Daisy Duke's Arc

Chapter 15 of 22

The feeder tipped faster every hour. By the third day, Daisy had emptied every cup she owned into the seam, and still the floor breathed hungry. Cream no longer calmed it. She knelt at the crack until dawn, but the boards bowed like something below pressed up to swallow more. "You don't want sleep anymore," she whispered. "So what do you want?" The floor gave no answer. She did not know what the thing beneath her shop truly hungered for, and until she learned, no offering would keep it quiet. Skeeter tapped in through the door, cane keeping time. "A guest who won't say his order," he mused, "is a guest who wants what's not on the menu." He crouched beside the crack, emerald eye glowing. "You've fed it sleep. But sleep isn't the meal. Sleep is the plate." Daisy stared. "Then who knows what's on the plate?" The door swung again. A figure filled it, face packed with eyes, dark rose petals crowding their head. Under all that they wore a jean jacket and boots, like anyone. Daisy's breath caught. "Thorn." Her sibling. She hadn't seen them in seasons. Every eye on their face fixed on the seam at once. "It's not eating," Thorn said. Flat. No hello. "It's calling." "Calling what?" Thorn knelt. Their many eyes shone with the same starry light that leaked from the crack. "My twin's lost in a place like this. Fading. I follow the tug." They pressed a palm to the boards. "This one's the same. Half of something, cut off from its other half. It's not hungry for cream. It's hungry to be whole." Daisy's stomach dropped. All this time she'd fed it the wrong meal. "How do I feed something that?" "You don't feed it," Thorn said. "You answer it." They pulled Daisy's hand to the seam. The floor breathed against her palm, quick and pleading. She felt it then, not hunger but reaching, a thing straining toward a lost piece it could not find. Daisy understood. She ran to her star-flecked stove. She bound a small cake, not to sleep, not to salt, but to the ache of a thing split in two and searching. She anchored the flavor to Thorn's own longing for their twin, the tug they carried in every eye. She dropped the cake into the crack. The floor went still. Not fed. Recognized. A long, slow breath rose through the boards, and for the first time it did not ask for more. It had been told what it was. Thorn stood. "Told you it was calling." A flat line, but every eye softened. Daisy laughed, shaky. "Now I know its true flavor." She could bake for it and for the waking world both. But Thorn stared at the quieted seam, and their petals curled inward at the edges. "If this one's calling," they said, "then mine can be answered too. Show me how you did it."