The Eternal Hunger Horror Story

In “The Eternal Hunger” horror story, an ancient, regenerating entity is captured and dissected alive in a sterile human laboratory. Piece by piece, scientists excise the flesh it has carefully shaped and preserved from a long-lost companion—muscle, nerve, tongue, eye—each fragment carrying memories of distant worlds, shared lives, and rituals of consumption that cover eons.

The creature takes on the pain in silence, clinging fiercely to every recollection of the one it once devoured to keep alive, while the researchers marvel at its impossible biology and debate whether it even feels pain the way humans do. As the cuts deepen and the lights begin to flicker, something unspoken stirs beneath the clinical detachment: a hunger older than stars, waiting for its next turn.

They are removing you from me, these beings in their sealed white suits. With each cut, their knives and curiosity separate the gifts you gave me from those I made for you. The eye that once watched the cyan and purple sunset on Taurus 4 is gone. The muscles in my forearm, which shaped your old body into art, have been cut away. There is now an empty space where my tongue once tasted your many adventures.

My lips are dry and cracked. I cannot lick them.

The younger one is using the knife today. His name is Marjan, and his golden skin makes him look about 20 years old by terrestrial standards. My forearm, the one they already cut into, is back in the metal vice. Marjan pulls at the split skin and pushes cold metal forceps into the wound, where muscles shine, and blood moves weakly in blue strands. His gloved fingers reach in, and pain shoots up my restrained arm as he presses down.

—Whoa. Come check this out.

—What is it? Have you found something significant?

—Yeah, you need to get over here and see for yourself.

His supervisor leaves the busy sequencer and walks across the clean lab floor, her white hazard suit blending in with the surroundings like some terrestrian animal. Her name is Jae. She leans over and looks through her helmet’s glass at my trapped arm.

—You see that?

—Hmm. Yes.

She takes the forceps from him, causing more pain in my arm. With my remaining eye, I watch her lips tighten as she studies the weak resistance of my flesh.

—That’s definitely new growth, right? The muscle is regenerating!

—Looks like it. Quite remarkable.

—You wanna test it too? We should take a sample.

—Just take one. As small as you can. I want to monitor the regeneration process.

—Sweet. Prof Liu is gonna be thrilled.

Marjan picks up his scalpel. They want more from me, but now it makes no difference. I have not eaten. I am strapped to a steel table inside a box of strong glass and plastic. The air is sterile, just a bland mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Even if my core has used these poor surroundings to make new flesh, it means nothing. Take it all away.

The pain starts again. I close my last eye. I have to hold on to my memories. I cannot let trauma erase them. I must remember everything since we last met. They can take all the flesh they want, but they cannot take this.

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It began here, a reflection of this butcher’s table, the last time we met. This is where your memories and mine split. This is where I killed you, where your body became sealed, its treasures locked away forever.

It goes like this:

You lie still on the carving table, your hands powerless, your mouth closed tight, and your ribs showing just bone. Your eyes are open, but you see nothing at all. Light passes through the fluids in your eyes but doesn’t reach your brain to create an image. There’s no signal sent from your eyes to your mind; everything is completely still.

You are dead, but not without life. Life still marks your bones, your brain, and the atoms that make up your flesh. Since we last met, your body has absorbed the world, building nitrogen flesh around bones shaped from metal and dust. These atoms wait, ready for my knife to release them.

Knife, do your work. The first cut is straight, opening the layers over gristle and gut. I peel back your soft skin and slice tender flesh into neat pieces, placing them on a cold, frosted slab. I save the tendons and tripe. I cut the fat into strips for flavor. Blood flows into a bell jar, for pudding or wine.

I slice your neck open, flaying it under the line of the chin. The viscera I dig out in a single lode.

I remove the skull with a small saw, bending over it like an artist facing their limits, sweat forming on my brow.

These bodies we use are crude and awkward, with brittle fingers that cannot move well. My hands tremble as I lift the bone, its edges sticky, to reveal what lies beneath. All your experiences are written there, in the soft pink tissue, still marked by the traces of chemicals that once moved through it.

I gently draw your brain out of its casing, trailing grey stem. I put it aside in the cold.

My fingers are wet with spinal fluid. I lick them, tasting an early treat. Suddenly, I feel a rush of sensation: a beach on Mars, sand under my toes, a cold wind on my face. It is just one small taste from the many memories I have before me.

I keep mourning the limits of these terrestrian bodies we copy, the weaknesses we always repeat. We only see a small part of the light spectrum, feel pressure awkwardly, and depend on sound waves in the air. It is such a narrow way to experience the universe.

Driven by greed and hunger, I cut a small piece from the brain. I will eat it raw, taking in its memories all at once. I hold the soft piece over my open mouth and move my tongue to meet it.

Here, the conversation ends.

—Do you think it can feel pain? Like how humans do?

—I think wondering about that is kind of pointless. We don’t really understand its biology well enough to know what pain could mean for it.

—But it has human DNA, right? So it must have a biology similar to ours.

—It might seem like that, but if Professor Liu’s ideas are correct, it can copy the characteristics of any living thing it encounters. So that doesn’t tell us much.

—But look! When you touch its nerves, it seems to react like it’s feeling pain—

—Stop that.

—Why? If it were dangerous, it would have attacked us by now. Look, it doesn’t seem to care at all. It’s not even—

—Have some professionalism, please. Get back to work.

Maybe it is just my imagination. Maybe it is hope creeping in. But the lights are flickering, as if someone has messed with the power supply here.

I watch the terrestrians. They seem to notice it too. The older one, Jae, looks upset and irritated.

Maybe it is not just my imagination. Maybe something really is happening.

Pain returns. More knives cut into me. Almost without thinking, as if to survive, I dive back into memories, back to the things that once brought me joy:

A piece of your left shoulder, marinated in red wine and herbs grown in a greenhouse. The juices are thick, smelling like iron dust from Chryse Planitia and selenium from a long-haul freighter’s journey between the stars. I chew slowly, enjoying the taste of sweat, hope, and despair you took in during that three-hundred-day trip.

A terrestrian woman left something of herself in you. I taste her, mixed with the strength of your muscles. You shared spit, blood, and other fluids. There is emotion there, hard to define, like a creature from deep water. You fall for them every time, and I—

I breathe in and keep the taste in my mouth a bit longer.

—Did you ever think the legends were real?

—What legends?

—The Xanthrian legends from Eglwyswrw—ugh, I can’t even say it right. Eglwhensyrr? Egleyswer? The Ancient Ones! Seriously, I used to believe they were just stories made up to scare kids or sell tickets to musicals or something. Do you think the Xanthrians had musicals? Those big jaws. Clack clack clack clack. No?

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—They were believed to be extinct by the time Xanthrian civilization was at its height. Or at least, that was the prevailing idea. This discovery has clearly changed that view.

—Why do you think they went extinct?

—Why do I think what happened?

—The extinction! What do you think caused it?

—Earth has a long history of mass extinction events. It’s not hard to imagine it happening on a universal level. Civilizations rise and fall all the time.

—Yes, but how? If they’re immortal and always able to regenerate, how can they die? You can destroy their organic parts, but do you really end them?

—Everything has to come to an end. It’s a basic rule of the universe. Everything eventually breaks down.

—That’s not really an answer.

—No, it’s not. If we had all the answers, we wouldn’t be here doing this job.

I have finished consuming the last part of you. Now, all that we are is joined. I release your core back into the void, like a hopeful seed sent out into the universe to grow again.

When you returned, it was meant to be your turn.

The terrestrians have a saying: The best laid plans of mice and men.

—Where do you think the other one is? The one it… consumed, I suppose? It must be out there somewhere, growing a new form. Do you think it will return?

—It’s difficult to say.

—Why do you think they do that? Maybe it’s like when a crab sheds its shell. But the eating part seems quite ceremonial. I’m convinced it signifies something important.

—You’re very certain about a lot of things, Marjan. Maybe you should consider a career in motivational speaking.

—Come on, Jae. Don’t you ever wonder about these things? I just wish Professor Liu would allow us to examine the brain. “Oh, we might harm it!” I bet we wouldn’t be harming anything.

—That’s enough. Did you check the electrical system as I asked? Those lights have been flickering for an hour.

This is your fault. You loved terrestrian life, became part of their world, made friends—friends who noticed when you disappeared, friends who sent people to find out who took you.

You know how weak and defenseless these terrestrian bodies are. Their short lives have made them warlike. Their softness and small size make them harsh to others and even to themselves.

In another era, I might have escaped, or maybe I would not have been chased at all. During the time of the triapsids, the klng’wcnh’g, and the Δλ / λ = 0.314, our rituals might have gone undisturbed, even with your mistakes.

But expecting caution from you was always too much. That is why you became an Outlaw, and I was the Enforcer.

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That is why you were chased, and I was the one chasing, into the mouth of that black star, into our doom.

That was your fault as well.

That is how our story has always been, since the universe was young and filled with burning red gases.

Still, I would not change anything.

—That’s strange.

—What is?

—Something’s interrupted the power supply to the spectrophotometer. Stay here and watch the specimen. I’m going to find out what happened.

—Okay. Don’t be too long. I might get hungry.

—It’s not funny.

You took a risk, and we all suffered for it.

There were three of us then. I was the Enforcer, chasing you and your partner, the two Outlaws, across the universe in infra-dimensional form, as was common in those days.

You two Outlaws committed the greatest sin: keeping what you learned from our Mothers and from the rest of our people. You fed your gathered lives to each other, back and forth, shutting out everyone else. Our Mothers knew what you had done. They demanded the flesh they were denied.

You led us to that black hole, to the singularity that would destroy us.

When the gravity well pulled us in, stripping away our outer shells and leaving only our cores, did you know how it would end? Did you know that when your partner sacrificed themselves, the energy would finally pull us free from the event horizon? Did you know we would return to a universe changed by thousands of generations of stars, an empty and strange universe with our Mothers gone forever?

I do not know, and I never will. By the time you come to me, with your many limbs and hard outer shell, begging me to consume you, your core is already changed by grief. Your memories are blurred and weakened by trauma.

“Eat me,” you begged. “Eat me before everything I hold is lost.”

We are the only ones left.

You are all I have left.

—Well, I guess it’s just the two of us now, my friend. Can you even understand what I’m saying? We know the other one could talk. Your companion. “Alice Rei Kawasaki.” Quite the fancy name for someone who isn’t real, right? Did she give you a name, too?

—Ugh, I wish I could see what’s going on inside your head. Understand what makes you tick.

—Well, Jae isn’t around, is she?

Please.

I hope you’ll come to me soon.

When I first made that cut, breaking through your shiny exterior, I truly felt sorrow.

Your sense of loss, sharp and metallic, overpowers all other flavors in your flesh. It sinks deep into my core and becomes a permanent part of me, kept forever.

Gone is your partner, your other half, together forming your own world. Gone are the Mothers, the great commons, and the old ways. Gone is the universe we knew, the stars we named, and the civilizations we saw rise and fall. All that is left is you and me, two survivors of entropy, holding on to each other through the ages.

Your grief becomes mine. Your love becomes mine. Your memories of beaches on Mars, long-haul freighters, and moments shared with brief terrestrian lovers all become mine.

I eat you slowly and with care, piece by piece, keeping every flavor, every feeling, every moment of your life. I consume you so you will live on in me.

And when the last piece is gone, when your core is sent back into the void as a hopeful seed, I wait.

I wait for you to return, as you always do, in a new form, asking me again to eat you before everything is lost.

But this time, the terrestrians found me first. They took you from me before I could finish. They removed you, piece by piece, separating what was yours from what is now mine.

Your hands close around my skull, and I relax, finally home, as they twist to break my neck.