The daughters followed the
compass to a restaurant. The restaurant had been closed for fifteen years, but
the smell of cooking grease and old food rotted, intoxicating the very air…
Marietta pushed through the front door—unlocked, hinges silent—and immediately
tasted rendered fat thick as molasses on the back of her tongue.
"Site Two," Anne Faith
murmured, pendant flaring hot against her sternum. The compass needle didn't
spin this time. It led them, through the floorboards, to whatever waited below.
The dining room stretched
too far. Marietta's water-sense caught it first impossibility, insatiable
hunger. A place where there should've been a foundation but was not. Booths
lined walls that receded. Each table was set. Plates, silverware, folded napkins.
Waiting.
"Someone's here," Anne
Faith whispered.
Not someone, something.
The smell—
The air smelled of sulfur
and the smell of dead bodies left to rot.
Then, out of nowhere,
impossibly, the smell shifted. Fresh flowers. Meat left too long in summer
heat. And underneath it all: cinnamon rolls. Fresh bread. Maryanne's Sunday pot
roast.
Marietta's throat closed.
"Don't."
"I smell it too." Anne
Faith's voice cracked. "That's… that's not real. Can't be real."
From the kitchen, a sound.
Not footsteps—dragging. Something heavy as hunger, and deep as sin, pulled
across the tile. It accompanied a shuddered breath that echoed.
The kitchen door swung
open.
She had been beautiful
once. Marietta could see it in the bone structure, the elegant hands now
swollen with slightly bruised fingers. The woman wore a stained chef's apron,
whites stained with endless dinners. She moved like pregnancy's final month.
But her eyes were a
starved dog biting off the hand that feeds it. Not empty—worse… Hungry but
never satisfied with food. Something in the way she looked made Marietta's
water-sense recoil, recognizing the Deep's signature but inverted. This wasn't
drowning. This was consumption without end. Anne Faith said, "I'm hungry…"
"Guests." The woman's
voice rustled like dried leaves, words creased by hours of feasting on darkness
as food. "I haven't had guests in… how long has it been?"
She dragged herself to the
nearest table, movements labored, and began arranging invisible items on empty
plates. Her hands moved with practiced precision—serving portions that didn't
exist, garnishing nothing with flourishes. She sat.
"Please," she said. Not
bothering to look up from her phantom meal of maggots and rotting flesh."Sit.
You must be starving. Everyone is. All the time. Sit and I'll—" Her voice
broke. "I'll fix you something."
Anne Faith's hand found
Marietta's wrist and squeezed hard. The scar on her palm burned cold, a
cross-shaped warning etched in flesh.
"We're not hungry,"
Marietta said carefully.
The woman's hands stilled.
Then, slowly, she raised her head. Her neck creaked with the movements, joints
grinding audibly. When she smiled, her teeth were perfect—the only part of her
that remained unchanged.
"Everyone's hungry," she
whispered. "The-Crowned-Deep taught me that. Showed me the teeth of hunger. The
real sin is pretending you're satisfied. We always need more."
She returned to her
invisible cooking, hands moving faster now, frantic but controlled. "I tried to
feed it. The Crowned-Deep. Thought if I gave it enough and prepared the perfect
meal, it would be satisfied. And it would leave me alone permanently." Then she
laughed, sharp and broken. "Do you know what it's like to feed something that
has no bottom? To pour everything you have into a void that only gets hungrier,
the more you feed it?"
The air thickened.
Marietta tasted it now—actual food, manifesting from memory or madness or
something worse. Her favorite breakfast, the one Maryanne made on birthdays.
Pancakes with too much butter, syrup warmed on the stove, bacon burnt just how
she liked it.
Her stomach clenched with
a depth beyond starvation.
"Don't," Anne Faith
gasped, but she was swaying too, eyes fixed on empty plates that suddenly held
food, held whatever she needed most. The aches inside her demanded filling.
The woman laughed again,
delighted. "You see? You see it now? The hunger's always there. Just under the
surface. Waiting. I can give you what you need. I can fill that emptiness. All
you have to do is—consume the absence. Feed the Deep. Become the hunger."
"Yes." The woman's belly
rippled, something moving beneath skin that had stretched past tearing. "Yes,
hungers all that matters. Join me. We'll feast forever on everything we've
lost. Every meal we've missed. Every comfort we were denied. It's all here. All
waiting. Just—"
She lunged.
Not physically—she was too
heavy, too bloated with emptiness to move that fast. But her hunger lunged, a
palpable wave of need that crashed over them, pulling them toward tables set
with their own cravings made manifest.
Marietta's blade was in
her hand. Anne Faith's scarred palm blazed. But the woman didn't attack. She
just stood there, grotesque and pitiful, belly writhing with all the nothing
she'd consumed.
"Please," she whispered.
"Please eat. If you eat, if you take it into yourselves, maybe I can stop.
Maybe the hunger will—" Her voice dissolved into sobbing. "I'm so empty. So
empty. And I can't stop trying to fill myself."
"No," Marietta hissed,
grabbing her sister's arm.
But Anne Faith shook her
off gently, moving with purpose Marietta had seen it before. The final walk
toward the final curtain.
She sat. Not at the table.
On the floor. Cross-legged, scarred palm open in her lap.
"I'm not going to eat,"
Anne Faith said quietly. "And I'm not going to run."
The woman stared,
confused, and quietly whispered "Then wha—"
"I'm going to sit with
you." Anne Faith's voice was steady. "While you're hungry. I can't fix it.
Can't satisfy it. Can't take it away. But I can be here while it hurts."
The kitchen went silent.
Even the phantom smells faded. The woman's lips trembled soundlessly, belly
still distended but motionless now, hunger paused mid-lunge by something it
couldn't comprehend.
"You…" She swayed. "You're
not going to try to feed me?"
"No."
"Not going to run because
I might infect you with this?"
"No."
"Then why… why? Would you
stay awhile?" Tears now, actual tears, cutting tracks through grease-stained
cheeks. "Why would you stay here? I'm grotesque?"
Anne Faith looked up, and
Marietta saw it—the same expression Maryanne wore in family photos from those
last weeks. Not grim determination. Not martyrdom. Just presence.
The woman said, "Someone
sat with me once," When I was so empty I thought I'd cave in. She didn't try to
fill me. Didn't run from my hunger. She just… stayed."
The woman's legs folded.
She collapsed more than sat down, belly hitting the floor with a sickly sound.
But she was facing Anne Faith now, close enough to touch but not touching.
"I fed it," she whispered,
sobbing hysterically… I prepared seven-course meals, sacrificial feasts, and
inverted Eucharist. Thought if I gave it enough, it would be satisfied. But it
just kept eating. Kept wanting. Until it reversed the current and trapped me."
Her hands spread across the swollen abdomen. "Now I'm the feast. Forever
hungry, forever trying to consume enough to feel full. Forever feeding it, but
it's, it's never satisfied. And it's killing me, but I can't stop because the
alternative is admit—"
"That hunger isn't
something to satisfy," Marietta finished, lowering herself to the floor beside
her sister. The blade stayed in her hand, but pointed down now, neutral. "It's
something to be thankful for."
The woman looked between
them—two daughters who'd learned to sit with absences they couldn't fill,
losses they couldn't imagine.
A mother-shaped hole that
no amount of consuming would close.
"How?" she gasped. "How do
you live with it?"
Anne Faith showed her the
scar. Cross burned into flesh, a mark of being witnessed by something higher
than hunger.
"We don't fill it," she
said. "We go through it. The emptiness isn't the enemy. It's the teacher. And
trying to feed it only makes it worse. The absence showed us we need something
deeper than consumption. Something that doesn't run out when we take it in."
The Feast exhaled relief.
"Love." Understanding breaking across her face like dawn."The woman you're
tracking. She came here and saw me like this. I tried to feed her, tried to
infect her with the hunger. She just sat. Right where you're sitting. And she
said, 'The emptiness is teaching you. Don't try to fill it. Let it hollow you
out until only love remains. Jesus is love."
Marietta said, "Love is
Jesus."
She wept, and with each
cry, her belly deflated slightly. Not healing, not fixing. Just releasing.
Letting go of the numbness she'd swallowed for years , the hunger, and the
consumption she'd made her identity.
After a long time, her
voice carried through the wind of the restaurant. A voice smaller now, more
human.
"I'm still hungry. Still
empty. But…" She has a sweet voice now, like music with compassion. "You
stayed. Even knowing you can't fix it. That's…" Her smile broke midway. "That's
the first time I've felt anything close to full since your moth…."
The restaurant shuddered.
Plates rattled on tables. And across the wall, roses—crystallized into words:
SHE SAT WITH ME TOO.
BEFORE SHE DOVE. DIDN'T TRY TO FEED ME. JUST… SAT.
Below it, reforming as
they watched:
FIVE SITES REMAIN. THE
KEEPER WATCHES.
Marietta helped Anne Faith
to her feet, confused but longing for truth. Anne Faith looks at her scarred
hand while holding back tears of an unnamed love. Marietta's chest tightened;
she thought. The Covenant had said the same thing—but was it true? Was any of
this real, or was it another layer of lies disguised as truth?
The woman smiled up at
them, and for the first time since they'd entered, Marietta didn't smell
rotting flowers, old meat, sulfur, or dead bodies.
She only smelled salt,
chocolate, and roses.
"Go," the woman whispered.
"Finish what she started.
They left her sitting in
her empty restaurant. Behind them, the phantom smells faded entirely.
The Feast wasn't defeated.
But was released from her prison.
She saw Maryanne in her
daughters.
Someone who had sat with
her hunger without trying to satisfy it.
And that presence had fed
something deeper than her stomach.
It had fed her love's
name, and she was satisfied for good.