The first time he ate, his body rejected it.
The flesh was heavy, unfamiliar. His stomach twisted violently, and he vomited until there was nothing left inside him. His small body trembled from the strain, throat burning, eyes watering. For a moment, instinct told him to stop.
But hunger was worse.
Hunger clawed at him constantly, sharper than pain, sharper than fear. It was the only sensation that never faded. So when the nausea settled just enough for him to breathe again, he returned to the carcass and forced himself to swallow.
He learned quickly.
If one part made him retch, he searched for another. Softer areas. Warmer pockets untouched by wind and sun. He stopped biting the tough outer hide and began using wounds already carved by weapons. Little by little, he adapted.
Days passed.
He did not know what a day was, but he noticed the sky changing. Light came, then darkness. Again and again. He began counting without understanding numbers, only repetition. The sun rose. The sun fell. Each time it returned, he was still alive.
The bodies around him slowly changed. Flesh shrank. Scents shifted. Birds gathered in greater numbers. Other creatures came at night. He learned to avoid them. He learned to protect what he had not yet eaten.
Elephants first.
Their massive bodies fed him for a long time. Then horses. Smaller, but easier to climb. Easier to tear into.
He grew.
By the time the sun had risen and fallen enough times for four cycles of seasons to pass, the child was no longer an infant stumbling through blood.
He was four years old.
If someone had seen him then, they would have been struck first by how beautiful he looked. His features were delicate, almost refined. His hair fell loosely around his face. His skin, despite everything, seemed unscarred at a glance.
But his eyes were wrong.
Pitch black. Not merely dark brown. Not deep. Black in a way that absorbed light rather than reflected it. There was no innocence in them, but neither was there cruelty. They were empty in a quiet, unsettling way.
His body, though still appearing small and soft, had changed. Muscles formed beneath the surface without training. His skin no longer tore easily. Cuts that once bled freely now barely opened. The battlefield had hardened him in ways he did not comprehend.
By then, the elephants were gone.
The horses too.
Stripped to bone by time, birds, and by him.
He did not think of himself as desperate. Desperation requires awareness of lack. For him, there was only hunger and the search to quiet it.
So he wandered further across the red plain.
When he returned to the dragon and the humans scattered around it, something stirred faintly inside him. Not fear. Not recognition. Just discomfort. A hesitation he could not name.
He ignored it.
The dragon's body was immense, even after years of decay. Its scales remained intact, harder than anything he had encountered. He pressed his hands against them and tried to peel one away.
They did not move.
He found a sharp piece of metal nearby and struck the scale.
The impact sent pain shooting through his hands. The metal snapped before the scale did. He tried again, again, and again. Each attempt left shallow cuts along his palms. Blood from his own body dripped onto the dragon's hide, mixing with what had long since dried.
The scales did not yield.
He felt only pain. Nothing more.
So he changed his approach.
Instead of attacking the surface, he searched for openings. The dragon's mouth, frozen half open since death, offered one.
Standing before it, he could sense its size properly. Even at four years old, he understood scale in a physical way. He could see that several elephants could have fit inside that mouth at once. Its teeth were like pillars. Its tongue thick and darkened with age.
He climbed in.
The interior was different. The outer scales had been armor. Inside was softness, even after time had passed. The air was stale, heavy with decay, but he did not hesitate.
He began eating from within.
He tore at muscle. He swallowed organ tissue without distinguishing what it was. He did not leave scraps behind intentionally. Waste did not exist in his mind. If it could be bitten, he bit it. If it could be swallowed, he swallowed it.
Days blurred.
He lived inside that dragon, emerging only to drink rainwater or search for small remnants elsewhere. Then he returned.
He consumed it slowly, methodically.
By then, he was no longer reacting like an animal in panic. There was a strange steadiness in him. A routine. He moved without thought, but not without precision.
Eventually, he reached deeper.
The heart.
The brain.
He did not know the significance of either. They were simply parts not yet eaten.
Without pause, he devoured them.
The moment he swallowed the first pieces of the heart, something changed.
The pain was not external.
It did not come from cuts or bruises.
It erupted from inside him.
His stomach clenched violently. His chest tightened as if something were expanding within it. His veins felt as though fire had replaced blood. He staggered backward inside the dragon's ribcage, hitting bone as his vision blurred.
He did not understand why.
He had eaten everything else without consequence.
Why was this different?
The pain intensified. It felt as though his insides were tearing apart and reforming at the same time. He clawed at his own chest, but there was nothing there to remove. His black eyes widened, but no tears came now.
For the first time in years, he fell.
Not from stumbling.
Not from weakness.
But because his body could no longer remain upright.
He collapsed within the hollow remains of the dragon, small frame shaking as the agony consumed him. The battlefield outside remained silent, unchanged, indifferent to whatever was happening inside that corpse.
His breathing grew shallow.
The pain did not fade.
And then,
Darkness.
He lost consciousness, alone inside the beast he had hollowed from within.