The blue-eyed girls had been dead nearly a year before Fabian dared return to the town. He hadn't wanted to stay long, only enough to see if anybody still cared about the violent demise they'd met. It wasn't smart by any means to go back. Fabian, however, couldn't be convinced to avoid paying his respects.

That wasn't strictly true, he supposed. Much the same as his self-inflicted scars, setting eyes on the graves of those his other self killed left marks on his mind he had grown reliant on. How else was he to keep his distance from the monster that ruined so much of his life?

Nestled on the fateful hill were two rocky slabs, decorated with mounds of colour. As he approached the scene of his crime, Fabian saw flowers, scraps of ribbons, and candles by the dozens. Did these people wish to reenact the same fire he'd set in his rushed attempt to hide the brunt of the violence?

If he could have read, Fabian would have burned the names of the girls into his memory. He was sure the older one had told him, but after just that night, that horrible night, there was no possibility of him having remembered it. All he knew next was that she'd been dead, and he was throwing up pieces of her. No, her name was lost to him, and the last year had done nothing to rattle his memory. Would the sister's name have stayed with him? Fabian wished he could have spoken more with her. Those lake-eyes, filled to the brim with curious questions and taboo answers, knew something special. She had to have been a remnant of a god long dead, he was sure. Alas, he would never know. He'd only heard her speak a handful of words, and identifying herself was assuredly not one of her priorities.

"It wouldn't have been mine, either," he whispered to the smaller of the two crude graves. "I wanted to kill the man that did this to me. What did I care what he was called?" Crouching down, Fabian ran his fingers over the etchings on the stone. Whatever the shapes spelt out, they felt powerful. A life had been pointlessly stolen, and this shape seemed to know.

He pulled his hand back, scars acquired in the last year glinting in the moonlight (he dared not return in the day) and turned his attention instead to the ribbons. None of them looked the sort of thing either girl would care about, but they were pretty, nonetheless. He picked up a cream-coloured one, tattered at one end, and slid it between his fingers. It was soft and smooth, textured like skin. What angel had died to form its intricate texture? Fabian found himself tucking it into his fraying coat, fingering the seams within the safety of his pockets.

There wasn't much else to do, so he rose up and walked to the top of the hill. As he climbed, he decided the townsfolk hadn't deserved the girls. Even if he couldn't remember the older one's name, he could remember her personality. She was bright, passionate, and sexy. He almost blushed at the thought, but it was true. Every inch of her had called out to him, from her sensually curved lips, right down to those long, long legs. There was too much of that girl for one man, too much for every person in this forsaken village. Perhaps she'd been a woman, but Fabian hated semantics. All that had mattered, then, was how much she wanted him and he wanted her. Of course, Fabian knew how the night was going to end, and that he would have no control once the clouds rolled away, but why not make her final evening one of absolute pleasure? It had been especially difficult, no matter how he felt before, waking up to see those legs twisted and separated from the rest of her, nameless objects in a sea of nameless organs.

The other one had been both too young to give such crude thoughts to, and in quite the wrong place at the wrong time. What made Fabian so sure she wasn't appreciated by her family, friends, or whoever else had to care for her was that miserable excuse for a grave. He'd seen far too many in his life to know when someone was missed, and whatever mysteries the girl possessed, he was apparently the only one who seemed intrigued by them.

He stood at the peak and looked to his feet, clutching the ribbon as his heart hammered away. The grass had yet to recover. It had tried, as surely as nature tries to get its way, but there was a distinct stain left behind. Even in the dark, the pool of blood from a year past seemed almost fresh.

"I'll be back," he spat, grinding a spot out with his heel. "You'd best be gone when I return, or I'll burn you, too."

Months passed before he was far enough away to look for more food. There were times when he could restrain his other self, but only if he starved in the cycles leading up to his cruel transformation. An unsustainable method, to be sure, but it was all he had. He'd tried countless other cures, but none of them worked. By his thirteenth failed attempt to divest himself of his curse, Fabian had given up and relied only on his temporary fix.

He was now, to put it mildly, starving. Every person he'd passed on the road produced such an intense writhing in his stomach that he'd been forced to travel off the path and into the woods surrounding it. If he still possessed any strength, he would have captured and eaten a rabbit or two, but Fabian possessed no such strength. Hours of wandering kept him trapped in a circle, first towards the road, and then sharply back to the trees. It was a dizzying pattern that served only to illuminate how maddening his hunger was.

Eventually, his sluggish steps over the roots and rocks of the forest bed caught his feet, and he fell over. He decided it was better to die there, and he closed his eyes in anticipation. Intentional attempts to end his life had never worked, but this! A weakened animal succumbing to fatigue and hunger was as natural as anything else in the world.

He remained there for some time, even falling into a sensitive sort of doze. The insects of the mossy floor had become accustomed to his smell and presence, and they soon used his limbs as convenient bridges from one source of nutrition to another; A bird perched on his tangles for a second before taking flight; The wet snouts of a litter of wolf pups hesitated at his body, mistaking him for some unfortunate family.

It was a peaceful death, until a human ruined it.

So complete had Fabian's resignation been that he seemed to blend perfectly in with the life around him, and directly out of sight of the unlucky bastard that trod directly on his back. A snarl escaped him, but he remained otherwise motionless, much to the shrieking confusion of his disruptor.

"Fuck's sake, you're ... are you alive?" He opened an eye to see a wide hazel one, staring inches away. "Dammit!" The intruder fell over in his attempt to scuttle backwards, but soon crawled forward again, hands and knees sinking slightly in the mud. "What in the hell are you doing down here?"

"Dying. Go away."

"You're doing a shit job." He felt an arm slip under his, and before he could so much as protest, he had been pulled to a wobbling stand.

Standing before him (and attached, still, uncomfortably at the arm) was a man around his own age who looked as though he'd been chased through the woods by a rather angry bear. His clothes were nothing of note, and his weaponry consisted only of a broken bow. Had he been hunting the lamest deer in the entire country?

"Let me go at once."

"No, you bloody fool, you'll be ravaged by the stag I'm after. I don't much want my dinner seasoned with your bones." So he was hunting deer! Fabian found himself resisting a derisive laugh at the image of this idiot killing so much as a squirrel with the splinters in his hand.

"Hard to kill anything with that." He slipped free from the man's grasp, snatching the bow as he fell back to the ground. "Couldn't even mark your own grave."

The man had shouted something useless and loud, but Fabian had already decided if this fool wanted him to live, then he may as well. And to think, the man had offered himself as a balm to his fasting!

Avoiding killing as a man was a rule Fabian generally kept to. Witnesses were, of course, the main exception, but as long as he killed in secret, he would have no more murder on his hands when the moon went back to its fragmented state and left him a mortal again. This was one of those exceptions. When the moon was as close to being hypnotically, magically full, the line between Fabian and his curse grew perilously thin. How often had he wanted to tear someone apart with his teeth, or rend their skin into thin shreds despite his human state? It was the closest he would ever come to thinking as the beast, or at least recalling the thoughts of the poor bastard.

In the end, the bow proved an excellent stake, and Fabian found one last reserve of strength in him, just enough to ground the hunter. Once they'd both been levelled, Fabian leapt on top of him and wrapped every tooth around the ear of his saviour. He reared his head back, taking with him the now-shredded skin of an ear, some face, and no small amount of neck. The screaming would have been louder, but Fabian knew where to gut a man, where to stick him so the air wouldn't work right. This one wouldn't be able to scream ever again.

Despite the safety of not being heard, Fabian knew he still had to protect himself from being hit. He didn't know what other faulty weapons the hunter had, hiding just out of sight. Even his broken bow had been enough to maim him - why couldn't he be holding a rusted blade, or something similarly deadly for long after their struggle?

He swallowed the ear and began tearing at the clothes, throwing aside ropes and blades and other curious instruments. None of it would help him eat, and thus, he felt no attachment to their potential uses. Upon finding a slender stake jammed in the boot of the hunter, though, he brought it down as hard as he could muster on the ankle where he'd found it. Kicking always annoyed him.

A strange gurgle forced his attention up and he found the man, doused in his own blood, glaring so violently at Fabian that every hair sprang up on his back. What tortures he conjured in that look!

"Yes," he whispered, jumping up and standing over the man's head. "Hate me. Go on, wish your worst on me. I haven't heard anyone curse my name in quite a while." He brought his foot over the man's neck, curled each clawed toe around the shape of the spine. To the man's credit, he did not flinch. He only glared, right until Fabian fell over and screamed as loudly as the man couldn't.

As he lost consciousness, Fabian wondered how much the hunter would regret stopping to help a monster. He would have killed to see the expression on the man's face, but his desires were washed away as he was ripped open, birthing something whose hunger dwarfed his own and whose appetites would need far more than one person to satisfy it.