The air in the training yard was different that morning. There was no booming voice, no heavy boots thudding against the gravel. There was only Eoman, standing alone by the platform.
The children slowed their pace, their eyes darting around the empty yard, waiting for the familiar, grounding presence of Ryven.
"Not happy to see me?" Eoman asked, pouting his lip in a display of feigned sadness. But his eyes remained wide, glassy, and completely detached from the emotion on his face.
No one answered. The children stood rigid, their newly sharpened instincts screaming at them to flee.
"Ryven will be running late, but he will meet us at our destination," Eoman announced brightly, turning on his heel.
He didn't wait for them. His long, spider-like strides carried him directly toward the edge of another training site—toward the jagged, gaping crevices where Ryven had thrown Kira months prior.
Kira's breath hitched. Her pulse instantly skyrocketed, a deafening drumbeat in her ears. Beside her, Sapphire, Kealor, and the others all turned to look at her, their faces pale. They knew what that place was.
The children halted several feet away from the drop, but Eoman walked right to the precipice. He stood on the absolute edge, tilting his body forward at an impossible, death-defying angle, peering down into the pitch-black abyss below.
"Hmm. Interesting," Eoman mused aloud.
'Won't you say so, My Lady?' Eoman's voice slid into Kira's mind like a cold blade. She caught a glimpse of his face over his shoulder—his eyes had crinkled into terrifying, crescent shapes.
Kira stumbled backward, her knees buckling as the trauma of her previous fall rushed back in a violent wave of nausea.
"Alright," Eoman said, turning to face them with a blinding, cheerful smile. "Your next training begins here. In you go."
The children froze, shaken to their very core. Kealor took a frantic step back.
"Ryven taught you physical training and body honing," Eoman said, his voice dropping its cheerful tone, becoming flat and empty. "Before we continue, let us see if you can recall what you have been taught."
Before anyone could scream, an invisible, crushing force slammed into the children back. It gripped them by their chests, dragging them forward across the dirt. They swept past Eoman like leaves in a gale, hurtling over the lip of the cliff.
As Kira tip-toed into the empty air, Eoman's final mental whisper echoed in the darkness of her skull: 'Enjoy the lunch, My Lady.'
Then, the world split. The sensation of falling vanished, swallowed by a suffocating, pitch-black void.
________
"What… Who are you…" Lucian stuttered. His voice was barely audible, vibrating with a primal fear as he stared at the monstrosity looming before him in the dark.
The eyes. There were hundreds of them.
They stared at him from the dark, varying wildly in size. Some were massive—wider than his entire being, dark pools big enough to jump into. Others were the length of an arm, the size of his palm, or smaller than his own pupils.
They looked identical, yet completely alien to one another. When they simply stared, they were a unified, silent wall of jelly. But then, they started talking.
When the voices began, the eyes within the tears started rolling and twisting like spinning discs inside a player. Some eyes darted to stare at each other, while others whirled in completely different directions.
Lucian didn't know where to look.
The overlapping, mismatched voices echoed from every angle, tearing at his sanity.
Which one? Who is talking?
They all were. With varying magnitudes, pitch and depths,
"We are final death, where destruction has no creation. We are nothing, the death of death and death of life."
"What?" Lucian asked,
Silence.
Then a chorus of a hundred different overlapping whispers, converging into a single, chilling warning:
"Beware of the night critters. We will be seeing you soon."
_______
With a violent gasp, Lucian's eyes shot open.
'Why did I remember this now?' the thought flashed through his mind, frantic and desperate, before reality crashed back into him.
He had barely survived the grey creatures when he came in contact with that monstrosity. And it has been a while since then.
The memory fractured as the children hit the bottom of the crevices. As they descended into the deep dark, the air grew thick and suffocatingly silent.
Kira's ears popped, a strange, static tingling sensation prickling across her skin.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
A series of heavy, brutal impacts echoed through the dark as their bodies collided with the stone floor. Agonizing pain shot through Kira's ribs and shoulder, knocking the remaining breath from her lungs. They were at the bottom. And they were completely alone.
"Oh remember young mortals, Hunger has many eyes. It better you start climbing" Eoman called out from above. Before silence was known again.
The darkness at the bottom of the crevice was absolute. As the children dragged themselves up from the stone floor, groaning and clutching their bruised limbs, their minds desperately tried to rationalize the nightmare.
They thought this was just another of Ryven's grueling tests. A climbing section, designed to force them to use the muscle memory they had just spent three days building. The only difference was the terrifying lack of safety harnesses, ropes, or nets.
"Get up," Sapphire muttered through grit teeth, his hands blindly sweeping the dark until he found Kira's uninjured arm, pulling her to her feet. "We have to find a wall. We have to start climbing unless we will remain here. Plus, it's best we don't find out what happens when we don't complete the task."
Then, the silence of the abyss fractured.
Chirp. Click-click.
It was a wet, skittering sound, echoing off the damp stone walls.
"What is that?" Jex whimpered from somewhere in the dark, his voice escalating into pure panic. "Something touched my foot! Something's on my leg!"
Before anyone could move to help him, a sharp, agonizing shriek tore through the crevice.
Jex violently kicked his leg out, his boots scraping frantically against the gravel. "They're biting! They're eating me!"
The children spun toward the sound, their hearts hammering against their ribs.
Kira's breath hitched. She backed away from Jex's screams, her eyes straining against the blackness—until the dark stared back. Directly in front of her face, four pinpricks of bioluminescent light snapped open.
The glowing eyes were arranged in a sickening, jagged formation, perfectly drawing the shape of a jagged 'M' in the air.
Kira let out a ragged gasp, stumbling backward in a blind panic until her spine slammed hard into another body.
"You too!" Lucian barked, irritated as he shoved her forward to maintain his balance. He went to snap at her to look where she was going, but the words died in his throat.
Over Kira's shoulder, Lucian spotted the jagged 'M' of eyes.
And then, like a row of dying lanterns being forcefully lit, pairs of four eyes began snapping open all around them. Dozens. Hundreds. A sea of glowing, twitching shapes illuminating the true horrors crawling along the cave floor.
The realization paralyzed Lucian, a cold sweat breaking out across his skin. These creatures down here were the ones he had been warned about.
Now, the suffocating pieces of the puzzle finally clicked into place. The children finally understood what Eoman had meant before he forced them over the edge. His final, parting words before telling them to climb echoed in their minds with a newfound, horrifying clarity:
'Hunger has many eyes.'