>>5696428>>5696418>>5696362>>5696333You hurry to the barn automatically, worst case scenarios spiralling through your imagination. Nat is intelligent, you remind yourself, not some simple animal… But HOW intelligent? He can ‘speak’ sign language, he can count to ten (or at least knows the sign for ‘ten’), but he IS also less than a year old in sire of his size, his strength, and his unsettling and vaguely intellectual demeanour. You told him not to EAT anything without permission while you stayed here, but is he OBEDIENT in your absence? And will he naturally make the jump form ‘no eating farm animals’ to ‘no killing humans’?
The sick feeling in your stomach turns to full nausea when you see the blood.
Fur, splayed guts, and fur are splattered like a goblinoid’s paint-job across the wall and ceiling, and the bisected (tri-sected?) main body of a farm-dog lays there in mangled chunks before you. You follow the trail to where Natvodosk has huddled into a corner, instinctively hiding away from you as you enter… No, not hiding per se. LURKING. Readying an ambush. Only when he recognizes you does he relax… Though some tension returns as you spy the bits of bloody meat hanging from his crocodilian mandibles.
“…Unknowable Wyrm.”
Natvodosk signs to you, measured in his motions but more frantic than his usual movements by some small margin: ‘Hungry! The food was bad. The thing was already dead.’
“Because you killed it,” you note, pointedly.
‘The thing hurt me! I didn’t start it.’
With obvious unhappiness to do so, your wyrm-son allows the half-eaten carcass to drop from his mouth. You take a step closer, and regard it…
