Chapter 113: Feral Beast

Astrid Vale

The dining hall that evening looked nothing like the market I’d walked through hours earlier. Everyone was dressed formally, fabric I hadn’t seen anywhere else in the settlement catching the artificial light, and the atmosphere carried something close to celebration. I sat where Maximus directed me, my mind still tangled around the image of the father’s body twisting into something feral, the boy’s scream, the mother’s silent tears.

And yet nobody here seemed disturbed by any of it.

Before a single plate was touched, Maximus rose from his seat at the head of the table, and the entire room rose with him. Even the youngest children knew exactly what to do, lowering their heads in practiced unison. I hesitated, unsure whether I was meant to join, and settled for simply staying quiet as the room spoke together in a low, steady rhythm that had clearly been repeated countless times before.

"Beneath the earth, we endure. Beneath the moon, we remember. What was taken shall return. What was cursed shall be cleansed. What lies above shall one day be ours again."

Ours again. I turned the phrase over, waiting for someone to react to it, some flicker of meaning I could read off a face nearby. Nothing. Every expression around me stayed reverent, unbothered, the words clearly worn smooth from years of repetition.

Maximus spoke the final line alone. "Until the Moon calls us home."

"We endure," the room answered as one voice, and then chairs scraped back into place and conversation resumed like nothing sacred had just happened at all.

"Long live the Elarisi!"

I sat through the meal with half my attention on my plate and half of it scanning the room, still turning the feral incident over in my mind. A man had become something barely human that afternoon. A child had been bitten. Soldiers had dragged the father away, restrained, while doctors worked over the boy’s torn shoulder. How could an entire room recite a prayer about remembering, then sit here laughing over dinner as if nothing worth remembering had happened just hours ago?

Then I spotted them.

The mother, sitting near the far end of the table, and beside her, the boy. Both of them eating, talking, entirely at ease. I froze.

How.

I remembered the woman’s face crumbling as the soldiers pulled her husband away. I remembered the boy screaming, blood soaking through his sleeve. Now they sat there as though none of it had touched them at all, and worse, when I finally managed to catch a glimpse of the boy’s arm as he reached for his cup, there was nothing there. No bandage. No wound. Nothing.

I told myself there had to be an explanation, some custom of theirs I didn’t understand yet, some way of processing grief that looked nothing like what I’d expect. I waited until dinner ended and slipped out after them into the corridor.

"Excuse me," I said, catching up to them. "I’m sorry for your loss."

The woman turned, her expression blank. "My loss?"

"Your husband," I said carefully. "What happened to him earlier, I’m so sorry."

Her face shifted from confusion into something closer to offense. "I don’t have a husband."

I stared at her. "I don’t have a father," the boy added, looking up at me with genuine puzzlement rather than the guardedness I’d expect from a child hiding grief.

"I saw him," I said, my voice climbing despite myself. "He was talking to you, adjusting your collar, and then he changed, he turned into something, and he attacked, and you were bitten—"

"Stop," the woman said sharply, pulling her son closer against her side. "You need to stop saying evil things like that."

"Look at his arm," I said, pointing. "Look at where he was bitten."

She hesitated, then checked, more to placate me than out of any real concern. Nothing. No bite. No scar. Not even the faintest mark where teeth should have torn through skin hours earlier.

My stomach dropped straight through the floor. This wasn’t a case of fast healing. I’d seen the blood. I’d seen the soldiers restrain a snarling, twisted creature that had been a father moments before. I’d felt the impact of his body against mine when I shoved the boy out of reach. None of that could simply vanish, not from the world, and certainly not from the memory of the two people who’d lived through it most directly.

"You’re not well," the woman said, backing away with her son held tight against her. "You’re one of those surface lunatics, aren’t you. Stay away from us."

She turned and walked off before I could say anything else, the boy glancing back at me once with an expression that held more pity than fear.

I stood alone in the corridor, the pieces refusing to fit together no matter how I turned them. Something had happened to their memory of that afternoon. Or something had happened to mine. Or something in this place worked in a way I didn’t understand yet, something that could reach into a person’s mind and simply erase what didn’t fit the story they were meant to remember.

I made my way back toward the dining hall, uncertain what else to do. The room was exactly as I’d left it, laughter and conversation still filling every corner, plates being refilled, wine being poured. I scanned every face I passed, looking for some sign, some flicker of doubt, some proof that anyone else remembered what I remembered.

Nothing. Every single person carried on as though the day had been entirely ordinary.

Then I saw her. The doctor, seated near the edge of the room, her plate barely touched in front of her. Our eyes met across the space between us, and for one held breath, neither of us looked away.

She didn’t look confused, the way everyone else had when I’d tried to explain what I’d seen.

She looked frightened.

I stood there, my heart pounding, that creed still echoing somewhere in the back of my mind. Beneath the moon, we remember. And yet an entire community had forgotten a man tearing his own son’s arm open only hours ago, forgotten it so completely that his wife had looked at me like I’d invented a nightmare out of nothing.

I thought of the doctor’s face going pale over my blood sample. I thought of the way she’d just looked at me now, across a room full of people who remembered nothing at all.

If everyone else had forgotten, I thought, staring back at her, unable to look away.

Why hadn’t I?