A blur of red and black sliced past Serathis as he twisted away. He struck with his tail, catching the king snake across the snout. It retaliated instantly, slamming its thick body into him like a battering ram. Stars burst in Serathis’ vision as his skull cracked against the ground. They circled, breath hissing, scales rasping. Tension coiled in the silence between strikes.
Then, an opening.
Serathis lunged, venomous fangs aimed for the throat.
But the king snake whipped its tail up like a club. It cracked against Serathis’ jaw with such force that his own fangs punched through the soft flesh beneath his tongue. Agony shot through his skull. Blood spilled into his mouth, hot and thick.
He reeled backward, but it was too late.
The king snake surged forward, looping around his midsection, tightening instantly. One loop. Two. Three. Serathis thrashed as his ribs groaned under the pressure. His spine arched in protest. His breath came in shallow gasps. He tried to sink his fangs into the coils crushing him, but the angle was wrong, his own body held him fast.
The king snake began to climb over him, mouth opening wide.
He felt the first contact, smooth, cold jaws pressing around the tip of his snout. It stretched impossibly wide, unhinging with mindless hunger. Slowly, it began to move forward, working its jaws over his head.
Serathis screamed… but no sound escaped. His skull was encased now, gripped by slick, muscular throat. Each contraction dragged him deeper. His fangs scraped uselessly against the inside of the snake’s mouth. He felt his own blood smeared along its palate.
The pressure around his ribs didn’t lessen. If anything, it squeezed harder, making each swallow easier. His world became wet heat and crushing dark. He felt the jaws creeping past his jaw, down his neck. The bones in his shoulders popped as they were forced inward.
Still alive. Still aware.
His vision was gone. The stink of digestion filled his senses. Each inch swallowed brought the slow, suffocating truth closer:
He was being devoured whole.
He fought until he couldn’t feel his tail anymore. Until even the fire of pain was dulled by numbness. Until he sank, body and mind, into the dark tunnel of a living tomb.
Serathis woke with a strangled hiss, his entire body rigid, coiled tight as iron. His throat burned with phantom acid. The pressure of phantom jaws still clung to his skull. He flicked his tongue, desperate to taste the world, to know that it wasn’t inside another thing’s gut.
Air.
Damp earth.
Still alone.
He lay still for a long time. Trembling.
That wasn’t how it had gone. He knew it. He remembered it. Didn’t he? The fact that he even wondered made his coils twitch with fury.
In life, he had struck the king snake swiftly. One bite into the neck, venom coursing, death minutes away. No fight. No coils. No slow, suffocating descent into digestive darkness. But the dream refused to believe that. It kept rewriting history, or was it correcting it? The thought coiled cold around his mind. Was he so far gone that he didn’t know the difference? He lashed his tail in the dark, furious not at the lies, but the possibility they weren’t.
His mind knew it wasn’t real. But his body didn’t. His scales still remembered the squeeze. His jaw still ached where phantom fangs had shattered bone. His ribs moved like old wood under wind. The fear clung like shed skin that hadn’t fully come loose.
He shut his eyes.
But sleep didn’t come.
Each night, death met him again.
The king snake returned more than once. In the first dream, it had crushed him and swallowed him headfirst. But the second time, it began at the tail… slow and deliberate. He could feel the muscle and skin peel away, inch by inch, as it swallowed him alive. He thrashed, fangs useless, body pinned by a hunger greater than strength. The heat and pressure built, until even his memories were digested.
He woke that time screaming, convulsing against the walls of the burrow. He’d torn out a patch of moss in his panic. It took hours to calm. To remember who he was.
In one dream, Serathis was basking on a slab of sun-warmed stone.
It was high ground, flat and dry, overlooking a gulch where wind stirred the tall grass in nervous whispers. He lay still, scales glistening, soaking in heat like memory- until a sharp breeze carried something foul to his tongue.
Dog.
No, dogs.
Nine of them. Feral. Half-starved and full of boldness, drawn by the scent of blood or arrogance or both. A mottled pack of rangy things, ribs showing, eyes shining with the kind of hunger that doesn’t wait.
They didn’t howl. Just appeared from the tall grass, pacing forward in loose formation, circling like they already owned the stone. Hackles raised. Tails low. One barked. Another growled, a wet, bubbling sound from a throat already torn by too many fights.
Serathis rose slowly from his coil.
He didn’t flee. Wouldn’t.
They struck all at once.
Teeth flashed from every direction: snapping at tail, throat, belly. He spun, striking low and fast, venom surging through his fangs like wildfire. One dog yelped and dropped, convulsing. Another had its eye torn from its skull. He coiled tight, tail lashing, jaw tearing, using every part of himself as a weapon. He fought like the world had declared war on him, and he meant to answer.
But there were too many.
Their weight was relentless. Claws scraped at his sides. Fangs found his flesh. He felt fur tear under his strikes. Another dog dead, a fourth twitching with foam on its jaws.
Still they came.
One caught his tail and held, yanking. Another leapt and sank its teeth behind his head. His body stretched, pulled taut. His muscles screamed. He should’ve seen it coming. Once, he would have. That blindness, that hesitation, was the worst wound of all.
He struck again, but the dogs only snarled and dragged.
The pain was unlike anything he remembered. It began as tearing: skin, scale, sinew. Then it became a splitting. Like being unraveled. His body screamed as it was pulled in opposite directions, his spine straining past its limit.
He thrashed, fangs snapping at empty air. There was no escape.
He couldn’t even hiss. Couldn’t scream. Only writhe.
And then… he tore.
Not cleanly. Not fast.
The dream made sure he felt it all.
His vision flickered. The last thing he saw was a dog standing atop the rock, his own entrails dangling from its jaws like stolen glory.
He awoke in silence.
Every inch of him shaking. He was still whole. Still alive. But the ache lingered. Phantom pain, cruel and convincing.
He lay awake, not in fear, but in fury. At the dogs. At the dream. At the part of him that hadn’t seen the kill coming. That had forgotten what it meant to be feared.
They grew slower, the deaths. As his body healed, so too did his dreaming self grow more dangerous. Less pathetic.
But the final dream… that was the worst.
He’d met the boar in life. Large. Cunning. They had exchanged favors: food for safe passage, mutual indifference in a world that demanded blood. But the beast had betrayed him once. Greed, perhaps. Or desperation.
Serathis had killed him, long ago. Venom through the eye. A slow death, bubbling and bitter.
But in the dream, the boar remembered.
They met beside a river, silent at first. Recognition passed between them, and they both knew: no talking. No truce. No mercy.
The fight stretched into eternity. Blood stained the water. Trees shook with each impact. Serathis sank his fangs deep, felt the venom pulse, but not before the boar’s tusk opened his side like wet paper. Flesh peeled away. His guts spilled across the moss.
They both died there. Entwined like enemies who had once been brothers.
When he woke, he didn’t scream. Didn’t hiss. Didn’t even move.
He just stared at the ceiling of the burrow, until the sun warmed the earth above his head.
And then…
Finally…
He moved.
Slow. Silent. Purposeful. The pain in his ribs was a whisper now, not a roar. The eagle’s talons had left him torn and humbled, but not ruined.
The burrow smelled of old musk and dry soil. He’d lain in it long enough.
Serathis slithered free, his scales whispering against the tunnel walls. The outside world greeted him with wind and cloud-filtered light. The forest pulsed around him, indifferent and infinite.
He was wounded. Haunted. Less than he once was, and he knew it. The mind frays before the body, some whispered. Let it. He would burn hot enough that even the rot couldn’t catch him.
Now the world would learn what the grave could not stomach.