It pained me to break apart from the closeness with Alex. Not feeling her tight muscles under my hands, pressed firmly against me, was hard to accept. Not to mention the more… softer areas upfront that felt so close in our embrace.

  No matter how monstrous my world got, a part of me remained the juvenile, immature little asshole I always had been. If you could see what was going through my mind at any given time since our connection, Alex’s boobs were always at the forefront at some point within every five minutes, ever since seeing them in her bedroom.

  I had to shake the thought from my head, because it was time to get serious. After we had gathered ourselves from our moment of closeness, we had both hardened back into silent, merciless predators on the hunt for only one type of prey: elders from the pits.

  We descended deeper, the terrain changing slightly after we reached a certain point, almost as if the deeper parts were hungrier. It was as if every surface yearned to tear apart and consume anything within. One wrong move and you’d be shredded. Everything up to the point we had explored on our first trip down here was jagged, toothy stone jutting from all angles on the cavern walls and ceiling. The ground was uneven and nowhere close to being level, as it constantly descended. But it wasn’t so steep that you couldn’t walk without falling. Now, though, the deeper we got, the more menacing the environment around us. The jags became sharper somehow, longer even. It was almost like the deeper we got into Hunger's core, the more alive she was. Like the Primeval corpse had died the most near its extremities, the outer terrain losing some of that menacing drip.

  The air almost seemed to grow thicker with the red haze that permeated the entirety of the pits. I could feel it when I breathed in and out; it made me feel like it was invading me somehow. I was just taking it in and out of my body with each breath, with no regard as to what it was… if anything. At this point, what could stop me… surely not some fucking fog.

  Randomly, I saw Alex’s eyes flare from her green human eyes to the blazing crimson eyes of the new, unknown creature with a Primeval relic inside. Her eyes weren’t the same vampiric crimson from before; shit, even before, Alex’s eyes were different than most vampires. Being an anthropophagus vampire made her more powerful, and her eyes showed it, with a hungrier and powerful tone of red. It spoke of an intensity that the run-of-the-mill vampires couldn't match. Now, though, there seemed to be a strange blackness that wove through the bloody crimson, almost like needles that were constantly writhing out from her pupils and around her iris of bloody power. It was like an emptiness hidden behind the blood, a visual representation of the hunger that needed to be filled with more of what she craved. But it wasn’t just a black emptiness… those spindly lines that pulsed within the red, there was a power in the void behind the blood… the power of the Primeval of Hunger.

  Right as I was about to ask Alex what she sensed to make her begin priming her power, she held up a hand to silence me.

  I had already begun sending out pulses of my Primeval perception, but I didn’t sense anything. Everywhere around me was still… as empty as before. I glanced over at Alex, who was only staring forward in silence, still primed and ready for attack.

  “I feel them,” Alex said slowly. “The other relics, they’re close, and one of them just disappeared.”

  “Disappeared? Like it left the pits?” I asked quietly to try to keep our position hidden.

  Alex shook her head frantically as her mind raced through horrible thoughts that were practically written on her face. “No, it didn’t leave… it was consumed. And now one of them is…” Alex’s eyes burned brighter again.

  Then something cut her off. Whatever she was sensing, whatever she could feel was outside of my realm. She was connected to this Primeval in ways similar to the way I was connected to Myordrakien. Obviously, I was much more tied to Annihilation than she was to Hunger; however, she couldn’t see into my world. So it made sense that I couldn’t see into hers.

  “Another one just vanished. He took another…” Alex said with a horrified gasp.

  Her powerful features trembled in a way that gave me pause.

  “Another what? Another relic?” I asked as my mind raced a hundred miles an hour, trying to keep up with what I couldn’t see, but only hear in her words.

  “He's eating them, taking the relics for himself… to become stronger.” Alex slowed in her words, seeing the picture clearly now and relating to me things she understood with more certainty. “There were eight of us before… Now there’s only six. I can feel the relics, and I know they’re different. My relic wasn’t the biggest or most powerful… it was him. He just took two more…”

  “Who is he?” I asked calmly, Annihilation feeling no threat.

  “I don’t know his name, but I know he was the most powerful of the elders just from the size of his relic, even before the two he just consumed.” Alex shifted her crimson gaze to me, boring her stare into my eyes. “We have to be careful, Sam. The two that are with him… the only ones left down here besides me… they both match me in power. I’ll be able to take one of them. At least take one out of the equation… for a little bit. But the other two… I won’t be able to…”

  “How long do we have?” I asked Alex, cutting her off from the fears that were slowly bubbling behind her eyes.

  “They’re moving now, all three of them are getting closer to us. I think they’re using…” Alex’s eyes opened wide as she had a revelation.

  It was at that same moment that I had a revelation myself. It was like Alex and my minds were in sync, and we both were piecing something together at the very same time.

  My mind was doing some quick math and recounting things Alex had said previously. Coupling that with what Hunger had shown me back when we originally came down into the pits, I concluded.

  Hunger had split her power into eight relics. Eight elders who roamed the pits and beyond. When we left the pits before, and Alex had a shard of Hunger inside of her, she said she felt the others. Two of them were far away, not in St. Louis or the pits at all. So that meant, including herself, there were six elders in the pits. When one of the elders just devoured another relic, killing the elder that had held it, for who knows how long, that six became five. Then five became four when it consumed the second elder. Taking Alex out of that group meant there were three elders on their way right now. That also meant something even more powerfully upsetting. Hunger had played us like a fiddle.

  My eyes tore back across the cavern to Alex, who stood there, remaining in her shocked state. But more was happening inside of her than just the realization. Red veins tore across her body, visible to me only where her flesh was exposed. I saw red, malignant-looking veins grow and surge under the skin of her hands, chest, and neck. Small, little arteries of hungry power lined the edges of her beautiful face in a way that twisted her visage. Then, in a moment of sheer terror in her eyes, she spoke only two words before everything shifted.

  “Sam… run!”

  Her eyes went red. Not just the irises. Not just the whites. All of them flooded with a dusty, corroded crimson like old blood rubbed into cracked stone. It was instant and absolute, a transformation so sudden my breath caught in my throat. There was nothing I could do to stop it… to help her… just like with Autumn.

  At the same time, my own eyes went void black, Annihilation stirring inside me, its talons brushing the edges of my mind. The world sharpened, split open, colors collapsing into shadow and light until only Alex remained in front of me. Except… it wasn’t Alex.

  She was still there physically, same shape, same features, but her stance shifted with a subtlety that made my stomach drop. Her weight rolled differently onto her feet, her shoulders straightened, her head tilted with an ease I’d never seen in her. It was like watching someone slip on a new skin and suddenly walk like they’d been born in it.

  This wasn’t Alex fighting her urges. This was something ancient wearing her body.

  When she raised her gaze to me, that confidence was overwhelming. She looked at me… at me, The Hand of Death, the Primeval of Annihilation, as if I were nothing more than a nuisance; a moth brushing against her arm.

  And then it spoke. “Thank you, Sam.” Alex’s lips moved, but the voice was wrong. It was a smooth and deep version of Alex’s voice. “Thank you for bringing me such a powerful new elder.”

  “Hunger!” I said her name with every ounce of murderous will I had.

  My chest tightened as her words crawled into my skull like cold fingers. Alex hadn’t just lost control. She was gone. Hunger had been waiting, patient, coiled inside her like a parasite, and now it had stepped out. Whatever game it had been playing with us since the start of our delves into the earth… it had led to this.

  “You still betray?” The question tore out of me before I even decided to speak. It wasn’t just my voice anymore. It was a double echo, mine and Annihilation’s pushing up through my mouth, our souls fused in rage.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  My eyes went completely black. The cavern exploded in detail, alien light illuminating all for me to see. My fingers curled, and black talons slid from my fingertips, a reflex I couldn’t stop.

  Across from me, Alex… no, Hunger, tilted her head. The mockery in her tone was sharp enough to draw blood.

  “Betray?” she said. Alex’s voice, but stripped of everything that made it hers. The tone was cold and alien; an echo of every hunger that ever was. She didn’t sound like a puppet; she sounded like the hand inside the puppet, the predator inside the skin.

  And in that instant, I realized the truth, a truth colder than anything I’d ever felt: Hunger hadn’t slipped into her now. It had been there all along, wearing her like a hidden blade, patient and smiling while Alex thought she’d cut it out.

  It was also at that moment that I realized that she had been lying to not only Alex, but also me. The memories she showed me of her children taking power from her and ruling the pits on their own were all fabrications. None of it was real. She showed me what she wanted me to see, and I ate that shit up like an idiot.

  “Is it a betrayal to want to live? Did any of us betray you by not wanting to lower our heads and allow you to execute us? Or did you, brother, betray us by not fighting for us?” Hunger asked through Alex’s voice, completely in control. If Alex was still inside, she was tucked so far back that I wasn’t even sure she could see or hear what was going on.

  The terror in her eyes, at that very last second, when she realized what was happening, was unmistakable. She was scared of what was about to happen. Not scared for herself… but for me.

  The air got thicker, and the haze that made this place look like Freddy Krueger’s wet dream grew more intense. It started to feel like it was harder to breathe, every action taking more effort as I slowly paced around in a circle, watching Alex and waiting for Hunger to make a move.

  The sound reached me first; rocks scattering, tumbling deeper into the cavern as something impossibly heavy forced its way up and forward. Stone cracked and split beneath the weight, and through the gloom, my Primeval senses peeled back the shadows like rotting flesh torn from bone. I saw them.

  Three hulking shapes, nightmares stitched together from spines, armor-plated slabs of flesh, and wet gore that gleamed from the glowing veins in the dark cavern walls.

  The smallest of the three stepped forward, if “stepped” was even the word. It looked like a man stretched until his frame threatened to tear itself apart. Every joint bulged and tore open, punctured by jagged spears of bone that jutted outward as if his own skeleton were trying to claw its way free of him. His knees were grotesque hinges where shin bones had erupted straight through, long ivory lances spiking up past his thighs.

  Each knuckle was split open, dripping with thick, dark fluid as bloody shards of bone stabbed out from the flesh. Worse, those shards grew as he moved, grinding longer, sharper, as though the act of walking fed the deformity’s weaponized internal structure.

  The creature towered nearly fifteen feet, a gangly giant of jagged bone. Along its forearms ran serrated ridges of bone that pierced clean through its elbows, curving upward into lances so long they loomed higher than its own skull even as its arms hung slack at its sides. They swayed when it walked, deadly pendulums of living ivory.

  And then my gaze reached its head. Its face was a grotesque parody of humanity, the central skin of its features ripped clean away as though flayed by unseen claws. Strips of raw muscle twitched, glistening, clinging to the edges of its jaw and cheeks. Its eyes hung loose in their sockets, suspended by thin, quivering strands that barely held them in place. They didn’t look… they floated, drifting slightly with each lurching step, like pale spheres adrift in gore.

  It lumbered forward, dragging itself over the jagged crags of razor-stone, each movement wet and cracking, like meat being torn fresh from the bone.

  The next one came crawling out of the abyss, and the earth seemed to recoil beneath it. It was larger… so much larger. At first, it clattered like broken machinery, an unnatural percussion of chitin grinding on stone. Then the cavern split open with the sound of stalagmites snapping and stalactites exploding into shards as it forced its way through, a hulking spider-shaped leviathan dragging itself into view.

  Its armor was thick, blackened plates, the kind you’d see on a charred corpse left too long in a fire; splintered and uneven, brittle-looking but unyielding. Sickly patches of yellow corroded across that shell, bleeding out into streaks of orange, before darkening into a central body the color of clotted blood. It wasn’t just armor; it looked diseased, cancerous, as though the shell itself had inexplicably rotted into something stronger.

  Its head was a swollen dome crowded with eyes. Dozens of them. Beady and wet with a single yellow dot twitching in every direction. The endless eyes littered the crown of its skull in uneven clusters. Each one blinked independently, like pus-filled blisters opening and closing, reflecting the faint red glimmer of the cavern light. Below them yawned its maw… an impossible shriek of mandibles, jagged fangs clicking and scraping against one another, too wide, too eager. Every time it opened, a piercing whine rang out, sharp enough to rattle my teeth as I stared into this horror.

  If the skeletal spike-walker had been the size of a telephone pole, this thing was an office building with legs. It towered over even that fifteen-foot monstrosity, its legs stabbing into stone and crushing it as though the ground itself were paper. Each limb was segmented, grotesquely long, with joints that bent too sharply, like a thing that had learned to walk after breaking itself apart.

  Its body bristled with hair, but not the coarse fuzz of an insect. These were translucent, silvery strands that twitched and writhed, alive on their own. They didn’t just coat its body, they felt. They rippled outward, bending toward the faintest tremor in the air, each strand quivering as if savoring vibrations, tasting the space around it like a tongue spread across the cavern, hungry to feel. Those whisker-like filaments were its nerves, spread outward, crawling through the air itself to drink in the world. It didn’t need eyes or ears… it was touching everything.

  When it turned its forest of beady eyes on me, I felt the hairs twitch, shudder, and point in unison. The whole body seemed to bristle, focusing, sensing, drinking in my presence as though it had been starving for me all along.

  But… it wasn't the worst of the three. Then… then came the last.

  The first two were horrors of bone and chitin, things you could at least name, if only by the closest shapes of nature’s worst mistakes. But the third elder… There was no name for it. No shape to describe. No logic to hold onto.

  It rose from the pit like the corpse of Hunger itself vomiting up an unfinished, half-digested meal. A tide of flesh surged in behind the other two, not walking, not crawling, but rolling, a storm of tissue and gore folding and unfolding itself as though it couldn’t decide what to be. It was larger than both, yet smaller, stretched thin and broad like a sea pressing against the cavern walls, filling the depths with its grotesque tide.

  Skin rippled across its surface only to slough away in sheets, baring wet coils of muscle that writhed and tangled with each other like serpents in a pit. Strips of sinew tightened and snapped. Ligaments pulled taut only to dissolve into strings of pulped meat, while splintered bones surfaced like driftwood in a bloody ocean before sinking again. It was in constant flux, trying to remember… or invent a form.

  Every inch of it moved, every part of it alive, writhing… hungry.

  It wasn’t walking toward me. It was spreading… oozing, seeping forward like the tide rolling in. The floor vanished beneath it as they moved forward, swallowed by waves of gore, until the cavern itself seemed to tilt toward me with its advance. The sound was unbearable… a thousand wet mouths smacking and tearing; the endless groan of meat being stretched, the bubbling hiss of blood boiling in transformation.

  For a moment, I thought I saw faces. Not one… but dozens. Maybe hundreds. Half-formed human visages pressed against the rolling surface, screaming silently, their eyes bulging before melting back into the tide. Hands clawed upward from within the mass, fingers reaching, scrabbling for freedom, only to be reabsorbed with sickening pops as if the flesh itself fed on their desperation.

  This wasn’t a creature. This was the aftermath of creatures. A graveyard made animate.

  The shapeshifter Alex, Martin, and Charles had once fought in that alley came to mind, but this… this was the blasphemy that creature must have dreamed of being. A god of formlessness. A womb of endless hunger, forever taking and never finishing, devouring forms and spitting them back unfinished.

  And then the thought cut through me like a knife of ice: it’s still changing.

  This wasn’t even its final body. It was still digesting the elders that had been consumed. Still consolidating their relics. Still deciding what shape could hold so much Primeval power.

  The ocean of gore behind the other two elders surged higher, spreading wider, like it would drown the cavern itself before it was done. And when its waves broke forward, it wasn’t water they promised to drown me in, but every nightmare of flesh that Hunger had ever dreamed.

  “Three of my elders,” she… no, Hunger said, slow and savoring the syllables as if tasting them. The cavern vibrated with the words.

  I watched Alex’s hands move over her skin. Not the deliberate, sensual coaxing she used on prey, but something cruder, animal, and obscene: a possessive mapping of territory. Hunger was feeling the edges of the body it had taken, cataloguing the curves like a thing inventorying a meal. The gesture didn’t belong to Alex; it belonged to something that thought of flesh as fuel and people as ingredients.

  “We’ve had some changes recently,” the voice purred through her. “All for the better.” It laughed, low and wet, and then, softer, closer, mock-affectionate: “Add in this little beauty here.” Her fingers raked down her breasts again, and the motion was obscene because it claimed the thing inside her as owner.

  Inside Alex, something howled. Not a whisper, but a raw, animal scream that trembled behind the mouth speaking. I could feel the tremor of it in the air… her consciousness banging at its prison like a trapped thing. For a sliver of a heartbeat, the original Alex flared through: eyes wet, pupils tiny, lips trembling, an old, human terror that didn’t belong to the Primeval. She tried to speak, and only a broken, muffled syllable came out, swallowed by the predatory voice that overrode her.

  Rage detonated inside me… pure and powerful hatred for this Primeval. It hammered at the effects of the cavern and pushed the stale breath of that place outward like wind from my lungs. Something in the dark answered with a hiss, as though the stone itself noticed and recoiled from my power.

  “You used her,” I spat, the word a blade. “You took her… wore her like a suit… You have no idea who she is!” It enraged me that all Alex had gone through, all she had survived against within herself and the urges, was cast away like nothing.

  Hunger’s voice softened into something almost intimate, and that made my skin crawl. “I did take her,” it said, smiling through Alex’s lips. “You brought me the perfect vessel, Sam. She was already hungry… so hungry. How could I not let her feed?”

  I felt Myordrakien’s will rub against mine, cold metal against tendons, and for a breath we became one; Annihilation and Sam… two wills gleaming and sharpened into one. My eyes blackened further somehow; shadow crawled along my vision like oil spilling across a mirror. The talons at my fingertips extended even further, black, curved, hungry for death. The cavern smelled of strife and the metallic tang of old blood.

  Anger became sound. Words spat from me quicker than thought. “I’m gonna fucking kill every single one of you!”