Neytopia › Part 2: Noon › Chapter 24

Hungry

On the other side of the gate waited a library that stretched endlessly in all directions, its shelves filled with books. The gate disappeared at their back, leaving them in an aisle at the middle of the library. A flying staircase landed before them. They boarded it and it took them to a waiting room. There, a secretary ordered them to sit and wait.

While they waited, he browsed the books in one of the shelves. Most were written in tongues he could not even recognize. But eventually he found a book he could read. It was a collection of stories, and he picked one at random. It read:

On this matter, consider the tale of the Great boy: He was born in a kingdom of great wealth where people enjoyed copious crops, gentle weather, strong health and contempt for both gods and magic. Despite their riches, the boy could not stop crying. It was not pain, sleep or even disease that caused his cries, but hunger. A hunger that knew no bounds. It made him eat anything he could find, so the boy grew well beyond a man’s height. By the age of eight he was taller than most houses in his village.

The royal court wanted to meet the boy after they heard all kinds of tales about him. He was escorted to the royal castle to dazzle the noblemen with his bigness. Some noblemen wondered how he could be put to work in the farms, others about how he would help them in time of war. A noblewoman laughed at the boy like she laughed at jesters, calling him all sorts of mean things. The boy cried, but she kept laughing and talking as she drank wine. It was grotesque, since he was bigger than any man, yet still had the physical features and feelings of a little boy. Soon the Great boy ran out of the castle in tears.

The boy learned to hate mankind right then and there. After all, he knew that people would always see him as a beast. On his way back home, he crossed the royal field, which was ripe with the finest, ripest, juiciest fruits. He thought,

Nobody will notice one missing.

Oh, naive boy. The sour flavor drove him on. He gorged down the whole field, but that wasn’t enough, no. He devoured whatever crops and fruits he came across: lettuce, oranges, corn, lemon, potatoes. And every time he ate, he and his hunger only grew larger. At dawn he finally fell asleep. Though soon after he was woken up by the guards sent to stop the rampaging beast, who pointed their sharp spears at him, screaming:

Wake up, freak! You must answer for your crimes, you are coming with us!

The boy tried to apologize, but the guards would not listen. For what did they know about his hunger? He let them bind him with heavy chains and take him to court. The whole city gathered to see the Great boy, the terror of the fields. They flooded the royal court and the nearby streets. The king felt pity for the boy, but he had to do what was right for the kingdom. The king told the boy,

We cannot have you wandering our land, ravaging our fields. With a heavy heart, we have decided to banish you from this kingdom.

The boy wept and called for his parents who were in the crowd, but his parents looked away in shame. Then he saw the noblewoman who had laughed at him, smiling a smug smile. Without thinking about it twice, he ran up to the noblewoman and grabbed her to yell at her that it was all her fault.

His strong grasp crushed her bones like twigs. She died on his hand to the horror of the citizens. He never meant to hurt her, so he panicked and started to cry. The citizens screamed and ran away, trampling each other. The guards tried to surround him, but they were slowed by the frightened crowd which rushed in the opposite direction. The king commanded,

Slay the monster!

Before the guards got to him, the Great boy crashed through the castle’s walls and fell through to the other side. Then he ran as fast and far as he could, leaving the royal guards behind. He ran through the forest until he discovered a cave where he cried himself to sleep. Afterwards he was forced to wander the land as an outlaw, eating whatever he could from the farms he found, driven by an insatiable hunger.

But this is only the beginning of his story. For the lands he ravaged soon became barren, though he didn’t know it as he never stayed long enough to see it. The guards swept the forest looking for him and guarded the crops at night, but he simply crushed all oposition and soon, all morale.

The king was desperate to save his withering kingdom as food waned. He summoned the folk to help him: anyone who helped kill the beast would be rewarded with gold. Charlatans came in droves, peddling shiny trinkets, spells and other sorts of snake oil, promising they had the solution to stop the behemoth. The kingdom’s gold ran out, but the Great boy was stronger than ever.

By the time the woman came by, the king had already gone mad. The woman asked only for a small group of men and found the boy. She made him disappear and nobody ever knew what happened to him.

The kingdom, however, did not recover. The land never yielded fruit again. All the gold had been wasted on charlatans who did nothing to help and left the kingdom to rot. Hunger was so bad that cannibalism ruled the streets. The king and his court all died, and the fine castles turned to dust. Those that could not escape died shortly after. One of the woman’s disciples claims she took him to an is—

Before he could finish the story, the office door opened. The old woman had gone inside without him noticing. There was something disturbing in her eyes. She called him on,

Come, come.