Quoted By:
>Finally Starting!
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Current Storyline **M30 787** Thion III
>viewpoint: Creature Hatchlayer
The folded being was still, coiled under the cavity. It was large 6 meters long, from head to tail, an evolved genecrafted specie long forgotten above the deserted surface of Thion III. It lurked into the gap of the world, roaming mineshaft if aperture could be found. The underworld was rich in food.
She was clever enough to recognize itself in a mirror or pass down hunting knowledge generation by generation, through breeding. She knew this from the female memory that lay its egg, 2 decades ago.
Down the volcanoe slopes were ancients hatches that lead to the soft-flesh territory, their blood was less tasty, but their bones were brittle and easier to hunt than the hard-flesh. They ran faster also, and usually did not hold the strange indigestible skin excrescence, that constrained her to husk them, unpacking organ by organ.
Sometimes she liked to play with it, taking just a part, imitating sounds, following for pleasure, always moving. Even letting them escape or adopting one of the hunt patterns of another Hatchlayer. They would send more and that could be a very good hunt. She knew not to do that with the hard flesh. Too dangerous. She knew how to evade them when they sent the fleshless warrior. Her blood could turn cold and her outer-membrane changed color, absorbing the cold. Her own hatchlayer, her mother, had even made a technique, rummaging into the snow, below the surface. It was slow but against fleshless, it was efficient. Fleshless often led to fleshy one, if they did not, they were not dangerous, ignoring her as long as she did not attack their nest, who would, nothing but rock and light there. Patience is power, that she would give to her own batch of hatchling.
She had felt a youth. She had even started to approach the prey. Small, a soft-flesh. Perhaps. She hesitated, it was hard to notice, fast, and was not wearing the usual furs of the soft flesh, but not freezing. More than once the game started to move toward possible cliff where she could lay an ambush, but it seems to have strong instinct and always changed his path. Inscrutable. The youth held sharper sense that even a fleshless, no obvious destination, no hunting ground nor heading toward a burrow.
That strange soft flesh had survived the terrible thing that felt from the sky. She knew that sometimes fire felt like sunlight from the sky, but it was different, earthquake was strong. Soon the would make her move.
> XXI viewpoint
The Primarch licked his lips with indulgence, they were red of vitae.
He had had no other vision that his first glimpse, but he had inferred where the beast would have attacked him. From this information he had extrapolated premise of the beast tactical instinct.
