After a few soundless minutes ghosting deeper into the hollow passage, the tunnel widened into a cavernous junction. I tried to picture what part of Hunger’s titanic, spider-like body this had once been. The walls curved like ancient tendons forming a dome, their texture softer, almost fleshy. A joint, maybe a bending place where connective tissues clustered, and her spawn had gnawed through. The thought left a sour taste on my tongue… things living down here in the dark.

  I raised my hand, halting Alex. She froze instantly, and predatory stillness settled over her as her sharpened senses raked the dark. We both knew the price of being seen here: chaos, swift and absolute, because we didn’t belong.

  I exhaled and sent a pulse outward, my strange sense rippling through the cavern like sonar. It licked against stone, flesh, and shadow, then returned with shapes… ten of them. Vampires for certain, without question. They were twisted somehow, yet their blood was unmistakable, saturating the air like the fog of a crowd, thick with years of concentration.

  Further behind them, something else pressed back against my sense. It was a structure. Its outline emerged with each pulse: white stone… bone, maybe. Carved into a block the size of a three-story building, standing where no architecture should exist. Each echo shuddered along its edges, too clean, too deliberate to be natural within this ancient body. Inside was the target… a resonance of a Primeval echo… a relic of Hunger.

  It loomed like a fortress, a checkpoint, maybe, where Charles and others like him gathered before climbing back into the mortal world with their orders. A waystation for obedient slaves to the elders. The thought clawed at me; even buried this deep in Hunger’s body, her children had built shrines of control. Places where they wielded their power over lesser beings, compared to themselves.

  I turned my gaze back towards Alex, looking at her one last time before I let my inner monster out. “Start from the outside and work your way in. We kill our way to the elder. I don’t sense anything else for miles down here, and I don’t want to have this thing run on us if we’re too loud. He might also be able to call others towards us.”

  Alex nodded only once, her face shifting into a more angular, monstrous look as she went into full vampire mode. Her eyes bled from the iris to turn the whites an extreme bloodshot. Her crimson red hair almost vibrated like it was trying to stand on end before gravity naturally brought down the end of the length of hair. It reminded me of the way a cat's hair bunched up on its back when it was pissed off. Wickedly sharp fangs protruded from her top jaw, and her claws grew out steadily like living razors hungrily seeking flesh to rend. They were long, just not as long as my talons.

  After a single breath, we moved forward in a rush. Everything that happened was fast, bloody, and pure chaos. Only fragmented images broke through my rage after it started. My human, rational mind only caught glimpses as I tore through these enemies. I fully embraced the urge to kill… and my monster as I moved toward the goal of claiming the relic. The need had taken over, and I was craving death!

  I did see that Alex slipped into the dark like a streak of blood, vanishing left, while I stormed forward, straight into the nearest heartbeat. The monster rattled the cage inside me, claws on mental iron, but I kept it shut. Myordrakien was my ace, held back, simmering for the elder. I’d need surprise on my side when the true fight began… just in case. I’d never fought an elder before, and Death had left me alone for this. I had to use all my weapons… even strategy.

  The first vampire never made a sound. My talons clamped over its mouth as I dragged it down into the stone floor, my strength like a hydraulic press. I shoved his face against the rock and ground it forward, slow and merciless. Flesh tore like paper, fangs snapping, eyes bursting wetly as I grated its skull into fragments. When I lifted my hand, nothing remained but ribbons of skin smeared into the grooves of the cavern floor… and a torn-up, headless body.

  Another leapt, alerted by the wet crunching. I caught the young black haired vampire midair and wrenched its arms backward until the sockets burst. Its shriek choked short as I tore its head sideways and slammed it against the stalagmites. Bone cracked as the jagged point of the stone pierced through its throat, pinning it like a gutted insect.

  A third rushed me, claws flashing in the red light of the cavern. I let it strike… its nails raked across my chest, harmless marks on darkening flesh. It stared at me… stunned at the lack of effect.

  Then I seized it by the ankle, swung it overhead, and brought it down spine-first across a jagged rock. The body folded backward… the wrong way, snapping in half with a grotesque pop. The knife-like crag of stone I used was a great tool for splitting his body.

  The others hesitated now, their blood signatures flaring in my perception with fear. Still, they circled. One darted left; I followed its momentum, driving my hand through its back and curling fingers out of its chest, ripping its heart loose in a single savage pull.

  Another thought to escape. I was on it in a blink. My jaws split wider than human, and I bit into its shoulder and neck, tearing away half its neck meat in a spray of gore that painted the cavern floor at our feet.

  Five gone in seconds. The others kept their distance, but I could feel them thinking… planning.

  I turned slowly in the dark, talons dripping with the gore I had ripped from them. The cavern floor was painted red beneath me. I let the silence stretch before exhaling a guttural noise, low and throaty, meant for them to hear.

  Alex launched herself forward as I tore another shrieking vampire apart. Her speed was a blur, a streak of dark movement cutting across the cavern, the faint glint of her eyes catching the dim light, which alerted me to her stealthy presence. She was on the nearest bloodsucker before it even realized she’d moved. One arm hooked its throat, the other buried into its ribcage, and with a wrenching twist, she ripped half of its torso free in a wet explosion that painted the cavern wall. She let the mangled husk drop, still twitching, then kicked her legs out into another’s chest like battering rams, splintering bone with the sound of cracking wood.

  Another lunged at her back, but Alex met it without turning; her elbow snapped backward, shattering its jaw so violently that its head twisted almost clean around. She caught it by the skull before it hit the ground, slammed it down with such force that the stone cracked beneath. She smashed its face in until it was nothing but gristle and grey matter.

  I ripped one vampire from the wall area that lived through her assault and flung it into her path. She met it with an almost feral laugh. She caught it midair, both hands digging into its shoulders as she drove it down onto her rising knee, the spine crunching in two sharp snaps. Its scream broke into a wet gargle before she tossed it aside like garbage.

  The cavern rang with the symphony of violence; bones shattering, claws tearing through flesh, the guttural bellows of dying vampires echoing like damned souls in a hollow cathedral. Every step we took forward left another broken body behind, the stone slick with gore.

  And still, Alex moved like a storm beside me, merciless and unrelenting, her brutality a perfect mirror to my own.

  I moved without thinking, everything fluid on instinct. Everything came in flashes: red, splatter, a head dangling from my hands, dripping, its face slack with death. My breath tore ragged from my lungs, and the world tilted, breaking apart in violent stutters of sound and motion. My arms… my arms weren’t mine anymore. Black veins spread out under my skin, crawling and writhing in every direction like ink spilled through flesh.

  For a heartbeat, something like fear stabbed me. Had I slipped? Had one of them poisoned me? Or worse… the elder?

  No. No… this wasn’t them. I felt it, deep, flooding through my veins, filling every corner of me. The monster’s power was surging, boiling, and pouring into me in ways it never had before; even while I still looked more man than beast. The intent that created this new effect was not human… or Death-related… but pure Primeval. It was slaughter, viscous and absolute Annihilation that gripped my cells.

  Alex’s voice cut through the murder haze in my mind. "What is that? Are you alright?" Her eyes caught the black veins spreading on my skin.

  I couldn’t let her speak again. Couldn’t let her waste time on this. Slowly, deliberately, I lifted my hand, a single talon pressed against my lips. My black eyes, hard and bottomless, locked onto hers. An ominous shush slipped out of my lips. “Shhhhhhhhhh…”

  I saw it. The flicker in her expression. Unease, like she was seeing something even she couldn’t quite reconcile. Then… her mask slammed back into place. Her monster returned equally as vicious… and we moved.

  The world blurred again as I launched myself upward toward the white wall of this weird structure. I scaled the building quickly, hands clutching at the tiniest of ledges, my talons gaining purchase on the smallest of chips and carvings, or just outright piercing in and creating new handholds as I ascended. I knew for certain that it had already heard us, and definitely me, climbing so aggressively with my harsh and powerful movements.

  I could feel hammering at the top of the building… a hungry aura waiting for me to make it there. It was the elder… no doubt about it. Alex veered off in another direction, flanking, maybe to cut him off if he ran. I prayed he wouldn’t. She wasn’t ready for what I felt. Not for one of the holders of Primeval power like me… and definitely not alone.

  The resonance changed as I tore through the building’s bones, breaking through the plane of the third floor, arcing my body through a jagged gap I found. It might have been a window at one point, but now it was just a hole. In seconds, I had gone from the ground to the third floor. And there he was… the elder.

  For half a moment, my thoughts scattered. I expected a monster. Instead, I saw a man. Just… a man. He had an average frame with light-brown hair hanging limply down his face. His clothes were in tatters, grey sleeves and black pant-legs frayed, stained with filth. He looked like something that had crawled out from under a bridge, some roadside ghost in rags.

  But his eyes and his face didn’t match the ruin. They were calm and still. Not a tremor of fear. He had the face of a twenty-year-old male, white skin that wasn’t as pale as the vampires we had slain. His hair hung down behind his head to his shoulders. He looked wild, but composed… like an animal that was supposedly tamed, but could kill at a moment's notice.

  He tilted his head, casual, like he’d been expecting me all along. Then, with a glance out the crumbled window, he smiled in amusement at the carnage outside.

  He spoke in plain English. “Seems like you've gotten rid of all of my friends,” the way he said “friends” didn’t feel friendly. It gave me a sense of something that had just had its meal taken from it. “I suppose you’ll take their place?”

  I didn’t feel like joining in on his forced conversation. I came here for one thing… to fucking kill this asshole. So, with as much force as I could summon, I threw myself forward at the subterranean hobo.

  My speed caught him off guard, and I saw his eyes change. Not literally, but the way he held them. As I reached forward at him with extended talons, his eyes widened in surprise. Not fear… not yet.

  He sidestepped as soon as my right arm came flying through where his head had just been. It blew past him like a weaponized freight train. If he hadn’t moved, my full strength swing would have splattered his head instantly. As soon as he cleared my arm, he leapt from the ground up to the ceiling of this structure. He landed upside down on all fours, like gravity held no control over him. Something other than physical strength was at play to keep him up there the way he was.

  That’s when the air changed. Not just a breeze or a shift in pressure, but a metallic ringing that lanced through my ears, high and thin, followed by a hiss that didn’t come from his throat so much as it bled from his form.

  His face twitched first. The skin rippled like a film stretched too tight over something beneath. His eyes spasmed in their sockets, jittering in a hundred micro-movements before locking forward, turning into molten, matte-yellow orbs. No pupils or whites, just blank, alien lamps staring into me; not seeing me, but weighing me. Whatever he was, it had never been human. Hunger could call it “her child” all she wanted, but that didn’t do the grotesque existence justice. This wasn’t like the vampires, or the werewolves, or even the unknown freaks I’d cut through before. This thing wasn’t created like they were… it was spawned down here in these depths.

  And then his body started peeling apart. The flesh on his fingertips and toes sloughed backward like old gloves, revealing not meat, not bone, but a shifting underlayer of jagged, sand-colored scales that forced their way outward, tearing free of his skin in patches. Every movement came with that awful dry rasp, like stone dragged across sandpaper. No wet squelching, no oily sheen like the alley shapeshifter. This was brittle, sharp, arid; like his body was grinding itself into something new.

  He dropped to the ground with a flip, landing awkwardly as his body morphed. His arms snapped and re-bent with dull cracks, shoulders widening, spine curving. More limbs pushed out from his torso in awkward bursts, tearing through cloth and skin, growing and splintering with insect precision. They unfolded, joint after joint, until he was a thrashing mass of hooked appendages, scraping and clawing against the edges of the structure. His jaw unhinged, tearing wider than it should, his throat stretching as if it wanted to spill out something else entirely. Rows of serrated teeth folded into place like rusted sawblades, the flesh around them chafed raw and mangled.

  By the time his form steadied, he was too big for the building. A leg, or maybe it was an arm, hard to tell with all the new geometry of his body, lashed out and slammed into my chest. The strike cracked through the stone wall behind me, turning it into a spray of jagged splinters.

  I went airborne, a comet in the cavern’s dark, slamming down on the broken rock below. My body skidded and rolled, stone screaming against me, but my flesh had thickened even in my human form. The veins spiderwebbing across my skin had made me denser, tougher. It hurt… pain always hurt… but the rocks couldn’t tear me open anymore. Not when I was like this.

  Above me, the thing jumped. The entire third floor of the bone-white building caved under its weight as it leapt through the wall and down to the ground; the building was decimated. Eight spindly, barbed legs dug into the ground as it landed, each impact crushing stone like clay. Dust plumed, walls collapsed, and for a split second, I thought Alex had been buried alive in the ruin.

  But I didn’t panic. I knew she was alright. My sonar-like pulse I sent out, my sixth sense of Annihilation, was still tethered to her. She was alive and slowly moving out of the rubble.

  So I shifted focus back to the monster, my teeth gritting, not in fear, but in anticipation. Out in the open now, I finally saw it fully. It was obscene. A spider-shaped mass of scales, hooked limbs, jagged mandibles, dripping a resinous saliva that hissed when it touched stone. Its abdomen swelled and contracted, like a blister ready to pop. Every breath rattled through its chest like gravel in a steel drum.

  And still, even staring at that grotesque mutation, I felt no fear. Just a gnawing intrigue, the obsessive cataloging of someone trying to burn the details into memory for later. A new entry for the bestiary. The one that I had begun to create for myself.

  It was definitely a spider from the depths of hell itself. Some abomination that had crawled out of the marrow of the world, birthed by Hunger and fed on her rot. Its spiny legs stabbed into the cavern floor, each tip blacker than volcanic glass, but the black gave way further up, the limbs shifting to a sickly yellowish-red, like infected flesh. All eight legs met in a massive, blood-slick body bristling with jagged spikes and wiry hairs that shimmered as if coated with venom. And then there were the eyes… dozens of them, black and glistening, with jaundiced yellow pinpricks burning at their centers. Beady at first glance, but I knew each was the size of a human head, maybe bigger; like fucking volleyballs staring, unblinking.

  The thing’s proportions were wrong, too wrong… its overall size as vast as a house, legs stretched outward like the broken ribs of some ancient monstrosity. And yet, its central body, that grotesque core, hunched and armored, was about as big as a dump truck.

  It let out a shriek, a metallic screech that shredded through the cavern like saw blades screaming against each other. The noise drilled straight into my skull, reverberated down my bones, clawed at my teeth until I thought they’d crack in my jaws. I snarled and grit my own teeth against the sound, but the fury it stoked inside me wasn’t just the Primeval twisting in my veins. No… this rage was mine too. Ours…?

  This thing wasn’t just a predator… it was a rival. It knew me the second its eyes raked over my shape. It could smell the Primeval in my blood, the Annihilation humming in my bones. And I knew the truth just as clearly: this beast was cut from the same ancient cloth. Another relic from the before-time of Primevals. Another nightmare shaped in the dark depths of our world's birth. But it was a stolen identity.

  It knew what I was. I knew what it was. And in that instant, something clicked deep in me; an understanding that this wasn’t going to be a fight. No, this was an inevitability… not just with this one… but with all of them; the elders… Hunger… all the Primevals. I would come for them… and I would end them!

  The cavern air grew dense with its fetid breath, and I could taste the rot on my tongue like copper and spoiled meat. The ground beneath my feet trembled with every twitch of its spiny legs.

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  My claws flexed, black and slick with the blood of the vampires I had just torn apart. I didn’t hesitate, didn’t doubt. That thing wanted to go? Then we’d fucking go!

  That was when it happened… I let go. I let it out.

  A physical force ripped through me like a seismic quake, tearing through the bedrock of my body. Bones snapped and crumbled under the pressure; my sternum shattered, ribs splintered into jagged shards that stabbed into muscle and lung. For a heartbeat, I thought I was dying, thought my body couldn’t possibly survive this new transformation that powered through me… but then the monster inside clamped down tighter than ever, dragging me past pain and into… rebirth.

  It wasn’t the faster, familiar shift of before. No, this was violent and cruelly slow. My flesh warped like clay being kneaded by Myordrakien’s hands. Every tendon stretched until it felt like it would tear loose, every ligament screamed before snapping into new positions. I convulsed, choking on my own growls as the thing in me took shape. It wasn’t my old form. It wasn’t the silhouette of the titan I became in the Unseen’s dimension, either. This was something new.

  My muscles swelled, tearing open skin only for it to reseal thicker, darker, and harder. I grew twelve… fifteen feet, maybe more. A brute frame of dense flesh and iron-hard sinew. I felt like stone given life, a tank walking upright with talons like executioner’s blades. My talons stretched out three feet long, obsidian swords designed to shred through anything stupid enough to stand near me. But even as I felt that raw, crushing power settle into my limbs, something else began building… something alien, something I hadn’t invited.

  The pressure gathered low in my spine, a growing knot of violence swelling beneath the skin that itched, and then burned to be free. It didn’t want to stay inside… it couldn’t. It swelled, pressing outward until my body cracked to make room. My spine split with wet, meaty pops, vertebrae tearing apart, growing, reforming… multiplying. Then it burst through, spilling out behind me… a tail.

  Black spikes erupted from my shoulders and spine, each vertebra crowned with jagged blades that tore through flesh. I roared, the sound guttural, primal, half mine and half something older that echoed through the cavern walls. And then came the tail… a slab of meat, bone, and spiked flesh dragging itself from my back like a creature all its own.

  It lashed once, instinctively, gouging a trench into the stone floor. A weapon that belonged to something else, something I had only glimpsed in Hunger’s memory; the tail of Myordrakien, that ancient horror suspended in the air on wings too big to measure, dragging its colossal tail like a chain heavy enough to anchor a titan. And now it was mine!

  For a brief, human moment, I thought… the fuck am I supposed to do with this?

  But then instinct roared louder than thought. I could feel it, every ridge, every spike, every extent of its power humming in my mind like it was another limb I’d always had. It flexed when I told it to, coiled, snapped, and slashed the air with the force of a wrecking ball. It was prehensile, deadly, and entirely under my control. It was another weapon bestowed upon me by the monster… just like my fangs… my talons… my transformation. Another tool for this life of Annihilation, and it was begging to be used.

  The black spikes across my back and shoulders gleamed like obsidian, slick and sharp, drinking in the cavern’s dim, red light. My tail writhed behind me, bristling with a hunger to destroy, thrumming for blood. And that’s when the spider came.

  It launched itself forward with impossible speed, eight spiny legs hammering into the stone, sending cracks spiderwebbing through the cavern floor. Its body blurred in rage, mandibles shrieking as its shrill metallic roar split the air. It wasn’t just attacking… it wanted me erased. It was greedily clamoring for the opposing power it felt in me.

  But I was ready. Every nerve in my monstrous body burned, every bone still singing with pain from its rebirth. My talons clenched, my tail arched behind me like a scorpion’s poised to strike. My blackened hide pulsed with the power of destruction.

  Instinct overtook thought, and I dropped low onto all fours, the cavern floor cracking beneath the weight of my bulk. My tail, thick with serrated bone spines, whipped outward like a siege weapon. Every muscle in my warped frame convulsed with violent precision as the tail carved through the cavern, momentarily whistling as it sped through the air. My tail met the spider’s front line of legs with concussive force. The impact thundered through the cavern like a bomb going off underground. The tips of its black, spiny limbs exploded into shards as bone spikes shattered them to pulp, ripping straight through cartilage and chitin. The tail didn’t stop; it gouged through three of its limbs in a single sweep before hammering into the spider’s pulsating red thorax.

  The elder-spawn of Hunger was launched across the cavern like a derailed freight train. It slammed into a jagged wall of stone, boulders collapsing inward with a chain-reaction of quakes that showered the cavern in rock and debris. Dust clouds vomited up around its massive body, but even through the haze, I could see it writhing. Its limbs jerked and skittered in a mess of broken sticks. One ruined leg buckled under its own weight when it tried to rise. It collapsed again, shrieking with a sound that peeled across my bones. A screech of pure, furious agony.

  That’s when the blur of red descended. Alex had returned to the fray. Even through this rage of destruction, and my need to kill, I had enough clarity to worry for her. She wasn't built for this. She was not like us, me and the spider. Yet… she threw herself into the fray all the same. Part of me knew… even now… she didn’t care if she died here.

  Tiny compared to either of us now, Alex ghosted toward the elder. She landed on the spider’s head with vampiric velocity, claws carving into its grotesque cluster of eyes. The wet sound of orbs bursting was drowned out only by her snarls, animalistic and relentless. Yellow-black fluid sprayed as her claws gouged and scooped through that obscene mask of eyes, sockets popping like overripe fruit. The spider flailed beneath her, shrieking louder as ichor rained down in sickly torrents.

  But the cavern vibrated then, an unnatural quake born from the elder’s fury. The sound tore through everything, a violent, concussive roar that stunned even me. Alex faltered, only for a heartbeat, but that was all the monster needed. She couldn’t evade.

  One jagged leg swept upward in a blur of black rock and spines. The blow caught her mid-body with the force of a wrecking ball. She was torn off its head and hurled like a broken doll, crashing through the cavern before smashing into the stone floor. Her body bounced, tumbled, and rolled through a minefield of jagged rocks; each impact cutting and tearing, lacerating her skin into ribbons. I heard bones snap like dry twigs. Her body lay twisted, unmoving.

  For a second, everything went still. The cavern held its breath. Even the spider froze as its mutilated head dripped gore, and it tried to gather itself.

  I moved before thought caught up. One heartbeat, I was standing in place… and the next I was on it. My talons, obsidian blades of living death, plunged into its legs as they swung for me. Each appendage it tried to drive through my body, I caught, and I tore free. I ripped them straight from the sockets in bursts of gore and snapping chitin. The sound of rending flesh and grinding cartilage mixed with my own roars as I dismantled the elder limb by limb.

  Hot ichor sprayed in sheets, coating me black and yellow. Every time a leg came free, the cavern thundered with the wet crack of armored flesh separating from meat. I beat its body with its own severed limbs, spikes stabbing deep into the spider’s carapace until its screeches broke into ragged static. I was blind to everything but the red haze of destruction. The kill.

  The cavern shook with every impact. Rock faces crumbled. The air tasted of blood and stone dust, hot and choking. My mind dissolved into fragments, only flashes piercing the haze: yellow gore spraying across my chest. The spider thrashing in futility. My hands, ripping, gouging, tearing, fueled only by the need to kill… and to claim the piece of Hunger.

  I realized I was holding its last leg. The elder was reduced to a twitching stump, its body a wreck of punctures and torn-open cavities, its abdomen leaking like a ruptured tank. I stared at the limb in my hands… and drove it back into its master. The sharp, spined leg I held plunged straight through its abdomen with a wet, meaty pop. Its entire body convulsed as yellow ichor exploded outward, geysering across the cavern floor, flooding it in stinking, steaming pools that steamed upward from its internal heat. The leg skewered it clean through, nailing it into the stone below like a grotesque insect pinned for display.

  The elder shrieked one final time. A metallic, dying scream that fractured into static before cutting off entirely. Its massive body slumped, twitching once… then went limp.

  The cavern floor was a massacre of gore and stone, spider ichor flooding the cracks, bodies of lesser creatures crushed to paste from the quake of our battle. I stood there over its ruin, chest heaving, tail lashing behind me, dripping gore.

  I staggered back, chest heaving in jagged bursts… not from fatigue, not from any real strain, but from the sheer tornado of killing intent still boiling in me. There was something else there, too… anger… resentment maybe. Rage for everything that had happened; for the life I once lived as a man, for the family I had failed and abandoned… my daughter, who would never know me. Furry at the betrayal of my kin… the Primevals. Even the bargain with my sister… Hunger infuriated me. I was mad at Alex, who had followed me down here only to be decimated in a fight that was never hers to carry. Why wouldn’t she just go away and stop trying to fight everything she saw as a threat? It wasn’t her problem… it was mine!

  I lifted my monstrous head and let out a rage-filled roar that shook the area.

  Each thought tore across my mind like jagged glass, each one sharper than the last, causing chaos and pain across my mind. There were so many emotions and urges that I couldn’t understand where one started and another ended. Thankfully, amid the fury, I realized something that chilled me more than any loss, more than the understanding of Death himself.

  Myordrakien and I… we were no longer two. Not allies, not halves… but one.

  The thought had lingered at the edges of my mind before, a dark whisper in the back of my thoughts. I had toyed with it, dwelled on the idea without letting it take root. But now, standing here in the aftermath, I didn’t just know it… I felt it as absolute and undeniable as the bodies around me. His voice was my voice, his fury mine, my hunger was his. I wasn’t speaking with him anymore. I was speaking as him.

  The revelation left me dizzy, strange, unmoored. My vision blurred, my body hazy with the weight of it all. I could feel the emotional pull and rage at the loss of my wife and daughter in my life, but coming from the monster. I had intense urges and thoughts about the other Primevals like I had known them my whole life. Myordrakien was me… and I was him. In a single moment… I felt a union that seemed to finally be coming into focus. Something that had remained blurred for so long was finally syncing together in perfect harmony…. dreadful harmony.

  Then the world split… and the shift came.

  It wasn’t violent, not this time; though the pain was still there, deep and raw, every nerve screaming as bone and sinew were being folded back into some smaller shape. My body collapsed inward on itself, an immense weight compressing into something familiar yet alien to this new version I had just attained. It was a human form. It was like falling, though not uncontrolled… like descending, step by step, into some remembered place I no longer truly belonged.

  I felt the essence of what I had been draining away, not vanishing or dissipating, but flowing through me to… somewhere else. It was familiar, and I was still connected to that power I felt leaving me. That’s when I realized it was the fields. I felt that place echoing at the edges of my mind, wide and endless, the great and murderous pulse of the heart tied to mine. With each thunderous beat of my heart, I could feel the reverberation ripple across Death’s domain, reaching out to the gargantuan heart that remained at the core of Myordrakien’s true, desiccated form. My chest burned with it, the throb of power too vast for this fragile vessel, every surge rattling me apart and pulling me back together in the same breath. That is where my power came from; more came from the heart when I needed it or returned when I was done.

  When the shifting stopped, I stood bare and dripping, my body a grotesque reminder of what I had been. Naked, smeared in blood and yellow ichor, I felt the weight of the mask I now wore… the mask of a man I could never be again… not truly. I watched it surge through my veins, black tendrils crawling beneath the skin, staining me in a way no water could ever cleanse. That new piece of Myordrakien was a catalyst that pushed me even further down the monstrous path. Sure… I was me again… I looked like Sam, but… I could feel it inside. Myordrakien and I had become entangled even more than ever before.

  For a moment, it showed itself openly, veins glowing faintly with that shadowed current. Then, slowly, it sank deeper, hidden from sight though never gone. My heart calmed, its beat steadying, though each pulse still echoed too strongly, too Primeval within my human form. I was back in the shape of a man. But I was not a man. Not anymore. And I finally understood… this wasn’t a transformation I could undo. This wasn’t power I could shed. This was what I was now… what I had become, and I knew that I had evolved into something… more. More than any man or woman that held this monster before me… I had evolved beyond. They didn’t have the piece of power Hunger had eaten.

  To say I wasn't prepared for that would be an understatement, but I couldn’t dwell… not yet.

  My thoughts were cut short when Alex’s breathing steadied just slightly, the ragged glass-in-a-bag sound softening, her chest finding a rhythm that wasn’t there before. Her lips, soaked in gore, twitched with the faintest snarl, more instinct than choice, but it was enough. She was fighting to stay alive.

  I stayed kneeling beside her, crouched low like some beast hovering over its wounded kin, every instinct in me screaming not to move her. My body was still raw, humming with power, but my hands trembled with restraint. For once, I wasn’t the destroyer… I was the helper.

  I brushed a clot of hair away from her face, though it was matted with so much blood it hardly mattered. Red over red, indistinguishable. She looked less like Alex and more like a corpse someone had tried and failed to piece back together. But her eyes… those dim flickers that barely stayed open… they locked on me. And in them, through all the haze and weakness, I swore I saw something like trust. Like she was asking me to help her. It hit me harder than the spider’s sharp legs ever could.

  “You’re not dying here,” I whispered, my voice low.

  Her throat gurgled again, blood slipping past her lips. She couldn’t answer. Maybe she didn’t even hear me. But I needed to say it, as much for myself as for her.

  I paced around the area and collected body after body, bringing them close beside Alex’s broken form. I brought one corpse up to her face and helped her bite into the dead vampire. I stayed there, basically spoon-feeding her vampire blood, one body at a time, holding her broken form together in my arms until her body knitted itself back together. The sound of her teeth puncturing into flesh grounded me. Every pull of blood into her veins was a lifeline I refused to let her relinquish.

  In that silent work… I realized something I never thought I would. Alex wasn’t just an acquaintance or some reckless vampire I tolerated. She mattered to me now. She had carved her way past all my walls, buried herself into the part of me I thought long since dead. Even though she was prickly and resistant to the things I did most of the time… and a total bitch at times, she had grown on me. I knew her story… partly, and she didn’t deserve to die down here.

  I didn’t want her to die… not because she was useful. Not because she was another piece in the war we were waging down here, but because losing her… would mean losing another person in my life. I wasn’t about to do that. If keeping her alive was selfish… fuck it. I didn’t care.

  So I sat in the dirt, naked and covered in ichor, cradling her skull with hands that had just torn Primeval spawn and monsters apart. Guarding her with the same fury I had just unleashed on the elder spider.

  I shifted through the bodies once I knew Alex had taken all she could from one. She wasn’t done, though, and she lifted a broken arm and dragged the nearest corpse to her face, feeding with her own strength. She hadn’t been lying down waiting to die like I thought… she wanted to live, or maybe she just wasn’t finished punishing everything around her.

  She was good enough that I left her with the pile of drained vampires and went hunting for clothes. The first few she’d cast aside were still nearby, and after some digging, I found a pair of half-intact pants. It wasn’t much, but better than walking around bare assed.

  As I pulled them on, something caught my eye; a glow inside the hulking spider’s ruined corpse. My focus snapped to it at once. The monster inside me stirred, not to break loose, but to drink in the source of that red light. I stepped closer.

  The glow spilled from the massive wound I’d torn through its body earlier. Guts and ichor shifted as the light pulsed stronger, humming low enough to make the cavern walls vibrate. Buried deep inside was something long and jagged. It looked like a tooth. Not human, not spider, but more like a stretched-out shark’s tooth, long and triangular. It stuck out like a sore thumb in the corpse.

  Each heartbeat, it burned brighter. Each hum rattled deeper in my chest. Power radiated off it in waves, and I felt my skin crawl in response. If I could sense it, so could others. It was only a matter of time before something else came looking.

  That’s when the realization struck, cold and cruel. I had been a fool… drunk on carnage, staggering in the haze of slaughter as my veins thrummed with the exhilaration of being one with the monster inside me. The monster and I had moved as a single will, reveling in every tear, every scream, every life broken under talon and tail. And in that frenzy, I had nearly forgotten why we had come. The relic. The relic of Hunger.

  It pulsed within the carcass of the elder like a rotten heart still refusing to die, calling to me with a gnawing insistence. A cold dread crept into me… the certainty that the longer it remained here, the more its starving light would bleed outward, beckoning worse things than we had yet faced. The other elders… others that Alex was not ready to stand against.

  I pushed deeper into the gored ruin of the spider’s central mass. My hands sank through clotted ichor, tearing aside ropes of half-coagulated flesh, splintered chitin cracking like brittle bone under my grip. The stench was overwhelming, a carrion sweetness thick enough to choke. But beneath the pulp of shredded organs, my fingers brushed against it; a shard of Hunger.

  I seized it and ripped it free, wrenching it from its cradle of rot with a wet, shrieking tear of ruptured tissue. Black fluid poured down my arm in sticky rivers as I pulled the thing into the open.

  It was no mere bone or fossil. The length of it shimmered with a crystalline gleam, a jagged fang too long to belong to any natural beast. The edges caught the cavern’s dim, red light and fractured it into sickly hues, as though the shard itself bled color.

  In my hand, it throbbed with a rhythm that was not mine. It pressed against my skin with each pulse, as though it wanted to crawl deeper into the flesh of my palm. The vibration climbed my arm, sank into marrow.

  I lifted it closer to my face, staring into the glow that seeped from its core. My breath hitched. It did not simply hum… it whispered, it starved, it demanded. The shard was a hunger made solid, a fragment of that Primeval aspect given edge and form.

  Hunger, gnashing and endless, pressed itself into me through the tooth. This was a piece of the Primeval of Hunger itself. This was what we came for.

  Then I heard it… no, felt it first. A roar that wasn’t just one throat but a swarm, a hive, a flood of voices crashing together in a wall of sound. The stone under my feet trembled as pounding footfalls picked up tempo, closing in fast from deeper in the pits.

  I snapped out a sonar pulse, desperate for clarity. The image that slammed back into my mind made my gut twist; creatures… dozens. All shapes, all twisted, all wrong. Thirty… no, forty at least. A horde of unseen horrors from depths greater than even Charles had known. Things that the city had never known to fear.

  “Oh, shit.”

  My first thought wasn’t me… it was Alex. She wouldn’t last five seconds in her state. Not against this. And the shard… if they got their claws on Hunger’s shard, that was it. Nothing else mattered if I lost it here.

  I didn’t hesitate. In one rush, I was at her side, scooping her broken, half-healed body off the stone. I felt bones grind under my grip, heard a muffled gasp, but there was no time to be gentle. I flung her over my shoulder and bolted.

  The white building loomed ahead, or what was left of it. Nothing but shattered stone and ruin after the spider’s rampage. It was perfect for my quick plan. I dove into the rubble, shoving her body deep into a crack, pushing until she vanished into shadow. She hissed in pain, but I didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop if I wanted her to survive, and to keep the shard away from them.

  The shard pulsed hot in my palm. I shoved it against her chest, forcing her arms around it. “Hold it,” I growled under my breath, praying the monsters’ hunger wouldn’t sniff it out before I made my stand and slaughtered anything that came up from the depths.

  I dragged broken stone into place, sealing her in darkness and debris. I layered it until she was nothing but a mangled body trapped beneath stones too great to escape. I hoped their senses wouldn’t latch to her… but I couldn’t be sure what they felt about the shard. It wasn’t much, but it had to be enough.

  The footfalls thundered closer, the tunnel itself shaking as the horde pressed in, their intent overwhelming with purpose as the mass of monsters prepared to burst from the darkness. They wanted the shard. Wanted it so bad they’d kill each other for it. I could feel it… pure, ravenous greed rolling off them like heat. Some of them are already biting into the others of the horde to thin numbers and competition once they arrive. My pulse sense picked out random shapes I did recognize, but most I did not. There were devourers… those pasty white, bald vampires we fought at the Lemp Brewery, even shapeshifters… and other things I couldn’t name. Things I had never seen before.

  I turned back, facing the dark, my breath sharp and steady. No running, no more hesitation. If they thought they could take this shard, they’d have to take it from me. Not Sam… not the monster... but what we had become together.

  So I opened my mind with calm, brutal finality. I let Annihilation rise… and my body erupted into violence.