Gestated in agony, hidden in shadows, you’re birthed from the wrong end of the decomposing dog. With stomach acid for amniotic fluid, the bitch’s love burns.

Blisters erupt along your spine. They rupture, and your skin unzips from skull to coccyx. Exquisite pain. An explosion of pus fills your lungs, leaving you drowning, choking on the corpse’s stink. You gasp for air, crying like the newborn you are, and squirm, a raw thing, desperate to free yourself from the animal’s nightmare carcass. From her sticky, all-encompassing love.

The birthing alley you lie in is narrow and murky, and you are ravenous. Tender, baby flesh rips on the rough pavement, and you slither out of your skin-sack, leaving the placenta of your otherness behind. Your recognized self.

The new you doubles in size, and your tongue is pierced on the dagger-sharp incisors already emerging from your gums before you’ve spat the useless baby teeth from your bloody mouth. One thought imbues every cell; one need obliterates all others.

Food.

You crawl, knees raw, drawn forward by ever-increasing, urgent hunger.

Pebbles press deep and are permanently embedded into your flesh as it hardens over them, leaving visible gourd-like bumps bulging atop your patella. You are not beautiful, but that isn’t your purpose. Your birth isn’t arbitrary, and there’s no time for languorous growth. That privilege belongs to other pups, ones born in a natural way, and you are anything but. But you’re here and almost ready.

Bones lengthen in an instant, pressing beyond the confines of your skin, rending open fissures that will never heal. You howl in agony.

All the changes, all the growth, demand energy. You must replenish.

A tickle, a delicious prickle in your nose, and saliva fills your mouth before spilling down your jowls.

You’re ravenous.

Shadowy creatures mill about a portal ahead. With only your instincts to guide you, you know. They are your prey. Specters drawn to fire, left behind in death’s chaos.

You stand, balanced on impossibly tiny, padded paws. Fury nails click against the asphalt, and your scorpion tail—your mizzen mast follows proudly in your wake. You move in wobbly, stagger-steps toward eternal flames to feed and blink, leaving your nictitating membranes to shield your eyes from the heat. You will—you must—eat. Your body, so quick to grow, already festers, and deep within your marrow decays. Food won’t save you, but you’ll die having fulfilled your purpose, one you never knew and had no say in. You’ll die bringing peace to the lost ones, the unknown petty evils left behind. You’ll die with a full belly.