Seth and the Prometheus Guild

Smell of Home

Seth had been exposed to a lot of horrors in his young life, but nothing could have prepared him for the nightmare that called itself a human cafeteria.

The foul smells battered his senses as soon as Mary Ann opened the heavy doors — charred, earthy, too sweet and too heavy and, worst of all, something sour, fatty and spoiled.

Almost without conscious thought his eyes glided over the big room, searching for the source of the offending smells. Like every other room in the sandstone building that housed the students, it followed the principles of big, arched and having a lofty ceiling. No windows disturbed the high walls, instead there was a mirrored set of big double doors on the other end, almost making the room look like a bloated hallway. The vast space was filled with tables consisting of metal legs and plastic tabletops, not fitting into the flair of the old and sophisticated building at all. Most of the smells centered around a long aisle in front of which human children were waiting and loading their tablets with food. While surveying the hall Seth once again realized that humans were quite social creatures, much like herd animals. They sat around the ugly tables in clearly fenced off groups ranging from three up to twelve members. Only a few sat alone with their food, glancing around or not looking up at all, which immediately made them look like prey to Seth. Outside the protection of the herd, lone animals were always the easiest pickings.

Considering the smells, Seth refused to take a closer look at what these humans were actually shoveling into their mouths. Though it felt strange to think about it, there was one thing he missed about his former imprisonment: the food. His old Whitecloaks had had a much clearer understanding about his dietary needs as they used to feed him mostly fresh, bloody meat, sometimes complemented by some raw eggs or fish. The first time he was brought food in this new place he thought they wanted to punish him: instead of soft and filled with delicious juices, the slab of meat they gave him was chewy and smelt like they had held it above a flame.

Now he counted his blessings that they hadn't tried to feed him some of these atrocities.

And then he spotted it: a human boy, sitting with a group at one of the multiple tables throughout the hall ... and drinking milk.

An actual animal's nursing milk.

Seth's stomach flipped. The perversion caused bile to rise in his throat especially after he spotted a few others following suit. In his mind a picture appeared, a memory from the mountains: a doe with twitchy ears nursing a fawn on wobbling legs. Only now the fawn in his mind was being replaced by a kneeling human.

He felt the fine hair all over his body rise in revulsion.

"Alright, this is the cafeteria. As you can see, the food is actually quite nice. You can eat here three times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, without additional costs. If that still isn't enough, there's a little shop selling snacks further down the hall. Outside of those times the room is closed for cleaning," Mary Ann said next to him. She didn't even seem to notice the milk-drinkers.

An especially pungent smell wafted over to him and Seth spotted a yellowish lump on one of the trays.

The sight decided it. He had been compliant for long enough. Employing the tactic he'd developed to get a break from Francesca's babbling, he turned toward the girl deemed his care-taker for the day. When Francesca had called her to Seth's room and told her she would get something called 'extra credit' for showing him around, her freckled face had lit up and she had been annoying him ever since, towing him around the multiple school buildings.

Around his age she was tall and gangly, with dark green eyes and red hair. The auburn waves had immediately reminded Seth of the woman that had let him out his glass cage all those weeks ago, but because Mary Ann's chest was flat he was quite sure it had been a different human.