Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: John Wiswell
- Language: English
- Genre: Romantic Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 5 MB
- Price: Free
Each year when Shesheshen hibernated, she dreamed of her childhood
nest.
Oh, the warmth of it. A warmth unlike anything in the adult world, soft
and pliable heat keeping her and her siblings alive. In that warmth, they
were fed raw life. Her father’s ribs, rich in marrow, cracking delicately in
their mouths, and providing the first feast of their lives. His fat deposits
were generous, and his entrails sheltered them from the cruel winter
elements. If Shesheshen could have spent her entire life inside the nest of
his remains, she would have.
But all childhoods end. Hers ended when one of her sisters bit off
Shesheshen’s left heel. Her siblings matured too quickly and hungered for
more than their father. Shesheshen had to defend herself using jagged
fragments of their father’s pelvis—his final and most gracious gift. The
assault was a gift from her siblings, too, for she spent a week dining on their
savory carcasses.
Mourning wasn’t natural to her. She missed the succulence of her
siblings for some time, and had the errant moment of nostalgia for sharing
their body heat. Little of her prey was memorable. Of her mother, she only
remembered her wide maw and the artificial steel fangs she’d worn. Still,
Shesheshen would always miss the nest that her father had made out of
himself. He had been a good parent, and a better setting.
Nothing matched that nest. These ruins were little more than an unloved
cave. Where weather had caved in the ceiling, ornery spruce trees grew and
plugged up the gaps. Poison ivy and spiderwebs were the few decorations,
overgrowing everything architects had once achieved.
Deep beneath the ruins lay an underground hot spring that some aspiring
human had connected to a bathing room. Nowadays the chamber was
flooded with humid murk, gone brackish and amniotic from Shesheshen’s
excretions. It was nearly opaque down in the waters. They were a refreshing
place to hibernate through winter seasons.
Yet noises had roused her prematurely. Her lair had unwelcome visitors
again. They did not even wipe their shoes.
She heard them before she saw them. The water of the hot spring
stretched into so many cracks in the building’s foundations. Sounds from all
ends of the property traveled through the network of water, alerting
Shesheshen when something worse than a bear was coming.
“Good gods, above and below. Rourke? Do you smell that?”
“Yeah. Like death without the sulfur. This is no wyrm.”
There were two visitors. Both human men, with two feet each, trampling
over the weeds at her threshold. They paused in the foyer, snuffling and
fighting with their gorges. Her foyer opened to many hallways, and one
would lead them to Shesheshen. It was fortunate they didn’t know which
one. She had to act before that changed.
The one called Rourke said, “Malik, don’t pass out on me. Put your
mask on.”
“I’m fine,” the one called Malik said. “The contract is for a wyrm.
Could it be an eastern wyrm? From the Al-Jawi Empire?”
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