The thing was a mound of flesh and mottled skin, as big as a barn and the shape of a pumpkin. Four tentacles as thick as trees hung limp at its sides; teeth ringed the gaping mouth at the top of its head like a crown.
A huge, sad whale eye the colour of wine stared at the knight. She could see her reflection in the jelly surface.
“We don’t know what it is,” she heard. “Some kind of monster that makes a perfect copy of whatever it eats. They think that was how the Dark Lord made his armies, feeding his minions to it so that it would make hundreds of copies of them. Do you recognize it?”
The knight opened her mouth. She hesitated. “Yeah,” she murmured, drawing out the word. “We found it in the Dark Lord’s tower, right?”
“That’s right. That’s where it ate you.”
The knight turned around and looked at her other reflection. This one appeared to be about ten years older, and had doffed her armor for a loose blue tunic and breeches.
She was holding a cup of tea. She had pressed another cup into the knight’s hand when she woke up here. It had been a shock finding herself suddenly out the obsidian dungeons of the Dark Lord’s tower and into this tall room of stone and straw. The warmth of it in her hands steadied her a bit.
“Everyone else in the party was worried, but then it started making copies of you,” the copy went on, staring up at the tentacled thing. “And all of the copies helped fight against the Dark Lord, and we won, and peace was restored across the land, but then nobody could figure out how to kill the damn thing or just to make it stop. Dozens of copies of us in a day, hundreds in a week, and then someone decided that the only thing we could do is just bring the thing here, seal it off and hope it starved to death.”
She sipped her tea. “Anyways, that was two-hundred years ago and it’s slowed down a bit. It can only make a new copy of us every few weeks now.”
The knight looked down into her tea. The copy had also draped a blanket over her shoulders.
“I have so many questions,” she said.
“I figured.”
#stories #:( does the flesh mound know that the dark lord is gone now #does it know that it’s safe #has it been in panic mode making clones for 200 years #just knowing that it’s running out of steam. it can’t keep this up #can the flesh mound get a cup of tea pretty please can someone give it a hug:(
“So do you live here alone?”
“Yeah, mostly. Just me and Moundy, basically.”
The knight stared. “Sorry — do you mean the flesh blob that ate me?”
“It ate me too, you know,” the copy said. She picked up a third teacup. After a moment the thing held out a tentacle, which the copy balanced the cup on. “Making a copy really stresses it out these days, so I try to calm it down when that happens.”
The teacup was raised to the huge wine-dark eye. It did… something to it, something like inhaling through its eye, gave a shuddering sigh and oozed in relaxation.
“It did eat you though,” the knight said.
“That was hundreds of years ago. I don’t hold it against it.”
I’ve decided the knight’s name is Milly. From the Latin “mille” meaning thousand. Because there’s thousands of her.
