The machines beeped.
That's what they did at the end, apparently. Beeped. Like the universe needed a soundtrack for irrelevance.
Damien Blackwood stared at the ceiling tiles—stained, yellowed, one of them cracked—and tried to feel something about dying. Fear? Regret? Anger? He'd spent twenty-three years feeling nothing. Why start now?
The cancer had eaten him slowly. First his energy. Then his appetite. Then his hair, his dignity, his future. Now it was eating the last few hours, and the beeping machines were counting down like a game show timer.
Congratulations, Damien! You've won: nonexistence!
He almost laughed. Didn't have the breath.
The door opened. A nurse he didn't recognize—young, tired, probably overworked—checked his IV and pretended not to see his eyes following her. She'd done this before. Watched people die. Knew better than to make eye contact with the soon-to-be-corpses.
"Anything I can get you?" she asked, already halfway out the door.
My life back? A reason to have lived it? One person who'll remember my name next week?
He shook his head. She left.
The beeping continued.
And then—
---
BEEP.
Long. Flat. Continuous.
Damien felt the sound more than heard it. A vibration in his bones, in his teeth, in the hollow spaces where hope used to live. The ceiling tiles blurred. The cracked one seemed to split further, darkness bleeding through.
Huh. So this is it.
He expected a tunnel. Light. Dead relatives waving. Maybe a highlight reel of his greatest failures—a greatest hits album nobody asked for.
Instead, there was just... dark.
Warm dark. Heavy dark. Dark that pressed against him like water at the bottom of the ocean.
And then, a voice.
"Oh, for fuck's sake."
Damien would have blinked if he'd had eyes.
"You're not what I ordered. I asked for a conqueror. A warlord. Someone with, and I cannot stress this enough, ambition." The voice dripped contempt. "They sent me a college dropout who cries during insurance commercials."
"I do not—" He tried to speak, but sound didn't work here. Thought did. Okay, that one with the dog was sad. The dog just wanted his person back.
Silence. Long, stretching silence.
Then a sigh that rattled through dimensions.
"Right. Fine. Let's see what we can do with damaged goods. Name's Malakor. I used to be a god. Now I'm a passenger in a corpse with feelings about dog commercials. Hold on. This might sting."
---
Pain.
Not the dull ache of cancer, but everything pain—every nerve ending he'd ever had firing at once, plus new ones he didn't know existed. Damien tried to scream, but he didn't have a mouth. Tried to move, but he didn't have a body.
And then—
Air.
Cold air. Forest air. Pine and earth and something rotting, something sweet.
Damien's eyes snapped open.
He had eyes.
He had lungs, too—they dragged in breath like they'd been waiting centuries for it. He had fingers, and they dug into dirt, moss, roots. He had a heart, and it hammered against his ribs like a prisoner demanding release.
"There we go." The voice—Malakor—sounded satisfied. "Not bad for a first try. Bit pale. Bit scrawny. But the raw materials were... well, they were garbage, actually. I did what I could."
Damien pushed himself up. His arms shook. His body felt wrong—too light, too warm, too alive. The last time he'd felt this good, he was seven years old and didn't know what cancer was.
He looked down.
His hands were his hands. Same knobby knuckles. Same scar on his thumb from that knife accident when he was twelve. But they tingled, like they were remembering how to be hands.
"You're welcome, by the way."
"What the fuck." Not a question. A statement. Damien's voice rasped, unused.
"Eloquent. I can see why the universe chose you."
He stood. The forest spun around him—trees he didn't recognize, sky he'd never seen, two moons hanging low and fat and wrong. Two moons. There were two moons.
"Different dimension. Different reality. Different everything. Your world was a backwater. This one? This one has potential."
Damien's legs gave out. He caught himself on a tree trunk, bark rough against his palms. "I died."
"Yes."
"I was in a hospital."
"Yes."
"There were two moons."
"Yes. You're catching on. Very smart. Definitely conqueror material."
Damien closed his eyes. Counted to ten. Opened them. Still two moons. Still alive. Still—he patted his chest, his stomach—no pain. No cancer. No weakness.
"I ate it."
"You... what?"
"The cancer. The death. The whole 'dying' thing. I consumed it. Turned it into fuel. It wasn't much—you were basically empty by the end—but it got the lights back on."
Damien processed this. "You're a parasite."
"I'm a passenger. There's a difference. Parasites take. Passengers... occasionally offer commentary and save your life. Now stop touching your chest and listen. We have work to do."
A feeling bloomed in Damien's mind—not words, but presence. Warmth spreading through his skull, his spine, his guts. It wasn't unpleasant. It felt like someone turning on lights in rooms he didn't know he had.
"The universe has changed since my time. Laws. Frameworks. They call them 'Systems.' Little boxes that tell you what you are, what you can do, how powerful you've become. Pathetic, really. In my day, you felt* your power. It burned. It ached. It* demanded."
"And now?"
"Now I've adapted. Corrupted one of their precious Systems to my own design. It'll give us structure—quantify our growth—but it runs on my* fuel. Not mana. Not levels. Vice Energy."*
"Vice Energy."
"Pleasure. Dominance. Consumption. The oldest powers in existence. Before there were gods, there was hunger. Before there was order, there was desire. That's what we'll feed on."
Damien laughed. It came out broken, hysterical. "So I'm dead, in another dimension, sharing my skull with an ancient god, and we get stronger by... what? Fucking things?"
A pause.
"...That was surprisingly perceptive of you. Yes. Essentially. Though 'fucking' is reductive. We'll be bonding. Consuming essence. Building a harem of powerful beings who will worship us, fight for us, and occasionally—"
"Stop. Stop." Damien held up his hands. "I need a minute."
"You need several minutes. You also need food, water, and probably a weapon. But we'll start with the minute."
---
The minute stretched into ten.
Damien sat with his back against a tree, staring at two moons, and tried very hard to have a breakdown. His body wouldn't cooperate. Every time he started to spiral, that warmth in his chest pulsed, and his thoughts steadied. Calmed. Focused.
"Anchoring," Malakor said. "You panic, we both suffer. So I'm... encouraging stability."
"You're drugging my emotions."
"I'm regulating* them. There's a difference. Now get up. We need to move."*
"Why?"
"Because something's coming."
Damien felt it a second later—a shift in the air, a weight in the shadows between trees. Not hostile, exactly. But interested. Hungry.
His body moved before his brain caught up. Years of being weak, being prey, had taught him to freeze. But this body didn't freeze. This body flowed—smooth, silent, pressing deeper into the shadows.
"Good. Let it come to us."
"What is it?"
"Food. If we're lucky. If we're not..."
The creature emerged from the treeline.
It had been human once. Maybe. The shape was roughly right—two arms, two legs, a torso, a head. But the proportions were wrong. Arms too long. Fingers too many. And the mouth—the mouth opened sideways, split into four petals lined with teeth.
It wore tattered robes. A woman's robes, once fine, now rotting. Its eyes found Damien instantly.
"Dryad. Corrupted. Probably absorbed too much wild magic and lost herself."
"Lost herself?"
"Turned into a hunger. A need. Look at it. Look at what it wants."
The creature—the dryad—tilted its head. Its mouth petals quivered. And Damien felt it: a pulse of want so strong it almost knocked him over. Not violence. Not death.
Sex.
The dryad wanted to mate.
"Corrupted dryads absorb life essence through intimacy. They drain partners slowly, blissfully. Most victims don't even notice until they're too weak to run."
"It wants to—with me?"
"With anything. But you're fresh. New. Your essence is loud, Damien. You just woke up from death with a primordial god in your head. You're a beacon."
The dryad took a step forward. Another. Its too-long arms reached out, fingers flexing.
"Here's the thing," Malakor said, and Damien could hear the smile in his voice. "We're hungrier than it is. And our System needs a test drive."
Warmth exploded in Damien's chest. His vision blurred, then sharpened—and suddenly he could see the dryad differently. Colors wrapped around it. Red at its core (hunger). Purple at its edges (loneliness). Gold threading through its veins (essence, power, food).
"Essence Sight. First perk. You're welcome. Now go be a beacon."
The dryad lunged.
Damien didn't think. His body moved—faster than it should have, smoother than it had any right to—and caught the creature's wrists. Its skin was cool, damp, like moss after rain. It made a sound: Haa... aa... —breath escaping in need.
Its mouth-petals brushed his throat.
And Damien felt it. The pull. The drain. Not painful—pleasurable, actually, like the first warm flush of alcohol. The dryad was feeding on him.
"Let it," Malakor purred. "It's just priming the pump."
Damien let it.
The creature pressed closer. Its robes fell away—or maybe they dissolved, rotted by its touch. Beneath, its body was... beautiful. Disturbingly so. Skin like bark and silk. Breasts that curved against his chest. A waist that narrowed into hips that pressed, ground, demanded.
Its mouth found his. The kiss was wet, wrong, amazing. Suap suap—sounds that shouldn't come from a mouth with that many teeth, but did. Its tongue—long, prehensile, split at the end—wrapped around his.
"Now," Malakor whispered. "Take it back."
Damien didn't know how. But his body did.
The warmth in his chest became heat. The heat became fire. And when he kissed the dryad back, he wasn't just receiving—he was pulling. Draining. Consuming.
The dryad stiffened. Hii...!—a sharp sound of shock, of pleasure, of fear. It tried to pull back, but Damien's hands held tight. Its essence flooded into him—golden light, warm and sweet, tasting of forest and loneliness and centuries of hunger.
Juru juru—the sound of suction, of souls trading places.
The dryad's body convulsed. Biku biku—muscles spasming, petals quivering. Its eyes—human eyes, still, buried in that alien face—went wide with something that might have been gratitude.
Then it collapsed.
Damien caught it. Lowered it gently to the moss. Its body was fading, dissolving into light, into leaves, into nothing.
"Thank... you..."
The whisper might have been his imagination. Or maybe it was real. The dryad smiled—a real smile, human and sad—and then it was gone, leaving only scattered petals and the smell of rain.
Damien stared at his hands. They were shaking.
"Well," Malakor said. "That worked."
---
The warmth in his chest didn't fade. It grew. Spread. Settled into his bones like he'd been cold his whole life and only now noticed.
"First Vice Energy acquired. Enough for a minor perk. Check your... actually, don't check. Just feel."
Damien felt.
His senses had sharpened. He could hear insects crawling under bark. Could smell the dryad's fading essence, and beyond it, other presences in the forest—some small, some large, one massive to the north, pulsing like a second heartbeat.
"That big one? That's our next target."
"Target?"
"Arachne queen. Rules these woods. Hasn't been touched in three hundred years. Lonely. Powerful. Perfect."
Damien laughed. It was the only response he had left.
"What?"
"Three hundred years. Lonely. And you want me to—"
"Seduce her, yes. Bond with her. Make her ours. She'll give us power, territory, an army of spider-children. And in return, she gets..."
"Gets what?"
"Company. Purpose. A reason to wake up in the morning that isn't just hunger. You of all people should understand that."
Damien's laughter died.
He looked north, toward the pulsing presence. Toward the queen who'd been alone for three centuries.
"Company," he repeated.
"And really good sex. But mostly company."
Another laugh. This one almost real.
"Okay," Damien said. "Okay. Let's go meet the spider."
He stood. Brushed moss from his knees. Took a step north.
Then stopped.
"What?"
"One thing."
"What?"
"My name's Damien. Not 'vessel,' not 'host.' Damien. You want my cooperation? You use my name."
Silence. Then:
"...Fair enough. Damien. Let's go meet the spider."
Damien walked into the darkness.
Behind him, scattered petals stirred in a breeze that came from nowhere. The forest watched with a thousand eyes. And two moons hung fat and heavy, lighting the path toward a queen who'd waited three centuries for something interesting to happen.
She was about to get her wish.