living thing in the vicinity.
She finally swallowed, and that was when reality came back to haunt her.
The white bones that surrounded her did not have any meat, and on these bones, there were signs of predation. She was the only predator around. It was pretty obvious that she had eaten the werewolves.
She had torn them apart and feasted on their flesh. Even their intestines and other internal organs were missing, indicating that she had eaten them as well. The only things she had let go of were the bones, and even these were not truly spared from her hunger. She had sucked out the marrow and eaten away the cartilage. Cate had lived for thousands of years, but she had never eaten human flesh. She had committed countless crimes and killed so many people, but in all that time, she had never thought of eating people.
Her eyes went wide, and her stomach turned.
"How did I eat over fifty people? Can my stomach actually be that large?"
She jumped to her feet and bent over in the nearby bushes, and began vomiting as though she wanted to remove everything that had ever entered her mouth.
For five minutes, she vomited, and this only confirmed that she had indeed eaten people. Her vomit contained pieces of clothes, eyes, tongues, and there was even a whole heart that, for some reason, she had not chewed at all.
Cate felt dizzy at the sight of her crime. She staggered backward and fell over. She lost consciousness. As she had predicted, she could not handle the truth of what she had done.
Cate was in the Edgeless Forest. The place was filled with countless creatures that liked the taste of human flesh, and yet all these creatures stayed away from the defenseless Cate. Nothing came close to her. It was as if they sensed something truly dangerous about her.
Cate woke up after three days, and at that time, she felt empty. She sat in place and watched the leaves sway with the wind.
Cate had used the Original Sin spell, and when she did so, she understood that there would be a heavy price to pay. She had still chosen to use the spell, all with the desire for revenge.
Cate had thought about what the price for power might be, but she had never thought of eating human flesh as being one of them.
To make matters worse, the Original Sin spell was the kind of spell that could only be used once before the natural world reacted to its use and sealed off the paths that allowed its use.
One would think that this was good news, since it meant that Cate did not have to eat people again, but they would be wrong. The Original Sin Spell permanently affected the caster, granting them permanent access to the forces of the Original Sin. These were forces older than magic, and even now, Cate could feel this new power moving through her blood, flesh, and soul.
What Cate had done to herself could never be reversed. She was sure that even the gods would fail to do so. After all, she had created this spell to fight the gods. It would not be of much use if the gods had the power to strip her of this power.
Cate felt that the power of the Original Sin that was flowing through her was not just doing that. It was transforming her right from the core. She had no idea what she would be when the transformation ended. Cate was sure that she would not be human.
Cate stayed in the clearing with her thoughts for another five days before she resolved to move on toward her goals.
"Something must be done," she said. Cate looked around, and the Edgeless Forests no longer appeared the same as before. In her eyes, it appeared to be a normal-sized forest. The only difference was that it was covered in magic.
At first, Cate did not fully grasp the meaning of what she was seeing, but as she saw more of the forest, she finally understood that she had gained the ability to see through magic itself. To her, magic was no longer a mysterious energy that flowed through the world. It was something she could see.
Magic was truly beautiful with its glow beyond description. Magic could be said to be an endless network of rivers that carried not water but a fundamental force of nature. Cate could see these rivers. The Edgeless Forests were filled with countless streams of magic that were connected to a larger river that flowed in the sky.
Cate had entered a whole new world, and her understanding of creation had forever changed.
Cate found a small river in the forest and cleaned herself. She had to wash her clothes several times before she could get all the blood out. She scrubbed her skin with all her might and brushed her teeth until her toothbrush broke. Even after all this, she still felt unclean.
Since Cate could see the true nature of the Edgeless Forest, it was no longer something that could hold her back. She easily tracked down Mary and the Mage Born.
They asked her about what she had gone through in the past few days, but she did not answer them directly. There was no way for her to tell her friends that she was transforming into a monster that enjoyed the taste of human flesh.
She decided to keep this information to herself. She had also made sure to burn all the evidence of the feast she had just had in the forest.