firsts

I’ve been thinking about firsts.

If I’ve asked you about yours, you must have demurred. You share so much with me, but about certain things you are a closed bear trap.

I know you weren’t always like this. You had to earn your teeth. I wonder, did you taste flesh first? Or drink blood? Perhaps you supped at the altar of the soul. It feels like the last should be most sacred and difficult, but I know first-hand the silk you use to seduce and bind your prey’s will. Perhaps your first meal swam too deep in your waters and drowned.

If you drank first, could you bite? It seems too cruel to give you the thirst and only human teeth. But then you were born with the hunger and had to learn how to satisfy it—perhaps the world is just unfair. Maybe you took your first draught from a cup into which a beguiled love bled for you. Perhaps you did it the old-fashioned way: blood for blood, negotiating with one who had taken that path before.

If you ate, then surely it was with the knife. You have dropped hints of refining yourself as a predator, and I think that means you can eat more and digest faster. Once, was even a newborn an impossible meal? Did you pack away pounds of steaming flesh, stretching your body, jaws and mind until the first sentient creature experienced what it was like to be undone by your insides?

God, I don’t even know when you transformed, or how many you have taken. Surely there have been thralls like me in your past. I have no doubt they traded their everything for your pleasure and fat. Did they struggle, when their hallowed ends arrived? Will I?

All I know is that your hunger is pure and perfect. Even if you had not earned your teeth I would love you just the same. The miracle is not some ritual or deal you made. The miracle is you, Raven.