The night pressed close, thick as a burial shroud. Mist dragged low over the marshes beyond the castle of Aelthas, curling around reed and stone like pale fingers. Rhael slipped among them barefoot, leaving no trace but the whisper of disturbed water. The moon caught his skin—white as bone, streaked faintly with black veins that glimmered when he breathed too fast.
Every breath carried decay.
The stench of rot. Of drowned things left too long in stagnant water. But beneath it—hidden, thin, maddening—there was something warmer. Something alive. His chest tightened. His tongue scraped the edge of his teeth until he tasted blood.
The hunger was not a call anymore. It was a chain. A dog bounded by chains.
He thought of the men he had devoured weeks ago and the memory slashed him open. He could still feel the heat of their veins spilling into his mouth, still hear the desperate sob that tried to break from one throat before it was swallowed whole. He hated it. He needed it. And every step he took reminded him: no matter how many monsters he carved apart, only flesh filled that void.
A ripple stirred the bog.
Rhael crouched low, eyes gleaming. Shadows shifted and from the reeking shallows rose forms half-swollen with rot: swamp wights. Their skin gleamed green-black in moonlight, slick with rotwater, bellies distended. Their jaws hung loose, teeth clattering as they clawed at the air.
"Half-men, ghouls," he whispered, his voice like a torn reed in the wind. His lips curled—not in mockery, but recognition. "Closer to me than any man will ever permit."
They did not hear him, or if they did, their dulled senses gave no sign. They groaned, staggering in their endless hungering.
Rhael flexed his claws. His body coiled with tension.
"You're already dead," he murmured, speaking as much to himself as to them. "So tell me—what does your death give back to me?"
He lunged.
The first wight screamed—a wet, gurgling shriek while his claws sank deep, rending flesh and sinew. The sound clawed through his skull, but he drowned it, burying his face in its neck. The taste was cold, half-life mingled with stagnant water, and yet… there was something in it. Enough to make his veins flare with fire. Enough to make him shudder as power licked through his body.
The monster writhed in his grip. Its hands, slick with slime, scrabbled at his chest. He tore it open with a snarl, ripping sinew in a spray of blackened gore.
Each strike, each bite, fed him—but only like scraps thrown to a starving hound.
He dropped the corpse into the mud, panting. His breath came quickly, misting in the night air. His body convulsed—muscles swelling, claws curving sharper, his teeth lengthening with each pulse. Veins crawled beneath his skin, black lightning weaving across his chest.
And still. Still hungry. An endless hunger that devoured his sane mind
He crouched in the mud, staring at his hands. His knuckles trembled as he whispered, "Not enough. Never enough."
A ripple of memory, of his mother's voice, faded as a candle in a stormlight—rose unbidden: 'Drink, Rhael. Just drink. Or the draught will spoil.'
He shook his head violently, slamming his claws into the mud until water spattered his face. "I drank, Mother. I drank it all." His voice cracked, low, almost childlike. "And still I'm empty."
The marsh gave him no answer. Only the creak of frogs and the sigh of water reeds.
He moved deeper, through forest edges where the air hung thicker with fog.
The swamp birthed horrors of its own. Rodents the size of dogs skittered over roots, yellow eyes glinting as they vanished into burrows. Wolves—thin, ragged, fur mangy—howled somewhere distant, their cries more desperation than fury. And worse still, he saw shapes that had once been men and women but were no longer. Their forms bent in half, skin mottled and slick, mouths pulled too wide.
Swamp demons.
Their shrieks hit the air like iron on stone, keening, half-mad. Their eyes burned faintly in their ruined skulls, as if some dying ember of humanity still resisted the corruption.
Rhael's throat tightened. He stepped into their sight without hesitation.
One shrieked louder, a sound so sharp he felt his teeth ache. It lunged, claws flashing.
He did not move until the last heartbeat. Then he slid aside with a fluidity no human could mimic. His teeth sank into its shoulder before it even landed.
The warmth. Faint, but there.
He drank deep, his claws pinning the demon's arms. And as its blood ran over his tongue, his mind burned with flashes—images not his own.
A face screaming.
Hands clawing at a door that would not open.
A voice, breaking in despair: 'Don't leave me here.'
The demon thrashed, its shriek cracking into something that sounded almost human. Rhael swallowed it all—the pain, the shame, the betrayal that had twisted it into this wretch. For a moment, it was exquisite. For a moment, it was wine.
Then the warmth died. The blood turned cold. The void yawned wider.
He spat the flesh into the mud, gagging. "You had nothing left. Nothing." His voice cracked, anger lacing each word. "All you gave me was the echo of your failure."
His claws trembled as he wiped his mouth. The ache in his chest had not lessened. It deepened.
By the third night, he had learned the swamp's rhythms. Goblins prowled the edges in packs, their small bodies hunched, teeth yellow in grins that carried no humor. Their crude weapons caught the moon, rust glimmering. Spears snapped with brittle cracks against his arms, knives broke against his hardened bone.
To them, Rhael was a phantom in the fog—appearing, striking, vanishing again. Their screams mingled with the swamp mist until the forest itself seemed to wail.
One spear pierced his shoulder. He growled, and his body answered: bone thickened like a shield, snapping the weapon in two as if it were reed.
He tore them apart, methodical. Each kill strung high on the trees, their corpses swaying in the fog like warning flags.
But victory was not triumph.
Arrows poisoned with crude black venom sank into his side, and the venom crawled through his veins like fire. He clawed it out, ripped open the wound, willed his blood to mend it but it left him shaking, weaker.
Every fight drained him. Every kill reminded him how little he was compared to what he might become. His power was only a shard of something greater, a fragment of a blade not yet forged.
And the hunger, always the hunger.
He stumbled against a tree, chest heaving. His hands dug into bark until it cracked.
"I am not enough," he whispered. His reflection in the swamp water shuddered back at him—eyes faintly red, face gaunt, lips cracked. "I am still empty."
Silence answered.
But in the silence, his own mind whispered back.
"Then fill yourself."
The swamp air thickened with the smell of human sweat. Close now. Too close.
Rhael pressed himself against the bark of a warped willow, pale fingers curling around its roots as if the tree itself might shield him from the inevitability clawing at his insides. His tongue felt sandpaper-dry. Hunger didn't only gnaw; it roared, it sang, it whispered a thousand promises of release if only he gave in.
Two figures stumbled into view—a hunter and his son, a lantern swaying between them. The boy couldn't have been older than twelve, clutching a net that dragged through the reeds. His laughter, of light, unthinking splintered through Rhael's skull. It was warmth, it was life, it was everything he could never touch without breaking it.
"Pa," the boy whispered, tugging at his father's sleeve, "you hear that? I thought I heard something moving."
The father grunted. "Marsh is always moving. Quiet now. Don't scare the eels."
Rhael's nails dug into the bark until the wood bled sap. His vision blurred around the boy's neck, the pulse flashing like a lantern inside the skin. Just a taste. Just one mouthful. The hunger lied sweetly.
He stepped from the shadow before he realized it. The lantern light caught his face, and the boy's laughter strangled into silence.
"Almighty Light may protect us—" the father hissed, fumbling for the spear strapped to his back.
But Rhael was already moving. The swamp seemed to tilt beneath his feet, carrying him forward in a rush of instinct. The spear's tip nicked his side, but the pain was smoke in the wind. His hands found the man's throat, not guided by thought but by a darkness older than words. Bone cracked beneath his grip. The lantern dropped, fire hissing out in the damp reeds.
The boy screamed.
That sound—sharp, pure—drove the hunger into a frenzy. Rhael spun toward it, eyes wide, chest heaving. The boy stumbled back, tripping on his own net. Lantern light had died, but moonlight gleamed cruelly across Rhael's teeth.
"No," Rhael choked, clawing at his own jaw as though he could shut it. "Not you. Not—"
But the hunger was stronger than the boy's fear. Stronger than his will. He lunged.
The world after was silence.
Rhael crouched in the reeds, breath wet, body shaking. The boy lay motionless, skin pale as if the swamp had drunk him dry. Blood was warm in Rhael's throat, fire and shame and ecstasy all braided into one unbearable knot.
He gagged, pushing himself back until his spine struck the willow. His hands trembled over the still chest, the wide unseeing eyes.
"What… have I done?" His voice cracked like ice breaking.
The marsh answered only with frogs.
He staggered upright, clutching his head. The father's body floated half-submerged, reeds tangling in his beard, while the boy's hand still clutched the useless net. Rhael's vision swam with afterimages of veins, pulses, the endless throb of life around him. Every bird, every insect shimmered with it. The world had turned to meat.
A hiss cut the night. Not his own.
Rhael whipped around. From the mire rose a figure draped in swamp-mist, hair dripping black as oil. Eyes that were hollow, luminous—regarded him with something crueler than pity.
"You felt it, didn't you?" The voice was everywhere, inside his ears, inside his teeth. "The hunger. The gift. The curse."
Rhael stumbled back, wiping blood from his lips. "Who—what are you?"
The figure tilted its head. "The first who walked in the shadows. The one who bore the sun's scorn before you were ever thought of." A hand, bone-thin, pointed at him. "Now you carry it too. You are one of us. No, I am you."
Rhael's chest heaved. "I didn't choose this—"
"Choice?" The figure's laugh was like reeds snapping in the wind. "Did you choose to breathe? Did you choose to bleed? You were born for this. You were the destiny"
"No." Rhael's voice hardened. He glanced at the boy's still body, bile rising in his throat. "If this is what I am, then I'd rather—"
"You'd rather die?" The figure finished. It stepped closer, water rippling without sound around its ankles. "Then look east, fledgling. Look at the edge of the night."
Rhael turned. Beyond the marsh, the horizon glowed faintly, a bruise of color warning the dawn's approach.
And the moment his gaze touched it, agony lanced through his skin. His hands smoked where moonlight thinned into morning gray. His knees buckled, body screaming against the sun that hadn't even risen.
He fell, clutching the mud, breath tearing from his lungs. "—help—"
The figure's voice curled around him like smoke. "No gods will answer. The sun will flay you raw. Its light will burn your flesh until nothing remains but ash in the wind. Hide, if you wish to live. Hide, and drink deep when the night returns."
Then it was gone, leaving only ripples.
Rhael dragged himself beneath the willow's roots, the boy's dead gaze following him even in the dark. His chest convulsed with sobs he tried to smother, but the hunger purred inside him still—sated, yes, but waiting for the next night.
When dawn finally broke, the swamp shimmered in gold. The father's spear floated away. The boy's hand slipped free of the net. And beneath the roots, Rhael curled into himself, skin blistering at every stray ray of light, whispering the words he no longer believed.
"Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me…"
But the marsh did not forgive. Forgiveness may as well be a curse as death has no right to forgive.