The sickness came in waves.
Kaelen woke in his communal shelter platform to find his stomach rejecting everything he'd eaten in the past two days. He made it to the waste grate before vomiting, but what came up wasn't food.
It was black. Viscous. Streaked with gold that glowed even in the shelter's dim light.
The other sleepers noticed. Of course they noticed. Sickness was contagious. Sick people got cast out.
Someone grabbed his shoulder—rough hands, calloused—trying to drag him toward the exit before he could contaminate the space.
Kaelen's hand shot out without thought. Grabbed the person's wrist. Held on.
The fragment in his other pocket shrieked its hunger.
Kaelen's vision inverted—black world, crimson-gold figures. The person attached to the wrist glowed with internal light. Life force. Energy.
And Kaelen was so, so hungry.
His grip tightened.
The person screamed. Tried to pull away.
Couldn't.
Kaelen felt it—the connection. Invisible threads running from his palm to the other person's wrist, burrowing in, finding veins, finding life.
All he had to do was pull.
He let go.
The person stumbled back, clutching their wrist, eyes wide with terror. They fled toward the shelter exit, shouting about contamination, about plague.
Other sleepers were already backing away, forming a wide circle of empty space.
Kaelen stood. His legs shook. His vision kept flickering—normal, inverted, normal, inverted—until he closed his eyes and forced it to stabilize through sheer will.
When he opened them again, he could control it. Keep the vision normal most of the time. Shift into the other mode when needed.
When he shifted, everyone glowed. Bright white for the healthy, dimmer shades for the sick. And connecting them all were threads—gossamer filaments of energy linking predator to prey, parent to child, all the thousand connections that made up the ecosystem of human desperation.
Threads he could pull.
Threads he could drink.
Kaelen walked out of the shelter before anyone could organize a group to forcibly eject him.
Outside, the eternal twilight of the Ash Layer pressed down like physical weight. His body was burning—not with fever, but with something deeper. The fragment in his pocket had gone from warm to molten, and where it pressed against his hip, the flesh had started to blister.
He walked deeper into the Bone Graveyard.
Away from people. Away from their glowing threads. Away from the temptation to feed.
The deeper graveyard was territory for the desperate or the suicidal. Kaelen moved through it with neither classification applying. He simply moved because his body demanded it—a restless, prowling energy that felt like his skeleton was trying to claw its way out of his skin.
The pain in his spine had localized. Thirteen specific points, all burning like someone had driven hot needles through his vertebrae. The seal. Breaking.
He found shelter in a collapsed cathedral of ribs—a structure so old and unstable even desperate scavengers avoided it. Inside, darkness and dust and the smell of calcified marrow.
Kaelen collapsed against the wall.
The fragment fell from his pocket. It rolled across the ground, coming to rest against his outstretched hand.
His fingers closed around it automatically.
The crack in its surface had widened. Golden light poured out, brighter now, more aggressive. And when Kaelen's blood—seeping from the blisters on his hip—touched its surface, the fragment drank.
Not absorbed. Drank. Actively. Hungrily.
And in return, it gave him something.
Not knowledge. Not understanding. Just raw, unfiltered instinct.
His hand moved behind his back, fingers finding those thirteen points on his spine. Pressing them. One. Two. Three. Four.
Each touch sent a jolt through his nervous system—not pain exactly, but information. Spatial awareness. His body's position in space. The stress points in the bone structures around him. The weak spots where collapse was imminent.
Five. Six. Seven.
Predatory awareness. He could feel the rats in the walls. Their tiny heartbeats. The flow of blood through their veins. How easy it would be to reach out and take that blood, drain it, feed it to the fragment and the thing waking up in his spine.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
Hunger. Profound, all-consuming hunger that made the void in his chest feel like a black hole trying to swallow itself. He needed to feed. Soon. Or the hunger would start eating him from the inside out.
Eleven. Twelve.
Combat instinct. His body knew how to kill now. Not from training—from something older. Muscle memory that didn't belong to him but was written into his skeleton nonetheless. Throat strikes. Joint breaks. Where to cut to make death fast or slow depending on how much blood you wanted to harvest.
Thirteen.
The final point. The center of the seal.
Kaelen pressed it.
The world screamed.
Not sound. Sensation. Every nerve ending in his body firing at once, pain so complete it erased thought, erased self, erased everything except the awareness that something fundamental was breaking inside him.
The seal. Shattering.
And from the cracks poured instinct. Pure, undiluted, predatory instinct that had been locked away for seventeen years.
Hunt.
Kill.
Feed.
Grow.
Kaelen convulsed. His spine arched. Blood poured from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes. The fragment in his hand cracked completely, splitting in half, and the golden light that had been contained inside exploded outward.
It didn't dissipate. It entered.
Through his palm. Up his arm. Into his chest where it found the hollow space the seal had been protecting and filled it.
Not gently. Violently. Forcefully. Like liquid metal being poured into a mold.
The pain lasted three seconds. Four. Five.
Then it stopped.
Kaelen lay gasping on the floor of the collapsed cathedral, covered in blood and bone dust and the residue of golden light. His body felt wrong. Too heavy. Too light. Like his skeleton had been replaced with something that didn't quite fit his flesh.
He stood on shaking legs.
His reflection in a puddle of industrial runoff showed him the truth: his left eye had changed. The iris had fractured into a ring pattern—black at the center, gold at the edges. An eclipse.
He blinked.
The reflection withered.
Color drained from it like water from a broken vessel. The image of his face in the puddle grew grey, then greyer, then translucent.
He closed his eye. The effect stopped.
Opened it. The draining resumed.
He was feeding on his own reflection.
Kaelen looked away from the water. His hands were covered in dried blood—his own and the fragment's residue. When he shifted into the inverted vision, he could see the blood glowing faintly. Still active. Still carrying traces of divine power.
His body wanted that power. Needed it.
He raised his hand to his mouth and licked the blood from his palm.
The taste was copper and lightning and something older than language. It hit his system like a drug, and the hollow space in his chest purred with satisfaction.
Not enough to fill it. Not even close.
But enough to prove the instinct was right.
Blood was fuel. Blood was power.
And Kaelen was so very, very hungry.