cw: blood, gore-ish, animal death, monster-fucker bait
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Deer come to the water’s edge to drink, parading twisted antlers through the pallid forest dawn. All they’ve known of it’s depths are mottled, misshapen fish hardly larger than his palm, no threat to their bulk.
Eventually, the deer learn. The smaller mammals suffice. He savors the taste of hot marrow and the sound of tiny bones breaking like new ice between his teeth. Raccoons stop bringing their young to the pond. Opossums grow skittish and fearful, favoring the dripping dew on tree bark to the tepid water below.
Three hundred winters have passed since the lands previous inhabitants had left, scattering great metal beasts as they fled their own toxins. Radiation had rendered the area uninhabitable, and now the only sign of them lay in the red rust of skeletal remains; houses, cars, machines.
None of these things concern the Rusalka, for his freshest memory of them is as aged and weathered as the ruins. Centuries-old scars mottle the scales along his hip, and a bright yellow number-tag flags proudly from one translucent ear. He doesn’t know his people. He knows he is faster than a deer. He knows that the inky, tapered points of his claws can cut bone. He knows that dark eyes can pierce the murkiest depths of the forest pond, and that he has swallowed nearly every fish within it.
A bird rustles in the underbrush.
The Rusalka watches, silent.
Raven hair fans out around the crown of his skull like a dark halo, just below the water’s surface. A hungry, luminescent stare tracks his prey; two glowing orbs in a pale half-moon face. The bird flits closer, and thin lips curl in a sharp-toothed grin.
Light flickers along sharp, gaunt cheekbones with a flutter of feathery gills. Flecks of iridescence glitter like stars along the Rusalka’s jaw, beckoning. Here I am, it whispers, come closer and see for yourself.
He waits until the curious thing is nearly at the shoreline before sleek, sinuous frame explodes from the water with a rattling hiss. Webbed palms snatch it out of the air as it bursts into panicked flight, and a terrified shriek is abruptly ended by tepid water.
Far below, coiled safely in the cool mud, the merman sinks sharp teeth into feathered breast.
