Aria

Everything is wrong, nothing is right. There's just skin and bones now. A shell. A vessel to house the never ending hunger and need to eat. To feast. To gorge. Feet shuffle, stumble, scuffle along the ground with the tail dragging behind. Eyes no longer truly see, and yet they somehow latch onto movement, to color, to life. Life. It has none, but it craves it. As if by devouring life of another will somehow infuse its empty being with feeling, with meaning, with something. With anything. Something moves. It darts away, but the sight was seen, and attention was snared. It's hard to roar when one's jaw is slack and drool continually slips free. It still has teeth though, rotting, blackened, but razor sharp all the same. Teeth and talons. It can still use these things, not because it remembers what they are for, but because instinct drives it. The muscles remember, the brain does not. Life is faded, unjust. It's nothing more than an old crumpled up paper of a memory tossed about in the wind along a deserted street. The feet continue to walk, the wings continue to twitch, and it continues to feed wherever possible. The moment it can sink its teeth into something warm, fresh, alive, it can feel again. It can, for the briefest of moments, catch a tiny spark of life. It wriggles maggot-like, eating through flesh and sinew. There's a flash behind the unseeing shutters over its eyes, a glimpse of what it used to be. A father, a mother, a son, a daughter, something alive and worthy. Even though the spark is fleeting, ebbing away before the heart stops beating and the blood stops blowing, it's enough. Enough to keep the feet moving, the wings twitching. Shuffling, stumbling, scuffling along the ground, waiting for another movement to catch its eye, a chance at another piece of life it can never truly have again. In those brief moments, it's more than skin and bones. Everything is right, nothing is wrong.