[Fic][FFIX] A Meal That Never Ends (Quina, SFW)

[wallwalker]

Title: A Meal That Never Ends
Fandom: FFIX
Character: Quina
Rating: SFW

For fic_promptly. The challenge was to imitate another author's voice; I came up with this, and tried to imitate Lord Dunsany. I think it turned out okay.


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The ponderous creature that was styled Quina, a being of strange habits and great appetites, wandered with the thief and his companions through the wilderness, for Quina was a creature who cared for nothing but food and drink, not for mere nourishment but for pleasure alone.

The road was long, through dark forests of night and rain and bright skies over sand and plains, and yet the fantastic tribesperson of the Qu did not falter. Quina cooked and served creatures to the others that no one before would have dared eat, a brilliant-eyed dragon filleted and stripped of its scales, a slimy sea-hag skewered over a smoky fire. Its companions would not always touch this food, for it frightened and repelled some of them, and even brought some of them to blows, for to one of them, dragons were too honorable creatures to be debased in such a manner. Even so, none of them could deny that Quina's delicacies were truly sublime, when they dared sample them.

Once, one of the lot, a creature who took after the Salamanders of old with flaming red hair and smooth white skin, asked the corpulent Qu a question - when would Quina stop cooking these strange things, and stop eating all things so voraciously, even the beasts of the field? And Quina stopped and considered this question, apron and tongue both flapping in a dry desert wind, and then shrugged. Quina would stop after the meal is finished, Quina said in the stilted language of the Qu, but the meal would never end as long as Quina was there to serve it, an endless array of aperitifs and courses and desserts that would stretch on for as long as they lived.

The other might have asked another question, but Quina turned and happily bounded away, and would say no more.