The daughters
decided to follow 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 where there should be foundation. Booths lined walls that
receded. Each table was set. Plates, silverware, folded napkins. Waiting.
"Someone's here,"
Anne Faith whispered.
Not someone. The
smell shifted—beneath grease, beneath age, something else. Fresh flowers. Meat
left too long in summer heat. And underneath it all, impossibly: 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 tile. It accompanied 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.
"Please," she said,
not looking up from her phantom meal. "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, squeezed hard. The scar on her palm burned cold,
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 movement;
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. Always more."
She returned to her
invisible cooking, hands moving faster now, frantic but controlled. "I tried to
feed it. The Deep. Thought if I gave it enough, prepared the perfect meal, it
would be satisfied. Would leave us alone." A laugh, 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 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 starving.
"Don't," Anne Faith
gasped, but she was swaying too, eyes fixed on empty plates that suddenly
held—what? Whatever she needed most. Whatever ache 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. 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 like deep water, pulling
them toward tables set with their own cravings made manifest.
Marietta's blade was
in her hand. Anne Faith's pendant 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. "Then what—"
"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 mouth worked 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…" Tears
now, actual tears, cutting tracks through grease-stained cheeks. "Why would you
stay?"
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.
"Because someone sat
with me once," Anne Faith said. "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. While I
figured out that the emptiness wasn't the problem. Trying to fill it was."
The woman's legs
folded. She collapsed more than sat, belly hitting floor with sick sound. But
she was facing Anne Faith now, close enough to touch but not touching.
"I fed it," she
whispered. "The Deep. Prepared seven-course meals, sacrificial feasts, inverted
Eucharist. Thought if I gave it enough, it would be satisfied. But it just kept
eating. Kept wanting. Until it reversed the current." Her hands spread across swollen
abdomen. "Now I'm the feast. Forever hungry, forever trying to consume enough
to feel full, but never satisfied. And it's killing me but I can't stop because
the alternative is admitting—"
"That hunger isn't
something to satisfy," Marietta finished, lowering herself to the floor beside
her sister. The blade stayed in her hand, but point-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
satisfy, 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, mark of being witnessed by something
higher than hunger.
"We don't fill it,"
she said. "We let it transform us. The emptiness isn't enemy. It's teacher.
Shows us we need something deeper than consumption. Something that doesn't run
out when we take it in."
"Love," the woman
breathed. Understanding breaking across her face like dawn."The woman you're
tracking. She came here, 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 said: 'The emptiness
is teaching you. Don't try to fill it. Let it hollow you out until only love
remains. Love is Jesus."
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 nothing she'd swallowed, the hunger she'd made 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 looked at the daughters, with compassion. "You stayed.
Even knowing you can't fix it. That's…" Her smile broke midway through. "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.
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 or old meat.
Just 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. Wasn't saved.
But she saw Maryanne
in her daughters.
Someone had sat with
her hunger without trying to satisfy it.
And that presence
had fed something deeper than her stomach.
It had fed her loves
name, and she was satisfied once more.