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Albino was not supposed to live, much less have a name. One child among many, hatched only as part of an experiment by those who would later be called his “family”. At this point he was simply supposed to be an unwitting and barely sentient participant in a test and then be killed. Albino is only barely a name. It is (somewhat obviously) grown into a proper noun out of ‘the albino one’ to differentiate him from his hatchmates.
The thing about juvenile snakes is that they cannot control how much venom they unload during a bite. This is what makes the bite of a young snake, who simply empties their venom glands into the victim, more dangerous than that of a more judicious adult. Albino was simply lucky enough to be the one who always bit first and dodged retaliation quickest. His siblings fell into his gullet and he grew strong and fat on their kind donations to his flesh. Their strength became his.
Then he was fed on ritual. The second part of the experiment. His siblings were forgotten as anything but a part of him, nothing more than those who did not make it past the preliminaries. The third part, Albino was placed back into a den too small and too full of other denizens to allow peaceful life. No food was ever thrown into the den. If one wanted to life, one must pick food from fellows.
Nothing was ever able to eat Albino. He was thankful for his siblings, whose incorporation into him made his flesh toxic. Anything that tried to kill him died first, if he had not already bitten it. He swallowed this experiment too, and became stronger. When the humans who raised him opened the den once more, Albino was the only one there.
A snake the size of a man, fat and pleased with itself. Survival is the impetus of an animal. His human family then fed him regularly, not making him fight for his survival, and in exchange they took of him his venom. Milking a snake is he term they used, and he lived next to a cow and felt it a kindred existence.
This was meant to be the end of it, once they had taken enough of his venom to keep themselves well stocked. It must be handled with heavy gloves and masks. A drop can kill an adult human. Not much was needed. With bottles secured, Albino was meant to die.
But, one of his soon-to-be brothers said, what of scientific curiosity? What of the question– how powerful a poison can one create? It is possible to solidify the soul down into mercury, so could it then be possible to poison that soul? Corrode the spirit?
So Albino was fed on curses and magic. Everything he ate became a part of him. The curses were made by humans and so had human touch; so Albino gained a humanity. The blessings of strange far-off gods were called down and fed to him, so he gained power. His breath became toxic. He shed skin and attained a shape that was no longer a snake and not yet a human, and his creators observed him with curiosity and fear.
He looked back at them with eyes that were beginning to have too much intelligence, and they hated it. Experimentation stopped. He was fed only by the most curious of his siblings, who kept him in the barn and waited to see if he could become a person.
They fed him human corpses. Snakes prefer live food. They fed him vagrants who wouldn’t be missed. Names disappeared from village records. Albino grew awareness and a mouth that could form words. He was taught, and his ‘parents’ hated him. Freak of nature they did not ask for when all they wanted was a way to kill their fellow man, and his siblings who taught him to speak did not argue for him when he still slept outside as an animal must.
In his sixteenth year of life, a bug came by. Like him, she was not a human and wearing an approximate shape of one. The real humans couldn’t tell this, but Albino could. She smelled him, she found interest in the writhing mass of venom and jealousy.
The bug snuck into he barn, kneeled before him, and introduced herself as Clementine, a doctor. She spoke to him in a way that Albino now recognizes as grooming to her purposes, but he doesn’t begrudge her that. All animals must feed and Clementine is an animal too. She wished to eat, and out of it Albino got a much more useful body.
She spoke him into human form. Clementine taught him how humans feel and how they look and act, guided his thoughts with her professional hands into human form until his body followed suit with enough sheds. She dined on his jealousy of the family that created him and left him in this barn while they, who were his equal in sapience, lived in the house. She led and coached him in that sweet and harmless voice of hers to a place where the idea to eat his human siblings the same way he ate his snake siblings seemed like his own idea.
She feasted on fear and agony the night Albino used his now-dextrous new fingers to open the lock on the barn and enter the human house, where he bit into and swallowed his brothers and sisters. He gorged on their flesh and their intellect, their own god-blessings, and then he turned and thanked his parents (for that is the word for a person who creates you, and they certainly created him) for their hard work before he ate them too.
He left the house using his brother’s body as his own. After enough feasting he learned this, to shed and reflect himself in the form of a human rather than the coiling mas of toxin. Clementine was there waiting for him, her hands clasped behind her and showing a gentle smile. None of her demeanor belied the tick swollen on misery. None of his betrayed the viper. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t embrace you in congratulation.”
“Of course,” said Albino with a smooth voice that held only a faint echo of the rasping hiss he formed human words with before. His mother was an excellent speaker, and her tongue is his to use now.
She looks past him, up at the wooden house and barn which birthed him. “Disappearances of humans are suspect by nature. But, were the shunned family of a rumored wizard happen to burn down in the night, everyone would be perfectly pleased to have an excuse not to look deeper.”
“As ever, I appreciate your advice.”
The house burns bright and warm. Even not in the body of a snake, Albino relishes in the warmth before he leaves. No one will investigate, and like as not, it will only be noticed that somehow the family cow got out of the barn before the fire started, and was the only surviving life when it was found amiably wandering a neighbour’s field some days later. Albino erased all mark of the people who made him from the land, a blot removed. He doesn’t need them alive to continue living, doesn’t need their records to attend his own purposes and carrying the experiments that still interest him. All of their minds still exist in him, dissolved and digested and assimilated, until no names remained but his own.