Silence slammed back at me at first, thick, as if the cavern refused to believe something so raw. Then Hunger laughed in Alex's voice, a sound that scraped like metal across bone. It bounced in the wet dark and came back at me, reverberating with a dozen mocking undertones.

  “Kill? Oh, little envoy, you speak so prettily,” the voice cooed. “You carve… You kill… you destroy, and yet…” It paused, tasting the conceit like spice. “You will feed me still. And she… she is mine! My relics give me life in this new world! The world you meant to keep us from.”

  Inside Alex, the mental scream became audible syllables as her face shifted into her own control. It was only for a split second, sharp and pleading. “Help me…” she broke through as control of her face contorted.

  The cavern tightened, waiting… three monstrosities arranged like instruments tuned by Hunger, and across from them… me, wreathed in fury that wanted nothing more than to make the cavern go silent; to destroy… everything!

  “Then come,” I said, voice low enough to cut everything else out and leave only the killing intent. “We’ll rip you out. Starting with the one inside her.”

  Hunger regained control and smiled through Alex, and the smile was a slash. “Start with me? How deliciously vengeful. Even if you had the balls...” The thing behind the smile relaxed like a cat settling. “By the time your hands finish with one thread, the pits will have woven another. You cannot stop a hunger that eats its own maker… and the maker is bound to the earth... the endless plane.”

  Alex screamed then, a thin, raw sound that carried all the fear and shame and pleading she could not otherwise voice. It wasn’t loud; it was a hollow, fractured thing from the inside of her, and it stabbed through me harder than any blade. For the first time, the idea that I might not be able to save her scraped at the edges of me like glass.

  Rage answered the weakness, and it was clean and bright. My talons flexed. The air around us hummed, thickening into the shape of a coming strike. The elders shifted in the dark… bone, chitin, and gore sensing the promise of violence. Perhaps sensing that everything in that cavern now existed only to feed what came next… whether that was them and Hunger feeding on me… or me… feeding on the death that would follow.

  I moved first.

  The moment my feet surged on the ground, the cavern shook. Rock cracked under my steps like brittle bone, rubble spraying out behind me as I sprinted forward, not at Alex, but at the abominations. My body blurred in the dark, every muscle coiled and straining. Alex wasn’t striking at me, not yet. These three were.

  I launched myself with everything I had, the air around me thickening until it felt like I was wading through oil. It slithered into my nose, my mouth, my ears, and I could feel it crawling over my muscles, heavier than the depths of any ocean. The jump faltered. My body lurched mid-air, my momentum dropping an instant before I reached the first monstrosity… the tall, skeletal one with elbow-spears of bone.

  It moved with impossible speed. One moment, its joints were cocked like a mantis; the next, a bone lance twisted around, uncoiling with the precision of a trap and impaling me before I even had time to think. It was instant. White-hot pain lit my insides as I was lifted on the spike, barbs tearing and splintering through my gut. And then… impact. It hit me like a freight train, a soundless eruption of force, and ripped me free of its own weapon, dragging jagged pieces of it out of my flesh as I was thrown.

  I slammed into a field of rock spires; jagged, thorn-like teeth bursting from the cavern floor. They didn’t break beneath me. They cut. I felt myself stabbed and sliced in a dozen places at once, driven deeper into the stone like meat on skewers. My blood hissed against the hungry rock, the smell of iron rising around me.

  I tried to move, tried to pull myself free, but it wasn’t like before. Here, my body felt fragile. Pain seared into me, real and raw, the kind of pain I hadn’t felt since I was human. The tall, lanky thing… the “weaker” elder, was manhandling me like I was one of the petty criminals I used to drag out of alleys and slaughter like pigs.

  Nothing made sense. My power should’ve answered. Death’s domain should’ve opened at my call for more. But it didn’t. The fields were silent. Annihilation’s strength was unreachable, as if the depths of the pits themselves were smothering me.

  For a flicker of a moment, doubt knifed into my mind. Death had told me there were places where things worse than dying could happen… where even I could be stripped, undone. For the second time since I became this… thing, I felt that inevitability creeping back. The only other time I felt this was when the Unseen stood as a titan before me in his dimension.

  Then came the ringing. A hiss, high and needle-thin, boring into my skull until it filled everything. My vision swam. A force, cold and unseen, wrapped itself around me, prying me out of the stone spikes with brutal efficiency. My limbs flailed, blood dripping in arcs as I was dragged through the cavern’s dark air.

  Alex’s hand was outstretched, fingers spread like claws, and I realized it wasn’t her saving me. It was Hunger, pulling me to her like a hooked fish.

  I hung there before her face, suspended in nothing. No leverage, no ground beneath me. She spun me like a toy, upside-down, bringing my face level with hers. The look she gave me was pure, twisted joy… a hungry glee that didn’t belong to Alex. Hunger was thrilled, eyes glittering with anticipation like she’d been handed a meal she’d never thought she’d taste.

  “You were the one to betray us!” Hunger’s voice rumbled through Alex, layered and echoing like multiple throats speaking at once. “We lived separately, yet we were still family. We had balance. We had ourselves… our world.”

  Her hands roamed her body again, possessive, obscene. “We didn’t need to bow to the well-laid plans before us. Why should we kneel, trampled beneath weak, pathetic humans that infest this world now? If you hadn’t taken your role as executioner, they would never have been born.”

  Her lips curled into a snarl, and the cavern seemed to deepen around her. “The Primeval of Flesh and Bone would still be alive, and these parasites would never have spawned. We were strong enough to resist the greater will. But you… You dear brother… You kept tearing it apart.”

  Her voice rose, the echo of three elders thrumming behind it. “You may have killed the Unseen and so many others over eons, but you have not killed me. And you have not killed the strongest of us. The Abyss remains. Others remain… things of ruin and terror bound to our choice to defy you… Myordrakien.”

  She leaned in close, eyes glinting with a thousand hungers, and whispered with a smile that was all teeth: “Even if you kill me, there is a boundless sea of our siblings waiting for you. We are many… and you… are… alone.”

  The words hit like a weight, echoing across the cavern. The three elders shifted behind her, bone, chitin, and shifting flesh waiting for the moment to collapse on me. And in Alex’s eyes, behind the glimmering malice, a flicker of her true self blinked like a candle guttering in a storm.

  The invisible force Alex held me with snapped like a wire pulled too tight. It didn’t just release me… it exploded, hurling me through the cavern as if I’d been launched from a cannon. The world spun once, twice, and then the spider was on me. One of its monstrous legs, barbed black and yellow like an industrial saw blade, swung out and hit me full-force.

  There was no sound at first. Just impact followed by a dull crunch in my face. Then everything in me broke. My ribs cracked like glass, my spine snapped in two places. I could feel every detail of the brutal pain. My vision went white as the searing heat of the pain invaded every inch of my body. I hit the rock floor like a meteor striking a planet, the cavern trembling under the weight of the blow. I carved a path through my landing, reshaping this part of the pits as I rag-dolled from the vicious assault. I slowed to a crunching halt in the rocky crater.

  I couldn’t breathe. Blood pooled beneath my cheek, warm and slick, the copper sting filling my nostrils as I weakly breathed in my broken and prone position. My arms convulsed as I tried to push myself up, but they bent wrong… snapped and twisted in angles that didn’t make sense, fingers twitching like dead spiders. I knew that my mind should have been vacant after so much damage… but I remained. Myordrakien wouldn’t give up the ghost so easily… even though part of me begged for the death I used to crave for so long in that moment. The floor beneath me blurred red as my blood dripped and splattered, each drop vivid against the black rock.

  For a split second, I thought of that night. The night I was attacked by something in the woods. The night that started all of this. All the way back then, when the world was simple, and Death would soon claim me. It felt like that night. The helplessness… the dread of the unknown… the inescapable silence of it all. I felt like I was back there for just a moment.

  Then I thought, why wasn’t Death calling me? He should’ve been there. My escape, my backdoor out of this kind of shit. The voice that commanded me to “Fall.” That single word called me into his domain, where nothing could touch me. But… it didn’t come.

  Instead, I was dragged between the elders like meat between dogs. The lanky, skeletal elder speared me through again and again, my shoulder, my thigh, my lung, before tossing me to the spider, which slammed me down with another blow. My body felt hollow… weak… fragile. The reddish atmosphere never stopped as it wormed into my mouth, ears, and wounds, and each second sapped more strength from me. Hunger was poisoning me within her body… her corpse. I had walked right into it.

  Minutes… or hours, passed in that cycle of being torn apart. Time dissolved into blood, bone, and impact. But… finally, I landed in a patch of stone mercifully flat and clear of spikes. I rolled onto my back and stayed there, panting in ragged and unappealing gasps.

  I was ruined. My left leg was a mangled knot. Both arms were snapped, bent awkwardly. My ribs weren’t just broken, they were protruding through my flesh, jutting like jagged ivory. My face felt wrong. I reached up with a trembling, crooked hand through the pain of a shattered arm and felt loose skin. The upper half of my face had been pulled back so hard in one strike that the skin had torn free from my skull, drooping like wet cloth. I probably looked more like the skeletal elder than myself at that moment.

  Somewhere in me, a faint tingling tried to ignite. A flicker of regeneration, cells clawing at each other to knit me back together the way I had grown accustomed to, but it was weak. It was failing… I was failing. This wasn’t me. My power was gone. Myordrakien’s power was nowhere to be found to help me.

  Why? Why was this happening?

  My chest rose and fell shallowly, each breath a jagged tear through my ribs. In the silence between strikes, the enormity of what I stood to lose flooded me all at once.

  Alex… she was still in there somewhere. She’d clawed her way through decades of darkness. In the last few days, she had found something to cling to in us… to find something like hope, only to be hollowed out and worn like a skin by Hunger. She didn’t deserve this. She’d already been stripped bare of everything that was hers. Now Hunger had taken that, too.

  Then there was Autumn. She was battling a curse that had its roots in a Primeval I’d already killed. She was cursed by forces she didn’t even understand, and a familial enemy she had never wronged. She only had the wrong last name… his hatred was all that was required for him to make this vile connection. I’d failed Autumn a long time ago by not coming straight to her and Patrick when I knew something was wrong. I let complications get in my way, when those complications don’t mean shit now. And I only ever made it worse since. If I died here, she would never survive it. I couldn’t explain it… But I just felt it somehow.

  Then there were the hardest thoughts… Vicky and Caydee. I thought back to Texas, to a life that was mine but wasn’t anymore. My wife still walked this world, the last untouched piece of the man I had been. Caydee wouldn’t know me, except in old pictures, confused, thinking of Seth as the uncle she knew instead of me… her father. I had run. I had left them all after my life was taken by the monster.

  And yet… they were all still tethered to me. My blood, my promises, my debts I had to pay.

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  The cavern blurred and swam in my vision as those connections burned through me. It wasn’t a neat line of faces. It was a visceral, clawing ache in my chest… a montage of lives I couldn’t let go of, even here, at the bottom of the world, in my last few breaths of life.

  For the first time since my rebirth, death itself loomed close enough to taste. The real thing. Not an escape. Not a domain. Not an inevitability I could lean into. This was the end. And it was coming for me. Nothing made sense… but I found myself not making sense… only feeling what was happening and falling into confusion about it all.

  Hunger approached me in Alex’s form, each step deliberate, predatory, her movements echoing some memory that was hers and not hers. The air in this place… the damp, swallowing dark shuddered with his power. When she stopped in front of me, her expression was not merely a sneer of victory but something older, aching, and triumphant.

  “Here we are again, brother,” she said softly, her voice a double note, Alex’s timbre wrapped in a deeper, hungrier resonance. “Back inside my dominion. And you… You’ve returned to me weaker than before. You should never have come back.” Her eyes, corroded-red and bottomless, flicked over me with a mixture of hunger and something like regret. “The first time you slipped through my fingers, I was unprepared. I had to… rearrange my house. I let you take the youngest of my children. I returned to you a piece of what I stole, all those ages ago, not out of generosity but to gain your trust. All of it was to bring you back to me… when I was ready. When I could make you kneel.”

  She spread Alex’s hands and gestured at the cavernous, lightless expanse surrounding us. The walls pulsed faintly, as if with breath. “This is my body. This is where I am strongest. Even the relics I’ve sent crawling out into the world… my seeds of famine and craving are nothing compared to the concentration of my being here. This is what you stepped into. This is what you walked into willingly. And here, brother…” Her lips twisted in something between a smile and a snarl. “Here… in this joke of an existence you wield… You are powerless.”

  She leaned closer, the red in her eyes flaring. “You were dead the moment you entered.”

  But then she tilted her head back, fingers threading through Alex’s hair, pulling at it as if savoring the tactile feel of the host. Her neck arched languidly, a predator luxuriating in its kill. “It wasn’t without risk,” she murmured. “I had to have faith. My control over my children fades when they’re away from my body. When this one…” she brushed Alex’s cheek with a mocking tenderness, “wandered topside, I could only whisper to her. I could read her mind, see through her eyes, but I couldn’t touch her the way I wanted. And yet I heard everything. Everything she thought about you. Everything you did to her. Everything she did to you.”

  A flicker of something… not quite malice, not quite yearning, crossed her face. “Honestly, I am impressed. Who knew Annihilation could form attachments? I never imagined you capable of tethering yourself to a human. Of caring for her. Of reaching for something so small, so fragile.”

  Her fingers slid slowly down her borrowed throat, across Alex’s chest in a gesture that was both taunt and allure. “But this body…” Hunger’s voice dipped, ragged and reverent at once. “For this world… this body is exquisite. I see why you broke yourself against her. I see how she became your allowance, how she rooted herself into the void where nothing ever rooted before. You must’ve felt a connection to our power, yet felt she wasn't a sibling.”

  She bent closer, her mouth almost at my ear now, her touch mockingly intimate. “You thought you were saving her. But all along, brother, she was my blade and my bait. She is the proof of what you cannot destroy inside yourself… the hunger for connection, the weakness you swore you didn’t have when you hunted us.” Her hands spread across Alex’s stomach, as if she could feel things only she knew. “And now, at last, you’ve walked into me. You’ve walked back into my domain.”

  I gritted my teeth as I stared at her, my own blood drying against the stone under me, feeling the weight of complete helplessness. Not for myself. For her. Always for her. Every thought clawed at the same question… what, if anything, could I do for Alex? What had I done to her already?

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” I rasped, my voice ragged but steady. “I should have known it wouldn’t be this easy. I’m sorry you got dragged into this. I know you just want to be back with Jerry. I know that’s where you truly live.” My lips trembled as the skin began knitting itself back across them, my mouth reforming word by word. “I’ll never forget our time together. As much as you hate this life… You were a bright spot for me. Something that made my darker world a little bit brighter.”

  It didn’t happen in a single blink. It was slower, like watching sunlight seep through cracks in a cave ceiling. The crimson in her eyes didn’t vanish at once; instead, the flesh around them shifted first… shock tightening her brow, then confusion cracking her expression, then something rawer, heavier. Despair, maybe… for one heartbeat, Hunger looked like she might break. And then, it all swept away.

  Alex’s eyes cleared to green, human, and alive. She stared at me with torment written across her face, like someone caught between drowning and surfacing. In that instant, it wasn’t Hunger looking back. It was her… Alex was back.

  “Sam…” Alex’s voice shook on a single breath, brittle and quick.

  The world shivered. It was subtle, a faint slackening of the air, a loosening of the oppressive weight pressing against my lungs. But I felt it inside my own bones, a strengthening of that strange tingling that had been coiling through me since I’d been brutalized. Hunger’s hold faltered, even if only for a minute.

  I drew from that crack in its control. I reached deep, down into the place where Myordrakien coiled within me, the rage and the Annihilation we shared. Power surged up like a black tide, filling my veins, lurching my body forward. My flesh gripped itself tight, bones setting, wounds knitting in one synchronized pull. The transformation rose over me like a tide turning, unstoppable.

  I forced myself upright as the cavern shuddered. Across the chamber, the great spider barreled toward me, its limbs striking the stone like hammers, mandibles clattering in hunger and rage.

  The last of my restraint snapped. My voice… twisted, deep, no longer fully my own, ripped from my throat.

  “Fuck you!”

  The sound echoed off the living walls of Hunger’s domain, a bellow not just of defiance but of something personal… my own rage, Alex’s pain, and the faint tremor of a Primeval-thing inside me preparing to tear free.

  I planted my feet and launched again, my body moving faster than the eye could track. I twisted midair, sending a double drop kick straight into the largest eye of the spider. The black orb, smeared with those sickly yellow flecks, exploded like a grotesque balloon of pus, the sound a wet, ripping scream of insectoid agony. The spider flailed, its chittering shrieks tearing through the cavern like something alive in a nightmare.

  Beneath Alex’s skin, the crimson veins writhed, stubborn and malignant, but she stumbled across the jagged stones, fumbling, desperate, fighting Hunger inside her own mind as I assaulted the elders. I could feel it… the mental clash between her and the Primeval that was resonating with my own surge of power. Every pulse of my power made her resistance stronger, each heartbeat of mine giving her leverage over the parasite buried in her consciousness.

  I pressed it further, letting the transformation take me over fully. My bones shifted with audible clicks, muscles stretched and twisted, my skin darkening to the ominous dark grey of encroaching storm clouds of the darkest variety. My chest expanded, my arms thickened, talons erupting from my fingertips as I let every ounce of Myordrakien’s Annihilation coalesce into one monstrous form. If that new tail was there, I couldn’t tell. All I felt was rage.

  The last of the elders, the seething mass of gore, started to condense. It shrank from a writhing ocean of flesh into something humanoid, roughly my size. Features emerged slowly: olive-toned skin, black oily hair swept to one side, expressionless and unnervingly calm. A fa?ade, a mask. It radiated something ancient, disciplined, deadly.

  Alex screamed, shrill and raw, a sound of pain and defiance mingled. I could feel it through the link, through the resonance of our connection. Every surge I sent through my body weakened Hunger’s grasp on her. Slowly, inch by inch, we were pushing back, turning its momentum against it.

  I roared, drawing more from the depths of Annihilation. My muscles knotted, my skeleton realigned, my form ballooned upward, massive and terrifying. The dark energy that clung to me burned hotter, brighter, a storm of void, fury, and death.

  Then it happened. The crimson veins under Alex’s skin retracted violently, as though yanked from her body. Hunger’s presence shifted entirely, abandoning her to seize the newly formed humanoid elder. The Persian-faced figure’s eyes flared red, glowing from within as the Primeval settled in, twisting control to this new host.

  Alex crumpled to the jagged floor, gasping, pain and relief mingling in her exhausted breaths. She clawed herself upright through the loose stone and shattered rock, dragging herself into a staggered stance. For now, she had won. For now, Hunger’s hold on her was broken… but the fight was far from over.

  I didn’t wait. I surged forward again, larger, faster, ready to meet the three elders where they stood, knowing every second counted. But… I felt the atmosphere return… invading me like before. Then came something sharp and decisive that nailed me like I was a piece of chicken on a shish kebab.

  The spike through my chest felt like it had nailed my soul to the rock. The spider’s leg pinned me so deep I could hear the bones in my back grinding against the stone. Every heartbeat pumped more black blood from my mouth, splattering across the cavern floor in thick ropes. The fog deepened, heavy as wet velvet, and the veins in the walls pulsed brighter, like the entire cavern was a living, breathing entity that was claiming my life.

  “Sam!” Alex’s voice cracked across the pit, terror splitting my name into two syllables. She could see everything, but she was trapped in her own body, in her own fear.

  “Run!” My voice was a rasp, half a roar, half a plea. It cost everything to force it out of my shredded throat.

  The humanoid figure stepped forward with a predator’s patience. His blank eyes glowed dusty red now, Hunger’s essence staring out of them. He didn’t speak, he just reached for my head. Fingers punctured my flesh as easily as paper, digging into the sinew of my neck until his claws scraped vertebrae. Then he pulled.

  The pressure on my spine built fast, like a vice tightening, threatening to pop me apart at the base of my skull. I flexed, braced, twisted, but the atmosphere here drained me like poison. My power slipped through my fingers, and still his grip didn’t waver. I couldn’t even turn my head to look at Alex. But through my pulse sense, I felt her… like a trembling, luminous thread standing frozen, her will caught between terror and desperation.

  She wanted to run to me. I felt it. She wanted to tear me free, throw herself back into the fight. But there was something new in her fear… a survival instinct she hadn’t known in decades. For the first time, she didn’t want to die. Not here. Not now. Because she couldn’t give up on the one tether she had to this world… me. But she was watching me be torn apart.

  I sent a surge out through the cavern, a pulse of Annihilation not meant to search but to push. My presence, my will, the raw echo of Myordrakien flared outward like a shockwave. The cavern walls quaked, the red veins stuttered in their glow, and all three elders faltered… just for an instant. Their grip on me loosened as the pulse hammered into them.

  It wasn’t words, but Alex understood it. She felt the surge ripple across her mind and body. She knew exactly what I wanted: Run. Save yourself. Get out of here. Live.

  She turned immediately, sprinting like something wild, her bare feet slapping stone, scattering shards and dust. At the cavern wall, she slammed her palm down, and the toothy rocks shifted under her touch, parting like a gnarled maw to reveal an opening.

  Behind her, the Persian-shaped elder trembled as Hunger’s full weight coiled inside him. His eyes went black-red, veins crawling across his face as he bent himself to the Primeval’s will. The spider skittered closer, hissing, its remaining eyes glowing like sulfur.

  I felt the grip on my skull tighten again, fingers sinking deeper. The pressure built until my vision went white at the edges. My spine creaked like a rope under strain.

  Alex put one foot through the opening but turned to look back at me, her green eyes wide, horror etched across her face; fear… guilt… something like love… or attachment. She watched as the elders tried to tear me apart, and Hunger’s power swelled to crush me completely. She looked like a woman about to shatter, not knowing what to do or how to survive being alone again.

  And still she hesitated… caught between the instinct to flee and the impossible pull to come back for me.

  It was the moment our eyes locked that the sound came. Not a clean snap but a wet, crunching pop, like green wood splitting under a blade. The pressure that had been building in my neck broke all at once, and the pain vanished. I felt weightless, disconnected, but not gone. My vision shifted in strange jerks as if my head were moving without my body. Alex’s face froze in front of me, and her expression told me the truth before my mind could catch up… my head was no longer attached. The prime elder had succeeded.

  For half a heartbeat, Alex just stared, her body trembling against the jagged stone as the wall shifted behind her. The eternity in her eyes was a reflection of the eternity in mine; an instant stretched to breaking as we both realized what had just been lost. Her lips parted like she might scream, but nothing came out; she simply fell backward into the shifting rock, vanishing into the ascending vein-lit passage, her green eyes the last thing I saw before the earth swallowed her.

  I thought everything would go black then. But it didn’t. Somehow, even severed, I still felt my body. It lay slumped on the cavern floor while the other two elders swarmed it like carrion beasts. Razors of teeth raked through me. I felt the pull of my intestines being dragged out, long wet strands stretched and torn before the skeletal elder stuffed them between its jaws. The spider impaled my limbs one by one with its barbed legs, ripping free chunks of meat as the two lesser elders fought over what was left. Every bite was a flash of sensation in a body I no longer inhabited but could not escape.

  From where my head rolled, I saw Alex disappear up through the shifting stone… a red streak swallowed by glowing veins as she ascended to the city. She had slipped through Hunger’s grip for now. I could feel it, even in my ruined state: the invisible war raging between them, Hunger filling her domain with a choking smog while Alex’s last mental push weakened it just enough to flee. Two primeval wills colliding on a plane no mortal could see, and it was enough to let Alex escape.

  But I had lost. I wasn’t strong enough to kill Hunger in her own body, her own domain. Not without Death. Not without his blade. The fragment of Annihilation I carried wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.

  The only shard of solace left was knowing Alex had made it out. If she could stay free, maybe Hunger’s voice would weaken, maybe she could stay herself. It had to be enough. It had to…

  The Persian man bent down, holding my severed head in both hands. His blank, youthful face warped into a sneer as Hunger peered through it. “Not so special after all,” she hissed through him. Then he tossed me aside like trash. My head rolled, bouncing once before lodging between two jagged stones.

  The pain dulled. The cavern’s red glow dimmed, and a darkness thicker than anything I had ever known crept in from the edges of my mind. My thoughts slowed, faltered, and faded.

  The last thing that surfaced wasn’t rage or despair but a single memory: Caydee, asleep in her crib. The rise and fall of her tiny chest. The softness of her skin under my hand. A perfect, untainted moment from a life that felt impossibly far away.

  And then everything went black.