Guro Challenge #11: Conjoined Bodies
#23 of 33 Day Guro Challenge
When any of their pups had a disagreement not vicious enough to result in death but loud and long-lasting enough to aggravate those around them, the ratwives would tie their tails together and leave them that way until they wore themselves out scuffling. Pairs were most common, but groups were not unknown. Mokkan had once seen a dozen squabbling rittens left like that for three weeks; they learned to move as one to get to food and water, and would walk paw-in-paw in pairs or groups for a full month afterwards. He had heard that some had died like that, and worse, that some had lived, had bound their minds together as their tails were until the knots in both became unbreakable. Rat kings, the stories called them, and they slithered through the nightmares of the castle's population often.
Silth had never done that to her pups. She always said if they must kill each other they'd get no help from her.
At the dinner table, the Marlfox pups competed for food with the viciousness befitting the fighters they were growing into, but as befitted the offspring of the queen, they used their cutlery. Ziral and Gelltor fenced with their knives, Vannan drove a fork into the back of Predak's thieving paw. Lantur, at the foot of the table, found their vanished father's signet ring in the stomach of her fish; she hid it in her sleeve and remained silent for the rest of the evening. Mokkan thought of the book their tutor had shown them that day; an old searat's log of tales from distant lands, written up in delicate calligraphy and illustrated in jewel-toned inks on Silth's orders. He had half-listened to the sickly romantic story they ended on, but had caught a particular image from it. In the lands beyond the sunrise it was said destined mates would be bound forever by an invisible red string leading through their paws to each other's hearts. Ziral had asked how it could be both invisible and red, Lantur had painted vivid verbal pictures of strangulation and cheesewire-like beheadings, and the lesson had devolved into laughter.
Slowly and creakily, the queen stood up and took one of her increasingly rare walks around the table. From Ziral at her left paw, around the table and to Mokkan at her right, she paced, eyes boring into her offsprings' backs. She paused to pile more bread and fish on Lantur's and Ascrod's plates, and the pups scowled at each other when she moved on. She always wanted them to eat more; so they would be big strong fighters, she said, and fatter than she was, they all guessed. When she reached Mokkan's seat, she stopped. He slowly put his fork down, put off his food by his mother's breathing down his neck. He was growing fast; when standing he would be almost as tall as her by now. Her paw slunk onto his shoulder and squeezed the developing muscle.
"So like your father," she murmured, glancing around the table. "And growing so fast. You all are. I'll be expecting grandpups some day soon, and plenty of them. I had to suffer seven births of fat and fighting brats, why should you all escape?" She chuckled at the horrified looks of the female cubs, and the males snickered and stuck their tongues out at their sisters. "Less of that," Silth said, and clipped Mokkan round the ear. "You've got your parts to play in it too."
"We know where babies come from, mother," Gelltor scoffed, flicking peas at Ascrod. "So are you sending Mokkan off courting now his voice is dropping?"
"Sending him away for it? Oh no, no," said Silth, shaking her head and scratching lightly at Mokkan's nape. "I shan't have you bringing home any old trash from off the island and making ugly common cubs! Ziral, grow faster. Don't keep your brother waiting."
She left before the cubs could work out what she meant, and when they did, one by one, they dropped their cutlery and stared at each other in frightened disgust.
Mokkan's dreams had become strange and restless recently, but that night they were worse. The new dreams melded with the old and he found himself embraced by his sisters who in turn were bound to his brothers, tails melting together and all entangled with bloody strings, and more linking them to their mother who pulled the strings like those of marionettes. For the first time since he had realised in his toddlerhood that Silth would not come to comfort him, Mokkan woke up screaming