Day Four-Sixty-Seven: Yummy

The trip continues. Dragomir's captors are not attempting to hide their tracks, and I suspect their leader is… easily distracted. Also, he's a horrifying butcher of a Non.

At least we know we're going the right direction.

I am a spider. I may be intelligent, and magical, and refined - my tea is second to none, rest assured - but I am still a spider. I web up my meals and suck their juices dry. Since gaining human sentience all those ages ago I have been forced to cope with the grisly nature of eating like an arachnid. I am no stranger to death. I do not revel in it; I simply do what I must to survive.

The man we found… the remains of the man we found… were not eaten. They were dissected. Pulled apart and left to rot when they proved unhelpful.

We found him perhaps half an hour after eating lunch. I'd caught a cricket using my witch-bestowed powers of persuasion, and Eve pulled one of many sandwiches out of her backpack. I don't know about her, but I was ready to vomit up cricket juices when we discovered the clearing. The bloody, trampled, disgusting clearing.

I hid my eyes for a few moments, steeling myself for the inevitable. I would have to check. I would have to know, for certain, that this was… or was not… Dragomir. I, the elder, couldn't rely on a little girl to do the job, a little girl who may or may not have just lost her father to a lunatic.

I didn't have to bother. Eve, true to her reputation as a merciless blood-letter, sifted through the scattered remains without hesitation. It only took her a few moments of observation to find the head… and when she rolled it over, the horrified face was covered in crimson-tinted wrinkles and a bushy beard.

"Not him," was all she said. So hollow.

We left the massacre behind as quickly as we could, I riding well away from Eve's bloody hands. She washed them in a stream a few hours later, and only after I insisted. What a twisted girl.

(And, yes, I'm fully aware that you can read all of this, Eve. It doesn't change my opinion of you. Let's just get that out in the open right now.)

I don't know what to think about the man we found. I will admit that we didn't stick around long to inspect him, but there seemed to be no tangible benefit to… ripping him apart. Did the Non take something of his? Do they, perhaps, feed on a part of the human body which we can neither see nor touch, but can only be acquired through complete dismemberment?

Or, as I insinuated earlier, is their leader just a sadist? For Dragomir's sake, I hope they were simply feeding… because if they're not… he might be in even more serious trouble than I'd anticipated.

The only up side is that the man's murder appears to have stalled the progress of the Non. Their tracks are fresher than before, untainted by the passage of animals through the brush. I just hope we catch up with them before they reach the vast fields north of Dragomir's former home - I find it a lot harder to track in grasslands than in a forest.

Sincerely,

Julius the Familiar