Book One – Chapter 10

They made it a vengeful game to smack her right ear whenever they floated past her head. Their actions sought attention and provocation. They wanted her to succumb to rage and attack. They wanted justification to eat her.

Midnight killed and ate other beings. She killed to survive, defend and to sustain herself, but she was never cruel with prey. She hunted fairly and killed swiftly. However, Midnight had many times experienced that what was natural and sensible for her and most beasts demanded great restraint from humanoid peoples. They needed many words to kill. They played with their prey and tortured their enemies, and relied on established rules to be less cruel.

The sprites, too, operated by a set of rules alien to Midnight’s instincts. Their motives remained elusive, but Midnight intuited a pattern in their actions. Instead of outright killing, they posed conditions and demands to exert their influence. They bound Midnight’s actions to arbitrary demands, before then attempting to trick her into failure.

As she had wanted to advance past the bone blockage, they had demanded her to reveal novel information to them, a challenge which was in itself as vague as it was unfair. Still, they had not simply let her answer, but tried tricking her to ask questions that they could obviously answer. Midnight believed that they would have eaten her if she had posed a singular question that they could have answered; in their words, a question they knew.

Their latest demand was as indistinct as the first challenge, though much more deceivingly woven into their distracting array of utterances and laughter — to shift not wrong. Even if there were a lesson here, it was not lost on Midnight that while the purple sprite had promised not to rip her apart, the green one had not.