Christofer lay there in the dark. A growing sensation was building in his stomach. The emptiness that kept reminding him. It contracted with pain, slow and brief, hollow, each deeper than the last. What had once been an absence had now become a presence, a grinding ache that spread outward with each pulse and receded only partially before the next one arrived. He thought back to the last meal that he could remember. Back at Gerard’s building. Some kind of sad gruel that kept you alive but cranky.

  Later when they hit the village, he was too exhausted and passed out. Only to wake up the place going to hell in a handbasket with the Wyvern bursting through the roof. The headache from healing pains gained a new dimension. That dimension of pain was spreading from behind his eyes to his temples to the base of his skull.

  He'd been lying there taking stock, while stewing in Wyvern stock, hands returning, shoulder warm with the gecko's quiet industry that he couldn’t define, ribs complaining with every breath, when the idea of hunger actually hit him as a single unified complaint that had been waiting an extremely long time for the adrenaline to clear. He swallowed. It didn't help. Dense rich smells had been present for a long while, which his body recognized before his mind did when hunger became a part of the equation. Christofer glanced at the gecko on his shoulder. It was dark and he didn’t see it, but he knew it was there, if only in spirit.

  "You’ve noticed. I will be the chef for the evening" rippled from the gecko. “Options.”

  'I'm listening.'

  "Liver. Nutrient dense, easy to chew, but high risk. The liver is the filtration system. Whatever was in the wyvern's blood moves through the liver. The frostbite had not reached the blood yet when it died. The hind leg’s blackening was peripheral, contained to the limb. But the liver will have been working harder than usual managing it. Possible toxin concentration."

  Christofer looked into the dark toward where he roughly understood the liver to be.

  ‘Eh. Pass. What else?'

  "Heart." rippled from the gecko, "The frostbite was peripheral. The blackening hadn't reached the core vasculature when it died. The heart was pumping clean blood until the moment it stopped. No filtration concerns. No digestive acid concerns. High caloric density.“

  'I assume there’s some cons in there, what do I have to work with.’'

  "It’s tough, and raw, but that’s what we got working with on the menu. The connective tissue will be resistant. And it will take effort to reach."

  'Eh, sounds like our best choice then. How much effort?'

  "The pericardium will need to be breached. In a bread analogy, our piece of bread sits within a furious plastic bag and we need to tear it out. The heart sits in a cavity within the cavity. Anchored. You cannot pull it free cleanly with your hands in their current state."

  Christofer thought about that. Looked into the dark. Mouth had been salivating for a while now, not because he was particularly looking forward to eating that thing, but because the body had already prepared itself when the mind was still asking questions.

  'The ribs.' he thought.

  "One of them, yes. The posterior ones are shorter. Less anchored. More accessible from your current position."

  He felt around in the dark until he found the rib he wanted. Ran his fingers along it. Solid. Dense. The connective tissue holding it was substantial and he was working with hands, but the principle was sound. He worked at it. The dark made it easier in some ways, removing the visual component of what he was doing, leaving only the tactile problem of loosening something that did not want to be loosened. The mind worked overtime filling in a worse image in his mind, but he decided to save the phone’s battery regardless.

  It took a while. His hands tired. He rested and continued. The hunger made the argument for persisting more convincing with each passing minute. The rib came loose with a sound he chose not to dwell on.

  He worked his way toward the heart by feel. Found the pericardium. Tough membrane. He pressed the sharper end of the rib against it and pushed. It resisted. He adjusted his angle and pushed harder, his shoulder screaming at the effort, and felt it breach. He worked the opening wider. Found the heart. It was warm. Denser than he'd expected. Sitting in his hands with a weight that seemed slightly disproportionate to its size, pulling at something within that wasn't entirely hunger and wasn't entirely the gecko. He pulled.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  The aorta severed with a resistance and then a sudden release of blood spatter that sent him backward into the cavity wall. For a moment he thought he'd managed it cleanly. Then he heard it. The wet, rhythmic pulse of blood moving through a severed vessel with nowhere left to go but down.The level around him began to rise.

  ‘Welp. That's a problem. Why didn’t this blood coagulate?'

  "The vessel diameter is significant."

  ‘Meaning?’

  “Coagulation requires time and the aorta is the largest vessel in the body. The blood in the pools around you had hours to thicken. This is fresh. The volume coming through a vessel this size will overwhelm any natural clotting for some time. The warmth of the heart kept the surrounding blood fluid as well.”

  ‘Well fuck’

  He could feel it already. Cooling blood rising against his legs. The cavity that had been his shelter becoming something else if he didn't address it quickly. He thought about it for a moment, ran his finger over the rib, sharp tapering to thick.

  He leaned forward, blood splashing into his face as he pushed the tip into the aorta, plugging it with a pressure seal he hoped would last. The warmth in his shoulder intensified. Not painfully. Deeply. The gecko's tendrils, already working inside him to stem the internal bleeding, shifting their approach to try and resolve the bleeding with the new batch of fuel sloshing around his waist. His own blood and the wyvern’s intermixing into a pseudo wyvern-human blend that plugged his own gap. He felt wyvern tissue moving inside him. Not painfully. Purposefully. The distinction mattered less than he would have thought. Some people had pig hearts, he had a partly inflamed shoulder with wyvern tissue reinforcing the strained muscles and veins.

  He sat in the dark and held the heart and used the excuse of the internal situation needing to stabilize enough as reasoning to wait as he built the courage to address the external one. Holding the weight of the heart. With the full awareness of what he was about to do with it.

  It was the most terrifying piece of bread he had ever held. Three fists wide and dense enough that if it was actual bread, surely it must’ve been vegan bread. It was warm. Denser than muscle. He bit into it. Felt wrong, too dense, not good. Just like vegan bread. His teeth clamped down on the connective tissue, the grain of the fibers, the softer sections near the chambers. He found the grain. Worked a section loose, just chewing it alone would not be enough.

  He decided to make it piecemeal, he held it against his chest for warmth while he worked the next. He worked at it with sustained effort, jaw tiring, switching methods when one stopped being effective. The posterior section will be less fibrous and soon enough, began to chew, going for the path of least resistance.

  The blood level around him had stabilized. His shoulder had settled into something that wasn't quite pain and wasn't quite normal, a deep structural rearrangement that he was choosing not to examine too closely. His collarbone sat differently than it had. His ribs complained less after an internal nudge, or differently, the complaint having changed character from acute to something more like the ache of correction.

  He worked through the heart in the dark with the methodical patience of a man who had nowhere else to be and a body that kept making the argument for continuing. Outside the blizzard kept going.

  Inside he kept eating. His jaw ached with an honest tiredness that was at least a different kind of ache than everything else. He relaxed and let the final piece sink into his stomach.

  * * *

  He felt along the cavity wall until he found the entry point by texture. The coagulated blood had done what he'd predicted. The breach had sealed itself, thickened blood and cold working together into something dense and resistant. He pressed against it experimentally. It gave slightly but held. More than he'd expected. He needed to know what he was breaking into before he committed to breaking into it. He found a rib by feel. Shorter than the one he'd used before. Tapered toward one end. He worked it loose with less ceremony than the first.

  The process was familiar now, and pressed the narrow end against the seal at the center of the breach. He pushed. The coagulated blood resisted, then the frost on the outside edge cracked, and the rib punched through into open air. It punched a small hole. He laid it down on the coagulated blood covering his legs and poked a finger through. Cold hit his finger immediately. Sharp. Immediate. The specific cold of air that had been doing serious work for a long time. The gecko appeared on his fingertip.

  ‘How’s it looking out there?’

  "The blizzard is still running. Reduced. The worst has passed but it hasn't broken." A pause. "The snow has drifted against the carcass. Significant accumulation on the windward side. Less on this side. Perhaps half a meter."

  The seal itself was manageable. Coagulated blood had density but no structural integrity, one good strike would breach it. The snow on the other side was the actual problem. He'd be pushing through into resistance. Half a meter wasn't insurmountable but it wasn't nothing either, not with hands that were functional but not strong and a shoulder that was repaired but not reliable.

  'Visibility?'

  "Poor. But not zero. The village structures are visible. No movement. No light. Dark. The light suggests late afternoon. But the storm makes it difficult to determine precisely."

  He pulled his finger back. The cold retreated. The gecko returned. He found the edges of the breach by feel. Mapped the seal. Found the center where the coagulated blood was thinnest, where the frost had already cracked around the rib hole. Christofer spoke aloud for the first time in what felt like a long time.

  “I should probably get out of here before the snow becomes too big of an obstacle. Let’s reposition this beast inside the ruins of a building… and I want my damn mug back.”