The moons have moved since I started eating.

  Pink light slants through the trees and makes the blood look almost pretty—until it hits the ribs and turns them into lacquered bone.

  The forest is trying to smell normal again—wet bark, damp leaves, creek-water—like it can erase what I did here.

  It can’t.

  The draxsio is under me in pieces.

  How long has it been?

  Long enough that the heat is starting to leave the edges. Long enough that my jaw throbs in that dull, used-up way, and my throat feels scraped raw from swallowing too fast.

  I don’t remember the whole fight.

  I remember impact—my chest folding inward, breath knocked clean out of me. I remember my shoulder going wrong with a sound I felt more than heard. Somewhere in that mess, there was a sharp white jolt at the back of my head—like something gave way, like my skull cracked and the world leaked for a second.

  Then there’s a gap.

  And after the gap, there’s this.

  Sitting on the corpse.

  Eating.

  My left arm is halfway back—bone first, then muscle threading over it in hot crawling lines. It burns and itches at the same time, shape insisting itself into existence. Fingers are coming last, slow and careful, like Phoenix is taking its time now that it got fed.

  I scoot, the wet hide slides under me, and I nearly eat mud again.

  Then I look down—and my legs aren’t legs. One ends past the knee. The other is gone past the ankle.

  Then I stop caring, because Phoenix is already fixing it.

  You should be disgusted, I think.

  I tear off another strip and shove it in my mouth anyway.

  The draxsio tastes like iron and wet stone and something sharp I can’t name—new in a way that makes my mouth water harder than it has any right to. The flavor rides straight up my nerves and Phoenix settles, satisfied and smug.

  Stop.

  Stop eating it.

  My jaw keeps moving anyway.

  Somewhere above, a crow calls once—one harsh note—then goes quiet. I catch a flicker of black between branches and it’s gone again. Nothing else comes closer. No curious rustling, no little scavenger feet testing the edge of the smell. The woods are holding their breath around me.

  Because even the forest knows what I am right now.

  This patch of ground shouldn’t be this open. An hour ago it was all brush and tight shadows—close enough you couldn’t see ten feet without pushing through. Now the forest has backed off from me—like it knows better. And I’m sitting in the middle of it, chewing, alone enough that the silence feels like pressure against my ears.

  Being alone sounded better in my head—until my mind starts doing what it always does when it has room. It coughs up faces. Warm rooms. Voices. That one little corner of life I’d been pretending could stay small.

  I swallow too fast. It burns going down.

  My left hand twitches—new nerves lighting up out of order—then steadies as the fingers finish forming, slick and bright and too clean for what I’ve been doing.

  I stare at my own palm for half a second, like it might explain something.

  It doesn’t.

  Valicar blooms across my vision—quiet, clinical, like it’s speaking from behind glass.

  [VALICAR: INGESTION — STABILIZING REGENERATION RATE]

  Then another line slides in beneath it, smaller and meaner, as if it waited until I looked.

  [VALICAR: CALORIC DEMAND — INCREASING (GRAVID)]

  Something turns over hard inside me.

  Don’t say it like that.

  A low cramp twists—nothing dramatic, just a tight little warning—

  and my hand moves before my brain can catch up.

  Palm over my stomach.

  “Fuck,” I whisper, and it comes out like a prayer I don’t believe in.

  And then, because my brain grabs the dumbest rope it can find—

  “Fuck,” I whisper again. “I need a drink.”

  The thought is almost funny. Almost. My mouth tastes like blood and mineral and raw meat, and I’m craving Ruebrew like it could scrub my head clean.

  It won’t. That’s why I ran into the woods instead of a bar. But I sure as hell didn’t come out here to hunt a folklore beast.

  I ran because of a gate and a scanner—because a man stared at a slate and said it like he was reading the day’s temperature: a few months along. Just numbers and certainty, like my life hadn’t shifted under my feet.

  I came out here because my world had finally gotten small and warm and stupid for a little while… and my body reminded me it isn’t really mine.

  But my body doesn’t care why I ran.

  My body cares that I’m hungry.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  My body cares that I’m building someone inside me.

  Behind me, the draxsio is still open like a pantry.

  I glance back and something tightens under my ribs.

  I’m not done.

  I hate that I know I’m not done.

  I go back anyway—one more strip, one more mouthful—because the hollow inside me is loud and impatient and it learned something tonight.

  The taste is so good my teeth ache.

  Heat crawls down my legs as the last missing pieces seal up—tendon pulling tight, skin knitting, nerves sparking awake. It reaches my feet and the toes finish in a row of sharp little jolts.

  Mud squishes between them when I wiggle, and I almost laugh at how normal that part feels.

  I look up.

  Across the wrecked ground—maybe a few hundred feet—my boots lie where I finally kicked free of them, that half-detached sole yawning open like a mouth. Past them, farther into the dark, the elk and wolves are only rough shapes now, collapsed into the grass and shadow.

  I start to laugh—one short, broken sound that doesn’t belong in my throat.

  Look at it. Look at what we did.

  This wasn’t a fight.

  It was a feast the second I got my teeth into it.

  Poor bastard thrashed like anything that realizes it’s being eaten alive, trying to shake me loose—

  and the forest paid for my table manners.

  The brush between here and the boots is gone—crushed flat, torn up, smeared into mud. Saplings snapped like kindling. Bigger trunks scored and split, bark peeled off in long bright strips where something heavy slammed through and kept going. The forest isn’t a forest here anymore. It’s one wide scar, open enough that I can see what I shouldn’t be able to see in a place like this.

  Chunks of him are scattered like someone emptied a butcher’s table across the clearing—a limb half-buried near a stump, a slick rope of something dark draped over a branch, clotted blood painted in arcs on broken bark. His hide lies in torn sheets, ribs cracked and splayed where I opened him up.

  And there are pieces of me too.

  A smear of pale tissue ground into the mud. A strip of leg that looks unfinished, half-knit and wrong. A hand—mine, I think—fingers curled, nails mid-growth, like Phoenix started rebuilding and got dragged away to do it again somewhere else.

  Only one of us kept getting up.

  Near the boots, a strip of cloth hangs from a thorn bush—one of my wraps, snagged and left behind.

  A trail.

  My fingers flex—stiff, wrong—then close around another strip of meat. I pull, teeth tearing through fiber like it’s nothing, and I hate the ease of it.

  How much to stop the shaking?

  How much to shut Phoenix up?

  How much before it decides “enough” and lets me pretend again?

  The forest listens.

  No insects. No night-calls. Even the wind holds back.

  My ears twitch again—but not for sound.

  A pressure—warm and searching—brushes the inside of my skull.

  I know that touch on instinct now.

  Orion.

  Where have you been, Little Phoenix? he murmurs, calm and careful.

  Then the second presence hits—hotter, heavier.

  Queen Mother! the Devil snarls. How I have missed you. I can feel your hunger.

  My jaw tightens. My mouth waters.

  Orion stays smooth.

  Half the galaxy has fallen between us, he says. The smaller broods keep choosing sides.

  The Devil laughs.

  They crawl to the loudest mouth. The hungriest.

  Orion tightens, controlled.

  They crawl to the one who will win. Merge with me, Little Phoenix. Make the Hive singular again.

  The Devil surges closer.

  No. Merge with me, Queen Mother.

  I want you.

  I will wear you like a sun and eat everything that won’t kneel.

  Orion doesn’t raise his voice.

  See? This is why they fear him. And why they’ll run to me when he overreaches.

  The Devil coils around my throat.

  Choose, it hisses. Or we take the choice out of you.

  A beat.

  Orion’s voice turns pleased.

  And you’ve made another.

  My hand goes to my stomach before I can stop it.

  The Devil flares.

  You are with child. A new queen.

  Orion hums.

  With child, he echoes. A new queen.

  The pressure tightens—amused.

  My body leans toward it on instinct. Phoenix reaches.

  Valicar is already there.

  [VALICAR: PERSONAL SHIELD — ACTIVE]

  [VALICAR: OSCILLATION — ENABLED]

  [VALICAR: INTERNAL BIO-SIGNAL — SCRAMBLING]

  Valicar drops the wall like a portcullis—iron and final.

  The connection cuts off mid-breath.

  One second they’re in my skull—

  the next they’re on the other side of iron.

  My lungs unlock.

  I’m not safe. Not even close.

  But they didn’t find me.

  “Shit,” I breathe. “Thanks, Val.”

  The relief is so sharp it makes me sick.

  I stare at what’s left between my fingers and nausea hits—not from the gore. From the knowing.

  This is my father’s legacy. A hunger that goes beyond just one.

  A hunger that can make a whole galaxy disappear.

  And someday it will be mine.

  The little girl growing inside me will inherit it too—this hunger, this drive—

  —and she’ll eat me alive first, the way anything growing does.

  It’ll take what it needs.

  Calories. Blood. Flesh.

  People.

  I can’t go back to a tavern with this inside me—back to warm bread and dumb jokes—while my body listens to heartbeats the way a butcher listens for the last kick.

  If I stay around people, I will hurt someone.

  You don’t get to be normal anymore.

  You got a taste. That’s all.

  My jaw aches. My throat is raw. My stomach is full and still hungry.

  I back away from the carcass on my hands and heels until the air smells more like mud than meat, then I find the creek by sound and drop to the bank, shoulder against an exposed root.

  The water isn’t the clean ribbon I want it to be.

  It’s shallow here—more a smear than a stream—muddy from all the churned ground upstream. It still talks over stones in a steady little voice, like it’s trying to pretend nothing happened.

  I shove my hands into it anyway.

  Silt billows up around my wrists. The water clouds brown… then pink… then that ugly in-between that never clears no matter how hard I rub. I scrape my nails against stone. Grind my palms together. Drag my fingers through the muck like I can sand myself back to normal.

  The creek just keeps swallowing it and giving it back.

  My hands come out clean-ish—mud-caked, shaking—but the smell stays. The taste stays.

  And the body behind me doesn’t go anywhere.

  My eyelids get heavy.

  Just a minute.

  I blink once.

  The forest tilts.

  I blink again and it’s hours later.

  Cold has crept into the ground under my hip. My neck is stiff. The moons have shifted again, and the air tastes thinner—meaner.

  I don’t sit up so much as snap awake, whole body going tight.

  A voice cuts through the trees, ragged and familiar.

  “Sol?”

  Alkek.

  My lungs forget how to work.

  Another shout, closer, strained like he’s been calling until his throat bled.

  “Sol! Please—”

  Hooves crunch through brush. A horse snorts, sharp and nervous, smelling what I can’t wash off. The sound makes something in my gut lock hard enough to hurt.

  Stay human. Stay human.

  [VALICAR: AUDIO — MATCH CONFIRMED (ALKEK)]

  [VALICAR: THREAT ASSESSMENT — LOW (HUMAN)]

  [VALICAR: CONCEALMENT — COMPROMISED (SCENT / VISUAL)]

  I push to my feet too fast. Leaves stick to my calves. My fingers flex—stiff—then I force them still.

  The brush parts.

  Moonlight slides over a familiar head and ears first—Cinder’s silhouette, tall and black against the trees, breath ghosting white. He stamps once, wanting to turn away from the clearing.

  Alkek sits high in the saddle, hunched forward like he’s been riding too hard for too long. Mud on his boots. Mud on his hands. Mud ground into the knees of his pants. His eyes look too bright—panic held in by sheer refusal.

  He sees me.

  Then his gaze drops past me.

  To the torn hide. The cracked ribs. The bone shine.

  His face changes in steps—shock, then disbelief, then something that doesn’t have a clean name.

  His mouth opens.

  Nothing comes out.

  Cinder gives a rough, chest-deep blow and dances sideways, hooves scraping. Alkek tightens the reins with one hand and lays the other on the horse’s neck, a small steadying touch that doesn’t reach his eyes.

  “Don’t look,” I say, too fast. “Please.” Then, softer: “Don’t.”

  He swallows hard and forces his voice to work.

  “Tell me,” he says, raw. “Tell me what happened.”

  My voice catches on the taste I can’t get rid of.

  “I... ran,” I say, and it comes out too simple.

  Alkek flinches like I hit him.

  Then his eyes catch—my mouth, my hands, the red-brown mud crusted into my skin—and he stops, staring at the wrong colors in my eyes like he’s not sure he’s found me at all.

  He whispers my name again, smaller—careful.

  “Sol…?”