Nobody's Servant, Act 1

Effectively The Beginning [vore]

Let's go over what I know right now. The sky started to ripple; it doesn't matter what planet you're on, you can almost always take that as a bad sign.

The decaying aether from our stand-in for a sun fell from the sky and blasted my island off the map. That's pretty bad too.

I've got no idea if my folks are alright. And right now I've got no means of finding out. That's the item I get to when I offhandedly discover that the pit of my stomach is much lower than I've previously known it to be.

I shouldn't be this calm. I should be sobbing on my knees on the ashen beach. Crying hasn't come so easily since my first death, and that should scare me. I wish it scared me. I try to tell myself that now is not the time for a personal crisis, but quickly correct myself; it is the perfect time for a personal crisis. My dad and my friends are potentially dead, and I'm an indeterminate distance away, so I can't even know. I just hope the damage wasn't so widespread that it got the rest of my family on the other side of the archipelago.

...What if it was?

All the tears finally hit at once, and I grieve for a while; I'll spare you the details but it was ugly. I manage to eventually tear myself out of it and make an effort to get my bearings. Though I lift my head, I still wallow in the aftermath of my quiet despair for several minutes, the gentle gray tide's chill permeating me in my entirety. The storm must have truly been massive to keep the sea in motion this long; it's usually stagnant and lifeless. A depressing scene, to be sure, but given recent occurrences, I would prefer it to this. I tire of it before too long, and begin to pick myself up out of the water.

I need to focus on survival. I won't starve very quickly unless injured, but I do need fluids. The ocean won't be a good source of that; undead or not, the arsenic concentration will do me no favors. For the first time since I woke up, I turn and regard the island, a maze of bluffs and sheer drops. It'll be hard to navigate.

>>>>>>>>>

My recollection is interrupted as fingers dive in and my captor lifts me by my midriff out of her canine jaws. The steam in her breath is quickly lost in the air outside.

"This doesn't feel like the beginning to me," she says, dangling me a little too high for my liking. "And has anyone ever mentioned to you that your pacing could use work? I asked what happened, not how you felt about what happened."

"I get really into it," I defend, my ears folding. "I thought I'd omit the whole 'life at home' thing for now; that's a little boring." In honesty, that's not true. There's just a lot that she doesn't need to know.

"Fair enough, you can always tell me about it once we're better acquainted," she chuckles. "Anyway, can you get to the part where you stop being on the beach?"

"I was getting there."

"Perfect." With that, she stuffs me back into her mouth, face down on her flat tongue. As odd as it is to say, I'm getting used to this texture. I might even enjoy it if not for the implications of it. After all, it's not a new experience, you know, but so far neither flirtation with it has lived up to depiction.

I try to get situated without slipping into her throat again, and find my spot in my tale again.

>>>>>>>>>

There are some pieces missing, forgive me. Not of me I mean, of my recollection.

I am, and for now continue to be, Merion. Morph, black-backed jackal type, there are a lot of jackals on Paliputra.

I am, until officially counted among the casualties and the missing, a Maxim citizen.

I was, until just this morning, a full-time ghostworks technician but the likelihood of any part of that campus continuing to exist in recognizable form is, shall we say, suboptimal.