Chapter 1:what monster are

Abhorasj did not wake.

Waking implied a prior state of not-waking, a withdrawal into some private dark room where a self went to be alone with itself before returning. He had no such room. He simply became less active in the intervals between the things that required him to be active, the way a fire settles into its coals when there is nothing left in front of it to burn, and then something arrived — a report, a smell, a sound worth investigating, the far-off pressure of something moving through territory he considered his — and he was active again. There was no line to cross to get from one state to the other. There was only more or less.

This morning there was more.

He came up out of stillness the way water comes up over a ledge, and stood, and the cave he had been occupying for the last several days rearranged itself around the fact of him standing — dust finding new places to settle, a colony of small nesting things two chambers over going silent all at once, the temperature of the air shifting by some fraction that only a body as large as his could produce. He did not notice any of this. He had never had to notice it. Space simply did what space did around him, the way weather does what weather does, without either party needing to remark on it.

He walked to the mouth of the cave and flexed the hand that had been broken and healed wrong across the knuckles, a long time ago, in a fight he no longer troubled himself to date precisely. It had healed at an angle that put more force behind a downward strike than the hand should have been able to produce, and for a while after the break he had been aware of this as an inconvenience — the fingers didn't sit right, closing a fist took a fraction longer than it used to — and then one day, mid-strike, the inconvenience had turned out to be an advantage, and after that he stopped thinking of it as a break at all. It was simply how the hand worked now. Everything on his body worked the way it worked now because something had, at some point, tried to make it work differently and failed.

There was the shoulder that sat slightly wrong from the first serious thing he had ever fought and nearly lost to, decades back, before he understood yet what he was capable of — a creature with too many limbs and an unpleasant habit of finding the same spot twice. It had found that spot on his shoulder three times before he killed it, and the joint had never gone back to sitting the way it used to, and now he could rotate the arm through an angle that most things with shoulders could not produce, which made certain grips impossible to escape once he had them.

There was the long pale line across his ribs where something with teeth built for a different kind of prey had opened him up nearly to the organs, and which had taught him — slowly, expensively — the particular angle of approach that let you get inside a longer reach before it could close. He had used that angle so many times since that he no longer remembered learning it. It simply lived in his hands now, the way the wrongness in his shoulder lived in his hands, the way every mistake anything had ever made trying to end him now lived somewhere in his body as a small permanent advantage.

This was, as far as he had ever examined the matter, the whole of his design. He had not been built once, by some deliberate hand, in a shape decided in advance. He had been built the way a riverbed is built — by the accumulated passage of everything that had ever tried to move through him and failed to move him instead.

He wore the record of it, too, in a way that was not accident.

Around his left arm, wound through a heavy braid of leather he had made himself long enough ago that he no longer remembered the making, hung a string of teeth — not a trophy in the sense of a single kill commemorated, but a specific set, taken over specific years, from things that had each been, in their moment, the strongest thing he had yet faced. He had thought about the order of them. He had rethought the order twice, moving one tooth further down the strand when a later kill made an earlier one look small by comparison, so that the whole arrangement told an accurate story if you knew how to read it — not just that he had won, but the shape of the winning getting larger and larger, a visible curve bending upward with no visible place where it stopped.

He did not wear it to be seen, particularly. There was almost never anything left alive afterward that needed the reminder. He wore it because a record needed keeping and this was the only kind of record he had ever found worth keeping, and because there was a satisfaction — quiet, physical, entirely private — in the weight of it against his arm when he moved. Desire, once satisfied, tended to evaporate and leave nothing behind but the appetite for the next thing. The teeth did not evaporate. They were the one part of having that stayed.

He had thought carefully about this arrangement, in the specific and limited sense that he thought carefully about anything. Abhorasj did not turn thoughts over for the pleasure of turning them; thinking, for him, was a tool that got used exactly as far as a problem required and no further. But trophies were one of the very few things that had ever asked more of him than a glance, because trophies were the physical proof that a want had once existed and had once been answered, and he had never encountered anything else in the world that did that particular job.

The territory beyond the cave mouth had, at some point in a history that predated him and did not especially interest him, belonged to somebody's ordered world — there was a boundary stone half-swallowed by moss a short walk down the slope, carved with a sigil some temple somewhere still considered binding, marking where one jurisdiction supposedly ended and the next began. He passed it most mornings. He had never once altered his path to avoid it, and he had never once altered his path to make a point of walking over it either. It was simply in the way sometimes, and when it was in the way, his foot came down on it the same as it would have come down on a stone that had never been carved with anything at all.

This was, in its way, the entire relationship between what he was and what the ordered world believed itself to be.

Mortals — and here he would have included, if he had ever cared to make the distinction aloud, the vast administrative apparatus of gods, priests, kings, and the boundary stones they left behind to mark where their claims supposedly held — organized themselves around a ceiling. Somewhere above every mortal thing, in their understanding of the world, there was a limit: a rank you could rise to and no further, an authority you answered to, a structure that had decided in advance how large a given kind of creature was permitted to become. They built their entire lives inside that ceiling, arranging themselves carefully beneath it, calling the arrangement order, and mistaking the ceiling itself for a law of the world rather than what it actually was, which was an agreement mortals had made with each other because none of them was strong enough to test it.

Monsters had never made that agreement.

Not from any conviction about it — Abhorasj would have found conviction, as a category, faintly ridiculous, in the rare instances he thought about it at all. Conviction was the effort of turning an instinct into a belief you then had to go around defending to people who disagreed with it, and he had never in his life needed to defend anything. Monsters didn't decline the ordered world's ceiling as a philosophy. They simply had never been shaped by anything that installed one. What they had instead was a single, self-enforcing law that required no priesthood and no court to uphold it: you were exactly as large as what you had beaten, and nothing more, and nothing kept that fact from being tested at any moment by anything that wanted to test it.

It was, he had always privately felt — in the wordless way he felt most things, since he had never had much cause to put feelings into language before this year — the only honest law he had ever encountered. Everything else claimed to be a limit and turned out, on inspection, to be a story. This one simply was what it said it was.

He could beat everything.

This was not a boast, and he had never once needed to make it as one, because a boast is a claim about yourself made in the absence of proof, offered to persuade someone of something they have no other way to verify. Everything Abhorasj had ever claimed about his own strength had already been tested directly against the thing being claimed, repeatedly, by challengers who had every reason in the world to want the claim to be false and every opportunity to make it so. He remembered, distantly and without particular feeling, a creature three winters back that had come a very long way specifically to test whether the position of king-of-monsters could be taken from whoever currently held it, on the theory — reasonable enough, on its own terms — that no single thing could plausibly remain the strongest expression of an entire category forever. The theory had been disproven inside of a few minutes. The teeth from that encounter sat near the top of the strand on his arm, because the encounter had been, at the time, the largest thing he had yet absorbed.

He had grown, in the years since, precisely as large as the sum of every fight he had ever won. Which was to say: every fight there had ever been.

He took what he wanted, because he had never once encountered a reason not to that struck him as a reason rather than an inconvenience belonging to someone else.

Women, when desire moved that direction, because desire moving somewhere and a body simply not going there was, to him, an idea with no content — like water deciding not to run downhill. Treasure, because a kingdom's treasure was the clearest statement that kingdom had ever made about what it believed mattered, and taking it was the most direct way of overturning that statement and replacing it with a truer one. Territory, because territory was the physical shape of how far a thing's reach extended, and his reach, as far as he had ever tested it, extended as far as he cared to walk. And, on occasion, a life — not often, and never for the pleasure of the ending, but when some particular life had done something that registered to him as an irritant: looked too long, spoken in a tone that assumed an equality that did not exist between the speaker and him, decided out loud that it had an opinion about what Abhorasj was owed that differed from his own opinion on the matter.

He did not hate the things he killed. Hatred required the other thing to matter to you in a particular sustained way, and almost nothing had ever mattered to him for longer than the length of an encounter. He killed the way a foot comes down on whatever the ground happens to put in front of it — without cruelty, and equally without hesitation, because hesitation was a mortal habit that assumed the outcome was somehow still in question, and for him it very rarely was.

He came down the slope that morning past the half-buried boundary stone, and somewhere along the path a small creature — some low, quick, unremarkable thing that lived in the scrub and had built, in whatever manner such creatures build things, a life for itself in the space between the rocks — did not move quickly enough out of the line his foot was already following.

He did not alter the line.

He did not, afterward, look back to see what had been there.

He kept walking, because walking was what came next, and the day, as far as he had any reason yet to suspect, was going to be an ordinary one.