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Though sure of the answer, Leo once asked if Eleanor could prepare Plesioth liver.
They weren’t like the average fish, of course, especially given the turn evolution had. Plesioth anatomy was more flying wyvern than piscine down to their reproductive organs, and they’d do elaborate mating dances with flip-floppy grace and the most unholy squishes. Their liver was bulbous and set to burst like bombs when met with knives, and most chefs were too busy cleaning off copious amounts of blood to focus on trying to break the slippery, rubbery shield.
Truthfully, he was looking for a substitute. He missed the Epioth, though his memory of them warped and changed. Sometimes they resembled the Ludroth more, others like scaled felynes, something in between, and yellowing observations never matched the kind of Epioth he liked.
There used to be plenty in the lake and few when he was younger, with tales of a lantern fish-like leviathan having once ruled the lake and gobbled the population now left as a flimsy excuse for their extinction. Without the lantern leviathan there would be no Epioth, and try as the Lagiacrus may, they could not fill that void. The remaining few were too old or stressed and their clutches couldn’t be properly hatched let alone raised, so soldiers encouraged trainees to fish them up before the Plesioth and Ludroth decided they’d eat them again. The bottom of the lake was swarmed with vegetation to the point where fish would be suffocated by green and forced to shore. Nobody bothered to ask why the Epioth weren’t eating.
Amara once mentioned how the taste had changed. Supposedly, they were muddier, and the richness of their meat wore thin. Leo didn’t care. When he was thirteen, his first hunt was not of Aptonoth but of the fattest Epioth Azuria had left, and the ghost of Amara’s smile was made of rhinestone all the while prepping for a lecture that never came. Still, he didn’t care.
He was terrible at gutting them. Simon—the sole witness to his crowning achievement—wasn’t. Though he had never gutted a monster of that size before, he had both an idea and enough experience. The smell was repulsive and the guts were golden. Simon’s cut was from just above its anus and ran to the jaw, clean and simple. Like he’d been preparing to do something like this for years. He was cold the entire process. He couldn’t cook.
Leo wasn’t the killer of the last Epioth, but he fished up enough that he might as well have brought their downfall. Each were brought to Simon first. There was no argument. They hauled it all back easily. During the span of two weeks, there were muddy feasts.
And at some point, Leo asked what it would be like to be gutted. Would it feel funny? After Ogden mourned and gave the lecture he was lacking, that question became a bit more frequent. What would it be like to be the last one? To know you were to be gutted, that you would bear no kin to witness it, that your family would at best frown upon your failure to carry on? Maybe he should be gutted.
If he were to die, he would like to be used up, much as other hunted wyverns. And he verbally entrusted that role to Simon as hunter, or at least the one who could prepare the body. It was morbid, sure, but Leo said it anyway, and he didn’t care for the implications or consequences as if he were telling a lame joke. Simon was quieter that day.
Initially, he tried Ludroth to fill that void, and he brought his first to Simon who complied but lacked the clean cutting job. The guts were like poison.
But Plesioth also lived in Mirror Lake. They were bigger game. Simon declined. Be it out of respect or pickiness, Leo didn’t take it to anyone else.
It had been years. Simon was gone. There were no Epioth.
In some places, the liver was a delicacy, Eleanor told him, though it was already clear her passion for cooking waned. There was more on her mind than dishes, at least for a time, yet she refused to bring them up. Still, she prepared it without issue, as expected.
It was just okay.
He’d never let anyone gut a monster in his presence, including his own hands.