AnnouncementContent warning for gore in this chapterThe first sparks of consciousness brushed against her mind, and there was one dominant sensation: hunger.

  She pushed against her prison, unaware of its presence until she felt its walls. There was a tough shell around her in every direction, constricting the movements of her coiled body. She knew she could get out.

  Pushing harder and harder, she eventually cracked it after several agonizing minutes of effort. With a sound that filled her mind, the surface fractured open, barely letting her head squeeze into the gap. She had to continue prying for what felt like an eternity until it opened enough for her to break free.

  Finally! She thought, and she knew something was strange about the word. It perturbed her for some reason, but she ignored the feeling. She was still very hungry. Opening her eyes, she saw scaled flesh coiled and stacked around her. It was massive, encompassing all she could see with scaled yers, banded in bright orange and blue, all as thick as a city bus. She lightly flinched at another perturbation as she tried to perceive the circur patterns across the banded serpent. As her eyes finally found focus on its head, she realized what she was seeing.

  It was an immense snake, with a head shaped such that it had a line of eyes running up both sides. Starting at its snout and increasing in size up to the neck, the line of oculi ran across the whole coil. Immense eyes evenly spaced across the sides of its entire length, and they were not just the eyes of a snake. They were cats and birds, goats and people, spiders and cephalopods. The eyes of all manner of creature, each the size of a boulder. The rgest was set into the top of the serpent’s head, where there was a single immense eye, closed and strangely human-like at rest. Something within her told her that it was dead, despite its pristinely panoptic permeating gaze. The same thing told her that it was all hers to eat. Within moments of the revetion, she was biting directly into one of the smaller eyes on its head. She tore it out with her teeth and swooned at the taste.

  It was divine ambrosia. A refreshing savory taste filled her body with a wonderful heat. The flesh was still warm, but her certainty that the beast was dead seemed confirmed by its ck of motion and complete disregard for injury.

  One eye would have been a satisfying experience, but she was still hungry. She ate another - just as wonderful as the first - then tore at the skin, flesh and sinew on the serpent’s face. It was all so perfect upon her tongue; truly the best meal she’d ever eaten, and the potential irony was lost on her. She feasted ceaselessly.

  When she tore open the lid of its central eye to chew at the flesh holding it closed, she froze when it looked back at her. The patterns upon it were wrong in an unworldly way. It could still see her, even in death, and a deadly pressure filled the air around her. Its gaze felt like a painful light that blistered her exposed skin and scales. The thing was not truly a serpent, it was like an eldritch predator, hunting all it could see. Her saving grace was that it wanted this; It had died for this to happen, and it would not hurt her.

  She closed her eyes again, and ate faster. The taste of the great eldritch eye seared every nerve in her body, filling her with energy. It was every fvor in its richest and most ideal profile. A delectable orb granting forbidden knowledge to the one who consumed it. Somehow, the power granted by her personal forbidden fruit only made her hunger stronger; the empty socket a prelude to the impending carnage.

  In her frenzy, she didn’t even notice as her body changed. Arms sprouted from her torso, new eyes opened in her skin and she grew in size. Strange organs grew within her, along with an intense vibration-but-not that she felt in her bones. She barely noticed the nonexistent osciltions as they faded with her other senses into the background. All of her focus was on satiating her hunger.

  A trance fell upon her while she feasted upon the great serpent, rendering her mindless. Hedonistic gluttony had resonated with her inexplicably endless hunger. She consumed the whole serpent over a period that felt like weeks, finally stopping when no flesh was left, leaving most of the skeleton.

  Only a few bits and pieces of bone had been victim to her frenzy, and while the marrow was good, she had intended to save it for st.

  Now, though, the hunger was finally sated.

  The tip of the monstrous beast’s tail was just inside a dark cave, and she could see grays and bcks in the dark. The cave went deeper, but looking back toward its gutted body, she could see the night sky peeking from above. At some point she had left the coils of the serpent’s nest.

  She wanted to see the true extent of her meal, and moved towards the night. New discoveries about her body filled her increasingly lucid mind in the dim light. She felt her… tail? Slithering up towards the sky, the clear light of the stars brought her body into focus and she gazed from her newest features.

  She could see from eyes on all four of the backs of her hands, and her head sported two sets pced on top of each other. When she tried to move too much, the input from her hands became overwhelming, and she was forced to close the backhand eyelids, leaving uncanny slits in the skin. Looking down, she saw her breasts, signs of her genitalia, and a thick serpent’s tail trailing from where a human’s thighs would have been. She felt strange from an incongruous sense of euphoria washing over her. Why was she so pleased to see the shape of her body?

  When the sky was finally above her, and she fully cleared the overhangs of the cave, she stopped. She could see the serpentine bones trailing off into a long, deep canyon that she was on the bottom of. An idea had occurred to her, so she held her hands up with her palms outward. The backs of her hands were level with her face, and she closed her eyes.

  Opening the eyelids on her hands, she looked at herself.

  She could see, but there was little color in the scarce lighting of the night. The person she saw was a beautiful light haired woman, with four closed eyes, an aquiline nose, elegant lips and deep skin.

  Her body and breasts were bare to the night, and she smiled at the sight of her own face and shape. Awkwardly moving her hands back to her shoulders, she inspected the simple fractal patterns in the scales of her long, ambutory tail, appreciating her strange heritage.

  She realized that she had to see her own eyes, and, after returning to position, she opened those on her face. The eyes in her head were like a python’s, dited in the darkness. The deformed rings of the irises were set around the wide, slightly oblong voids of her pupils. No sclera were visible on her face. Staring from the back of her hands were four very human eyes in the center of each. An innate part of her knew that this look was definitely going to be unsettling to someone.

  She wasn’t yet sure why she would care.

  Her hands weren’t delicate, nor particurly monstrous, beyond the obvious. They were sleek and strong, still grimy from tearing at flesh and sinew during her feast.

  She slowly moved her hands and face around, adjusting to the nausea of seeing from eight eyes through five perspectives.

  Eventually, she could move while holding her hands in certain positions. She settled for leaving them crossed at her front, with one pair gently covering her sensitive breasts, and another folded under that. Writhing forward over the rocky earth at the bottom of the canyon, she followed the seemingly endless corpse of her serpentine progenitor. The skeleton had strange orbital formations in its ribs, where its many eyes had been, serving as a constant reminder of the dead beast’s eminent nature.

  As night gave way to the early hours of morning, and the sky lightened with an impending sunrise, she heard a soft roaring noise in the distance. Trying to hurry along on her tail, she pushed towards the increasingly loud rumble, and found a waterfall pouring from the side of the cliff into a rge pool next to the skeleton. The pool flowed into a river continuing along the inside of the canyon and her intended path.

  Lowering herself to the edge, she sniffed the water, sticking a forked tongue out to taste the air, and then into the cool liquid itself. It seemed safe enough, and while she felt fine so far, some part of her said she needed to drink water to live. Drinking deep, she was unsure if it was necessary.

  Next, she slid into the surprisingly deep pool and started to clear the grime and dried gore from her body. While washing herself, another notion formed in her mind.

  What is my name? She thought, looking around the quickly brightening environment as the sun started to peek into the canyon. She didn't think she had a name, and every person should have one, right? Another instinctual perturbation was ignored as she took in the scenery.

  Rising up in a burst of warm colors, the piercing light of dawn coming through the canyon, over the endless skeleton of the great serpent was the most beautiful sight of her life. It was as simple as that.

  She named herself Dawn.

  Then she wondered where she had even learned the word. She had just hatched, and most of her life so far had been spent fervently consuming the body of her parent. The nguage she knew wasn’t from a period she could remember from her life. It was information from another time; from other memories… from before she was born.

  It was from when she was a human.

  Dawn had been a man with a wife and kids.