The prey had burrowed itself within a grand prison of stone.

  Strange.

  This prison was brimming with innumerable other inmates, entrapped within the bars of tortured matter of their own volition, but the stink of prey was in the air.

  Stealing up and over the bars was a trivial task. In the dead of night, a rippling shadow went entirely unnoticed.

  The first task was a feast upon one of the jailors, its metal shell doing little to protect it.

  Armour. The shell was called armour.

  Every feast brought more of the matter-born’s knowledge. If it was to be a hunter, it must know the prey.

  So, feast it must. Feast it did, hidden in water, in shadowed alleyways. It waited, pouncing upon the unexpecting and the intoxicated, swallowing them and their minds whole.

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  A realisation struck during one of these many meals. A sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach it did not have moments before washed over it. The more it consumed, the more it became like them. The disgusting matter-born creatures were changing it, giving it shape it did not desire. It dissolved this stomach inside itself with pure force of will, subsuming it back unto the mass of itself as though it were never there.

  Then, it reformed it again.

  Dissolve. Reform. Dissolve. Reform. Curiosity overwhelmed disgust as it explored this newfound capability. It made a demand of its form and it obeyed. So it tried then with something more complex, a bone of the jailor it had consumed earlier. Three times it formed bent and misshapen, but on the fourth it was perfect.

  Perfect? What was it thinking? Even its mind was changing, muffled beneath the meals and their incessantly chattering memories. Their forms’ concepts were poisoning its mind and body, stealing away its purity and making escape to the stars all the more difficult once its task was completed.

  But that must wait. It was bound by the choir of the stars to obey. And it realised that with this corruption of its form came a new opportunity.

  Thus, it rose from the water in which it lurked, at once both the creature it once was and not. Its form rippled and shook, at once the form it once wore and not. Shifting, shaking, shuddering, it emerged from the water, its ichorous black form sloughing off in chunks.

  What emerged was a corpse, grinning from ear to ear.