Unnamed

There’s something in the guts of the earthmover when you push that final panel loose and peer through like it’s the crack of a door. It’s dripping blood, same as you. There’s meat everywhere down here, wedged into every solenoid and fusebox and generator. The earthmover had to keep its blood fresh somehow.

The something has magic in its jaws, dripping thick sinewy strands back into the stagnant pool it’s drinking from. It sees you, with all six eyes, two and two and two all different colours, and it hisses.

It almost sounds like a laugh.

The room’s blissfully free of viscera. The pool of magic isn’t supposed to be there, though. It once would’ve fed into the massive pipes coiling around the room like veins. The earthmover’s dead now, though, so all it does is collect.

And all the something does is drink.

---

It's not a real animal. It just drank a whole pool of stagnant magic; nothing's a real animal after that. There haven't even been real animals in Central Sornieth for ages, not unless you count little Sullie's pet rat or what-have-you. Nothing survived; the earthmovers made sure of that. And if it wasn't the earthmovers, it was the waves of war machines duking it out on the ground.

What it is, though, is intelligent enough to rival a hainu, and one of the old coots in the back took a look at it (you'd say you dragged it back up to the city, but it really just followed you like a lost alley cat) and said it's probably a slink. Which both of you know isn't true, but both of you know she's not being literal, either.

They use slinks in those big old power generators you've never seen in your life but you've read about. You don't know if this old grandma's seen one, but who cares. It's a slink. You weren't digging through war-beast war-god guts for the fun of it. It's as good a generator as any to have found down there.

And anyways, the eel hasn't bitten you yet, so you guess that's a good sign.

---

You're taking care of the damn thing and training it to do slink-power-generation type things, and all you can think is that it acts like a gods damned rat. If rats weren't fluffy little things that nose into your wings and ask for scratches with their wet round eyes and were instead toothy slimy near-ridgeback sized tubes of animal that do the same thing anyway.

So here you are talking to your funny little (really big) eel-dog. Its name is officially Actually A Real Slink, but you don't call it that, you just call it something along the lines of eel, and it responds as long as that's in there somewhere.

What can you say about this all? It is how it is. Sornieth stopped being any semblance of normal the moment dragons constructed gods to fight for them. Now that there are war-god corpses littering the land, there's no way Sornieth's ever going back to normal. The event horizon's far behind; a million miles away at best, and drawing ever further.

Anyway, you were hatched on the back of one. You really should've seen everything by now.

And eelboy's hiss-laughing at you again.