Without Understanding

WARNIN: Vore be mentioned, me hearties. And a few sprinklin's of unsophisticated language, so hide yer doilies.
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Nolan died of his wounds late in the morning, and Marahk remained by the man's deathbed. Unable to stand at his full, towering height in the bedroom, Marahk sat hunched on the floor, staring at Nolan's corpse as if trying to solve some riddle it posed.

It was the closest to mourning that Tilera had ever seen from a demon, but she couldn't be certain that's what Marahk was doing at all. Exactly what Nolan meant to him, she couldn't say, either. They'd known each other far longer than she'd known them. Marahk's face was just as brutish as ever when he glanced at her, but she thought she saw a new stillness behind his cold eyes.

"What now?" he rumbled, returning his gaze to the corpse.

Tilera ducked her head, backing out of the room. While she didn't think Marahk would harm her, she didn't feel it was safe to try and shoo a demon out of the room. He was perhaps Nolan's strangest friend, if they could be called friends, and it felt wrong to disturb him at the man's deathbed.

Cleaning bodies and preparing them for cremation was not something Tilera ever got used to, and her throat kept knotting up whenever she tried to think of how to say her goodbyes. When Harod brought back Nolan's unconscious, broken body last night, they both worked tirelessly to stop the bleeding, set and splint what they could, and clean his wounds. Nolan had fallen off a short cliff in a careless accident, tumbling down the sharply-sloped scree at the bottom.

Marahk had barged in early that morning, before the sun had risen, and knocked over a table in his haste to reach the dying man. He didn't say anything, but he fetched bandages, sutures, alcohol, splints, and supplied what little irixi he had been carrying. When there was nothing else for him to do, he loomed by the bedside like a sentinel, as if he hoped his presence could scare the specter of death away. Harod, while not as familiar with Marahk as Nolan, seemed to know that the demon wouldn't do any harm, and Tilera had encountered Marahk on enough occasions that she understood the same. They wouldn't have been able to stop him anyway. When they had done all they could, Harod retreated to a blanket by the hearth, plagued with shadows under his eyes and no doubt hoping all this would turn out to be just a nightmare.

The demon's voice startled her. "That's not what I meant, Tilera," he said. "What do humans do when one of you dies?"

Taking a few cautious steps back into the room, Tilera frowned, wondering what he was getting at. She knew he knew. "Depending on the custom of the region, one may be buried in the earth, cremated, mummified - "

Marahk shook his head. "Not with the body. With the loss."

It took her the span of several breaths to find her voice again. "I've been trying to figure that out for a long time... It's a lot like other bad wounds. It stings at first, and fades into an ache, so slow and seamless you don't even feel it happening. But it never heals completely... A demon's worst scars may fade away. His limbs may grow back. Humans wear our hurts forever."

"Shit way to die," he said.

Tilera nodded. "Shit way to live."

Marahk glanced at her, and whether he looked uncomfortable or irritated, Tilera couldn't tell. His facial structure wasn't all that different from a human's. At times, it looked eerily similar, but the vast majority of his expressions were difficult to read, and the numerous differences between their species were a constant distraction. His skin was mottled gray, though the shades and patterns of his kind varied. The sweep of his pointed ears reminded her of the wings of a diving falcon, echoing the angle of his cheekbones. His jaws extended, almost like a muzzle, built to take large bites, and his lips might have looked human had she not already seen the cruel points of his numerous fangs. His hair was dark and thick, and some of it had been gathered up in a half-tail, pinned in place by what looked like a vertebra. It was too big to be human, but she still tried not to wonder who it belonged to. For all she knew, it could have been one of his own.

His eyes were the worst. The whites were black, and the irises were like clouded moonlight, as if they'd shine in the dark. They never did, but that realization unsettled her more. It was one less thing that would tell her where he was, should she ever find herself trapped in the dark with him. Demons somehow didn't need light to see, and nothing their size had any right to move so quietly.

Those ghost-colored eyes studied something in his mind, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. "If you had the chance to heal fully; regrow your limbs, cure any disease you had, even recover your youth... would you still take that chance if you had to submit to something that scared you?" he asked. "Would a blow to the mind be a fair price to regain your body?"

There was a weight to the question that ignored all of Tilera's efforts to believe it was hypothetical. She found she didn't mind her scars so much. Or the aches in her joints and spine. Even the teeth she had lost. There was a kind of virtue to them, she thought. Little pictures of her life. She cleared her throat, trying not to appear uncomfortable, and sat in a wooden chair near the foot of the bed for good measure, hoping it would help disguise the new tension in her posture. Demons liked to play with fear. "No, thank you. I'm quite alright as I am."

"Would you ever consider it?"

She frowned at the floor, feeling pinned every time she tried to meet his eyes. "I supposed that depends," she said. "How steep is this... mental price?"

"At worst?" He glared at the dust motes by the window. "You won't be the same. You'd have fits, missing memories, breakdowns, and the like. At best, nothing at all. It's a gamble."

"Is that what happens to you?" Tilera asked. "When you heal?"

"No."

She frowned uncertainly. "I don't understand. What does fear and trauma have to do with healing?"

He shifted on crossed legs, looking anywhere but at her, and she almost grew impatient before he managed to answer. "It's not... unusual for demons to heal each other’s fatal injuries." Once he found his footing, he rushed. "With humans, it's different, and there are different ways to heal them. None of them are easy or gentle, and humans tend to find the surest method the most horrifying. It requires a great amount of trust."

"You can heal people?" Tilera asked, her heart speeding up.

He nodded quietly, watching Nolan's still face. The growl that naturally carried under his words was almost gentle this time. "Of all the things that make us alien in this world," he said, "that is the greatest."

Tilera glanced at Nolan, finding a spark of outrage on his behalf. Another, more skeptical part of her mind was insulted. If it was a lie, it was a particularly cruel one. "So you chose not to save him? Why are you telling me this?"

"Because the surest way to save him will look to you, and him, like I'm devouring him." At her stunned silence, he continued. “The state he's in, I'd give it a few weeks before he wakes up. One month before he's recovered. He's not going to want to stay inside that long, and he'll hate me for it, but at least it'll keep him out of trouble.

"Do you understand now?" he demanded, watching her. "I never had the nerve to explain to him what I can do, so I missed my chance. How betrayed would you feel if you woke up in my belly, not knowing what I just told you?"

Tilera couldn't look away this time, trapped in her chair. A nervous laugh escaped her chest before she realized it was hers, and she felt as if she was hearing her own voice from another room. There wasn't much to feel betrayed about regarding someone she had very little trust in. "Not very..."

Marahk chuckled, and Tilera thought that under other circumstances it might've been a warm sound. She'd never seen an honest smile on him before. It was almost beautiful.

"To think," she said, voice slow with realization. "You don't enjoy scaring humans."

The honest smile twisted into an unkind one that suited his features better. “If you want to look at it that way, there are a lot of exceptions.”

“So...” Tilera started slowly, trying to understand. “He wouldn’t be in any actual danger?”

Marahk’s grin faded. “He’d never be safer… But I don't know which I value more - him, or my relationship with him." He rested his chin on his fist, elbow propped up on one knee. "It's not too late. I've healed worse. Fixing his body is not the problem. It's that I don't know which is more selfish - letting him rot, or bringing him back only to risk killing my favorite things about him."

She studied him all over again, as if seeing one of his kind for the first time, without having heard the countless, conflicting theories of their origins, purpose, and design. In that moment, it was clearer than ever before how little was known of them. Demons were not misunderstood. They were large, strong, fast, cunning, blood-thirsty monsters that were incapable of understanding and valuing life the same way a human would. But they weren't fully understood, and likely wouldn't be for a long time to come. Tilera thought she caught a glimpse, not of Marahk's true nature, but of her own lack of understanding.

And what was trust without understanding?

Marahk hardly moved, but she sensed that his whole body had relaxed, as if talking had helped him come to a decision. He stood as much as he was able, hunching under the ceiling and towering over Nolan's deathbed. Hooking a claw under the blankets, he drew them back, exposing the stink and mess of bloodied bandages. Marahk paused, taking in the sight of what was once his companion. "I never should've waited." He leaned down, bracing his clawed hands on either side of the corpse. "I should've done it as soon as I arrived. You all would've screamed, but he would be alive."

Tilera stood up, uncertain of what to do, or of what she could do. The thought occurred to her again that perhaps the demon was lying. Telling an elaborate story as an excuse for an easy meal. But if that's all it was, he would've surely taken it already. No one here could stop him from taking whatever he wanted, except him. "I can't blame you for hesitating," she said carefully, hoping he wouldn't notice the tiny step she took toward the door. "Your claims are difficult to believe... The very idea is unnatural."

"Unnatural," he mocked. The muscles in his back tightened as he stared down at Nolan. "You humans call dying of old age a natural death. This piece of shit fell off a cliff - how natural is that? Slipped like an idiot and broke all his bones. He was in his prime. He had a right to all the decades left to him, and all the decades I would give him." His muscles relaxed, and his tone turned pensive after a brief silence. "Perhaps we are unnatural. Perhaps it is impossible to connect to you in a way that both our kinds would understand. Perhaps that's why we have so much fun killing each other. You call us monsters. We call you vermin. It's easy. But Nolan changed everything for me. He makes me feel like we aren't out of each other’s reach. I'm not ready to give that up."

Tilera could feel sweat on the back of her neck. Marahk could claim that the process of reviving or healing someone was harmless, but what constituted harm to something as tough and alien as a demon? Either he had lied, or he genuinely didn't know the extent of the damage he could do.

Marahk nicked the body with his claws, cutting bandages and clothes away. "You shouldn't watch."

The floorboards groaned as she hurried toward the doorway.

"Tilera," Marahk said, just gently enough to get her to pause. "Don't let anyone in."