Praecantatio

      The feeling wasn’t brand new: her stomach cramped, her eyes darkened bloodily, and the pounding of her heart began to roar in her ears. Alex, who, owing her good fortune, met another attack of the magical illness at home, slowly sat down on the floor. The burning inside made her press her knees to her chest, but it didn’t help — it could not help.         She was feeling this unnatural hunger for the second time. It came suddenly even with a seemingly full stomach, and it couldn’t be quenched with the usual food. The disease required a special medicine.         Fighting back tears, Alex opened the chest in which she left the stinking loot from the monsters. A recent foray into the Nether replenished the storage, and it didn’t take long to find the necessary thing.         Without breathing, Alex slowly bit off the rotten flesh of the zombie pigman, falling apart in her mouth into bloodless fibers. The vividly disgusting taste amazed the imagination, and could have driven crazy even the sanest person… which she wasn’t. Warp was crushing her consciousness, reversing her volitional efforts and perverting them.         Last time Alex ate the rotten flesh relatively easily — she was twisting from hunger, smoldering in pain, and the fetid rot was just another edible thing that came to hand, and Alex did not notice the taste and texture of it because of her madness.         Right now, she would prefer not to know the shorter solution.         With each thrust of “meat” into the throat, the hunger gradually receded; consciousness began to clear up, and this was more a curse than happiness. It was humiliating to eat rot, disgusting and slimy, when there was good food nearby… and the disease knew it.         All these attacks carried only one goal: to laugh at success, to make her regret the effort. The point was not even to eat rotten meat — her stomach would most likely get rid of it very soon; if Alex was afraid to lick the dark obelisk, the disease would force her to do it. It would have made her desperately humiliate herself by her own actions.         That is the price of knowledge. Few people would be able to continue the journey after such obstacles.         The tales about thaumaturges going crazy no longer seemed like tales. Did they really keep people as cattle for situations like this one?.. After all, Alex could also get herself a new corral for a different kind of meat — she just needed to catch a zombie villager who wandered here from an abandoned village not far away.         She also heard that brains also helped well with hunger attacks. Brains ruined thaumaturge’s health in other aspects, but this wouldn’t bother a person who was unable to stand on their feet from exhaustion. Starving Alex seemed incredibly appetizing the idea of sucking fat, juicy brains, like a long, long pasta, forming convolutions… Convolutions, storing a comprehensive personality, forced to hunt in the body of a dead man and now being eaten without respect by another man going crazy.         Alex found herself curled up in a ball on the floor. A sober consciousness slowly filled her body, reaching even to the tips of her fingers. The sky outside the windows turned red, announcing the imminent night. It was as if there was no hunger, only the stench of hands and the echo of gloomy thoughts reminded Alex of what she had just been forced to do.         However, dubious moral decisions no longer caused her deep disgust. This only made the new knowledge even more valuable.