Alex wouldn’t stop messing with her shirt as we went deeper into the pits. She kept grabbing and twisting her body around in her new charcoal-colored T-shirt, huffing like she was annoyed that it wasn't the best fit or something.

  “This fucking thing is too small,” she said through gritted teeth with irritation.

  I glanced over at her, eyebrows raised. “You good?” It seemed a little excessive.

  She didn’t respond, just huffed again in frustration as she tried to stretch it out a little.

  We had left the open cavern where we slaughtered those vampires and returned to tighter spaces as we descended. I could smell the river water that had leaked through the deep cave walls, the same water she used to clean herself was still dampening her hair. I could smell it on her, as well as the lingering blood that hid in the cracks of her skin.

  “Sorry… I guess that woman wasn't as big as you,” I said quickly, acknowledging I took the best intact shirt. I wasn't shopping around for her to find the best option.

  Alex stopped walking, eyeing me with actual annoyance. “What did you say?” Real anger was building in her face as she scrunched her eyes and nose toward me, waiting for an explanation… or to swing at me.

  I realized as soon as she responded what she must have heard… maybe it was the way I said it.

  I chuckled darkly to myself, which warranted a deeper scowl from Alex in the eerie red light. Even my Primeval side laughed… only finding this conversation trivial.

  “Sorry… what I meant to say was, she wasn’t as big as you… in the… chest area,” I said it trying to find a way not to make it awkward.

  She realized quickly what I meant, and the anger faded. It was quickly replaced by an upturned nose and a snarky-ass comment.

  “Oh… so you noticed… I knew you were looking at me showering, you fucking creep!”

  And there it was… it was just a matter of time before that came out. She had that in her back pocket and was just itching to use it.

  I just shook my head, wishing I hadn’t said anything, because I knew I was about to get an earful. I couldn’t deny it… she had seen me watching her.

  About half an hour passed as we continued, going deeper and deeper into the pits. Alex found new words and phrases to call me: creep, weirdo, pervert, asshole, obsessed, pathetic… the list went on and on. I just blocked her out, especially when I saw the corner of her lips rise in amusement when I started to get irritated in the beginning. She was trying to piss me off.

  She spoke just quietly enough that only I could hear her words. Part of me wanted to tell her to shut the fuck up, but we both knew that it didn’t matter. Even as she was verbally abusing me, she never spoke loud enough to alert anyone or anything to our presence. Nothing outside of a five-foot radius could hear her whisper-like bullying.

  I stopped talking and let her ramble on at her heart's content. It was amusing to her… and I think it was distracting her from something else. So, we continued down the path. We had probably walked another hour or so with no change, other than the tunnel shifting between cramped and spacious a few times. Then we saw something that gave us both pause.

  The red veins in the rocks had been spaced out and randomly strewn across the walls of the caverns since we entered the pits. The glowing red mineral deposits were everywhere… until they became more complex. Now they surged in quantity, covering the walls more than ten times the amount where we entered. Not only that, but they all seemed to converge into a single point on the cave wall on our left. The mass of pulsing red stone veins formed a glowing spot on the wall the size of a garage door.

  Myordrakien’s voice ripped through me, “KILL!!!”

  The snarling voice vibrated every inch of me, making me feel like it spoke out loud in the cave. Its words caught my attention and forced me to stare into the glowing rocks. For a few seconds without breaking line of sight.

  I looked over, and Alex’s eyes were still on the wall, unbothered by what I had just felt inside. He was speaking to me, and she couldn’t hear it. That was good. Less to explain.

  “What is this?” Alex asked with awe in her voice. Neither she nor I had ever seen anything like this. She got closer to the wall, tilting her head in inspection as she tried to figure out what she was feeling.

  It felt… alive, and it pulsed with light that looked like…

  “Is that… a pulse?” Alex spoke out about her internal thoughts, knowing I didn’t have the answers. This place was new to both of us.

  It felt like… like a heart beating on the other side of the stone in front of us. The light surged with each beat, lighting up our faces in the cramped corridor of jagged stone. Every few seconds, a new surge would gleam, only to dim in the moments between beats. We stood together, side by side, watching the rocks do things we didn’t understand.

  Alex slowly lifted a tattooed arm and reached for the wall, but I felt an instinct to stop her. I snapped a hand to hers, pulling it away from the wall.

  “Don’t touch that!” I barked at her, unapologetically.

  She looked alarmed at my quick snap of seriousness, but she didn’t argue. She could see that I felt something, and she slowly pulled her arm away from the jagged wall of stone.

  Yet, I felt something that made me want to reach out for it. I slowly lifted my left hand to the wall. I could feel rings of energy running up each finger, rolling down my wrist, and up my arm as I got closer to the rough and craggy surface. Alex watched with large eyes, unsure of what was happening, but understanding that I was connected to it somehow. She didn’t stop me like I stopped her. She knew that I was bound to things much stranger than she was used to and didn’t protest my hypocrisy as I reached for the same wall.

  I placed my palm on the craggy surface that was burning red. The moment my skin touched the surface, the wall shifted and began shuffling in on itself like a deck of cards. The immovable had been turned brittle in a way that was hard to understand, and I was pulled into the wall. Jagged shards of black stone bit against me; they didn’t pierce my flesh, but they gripped me, pulling me inside like a million little fingers shuffling me inside the wall of the pits. I was being swallowed by the earth itself.

  For a split second before I fully entered the stone, I felt Alex grab my arm fiercely, trying to pull me back out. Then… a yell of sincere panic split her lips.

  “Sam!” she screamed in the fading red glow of the cavern as I was taken from it. It was too late. I was pulled into stone, and everything went dark as the earth itself swallowed me whole.

  Images flooded me… things I couldn’t remember, but memories so clear… yet segmented.

  I remember the ground trembling beneath me. The weight of my body pressing into the earth, many legs churning in a blur of motion, each one of eight clawing for purchase. The air was thick with the scent of torn soil and shattered bark. Trees broke against my mass of chitin armor, their trunks snapping like frail bones against my strength, scattering leaves and debris in my wake. But with every step… I was hungry… always hungry.

  Ahead… always ahead… I moved. The mountain rose like a black tooth at the edge of the horizon, nestled along the great sea. Its face was riddled with deep mouths of stone, caverns that spiraled far into the earth. I knew them. I had hidden there before, curled in the dark, wrapped in the silence of the deep rock. If I could reach them, I could vanish if things went wrong. The mountain would keep me, shield me from the coming destruction, from the open air where Annihilation would descend from.

  But even as I ran, I knew why I was running. The time had come. I could feel Annihilation pressing closer, though I could not see him yet. It moved in its own way; never all at once, but in careful, calculated movements. He took us down one by one. A name whispered in silence, then gone forever from our Primeval world. The essence scattered, drawn out across the land like seeds in the wind… our family slaughtered by our own… our eldest.

  It was the order of things. I had known it since the beginning. We were not meant to last. We were meant to grow… to establish and create… but end all the same. I did not want the end… none of us did. Not yet.

  My hunger burned in my chest, fueling my heart with power that carried a perpetual need… a need for more. It was a second heart in my chest… one that never ceased. I wanted to keep devouring, to keep moving, to keep breathing the taste of the living world and all of its aspects that could satiate me. I wanted to feel the stone beneath me, the sky above me, and the life I consumed to fill me. I wanted to live.

  I was born into purpose. Given strength not for myself, but for the shaping of the world for the next stage. My gift… my curse… was Hunger. I was the unquenchable thirst… the starving gut… the unending starvation. I was the drive to consume, to break down the living and the dead alike so that growth might follow. I was the cycle that turned flesh and matter into fuel. The shepherd who fed and grew his flock by devouring them in turn. Without me, the balance faltered. Without me, there was no process of renewal.

  That was what I told myself, even now, at the edge of destruction. I could not bow. I would not. I knew the design, the pattern laid long before I first opened my many eyes. I knew the span of my life, counted in eons, and the moment it would end. I had seen the same truth in the eyes of my siblings. Yet we… had grown attached. To the taste of the air, to the thunder of our own movement, to the pulse of the world beneath our limbs. We had shaped the earth to our liking, filled it with our children, molded it to reflect our own hungers and desires. A Primeval ecosystem that was meant to fall… yet we grew attached. We… I… did not want to lie down in servitude.

  We whispered in the deep places. We spoke of plans we should never have made.

  Our eldest brother, Myordrakien… he was different. He had been given a role colder and greater than ours. He was the harbinger of the next age… the Doom. The end of all things of the Primeval world. He would be the last to stand, the final blade before the next age could begin. He walked above us, yet apart from us, never lingering where the world was soft and green. He held to the highest point of the earth, a fortress of black spines and lifeless stone where no wind was gentle, where no life dared tread. Only one thing lived in his great and terrible domain… HIM!

  We could not go to him. It would have been death. That was his domain. When Myordrakien descended from there, it was never by chance. It was to claim one of us… and it had happened many times. None of us could stop him… we never knew he was coming. Not until it was too late, and one of our siblings was no more; their essence spread into the shifting world.

  The memories burned sharp. A shadow stretching across the land, swallowing it whole like a false sunset. Wings, colossal, jagged, living storms spread wide enough to smother the horizon. The wind bent to them, shrieking as it was beaten down. His roar was not a sound but a force, carried by the air that bent to his will. The sky itself broke when he moved.

  His body, vast as the mountains, passed overhead in silence save for the tremor of his wings. When he descended, the sun vanished… probably hiding, scared to fall to his wrath.

  Those he came for… my brothers, my sisters… they were gone before they could even scream. And I knew, with every trembling step of my many legs, that my turn was now.

  I tore across the land in a frenzy of motion, each stride shattering the earth. Entire forests vanished beneath me, their canopies ripped apart and hurled into the sky like driftwood in a flood. The soil still quaked from his arrival. I could feel him… not in sight, not in sound, but in the way the air trembled, in the way the world seemed to shrink behind me.

  He had looked to me… and decided it was time. Just as he had come for Xiecarniul. My younger brother, the Primeval of Flesh.

  I still saw his end when I closed my eyes… what was left of him sinking into the soil, his essence bleeding into the marrow of the world, dissolving into its lifeblood. His great body unmade, his will silenced, his essence scattered into the next stage of the planet’s long, spiraling life. A new order, finer and sharper than the one we had shaped with our monstrous hands. He had fulfilled the purpose carved into him before the first dawn. And then he was nothing.

  That was to be our fate. All of us. But not if we could stop it.

  I had not believed in the beginning. Myordrakien’s shadow was too vast, too certain. I had seen his descent, had felt the crushing inevitability of it. None escaped him. None defied the path laid for us. Yet my elder brothers, the Unseen and the Abyss, Wrievethiax and Leviaxzien, ancient beyond knowing, older than the core, older than the skies… they whispered otherwise. They had a plan, simple and reckless. We were to converge… strike together.

  Myordrakien could not take us all at once. We believed this. We told ourselves this. We had seen him descend upon only one sibling at a time, and from that pattern, we spun hope. Perhaps it was a limitation. Perhaps his power was not the endless tide we thought it was. If we stood united, all of us, bound in the same place at the same moment, we could overwhelm him. Kill the unkillable. Destroy the destroyer.

  The rendezvous was set, where the mountain’s jagged feet sank into the great sea.

  I only had to make it there. The others would be waiting. Some were vast like me, Wrievethiax and Leviaxzien, their forms casting shadows over entire regions. Others… smaller, stranger, their designs meant for the next world, not this one. Fragile by our measure, yet still willing to stand in defiance with their unique affinities.

  Better to risk annihilation together than to lie down for it alone. Better to live in this world than to be dissolved into a world that would never remember our names.

  The scent of salt struck me first… the vast breath of the great sea rolling in waves against the jagged shore. The ground beneath my legs shifted from the soft grip of forest soil to the skittering jagged stone, black cliffs rising and plunging into the deep. The mountain’s shadow loomed before me, its foundation sinking into the water, the sea forever gnawing at its base.

  I could see them… my siblings… silhouettes scattered along the coast and in the cavern mouths. They were shapes too great and too strange for mortal eyes to name. Wrievethiax coiled like a living spectre across the cliffs, his body disappearing into realities I could not go to, and reemerging miles away. Leviaxzien stood with many slick and scaled limbs rooted into the sea, his upper form hunched forward above the waves. His massive head turned to meet me with eyes that burned faint gold in the dim grey of the waves. He slowly submerged himself into the deep… into his domain as we waited for doom. Wrievethiax shimmered out of touch with this plane of reality… unseen yet again. The lesser ones clung to the jagged rocks or hovered in the air like shadows given shape. They stood with me… bait.

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  And then… the air shifted. The sky grew heavier. The light, already pale, dimmed further, as if the sun had been dragged beneath a shroud.

  I knew what it meant. From the highest black spines of the world, Myordrakien moved.

  The wind grew erratic, torn in every direction. The sea itself recoiled, waves buckling backward toward the horizon, surging in power and chaos as Annihilation descended on the world.

  And then… I saw him... it was like he just appeared. He did not fall… he descended from the grey skies, each wingbeat a slow and deliberate calamity. The wings themselves were colossal plates of jagged membrane stretched between spines, each spine long enough to pierce the heart of a mountain. Their shadow swept over the sea, erasing its scant color. The sound of them… no, the force of them was like the shifting of the earth’s bones, tectonic plates grinding in the sky.

  His body was not merely vast… it was endless, a fortress of flesh and armor fused into one. Spines jutted from his back and shoulders like towers, some curved, some broken, all gleaming faintly like volcanic glass born of my sister's domain. Yet… the Primeval of the Core, Morocthalis, was no more… she, too, had fallen to Myordrakien. His tail, long enough to lash across valleys, ended in a ragged cluster of barbed spines, each dripping with the same black sheen that coated his talons.

  Those claws… blacker than obsidian, sharper than the coldest wind. Each talon curved like a cliff’s edge, their surfaces ridged and weathered from eons of rending stone, flesh, and sky alike.

  And his eyes… two voids, deeper than the Abyss itself. No reflection, no glimmer of light. They were the silence between stars, the endless gulf that swallows thought and memory alike. When they found me hiding at the border of the sea, it was as though the entire weight of the world shifted, and all other life pushed to the edges of reality.

  Doom had come, and it wore my eldest brother’s form. My legs dug into the earth, instinct pulling me forward, but there was no horizon left to run toward. The sun was gone.

  The sea, the sky, the cliffs, my waiting siblings… everything bled from my awareness until there was only him. Myordrakien’s form filled the world, but it was more than size… it was presence. A gravity of being so great that my mind had no room for anything else.

  I had thought I was ready. I had told myself I would stand with the others, strike with the force of all our powers combined. But as he drew closer, the certainty of that resolve crumbled. The words of Wrievethiax and Leviaxzien, their plan, their belief that Myordrakien could be beaten, sounded suddenly thin. It was hollow, like echoes in a cavern I had never truly entered.

  And then… he spoke. It was not sound. No vibration in the air. It was inside me, as though my bones had learned to whisper.

  “It is your time, Druvhaexior.”

  The voice was nothing like I had imagined. Not the thunder of doom, not the rending cry of worlds ending. It was calm… gentle, even. A quiet tide lapping against the edges of my mind. It was so striking that… for just a moment… my hunger was gone.

  I had never spoken to him before. None of us had, not directly. Myordrakien was always a figure on the horizon, an inevitability, a shadow you never looked directly toward as he passed in the sky. His mind now was… not cold, but weighted with something I could not name. It was not joy, hunger, not even the ruthless duty I had imagined. It felt… like sorrow. Like a burden carried so long it had become a part of his shape.

  “Allow me to bring you to rest… to join the others… away from this place.”

  Rest… The word echoed in me, strange and alien. We were not meant for rest; we were motion, change, unending purpose to shape a new, growing world. Yet something in his tone made it sound almost… merciful. For the first time since I had felt his shadow pass over the land, I hesitated.

  For the first time since I had agreed to the betrayal, I wondered if the others had been wrong. And in that pause, the surety of my survival began to rot away.

  The weight of his presence pressed into me, heavy as the ocean’s floor, and for a fleeting moment I felt… small. Not in size… never in size… but in will. His black, endless eyes held me still, the air between us silent but for the slow, patient thunder of his wings as he remained aloft.

  I might have answered him. I might have asked what he meant by “rest.” I might have dared to ask if he truly mourned us. But then… movement.

  From the cliffside, the stone itself seemed to split. A shadow as vast as the coastline slid forward, scales the color of storm-slick granite peeling free from the sea’s depths. Leviaxzien rose from his domain, the sea spilling from his immense coils, body glistening with the dark sheen of the abyssal deep. His many eyes burned like embers under deep water, locked not on me but on our brother in the sky.

  Wrievethiax emerged next, the earth groaning in protest as his rooted limbs tore free from their anchors. The black forests that had grown over his massive shoulders tumbled into the surf below. His long, jagged maw split open in a soundless roar, hellfire eyes cutting like claws through the dimness Myordrakien had cast over the world.

  They were no longer waiting. They were signaling. The plan spoken in whispers in the hidden places had begun. A pulse of understanding rippled through me. Wrievethiax’s mountainous form stood tall, the signal we had agreed upon. Leviaxzien’s great head dipped forward through the waves, the confirmation. Others moved in the periphery; some greater, some lesser… but all crawling from fissures, sliding from the shadows of the cliffs, descending from the plains of existence around us where the mountain met the sea. Their shapes were strange and shifting, their eyes set on the black-winged harbinger above. We were many… and he… he was one.

  The moment broke whatever strange, unsteady thread Myordrakien’s voice had spun inside me. The hesitation burned away, replaced with the raw, gnawing will to live… the will that had always been my truth… my siblings' truth.

  My eldest brother might have spoken with regret, might have carried something in his heart I had never known… but he was still the hand of the end. He was still Annihilation… and I… I was still Hunger, and I was starving.

  The ruse held true in my mind. The rebellion lived.

  I spread my many limbs wide, claws sinking deep into the stone as I prepared to lunge. The taste of battle swelled in my mind, bitter and electric. My gaze met Leviaxzien’s across the black waves, then Wrievethiax’s titanic form, and I knew… whether we triumphed or died here… it would not be in silence. We would rage against the destiny shackled on us.

  The sky trembled, the sea recoiled, the earth cracked… and then… we struck.

  New memories plagued me next, starkly different from before. It felt later… it felt… panicked… fearful.

  I fled… running again like I had so many cycles ago; back when I lured my brother into an ambush. This time… there was no one waiting for me. There was no ruse… I was running… ready to abandon all. I was alone.

  The weight of the world beneath my claws shattered anew with every desperate step. My spiny legs, once pillars of strength and fury, now tore the earth apart in frantic bursts, ripping soil, snapping ancient roots, crushing stone like brittle glass. The forests behind me withered in my wake, leaves blackening and curling as though the land itself recoiled from my passage. The earth itself sensed the mark on me… and wanted no ties to my fate.

  This was no hunt, no move of Annihilation, no familiar predator of Flesh, Hunger, or Power. It was something else, something from beyond our Primeval world that came for us now. An unknown terror with power that mirrored Myordrakien’s; the power to erase, to end without mercy or reason. This power frightened me more than the destructive wrath of Myordrakien. This new enemy was silent… creeping, and hidden from us.

  I had seen what we had wrought. The killing of Myordrakien, the fall of the Annihilator. His gargantuan body pinned to the earth, spines embedded like jagged spears in rock and soil.

  Every living Primeval had torn at him, ravenous and relentless, devouring the end itself. Even I had fed from him; taken more than my fill of his powerful body. We showed him no mercy… as he showed our fallen brothers and sisters. Yet… it still felt… wrong.

  Now… a shadow hunted us. It knew what we had done… and we had cursed ourselves. Now it hunts me. The sky grew low and heavy, thick with silent menace. The wind was still, an unnatural calm pressing against my senses, as though the world held its breath for what was to come. This new presence was not a sibling… it was not of our Primeval world. It felt… older… yet newer at the same time. None of us could understand what had been born after Myordrakien’s death. It felt like him… but altered. Yet… we did not change. We were what we were… and nothing else. Not only that… but we had killed him… devoured him until all that was left was a graveyard that stretched beyond the horizon.

  I ran harder, faster, every muscle screaming, every limb driving me forward into the unknown… anywhere toward safety. Behind me, the shadow, endless and formless, folding the terrain beneath it like a nightmare spilling across the earth at the horizon’s edge just barley faster than I could run. Eventually, it would catch me.

  It did not stumble. It did not tire. And it did not relent. It was not a titan of power and destruction like the Primeval of Annihilation. It was quiet, moving through shadows, slowly taking us one by one toward the fate we thought we had beaten.

  My many legs clawed at the breaking ground, the scent of dirt and wood mixing with the iron sharpness of fear. I was Hunger, born to consume and survive… but this hunt… this chase… It was the death of us all. No matter how far I ran, the weight of the shadow pressed closer… an impossible darkness, swallowing sound, light, and hope alike. In the depths of my mind, a bitter truth clawed its way forward. We, my siblings and I, were left exposed. The death of Annihilation did not bring salvation. It tore open a wound, and from it poured a new terror… more terrible, more relentless.

  The shadow that hunted me now was not bound by flesh or bone. It moved between worlds, slipping through cracks where even we could not follow.

  I was the Primeval of Hunger, built to devour and endure. But even I knew, this new predator was a hunger beyond my reckoning.

  Alone, I tore across the broken land, the echo of my many claws a desperate drumbeat against the silence of oblivion creeping for us all. The shadow hunted relentlessly, its presence like a cold hand closing around our throats, unyielding, unseen, unstoppable. It followed me wherever I went.

  My older siblings had vanished into their domains. Leviaxzien slipped beneath endless oceans, where crushing depths swallowed him whole. Wrievethiax fled to the labyrinthine plains, where time folded and the air whispered secrets no shadow could unravel. The Abyss and the Unseen… gone beyond reach, into a silent reality of shadow, void, and silence. The leaders of our rebellion scattered in fear, leaving the rest of us behind to face the alien threat that seeped into our world. A silent destruction just as menacing as Myordrakien… maybe more so.

  I had no vast ocean to drown in. No hidden realm to dissolve into. But I had something. I could retreat inward, deeper than flesh, deeper than bone. I could dig into the earth itself, into the dark marrow beneath the world’s cracked skin. I could bury myself and curl within the cold embrace of stone and soil where none could find me. There, I could fall into a dreamless sleep, a long and bitter dormancy to survive what was coming. It was the only hope left. The only way to slip beyond the grasp of that alien hunger stalking us still.

  So I ran, I tore toward the earth’s black heart, where nothing could reach me, where no shadows could find me. There, I would wait until the world turned again. Until the hunger within me awoke anew in a different age.

  I paused at the forest’s edge, a vast cathedral of ancient wood, gnarled roots weaving deep into the soil, alive with the pulse of countless creatures hidden beneath the canopy. The air thrummed with their life, a thousand heartbeats beating unaware of the storm about to consume them. Lifeforms of so many types that they were too numerous to count; the children of Xiecarniul… Flesh incarnate. I needed them!

  I inhaled deeply, drawing the thick, damp air into my lungs. Inside me, a dark furnace ignited; a psionic flame coiling within my chest. The breath was not mere air; it was a conduit for a force ancient and alien, woven into the marrow of my being.

  Then I exhaled, slow and deliberate. From my mouth surged a silent, invisible wave… a psychic pulse that rippled outward like an invisible wind. It seeped into every living vessel, penetrating skin and scale, bone and fiber, unraveling the blood’s delicate chains that bound it to flesh. In an instant, the crimson rivers inside every creature ruptured, pulled free as a shimmering, viscous mist suspended in the air. It was raw life-force liberated from mortal form.

  My senses drank it in. With an inhalation, I drew the scarlet vapor into my lungs, where it burned and twisted, transmuting the liquid into a glowing, crimson energy. A burning essence that surged through my veins and fed the eternal hunger roaring within. It was… glorious. But… one breath was not enough.

  I inhaled again, faster, more urgently. This time, my power delved deeper. The flesh itself began to tremble, muscle fibers of countless dead creatures unraveling as my mind reached out. I felt sinew and tissue tear loose, stripped from bones like vines pulled from ancient stones. The rotting mass of corpses beneath the forest was peeled away, consumed by invisible currents of psionic force that dissolved flesh into pure, pulsating energy. The psionic hiss rending everything until all that was left of my targeted craving was energy to fuel me.

  The energy flowed, a dark fire coalescing with every stolen strand of muscle and skin, stoking the hungers that would never cease. Still, hunger gnawed, relentless and unforgiving.

  Then… a final breath…cold, deep, and absolute. My mind shattered the bones, breaking brittle structures into dust and ash with a focused thought. The remnants of the dead were crushed and crushed again, their essence pulled apart and converted into a spectral, pale energy; hollow yet potent, that wove into the fabric of my being.

  Nothing remained, no blood, no flesh, no bone; only the echo of their lives transformed into the fuel that sustained me. The hunger inside me had not been quelled… not even touched, but it was enough to carry me through the endless dark to come.

  With the stolen energies burning low in my core, I began to move again; this time not forward, but downward.

  My vast, spider-like body loomed over the shattered forest floor, legs like jagged columns of spiny chitin and sinew, each limb an engine of purpose against the earth itself. I pressed my claws into the soil and rock, the sharp talons scraping and gouging as they tore the ground open beneath me. The air filled with the scent of upturned earth… damp dirt, roots, stone dust, and the screams of the land itself, rent apart by my desperate descent. A massive dust cloud kicked up all around my titanic body. My legs hammered rhythmically, carving a cavern deep into the planet’s flesh. Each step sent tremors racing through the fractured terrain; trees that still clung to life toppled and splintered like matchsticks, their shattered limbs flung aside like forgotten debris. Rivers of dirt spilled down the jagged walls of the pit I made, mud and rock tumbling into the abyss I created. It caused more work for me… but I continued. The hole widened… swallowing everything in a growing earthen maw of destruction.

  My immense body folded carefully, yet with raw, unrestrained power… thick spiny legs bending and pressing against my eight-legged body, forcing me deeper into the earth’s embrace. Every movement crushed ancient roots, ruptured underground veins, and shattered the quiet sanctuaries of forgotten creatures long buried beneath the surface. The tunnel grew vast enough to hold my entire form, its walls stained dark with mud and clay, trembling with the force of my descent.

  Finally, as the cold weight of stone pressed against my armored back, I stilled. A final shudder ran through me… the last convulsion of a body pushed to its limit. I curled within the tight chamber I had carved, folding my legs close to my massive body, tucking every claw and spine against the rough walls, except one. I lifted it up to the surface, scraping earth back in on myself, burying myself as a forgotten memory. My leg stayed upturned, allowing only one clue to the location of my body. Yet, the leg was such a small mark on the landscape… none would ever know.

  I clutched the stolen energies to my core, a burning ember to sustain me in the dark. Around me, the earth sealed itself… silent, heavy, impenetrable. There, in that suffocating stillness, I surrendered to the forced slumber, the long, endless wait for the world to turn again… where I could emerge.

  The memories had stopped. It took me a minute or two to realize that I was seeing things that were not my own memories, but something else. It reminded me of when I got the visions from Death… but different. Segmented in a way, but I could still understand it. The words spoken… mental or otherwise… were not in any language I could understand or make out. Most of it was emotions… feelings… implied will, maybe. There was a language spoken between all of those alien creatures at times… but it was so beyond mortal comprehension that I was just thankful Myordrakien made it possible for me to understand at all. I’d probably have had an aneurysm trying to listen to it with my human mind.

  As my awareness settled, I became aware that I was in a void stretched endlessly black around me; no edges, no orientation, just a silence pressing heavy like a shroud. I floated there, weightless, isolated… but I had the memories I just lived through. They lingered.

  All around me, flickers of ancient pain and hunger stirred… visions not my own but etched deep in some forgotten corner of my mind flashed painfully. The memories of the Primeval of Hunger… Druvhaexior: racing across shattered forests, tearing the world apart with endless legs, devouring life in waves of crimson power. But those echoes faded beneath something else.

  Something thudded. It thudded again… powerful, but even in that power… I felt a drained weakness. Then, a glow bloomed in the darkness, illuminating the void where I rested.

  Off in the distance hovered a heart… massive and fierce, pulsing with a slow, labored rhythm that sent ripples through the void. Its surface was mottled and dark red, veins like blackened rivers snaking across it, yet it glowed from within with the same eerie molten light that burned in the fields… inside the great and terrible heart that lived inside Annihilation’s desiccated form. The still-beating heart of Myordrakien… the Primeval of Annihilation. My Primeval. Yet, where his heart was still an engine of destruction… this heart was… weak and starving.

  It beat feebly, a solemn sentinel in this empty abyss. That heart wasn’t just an image or a representation. It was alive, part of the Primeval that had once ruled as Hunger incarnate, one of the few lingering remnants of the Primeval age.

  My own heart echoed inside me, slow and deliberate, a reminder of the power bound within me by Death and Myordrakien.

  In this nothingness, I felt the weak heart watching… waiting. Not with malice, but with a weight far heavier… the burden of endings and beginnings, of destruction and the faintest hope of renewal.

  I reached out, not with hands, but with something deeper; a tether of urge... of the need within; a Primeval hunger of my own. The hunger for death, destruction… annihilation. The sickly heart pulsed in answer… in a mental voice too terrible to anticipate. It was like grinding teeth made of stone.

  “It’s been too long… brother!”