Aster’s mouth goes dry.

  “So if someone, say, me, had their life fall apart—financially, career-wise, physically—over and over again… that would mean…”

  Matter’s voice drops to a quiet growl.

  “That something is draining your Faith constantly. Feeding off it. And in your case, it’s the thing buried in your chest—a Void Wyrm.”

  Aster staggers back like he’s been punched.

  “This thing… it’s been feeding on me my whole life?”

  Matter’s expression turns grim.

  “Yes. The Wyrm uses your fate like fuel. It corrupts the cosmic scales, rerouting every stroke of luck, every potential windfall, turning it sour. It starts small—missed opportunities, jobs that fall through, relationships that collapse. But over time, it gets hungrier. Fortunes vanish. Homes decay. Health fails. And when it’s drained every last drop of Faith from your material existence…”

  Matter’s hand clenches into a fist.

  “That’s when it bursts free—on your twenty-first birthday, when your spirit fully ripens. It devours what’s left and tears a hole between the planes, one that kills you and lets it cross over.”

  His eyes flick back to Aster’s chest.

  “It’s why I left the note warning you not to leave the House. Those things that chased you before you crossed over—the Wyrm-Eaters. They are artificially built constructs. Spliced monstrosities of flesh, bone, and machine stitched together, built for one purpose and stripped of everything else. To hunt Void Wyrms nearing chrysalis. The pull you felt in your chest,” Matter continues, voice dropping. “That wasn’t fear. It was resonance. A growing Void Wyrm distorts fate—luck, probability, momentum. Like heat bending air. The Wyrm Eaters are tuned to that distortion.”

  Aster’s mouth goes dry. “And the Sirens?”

  “Triangulation,” Matter says. “Each one locks onto the signal, shares it with the others. That’s why they coordinated. That’s why more kept arriving. They were calling more of themselves so they could overwhelm you and crack you open, tear the Wyrm out mid-metamorphosis, and devour it before it can cross planes.”

  Aster stands there, chest heaving, head spinning with the enormity of it all. This isn’t just bad luck. This isn’t just misfortune. It’s systematic. Predatory. Engineered.

  His mind flashes back to every lost job, every bounced check, every home foreclosure, every doctor’s visit where they couldn’t explain why he’s so damn tired and sick all the time. It all lines up.

  “So my entire life,” Aster says. “The bad luck. The collapses. The constant sense that something’s about to go wrong—”

  “—was the Wyrm feeding,” Matter finishes. “And me making sure it didn’t finish the meal.”

  His entire life… has been feeding this thing.

  Matter watches him in silence, letting the truth settle like lead in his chest.

  And for once, Aster has no quip. No sarcastic shield. Just the cold, searing weight of revelation.

  Aster’s face drains of colour. He stands there, stiff as stone, while the ugly weight of it claws deeper into his chest and a new thought starts forming on the surface.

  Matter’s voice breaks through the spiral, low and grim.

  “Yes,” he says quietly, as if reading Aster’s thoughts. “The Void Wyrm is relentless. Especially when it’s implanted so young. It started with your family’s wealth, draining it slowly over a decade. I’m guessing you remember having to move to increasingly smaller homes? The rooms getting more cramped? Going from name-brand clothing to hand-me-downs?”

  Aster’s eyes go glassy. He doesn’t nod, but his mind is already there, walking backward through every dim, shrinking room of his childhood. He remembers his mother’s forced smiles as they packed again, his father’s shoulders getting heavier each time. And now… he knows. They’d been dying by inches, and he’d been the leak.

  His throat locks up. A lump like broken glass wedges there. His hands tremble, and suddenly he can’t get enough air.

  Matter’s next words drop like hammers.

  “It didn’t stop.”

  “After the money… it went after blood. It killed every last member of both your family lines. Your mother. Then your father.”

  Aster flinches as if struck. His lungs burn, breath coming fast and shallow. His father’s face flickers in his mind—the tired, weathered man who never told him why things fell apart. Now he knows. They died choking on a curse meant for him.

  Across from him, Matter’s face is tight, pale around the mouth. His eyes are wet, though he blinks it away like it offends him. He clears his throat roughly, voice turning hoarse as he powers through.

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  “Your father made me promise, on his deathbed, that I’d keep you alive long enough to break this thing. I’ve done what I could—rerouting the worst of it. I wove little pockets of fortune here and there to keep the Wyrm fed without killing you outright. But it’s not enough anymore.”

  Matter’s hands curl into fists at his sides.

  “It’s nearly done feeding. Your new home, your bank account—they’ll be gone inside a year. But the real deadline is sooner.”

  Aster forces out words past the tightness in his throat.

  “My birthday.”

  Matter’s nod is grim.

  “Your twenty-first. Spirit maturity age. The point where your vessel is ripe enough for full crossover. And that’s when it’ll burst free, devour the rest of you, and tear a hole into the Astral Plane. If that happens… you die. Both here and on the Material side.”

  Aster squeezes his eyes shut. His head spins again. Everything in him wants to run—to bolt back to the lie where life is just cruel and random, not personal.

  But Matter’s next words pin him in place.

  “There’s one shot to stop it. To integrate the Wyrm into your Astral Vessel before it erupts. I can do it—a ritual surgery. Dangerous as hell, untested, but if it works… you’ll not only survive. You’ll be the one controlling it. You’ll inherit your family’s legacy. Their power. Their place in this world.”

  Aster opens his eyes, feeling the sceptic in him surging back to the surface, staring at Matter like he’s just pitched him a timeshare on Mars.

  “That’s your big solution?” His voice cracks on a bitter laugh. “You’re telling me I’ve got a cosmic tapeworm, and the fix is some magical surgery? Yeah, that doesn’t sound like black-market organ trafficking at all.”

  Matter blinks. His mouth opens, then shuts, and for a beat he looks genuinely offended.

  “How the hell did you get that from everything I just said?!”

  His voice spikes an octave, and for the first time, he looks less like a stoic, war-scarred guide and more like a guy wondering how he ended up babysitting this lunatic.

  Aster shrugs, dry as bone despite the quake in his chest.

  “Look, I can’t argue with the magic city, or the fact that there’s a wolf-bird over there grooming itself like it owns the place.” He jabs a thumb at the creature on the rooftop, feathers preening in lazy loops. “That’s… real. Fine. But you expect me to swallow that all my suffering, my parents’ deaths, came from one monster that you conveniently can ‘fix’ if I just let you cut me open?”

  He spreads his hands, voice rising. “Sorry, but that’s the oldest scam in the book. Organ traffickers wish they had marketing this good.”

  Matter makes a sound between a growl and a groan. “For fuck’s sake—”

  But Aster is already turning, muscles locked in that flight response.

  “I’m out. Thanks for the hallucinations and the existential crisis, but I’ll take my leaky bank account and go.”

  He doesn’t get three steps.

  “Don’t freak out,” Matter mutters, and before Aster can snap back, the older man’s palm slams flat against his chest.

  And then the world rips open.

  Aster isn’t on the roof anymore.

  He isn’t anywhere.

  He’s standing—no, floating—in front of a mountain-sized nightmare.

  The creature looms so huge it bends reality around it, chitinous plates grinding like tectonic shelves. Hundreds of legs twitch and click, each the size of a subway car. Its head—God, its head—is an abomination: part dragon, part centipede, part festering larva. A massive cross-shaped horn juts from its face like a beetle at the head of a crusade. Mandibles clack wetly, and a swarm of multi-lensed eyes lock onto Aster, pinning him in place like a bug on a board.

  The pressure that rolls off it hits like a tsunami.

  Hungry.

  Old.

  Cold as deep space.

  And so, so familiar.

  Aster’s breath hitches. That feeling—tight and wrong and choking—the Dread he’s felt every time his life upturned… It’s this.

  The Wyrm.

  It’s been inside him. Always.

  His knees almost buckle, but not from fear. No, the flood that surges up isn’t terror—it’s fury.

  Raw, molten, chest-caving rage.

  This thing.

  This thing has ruined him.

  It has murdered his family, shredded his life, and turned every day into a slow-motion death spiral.

  Every failure, every lost friend, every heartbreak—it all leads back to THAT.

  Aster’s fists clench so hard his nails bite into his palms. His vision blurs, teeth grinding. He wants to rip it apart with his bare hands. He wants to scream, to burn it, to—

  A memory cuts through the blood-red haze. His father’s face. Tired, but kind. The man who fought to keep Aster alive long enough for this shot.

  No. His dad wouldn’t want vengeance for him.

  He’d want salvation.

  His fury trembles, then hardens into something sharper—resolve. A blade instead of a wildfire.

  In a blink, he’s yanked back, the world snapping into place like elastic. The monstrous presence vanishes, leaving him gasping on the rooftop.

  Matter stands there, arms crossed, giving him a look that screams I told you so.

  He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t need to.

  Aster’s chest heaves. He scrubs a hand down his face, breath shuddering. No more denial. No more sarcastic shields.

  It’s real. All of it.

  He meets Matter’s gaze, jaw tight.

  “Okay,” he rasps, voice raw but steady. “I believe you.”

  He drops heavily onto the rooftop, legs giving out under the weight of it all.

  His hands shake, but his eyes are steady now. Focused.

  “What do I need to do?”

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