See now the misfortune of the thinking tenax.

It is alone. The other tenaces have been chased away. Their gore stains the thinking tenax’s mandibles, and its roar drives them further back. Their flickering eyes peer out from behind feldspathic spires.

Though the thinking tenax’s carapace is star-spotted with scars, wet with weeping wounds, the ground shines more so with the stickiness of the prey-corpse.

The tenax crawls inside the beast’s abdomen. Its opercula flutter in anticipation. Even as its antennae are pressed flush to its head by pounds of flesh, it looks, and—it will eat, yes, but first—it feels and smells.

Inside: purple meat, which yields like loam beneath its snout, swells across too much of the abdomen. Too soft, too wide. Worms—seen, to some extent, in every beast—writhe in and out of the intestines through holes of their own making. The stomach contains sulvenate junk: leather, plastic.

Snapshots of a hundred corpses sprawl across its mind. As it compares old to new, it shivers with delight.

The thinking tenax has been haunted by its first thought since the birth of its sapience, when it tore open the flank of a beast and stopped seconds before devouring it because sunlight hit the muscle, filling it with a glowing translucency that the tenax had only seen in glass. It could not eat; it did not yet have a word for love.

Nothing in this thing, nor any other corpse, explains why the beasts wander so close to the city. What business does a beast have with the slithering silk-words of the sulvenax, with Eld-thul’s sprawling towers? (The thinking tenax has been there once before, as—it suspects—all other tenaces—when a sulvenax placed a collar around its neck and whispered there’s no other food but the wretched things in the wilds, nothing else that will sate your hunger.) Nothing inside the corpse but a flaccid stomach—but could it be so simple? Do the beasts stalk Eld-thul only to eat?

See now: It slips out of the corpse, shakes the blood from its scales, and when it looks up at the other tenaces—green like new weeds, mandibles chattering with hunger—it remembers that it is alone.

• • • •

Weye has forgotten the name of the supplicant on their table. Seventy-three hours ago, they pushed anesthetic into the supplicant’s catheter. They used a saw to open the carapace, a scalpel handle to scrape off the fascia, and they are still here, still awake. It will be another day yet until the supplicant wakes.

Wires cobweb the supplicant’s viscera. Weye measures gas and electrolyte concentrations, along with the movements of each organ. Soon, they’ll have a map of the supplicant’s circulatory physiology—an essential addition to the database which has yet to catalogue how a congenital hepatopancreatic shunt affects aortic function.

They wish they were asleep, or arranging instruments outside to be cleansed, or basking on the surface. Instead, ignoring their patient, they sit in darkness mandated by electricity rations and carve into their forearm.

Acute sympathetic response, Weye writes. On paper, as the priest-surgeons did before pilgrims stole computers from Eld-thul, where their worship is shunned. But if the Sun forbids sulvenax from cutting into sulvenax, It would not sterilize their instruments with Its cleansing light. Every priest-surgeon knows that they are blessed.

Incision extended. Tachycardia noted. Generalized weakness, vertigo. Unknown sensation in the abdomen—will investigate.

Surgeons are rarely made supplicants; they are too difficult to replace.

Weye will say that the wound was an accident and no one will suspect. No one. Weye whispers their prayers, remembering the shame that befell them as a larva, cocooned in Eld-thul and wanting for something they couldn’t name. Shouldn’t their supplicants’ sacrifices sate them?

They fumble for their ultrasound probe, third hand still writing. On screen, their ovarian filaments sway like kelp. They slide the scalpel deeper, and in a flash, their vision fades. When they come back to themself, they aren’t sure how to note this finding. Repletion, bloat, desire, desire, desire—Perhaps they’ll wait until they can breathe again.

An alarm rings deep in the temple, dragging Weye’s mind back to the surgical suite, the hard ground, and the beeping of the monitors. They stand unsteadily to look at the security footage.

A tenax.

They back away.

There shouldn’t be tenaces this far from Eld-thul. Created to be the great protector, the great killer, the first tenax rose from a sulvenate corpse; stretched like clay until it towered over all others. See now, the first tenax, from which all other tenaces spawned: corded lymphatics form a facsimile of muscle, spines crown mountainous shoulders, and hunger devours the mind.

So why is it here? Why does it lie still as guards throw ropes over its neck? Why do its mandibles open—oh, look, the split-fruit-wetness of its mouth—slowly, methodically, as if it speaks? How long would it take Weye to climb to—?

No matter; it is taken underground.

• • • •

A sulvenate priest-surgeon unlocks the prison.

The tenax has had to fold itself up, neck bent in half by the ceiling. Its shadow blankets the cell, turns the surgeon’s carapace an inky black.

They sit by its haunches.

“What are you?”

The tenax observes before it speaks. Their carapace is drilled with a constellation of holes threaded with gold cord. It cannot tell if they are old or young, but it can hear their aorta flutter. They wrap all four arms so tightly around their thorax that new lymph leaks out of their bandage.

“Tenax,” it says.

“No, you aren’t.”

“I am.”

“A tenax would have eaten me by now.”

“Not this one.”

“Who taught you to speak?”

“I hatched to sulvenate words. Since then, I have studied your tongue extensively.”

It lingered at Eld-thul’s gates, trawled through garbage, listened to the voices that trickled through cracks in the walls. How strange it is to be exiled from the city it guards, to be created with a great purpose and hated for that very thing.

“Why are you here?”

“I see the beauty of the inside of things.” The tenax’s head snakes down. “Again and again, I kill and I see it and I cannot escape it, so I have come here.”

When it speaks, a line of saliva reaches the surgeon’s waiting hand.

“This is what I have read of you,” the tenax says. “‘Those desert heretics who deface the living and see that which must never be seen—”

The surgeon is startled from their reverie. “Wait.”

“‘—shall be eradicated and buried in shadow—’”

“Stop.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think I want to hear that?”

“I do not think at all of your wants,” the tenax says. “Should I?”

“I am thinking of yours.”

The tenax is quiet, so the surgeon says, “My name is Weye,” and they put their hand on the tenax’s flank, until finally it says, “I want . . . If I am not welcome here, I want to leave, and if I cannot leave, I will devour all of you myself. But I do not want to devour you.”

“Is that all?”

“I want you afraid because then you will obey without violence.”

“And?”

So it is pulled inch-by-inch out of the tenax as if the surgeon were in its mouth, hooking their fingers in its crop and wrenching it inside-out:

“I want to see inside.”

“Of?”

“Everything. Everything.”

What a voice the thinking tenax has. It echoes down the caverns of its body. The vibrations reach Weye’s palm.

Weye peels off their bandage. With each aortic beat, hemolymph leaks out of their wound. “This?”

The tenax slips its proboscis inside. It has never tasted the living. Granulation tissue licks against the tenax like a mammal’s tongue, warm as if the sun reaches here, too. The tenax wedges one claw in the carapace and pulls; each time it cracks, Weye’s vessels throb, but still they name each structure the tenax finds. Viridescent pigment stains the superficial tissues, but nerves and cartilage are as clear as water. The tenax has no other corpses to reference. Weye will be a new prototype. How long has it been since it has been inside of something new?

It wants to say, “Yes, this,” but when it meets Weye’s steadfast gaze—sees the hand stuffed in their mouth, their scales shuddering—it freezes. They, tenax and surgeon both, are filled with a strange hunger—no, a longing, a burning, a need.

See now: it does not hear the storm of footsteps. It does not know why Weye stumbles upright before the sulvenaces even arrive, nor why they do not fight when they are dragged out into the hall. The other priests dote over Weye’s wound and hold Weye’s face in their hands and cry:

What did it do to you? What did it do?

In moments, they are gone. The silence that returns is unlike any other silence.

See now: it is alone.

It waits.