CRAWLER

Situ floated over their head, peering all around the room, “well. you’ve certainly been busy. you live here? how did you manage to get lost so far in my forest?”

They tried.

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Good going Raki, you taught the baby a curse word.

Bonus theme song

Right then he finally heard it. He blinked. A jolt of fear sparked in his chest and he whirled around, face savage, but sagging quickly into alarm. He’d been expecting a mugger, not the cage of teeth that snapped neatly shut around him.

“BAD!”

“no yelling, this is a very nice nest.” It really wasn’t, but empty meaningless compliments did seem to soothe the beast’s frustrations. He peeked around as he followed, cautiously inspecting the walls and noting just how dark it was starting to get, “what exactly do you do down here?” Nothing looked particularly egg-like, so that didn’t seem like the intended purpose of the place.

To the monster, it went without saying. What did they do down here? Why, they nested, of course. The concept was so ingrained into the creature’s psyche that they didn’t understand why further explanation would be required. What a strange bird, asking such obvious questions. Crawler glanced curiously back at Situ for a moment, before continuing down the dark hall. They certainly didn’t seem to mind that the god was following them deeper into their grotesque sanctuary. The corridor eventually terminated in a very large room--what was once the highschool’s cafeteria. This was more or less Crawler’s innermost cloister, where the monster spent most of their time. The place was near unrecognizable from what it once had been, the flesh clinging to the walls a great deal thicker than before, the only light source an unnatural and feverish red glow from pustules dotting the meat. Also of note were slimy, suspended cocoons dangling from thick ropes of sinew down from the ceiling. While they could be mistaken for eggsacks at first glance, further inspection would reveal the capsules as food storage, containing captured humans in various states of suspended animation.  In the corner, a sickly looking dog panted, its eyes red and ruddy with unnatural growth and fur sloughed off in a thick, runny mange. Crawler paid the infected canine no mind as they entered, as if it didn’t even exist. Instead the insect began to knead at the spongy flesh beneath their claws like a cat might a favorite blanket. 

“only because you tried to build one in my forest, where there wasn’t any food for you anyway. out here in the city is a much nicer place for you to build your nests.” He hadn’t yelled, had he? Wait. Oh yeah, he did lose his temper after getting his face cracked, didn’t he? He shifted uncomfortably, apologizing to something like Crawler felt wrong and yet he felt like he had to clear up the misunderstanding, “i’m sorry for yelling at you. you sent some debris flying and i got hurt, i was upset.”

There, that should cover it. House rules thus set, Crawler slowly turned their long body around on itself, slipping against the slick meat covering the walls and mass writhing and morphing to fit. Now that they had figured out Situ wasn’t here to scold them, the creature didn’t care much about the unexpected visitor at all. After all, the shadow bird no meat on him. They began to slide back down the corridor, seemingly returning to whatever activity the gross beast had been busying themselves with before the interruption. 

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Crawler was hunting him. The abomination had been skulking about this part of the city for a few days now, sleeping in the empty garage behind a dilapidated car shop, snapping up humans who were foolish enough to wander out alone during the late hours. Just like Raki was. Crawler was still very young, and they lacked the experience to recognize a fellow supernatural creature’s aura for what it was. The otherwordly beast was already drawn to areas of desolation and suffering, to them Raki’s stink of rot and demonic energy just drew Crawler’s interest to him instead of any other potential meals in the area. Perhaps it simply meant that the false-him would taste especially good, since he already smelled so good? They certainly hoped so. Stalking out from behind a dark apartment building, they approached, low to the ground, belly scales almost scraping the pavement. For such a large, and occasionally clumsy beast, Crawler was remarkably silent when properly focused on hunting their prey.  Click, went chitin against asphalt, and then in one great surge of momentum, the monster was lunging for the “human,” maw wide open.

Whatever it was, it hadn’t been the reaction he’d been expecting, “there’s no… ‘wildernest’ here.” He quirked a small smile, remembering their pronunciation all too well, “much better for something like yourself. you seem to be doing very well here.” They were pretty empty compliments without much real sentiment behind them, but maybe the reminder would serve to keep Crawler far away from his forest in the future as well.

Loud shadow referring to Situ, of course. Crawler looked quite proud of themselves, that was probably the longest, most complex sentence they had ever spoken so far in their short life.

It hadn’t been that long since his first run-in with Crawler, he hadn’t hoped to repeat it, especially not this soon. He was so surprised by the sudden appearance that he forgot to throw his voice, making his location painfully obvious, “big.. guy..”

“BAD.”

There was something familiar and unsettling about the sight waiting for him down there, but he couldn’t quite place it. This had to be the work of something supernatural, no human could do this. Situ hung back, he could see it got darker up ahead, he didn’t want to block off any of his potential escape routes if something went wrong. Hoping to expose whatever was down here before it saw him, he threw his voice off to the left, “hello? anyone home?”

On the outside, there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the abandoned highschool, left for dead in a struggling school district without the staff or the money to keep it afloat. On the inside, it took about five steps from the main entrance to encounter dried blood stains smeared along the old linoleum, old trails dragged one next to another that ran parallel with odd scratches crosshatched along the hard floor. The air was still, and heavy, sour with a wet, putrid scent that hung in tiny, pink spores. From below, the walls vibrated with a sound just out of range of human hearing. Following those blood stains down the mass-produced staircase that led to basement level One, things got a lot more interesting. Pulsing and squirming upon the eggshell white walls, tendrils of flesh criss-crossed the corridors in great, twitching heart strings. Sickly sweet pustules blossomed in the humid, stagnant air, wafting veiny curtains roughly the color of wet cotton-candy hung up like wet laundry. Putrid liquid dripped slowly from the meat, pooling slick upon the pockmarked floor.  There were no working lights, and no windows, the only illumination a dull, fever glow from wriggling tumors hanging in clumps, swinging gently from a wind that wasn’t there. As the path lead onwards, it soon became very, very dark, only the the heaving flesh and the soft, red buzz of its pulse all around and within it. This was one of Crawler’s “nests.”

The raven pulled out a couple of the bottled souls, absorbing them one after the other before tentatively running a tendril over his face to make sure the crack had sealed completely. Most immediate problem tended to, he vanished into the shadows to get supplies. He had a lot of work ahead of him.

Quickly, he retreated to a tree branch, not keen on getting injured again. Gods did that hurt. Good thing he’d collected so many extra souls. 

He reached out a tendril to lightly tug on Crawler’s tail to get their attention, “hey now, come on. no nesting here. what’s the point if there’s no food? you don’t want to do that. you should take your nestbuilding elsewhere.” He especially didn’t want to know what was going on inside that wrecked building, but he had a feeling it would take ages to clean up if it were even possible.

Their tail lashed around with their frustration, and in one mighty heave of tantrum fury, they wrenched themselves out of the household, causing the entire structure to collapse.

“i think you ate everything already, big guy.” He really didn’t want to get Crawler thinking about eating him of course, best to shift attention away from that, “you’ll probably need to move on if you want to find more humans.”

Muffled from inside the home, the sounds of their “construction” soon grew organic and disgusting.

It would be safest to leave and let it wander off later, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to leave Crawler unsupervised. Some unfortunate deer might get too close and he really didn’t want it to start associating his forest with food. Sighing, he fluttered up to a tree and perched there, eyes half shut, waiting and watching.

Perhaps luckily, something was disturbing Crawler’s sleep. As the day wore on, the big bug began to twitch, than fidget, exposed and out in the open air as he was. The fresh rural breeze through the town was simply too clean and too fresh for a creature used to polluted dystopian nightmares and post-apocalyptica to be properly comfortable in. After a bit of tossing and turning, the bug roused. It took them a moment of blurry blinking while scanning the surroundings to notice Situ was still there. Crawler stared at them a moment, head tilted. Then they ignored him, wandering over to a house slightly less destroyed than the others, pawing at the wrecked entrance and making quite a lot of noise doing so. They definitely had a goal in mind the way they were rummaging.