There was blood everywhere. Not a splash, not a trickle… everywhere. It ran down my arms in blackened sheets, filled the grooves in the stone beneath my feet, and sprayed across the walls in arcs that glistened in the dim light. My flesh was so saturated with it that I no longer knew where my skin ended and where gore began. My lungs worked like bellows, sucking in air choked with the reek of iron and rot, exhaling in growls that echoed like thunder through the cavern.

  My body answered me perfectly… too perfectly. Every muscle moved like it wasn’t remotely human anymore, like it belonged to a deeper will. And every order I gave was the same: kill. Every twitch was a deathblow. Every step left another corpse shattered against the jagged stone, as limp forgotten memories of things that once lived.

  They came at me in bursts; first thirty, then fifty, on and on, and still more crawling up from the black throats of the pits below.

  The first I recognized were vampires, their shrieks piercing and feral, eyes burning with greed, claws raking the stone as they swarmed forward in a frenzy. Their hunger for the relic drove them blind, fangs snapping in the air before they’d even reached me.

  Next, I recognized the devourers, hunchbacked and grotesque, with massive bottom jaws and blunt teeth. They walked on limbs like broken, angled arms, and their bellies swollen with half-digested carrion.

  And then the stranger things emerged. Creatures warped beyond sense, their bodies broken and rebuilt by some nightmare logic. Some stumbled forward on spindly limbs too long for their torsos, each step cracking like a spider’s leg made of bone. Others crawled on all fours with their spines split open, pointed vertebrae jutting outward like jagged sawblades. One dragged itself by its arms, its lower half nothing but a twisting mass of tendrils slick with black slime.

  Their numbers swelled by the heartbeat. The cavern vomited them out, every fissure and tunnel coughing up new horrors. A pack of eyeless hounds tore forward next, their skulls bare of flesh, tongues lashing like worms from gaps between their teeth. Behind them slithered things with eel-like bodies and faces split open into petals of gnashing fangs, leaving slick trails across the stone. Even insectoid shapes scuttled free of the walls… chitin plates scraping rock, mandibles clacking, their bodies glowing faintly with bioluminescent veins as though their blood was made of fire.

  They poured out endlessly, drawn by the relic of Hunger, their greed and madness driving them into the slaughter without hesitation.

  I stood in the center of it all, and the cavern became a grinder of flesh. My talons ripped through ribcages like parchment, skulls bursting in my fists. My tail cleaved entire ranks in half, sending torsos flying one way and legs tumbling the other. The floor grew slick beneath me, rivers of blood running between the rocks. Flesh splattered the walls in steaming streaks. Organs squelched under my attacks, slick ropes of intestine wrapping around my ankles only to be torn free with every step.

  Still, they came. Still, they screamed. The pit itself seemed endless, vomiting bodies until it was less a cavern and more a slaughterhouse floor, choked with unrecognizable heaps of meat.

  And in the heart of it, I moved; unstoppable, unyielding, the monster and I united, rending and tearing as though this endless tide existed for no purpose but to die by my hands.

  There must have been close to a hundred bodies piled before me already, mangled heaps stacked so high that stone was buried beneath a carpet of flesh. And still they came.

  I wasn’t just me anymore. The monster inside wasn’t separate… it never had been. Myordrakien and I were not two beings. We were one, two sides of the same coin. The truth hit me in every bone: I had wasted years pretending I was caging him, pretending he was something other than me. The deal had sealed it. There was no singular Sam… and no Primeval of Annihilation. There was only me… the thing made from both.

  The tail was my revelation. When it ripped out of me, bone and obsidian armor fused into a colossal extension of my spine, and I understood what it meant to be both of us. Thick and long, proportional to my body yet wider than any limb should be, its jagged ridges gleamed like black glass. It swung with crushing weight, yet I wielded it as though it were a feather. It was my broad sword, my wrecking ram. When it slammed into walls, stone shattered; when it connected with bodies, they disintegrated. Flesh and bone exploded into sprays of meat. Spines cracked like twigs. Heads burst like melons.

  I no longer had to face my enemy to kill them. With talons tearing forward and tail sweeping behind, every direction was mine. I was a whirlwind of destruction, murder, and inescapable doom.

  And yet… even as I tore through them, even as gore dripped from every talon, a flicker of thought pierced the frenzy. My sonar pulses… stronger than they had ever been, echoed deeper into the pits. What they showed me made my chest tighten. The sea of enemies had no end. Every wave I killed was replaced by another. The swarm grew denser. If I kept fighting, I would drown in them. And worse… Alex lay buried in the ruins of the white structure. The relic was still with her. If I stayed, she would die… and the relic would be lost to something that slipped past me.

  Then Hunger’s voice slithered into my skull.

  “Take your companion and flee this place. You cannot claim them all in one attempt. Return to the surface with my relic. The elders come.”

  Her intrusion enraged me, my instincts snarling against her. But beneath the fury was the truth. I could slaughter until the cavern was filled to the ceiling with corpses, and it would mean nothing. Alex would die.

  I sprinted, bounding through stone, crushing enemies beneath me with every step. Hunger hissed again:

  “Use the mark I have granted you. Place it upon one of my veins.”

  I didn’t trust her. The human in me screamed against it. But Myordrakien’s will smothered that doubt. The deal we had made was binding, and she would hold her word.

  I hurled myself into the rubble, ripping slabs of white stone apart like paper until her body came free. She was limp and unconscious.

  I shifted down, monstrous bone cracking inward, my form folding back into my human frame so I could scoop her into my arms. I didn’t trust myself to be gentle enough in my Primeval form to not hurt her further. My pulse hammered as my eyes darted across the rubble for the relic, but… it was gone.

  Panic consumed me. I blasted sonar pulses again and again, my senses tearing through the cavern in frantic waves. The fang of crimson crystal should have been here, glowing like a beacon. It wasn’t… and my heart raced, panic blinding me. Then I realized… it was already in my arms.

  My void-black eyes looked down. Alex’s wounds were gone. Bones once shattered were whole. Flesh once ripped to ribbons was perfect. Only her shredded clothes remained to hint at the carnage she had endured when the elder swatted her like a fly. And I felt it… the relic thrummed inside her chest.

  “What the fuck…” I gasped, my breath caught in my throat.

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  “MOVE!” Hunger shrieked, her voice tearing at my mind. “My children are on their way!”

  The horde’s claws echoed behind me, a storm of screeches and scrapes rattling against the cavern walls like the gnashing of a thousand rusted blades. Their shrieks grew louder, closer, promising to tear us apart the moment my legs faltered. I clutched Alex to my chest so tight I felt her ribs press against me, my stride pounding across the stone with frantic, bone-jarring force.

  The mark on my flesh seared, pulling me toward a vein of crimson that pulsed faintly in the cavern wall. To any sane eye, it was nothing but stone; a dead end waiting to crush me against its jagged face. My fury surged. Was this Hunger’s betrayal? Was she herding me into a trap?

  But the mark flared hotter, burning into my lower arm as I neared. The wall shuddered. Veins of red split wider, fissures spidering out until the rock itself began to bleed. The jagged surface softened, quivering like skin, and before me, the stone peeled apart into a gash of living flesh. The stench that hit me was fetid, thick with old rot and damp earth, as though the cavern itself had been revived from stone into a rotting carcass.

  With no time left, I hurled myself forward. The wall opened to swallow us whole. Darkness consumed me instantly, absolute and smothering, thicker than any night I had ever known. The rock was no longer rock. It was a membrane, slick and pulsating, tightening around me like the throat of some vast, buried beast. Crawling sensations needled across my skin, sharp as a thousand pinpricks, as if insects were swarming over me in the dark. The walls flexed and shifted, grinding against my shoulders and legs with the weight of stone and the give of flesh. It was like being chewed alive, pulled through the bowels of a thing older and hungrier than time.

  I pressed Alex closer, crushing her limp body against my chest, unwilling to give even an inch of her to Hunger’s passage. My mind raced with every heartbeat: would she try to claim Alex now? Rip her from my arms, steal both her and the relic that pulsed inside her? I wouldn’t let her. My talons dug into my own flesh with the effort of holding on, refusing to release her even as the membranes constricted around us.

  The grinding tunnels shifted and carried us, not solid stone but trillions of small pieces of Hunger’s old titanic form, like countless little hands moving me along. The walls sucked and pulled, dragging me through twisting channels where the air itself seemed to disappear. The pressure built until my skull throbbed, until I thought my bones might splinter from the strain.

  Then… sudden release.

  The membranes convulsed one last time and spat us forward. I burst into open air, stumbling into a cavern washed in natural blackness instead of Hunger’s red glow. Cool air rushed into my lungs, sharp and clean compared to the suffocating press of rock I’d just endured. It was surreal for a moment, unbelievable that we had made it back to the top after everything. My mind was still washed in the red fury of absolute Annihilation from slaying so many things down there.

  I didn’t waste a heartbeat and took off in the direction my senses told me. I carried her upward, retracing tunnels that were ingrained in my memory until the cornucopia of human smells drifted down from the surface, leading me up and out of the depths.

  I forced open a manhole cover, and the sun hit me in the retinas. I shook off the abrupt surprise and pushed Alex’s limp body through the small hole. I crawled out after her, quickly scooping her up and sprinting for cover. I was still a bloodied mess, and I didn’t think society would take too kindly to a naked, bloody man running with an unconscious woman in his arms. I didn’t think about anything, I just kept running. I had to get her and the shard somewhere safe.

  Sunlight blazed across us intermittently as I navigated my way to safety. We moved through alleys, buildings, and trees to remain unseen. Then it hit me…

  I froze. She should be burning. Every vampire I had ever seen had gone up in flames beneath the sun, their bodies bursting into smoke and ash. But Alex… Alex was fine… just lying in my arms completely unharmed… not even aware of the sun. The light didn’t burn her, only lit her up for the first time in decades. I noticed how she looked… healthy. She had no discernible markings on her. Her body felt solid, strong, and lithe. Her crimson hair gleamed darker, bloodier somehow than it had before.

  She was a vampire. She should have been ash. But with the relic inside her, she was becoming something more. My pulse sense revealed it… her body thrummed with power, every vein alive with the relic’s energy. Where once I had only seen a strange flickering light moving through her core, now her entire body was lit, pulsing with power. My pulse sense reacted to it in a way that reminded me of something… like the elder… but different.

  I whispered to her unconscious face, “What the hell are you turning into?”

  The city fell away behind me in fragments: streets lined with quiet houses, empty sidewalks, the occasional bark of a dog or the groan of a passing truck. The ordinary world continued on, blind to the ruin festering beneath its feet… and the hundreds of bodies that were lying in ruin down in the pits.

  I clutched Alex tighter, her body light as if she were already a ghost, and kept to the edges of everything, slipping between shadows until the city thinned.

  When the factory finally loomed into sight, my chest tightened.

  The old husk of brick and steel crouched on the outskirts like a rusting tomb, windows blackened, glass long since shattered and swallowed by vines. The smokestacks leaned like broken fingers clawing at the gray sky, their insides choked with years of ash and silence. Rust streaked the walls like dried blood, and whole slabs of roofing sagged inward, exposing the hollow ribs of beams that jutted like bones from a carcass. Every inch of the place reeked of abandonment, of forgotten time and rotting industry.

  This had been my first exile. My cave of concrete shadows when the city had no place for me. I had once slept on the cold floor here… showered from an old, rusty water pipe. I had sworn never to return, to leave behind the part of me that had lived like an animal inside this place. But here I was again, carrying something far heavier than before.

  When I found this place before, I was an unnamed monster, struggling to keep from killing everyone, while trying to find a way to be killed myself. To release myself from this horrific torment. Now, I came as something more! I was Annihilation, bound to Death himself… and I brought with me a piece of Hunger incarnate; bound inside Alex. Two monsters walked into the factory this time. Two things from an era before this world was born.

  Alex shifted faintly against me, unconscious still, her skin glowing faintly under the dim light that crept through the overhanging trees, as if the Fang of Hunger still burned inside her veins. She wasn’t the same Alex anymore. She wasn’t just a vampire… she never had been; but even now, she was more than the anthropophagous vampire who ate her own kind. She was something reborn… something Primeval… or as close to it as anyone else could get… besides me. I also assumed, technically, she was a new elder.

  I crossed the threshold, boots crunching on glass that had sat undisturbed for who knows how long. Shadows swallowed us whole. My sonar pulse rippled outward, and the cavernous factory responded: empty, save for the scurry of insects and the faint squeak of a rat that fled as soon as it felt me coming. Even the vermin knew better than to share space with me now.

  Inside, the factory breathed silence. Water dripped from somewhere deep, the hollow clang echoing through the steel ribs. A cold draft slithered through holes in the roof, stirring motes of dust that drifted like ghosts. I sat Alex down gently on a slab of concrete, her hair spilling across the floor like a crimson flame, and for a moment I just stared at her.

  This was no longer just exile… not like before. This was a new beginning… whether I wanted it or not. St. Louis would never be the same. Hunger’s relic had found a new host. Alex was its vessel until I found a way to disperse that power along with the rest of it. Until then… I would be her guardian.

  I sat against the cold wall of the factory, Alex still resting on the concrete, her crimson hair spilling over the exposed flesh of her shoulders, where her shirt was in tatters. I needed to find her some clothes.

  For the first time since the pit, I wasn’t moving. My muscles twitched with the phantom need to fight, to rip, to kill, but the silence here pressed that instinct down. The factory’s stillness was heavier than the blood-soaked caverns… it demanded thought, not violence. And with stillness came the fear I had been outrunning.

  The shard of Hunger pulsed inside Alex. I could see it in her veins, hear it in the rhythm of her breathing, feel it when my pulse sense brushed over her body. It was not dormant… it was alive, embedding itself deeper, weaving itself into her as though it had always belonged. She looked peaceful now, her red hair spilled across her shoulders, her face smooth and pale under the flicker of daylight seeping through broken glass. But I knew what she carried.

  I knew what it meant.

  When I finish what I had started… when the elders fell and the last battle was fought, the power of Hunger couldn’t stay. It had to be dispersed; broken apart and put into the world the way it was meant to be ages ago; when Myordrakien was supposed to destroy all of the Primevals. That was always the deal… the path Death had laid out before me. And if the shard lived inside her… then the day was coming when I’d have to take it back.

  However, I wondered… what would happen to her when the time came to give it up? When she released it… would she live… or die? The thought gripped me harder than I thought it would. I needed to figure that out. But… who the fuck was I supposed to ask?