Angram woke to nothing.
Not darkness—darkness implied the presence of something. This was absence. A void where perception should have been. His mind floated in that emptiness, untethered, drifting like ash on a dead wind.
After a while he sensed light.
Light that was a jagged, piercing intrusion. It didn't belong to the world Angram knew—it wasn't the soft luminescence of dawn, nor the harsh glare of midday. It was something thinner, colder, like light filtered through frosted glass or dying embers.
His thoughts drifted through a vast emptiness where memories should have been. There was no name. No purpose. No understanding of where he was or how he had gotten there.
Only confusion.
'Where...'
CRACK-SNAP. POP.
The sound was rhythmic, persistent. It was the wood—or whatever fueled the flame—giving up its soul to the heat. With the sound came the scent: sharp, acrid, mixed with the damp musk of earth and something metallic.
Fire.
Though he didn't remember the word, something deep inside him recognized it. A second sensation followed.
Smoke.
Understanding materialized in his mind, anchoring him. He clung to it, using the scent as a tether to pull himself out of the dark, suffocating fog of his own confusion.
Slowly, the world resolved itself. The blur became orange light dancing across rough stone walls. The darkness resolved into shadows. The shadows became a cavern.
Angram blinked.
Once.
Twice.
His eyes were dry, gritty, as if he hadn't blinked in hours. He turned his head—a movement that cost him more effort than it should have—and took in his surroundings.
The walls of this cavern were obsidian-dark, slick with a perpetual, weeping condensation that shimmered in the firelight. Jagged formations of multicolored crystals hung down like frozen teeth, their surfaces glistening with energy and illumination.
At the center of the space, a pit was bordered by heavy, charcoal-stained stones, containing a fire that roared with a defiant, hungry intensity. The air was surprisingly clean, despite the fire. The cavern itself seemed to breathe; high above the central pit, he could see narrow, chimney-like apertures in the walls, snaking upward into the gloom, designed with unnatural precision to draw the smoke away, leaving the main chamber clear.
He glanced upward and saw the entrance—a gaping maw several meters above the floor. Directly beneath it, arranged with a deliberate, lethal grace, were sharpened stalagmites, protruding from the ground like the teeth of the earth itself. It was a trap, an architectural statement of cruelty.
Even from a distance they looked capable of impaling anything unfortunate enough to fall upon them. The sight made his stomach tighten.
What kind of place was this?
Why was he here?
The questions drifted through his mind.
No answers came. Then his arm began to itch.
Angram tried to scratch it.
Nothing happened.
Confused, he tried again. Still nothing.
He frowned. Then for the first time he looked down at himself. He was bound, encased in a pale wax-like substance that smelled faintly of pine resin and something sickly sweet. Only his head remained exposed. A fibrous strand—something like rope made of spider silk, but darker—was attached to the wax encasing him.
His blank mind stared at the strange prison.
Then he pushed.
A crack appeared, a thin line splitting across the surface of the binding.
Angram blinked. He pushed harder.
CRACK.
More fractures spread through the cocoon. Something primal stirred within him.
Strength?
Desperation?
Instinct?
He shoved with everything he had.
SNAP.
The prison shattered and instantly gravity claimed him. The remnants of the cocoon tore apart and Angram plummeted downward. A startled scream escaped his lips and a few moments later he hit the ground.
Hard.
Pain exploded through his back.
"Ahhh!"
The impact knocked the air from his lungs. For several moments he simply lay there gasping.
Groaning, he rolled to his side, his hand brushing against something jagged and brittle. He reached out blindly, his fingers curling around a curved, serrated object. He lifted it to his face.
The orange glow of the fire illuminated the object: a beast's skull, bleached to a terrifying, bone-white hue.
He stared at it.
The empty eye sockets stared back.
For one terrible moment nothing happened. Then everything returned, the memories crashed into him like a tidal wave.
The two titan beasts, gargantuan avatars of ruin, locked in a dance of extinction. He remembered waking up in a dark wasteland of shale and jagged rock. He remembered wandering for days, his feet bleeding and weak, being chased into the fog, his mind being assulted by the Presence of the abhorrence shrouded in its embrace. The chasm—the shadow that had lunged out of the dark, the hot, wet breath of the monster, the searing pain of teeth sinking into his flank—
He screamed, a high, broken sound that echoed off the damp walls. He scrambled backward, his palms slapping against something hard. He looked down, and his breath hitched. He wasn't just sitting on a floor; he was sitting on a necropolis. The entire cavern floor was carpeted in bones—shattered ribs, splintered femurs, spines,the hollow eye-sockets of a dozen different creatures all staring up at him in silent, accusing judgment.
The phantom pain of the attack returned, more vivid than before. He felt the tearing of his skin, the internal rupture of his organs. He doubled over, his stomach churning, and he heaved, his body convulsing in a dry, violent retch.
Even so, his body convulsed as if trying to expel the memory itself, dry heaves wracking his frame, but only bile and agony emerged.
The hunger hit him immediately afterward.
He hadn't eaten in days, and the starvation was now a physical weight, a hollow gnawing that felt like his own body was cannibalizing itself from the inside out.
He collapsed, curling into a ball on the floor of bones. Tears streamed down his face, hot against his cold skin. He was shaking, trembling, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
He wanted his mother.
The thought appeared unexpectedly.
Then his father.
Home.
His village.
The familiar faces he had left behind.
The realization that he might never see them again nearly broke him.
'Where am I? What happened to me? How did I get here?'
He looked around the chamber with new eyes.
This was a den. A lair. Something had brought him here. Something had bound him in that wax cocoon, suspended him from the ceiling, left him to hang like a piece of meat.
'To kill me later. To eat me later.'
He forced his eyes up, toward the entrance. His blood turned to ice.
A figure was watching him. It had been watching him this entire time, observing his panic, his pain, his collapse.
It was a nightmare carved from shadow and plumage. The maw extended outward in a long predatory shape lined with countless sharp fangs from a skull like visage. Three dark pits where eyes should have been—empty, bottomless voids that seemed to swallow the light. Two horns protruded from its temples, curving backward, and from the creatures crown extended a frill of spikes that ran along the back of its skull. The frill was jagged, irregular, each spike a different length and thickness.
Around its neck was a thick ruff of dark indigo feathers, like a vulture's collar and its body was draped in a shroud of black, layered feathers that gave it the silhouette of a raptor at rest.
It carried a deer-like creature, its limp form slung effortlessly over one shoulder. It didn't attack. It didn't roar. It simply watched. It tilted its head in an inquisitive motion that was somehow more terrifying than a display of aggression.
Angram watched the creature shift its weight. He looked at it and then the spikes below the entrance.
'Maybe it will fall,' Angram thought, a desperate, hysterical hope rising in his chest. 'Maybe it will slip.'
But the creature moved with fluid, eerie grace. It stepped onto the ledge and leaped, clearing the spikes with inches to spare, landing silently beside the fire pit. It didn't even acknowledge the trap it had bypassed. It dropped the deer near the flames, then turned its skull-face toward Angram. His heart sank.
It looked at the empty wax-sling Angram had fallen from, then back to the boy. It took a single step forward, its feet making no sound on the bone-strewn floor.
"Get back!" Angram shouted.
His voice cracked. It was weak, barely more than a whisper.
"Get away from me!"
e scrambled backward, his fingers grasping for anything. His stone knife—where was his knife? He had carried it since the chasm. It was gone.
Panic surged.
He scrambled backward, his hands grabbing at the bones around him. He found a femur, thick and heavy, and hurled it at the creature.
It didn't even flinch. The bone bounced off its feathered body and clattered to the ground.
He threw another. And another. A skull. A rib. Anything he could reach.
"Stay away! Stay away from me!"
The creature didn't flinch. It merely watched, its three eye-holes tracking his every movement with an unnerving, clinical intelligence.
Suddenly, an intense, white-hot pain bloomed in Angram's stomach.
He spat blood.
It was the hunger—the true, agonizing starvation that signaled his body had finally run out of reserves. He clutched his midsection, his fingernails digging into his skin. Something had been keeping the hunger at bay—the wax, perhaps, or whatever had been done to him—but now it was gone.
He collapsed onto the bones, tears streaming down his face. He was so weak. So tired. He couldn't fight anymore.
Every heartbeat made him weaker.
Every breath hurt.
The creature watched him for a long moment. Then it turned away.
Angram watched through blurred vision as it crouched beside the deer. A clawed, humanoid hand—startlingly human in its structure—reached out from beneath the dense black feathers. Angram froze, his heart stuttering.
In that hand, he saw it. His knife. His stone knife.
The creature cut into the deer's flank, carving out a few chunk of meat. It tossed the pieces of meat into the fire, the fat sizzling and popping. Then, it then moved away from the fire and reached into the shadows of the cave wall and produced a handful of dried, pungent leaves. It threw them into the flames.
The fire flared, a sudden, unnatural green light washing over the cave, turning the shadows into long, twisting fingers. Angram watched, mesmerized by the ritual.
The creature reached into the fire, its hand unburned by the heat, and withdrew the scorched meat into the folds of its feathers. It turned toward him again and began to draw nearer.
There was the sound of something scraping against hard flesh coming from its chest.
"S-stay away," he whispered, his voice barely audible.
"I can't die here. I have to go back. I have to see my parents again. I can't—"
The world was fading. His vision was darkening at the edges, the firelight shrinking to a single point.
The creature crouched beside him and its clawed hand reached out. Angram shut his eyes.
Waiting for pain.
Waiting for teeth.
Waiting for death.
He felt a touch on his face. It was warm almost...human.
He forced his eyes open, his final effort at life. He looked up at the skeletal face, the nightmare that had haunted his waking moments. The creature was leaning closer, its jagged maw inches from his own. And then, a sound—a mechanical, soft click—reverberated in the silence of the cave.
The skull-face shifted. The white, bone-like surface seemed to split, moving like hinged plates, and the creature began to pull it away—like a mask being shed.
Below the bone, there was something else. A glimpse of something fragile, something pale, something deeply, terrifyingly alive.
Angram's vision shattered into total blackness, but as he fell into the void, he felt the touch again—the hand cupping his cheek as something, someone leaned closer.