Prologue: Hunger in the Void
The void stretched endlessly, black and cold, its silence broken only by the slow creak of bone beneath his feet.
Kael Vorran stood alone on a jagged spine of the world. Far below, the corpse's vast skeleton curved away into darkness, the last remains of a god-beast long dead.
Wind hissed through hollow ribs. Somewhere deep inside, something gave a hollow, sluggish thump — as if the heart still tried to beat.
Behind him, small footsteps approached.
"Master…" a boy's voice called, soft but unsteady.
Kael did not turn. His golden eyes stayed on the distant shimmer of light in the upper void — a place no one born here had ever touched.
"They're saying the Devourer Above has awakened," the boy whispered.
Kael said nothing.
The wind picked up, rattling the bone under their feet. The boy shifted nervously.
"…Is it true?"
Only then did Kael look back, his expression unreadable.
"If it is," he said quietly, "then the hunt has already begun."
The boy's brow furrowed. "What will you do?"
Kael stepped to the edge of the bone ridge, the void yawning before him.
"What I have always done."
He let the silence stretch, the bone creak, the cold bite deep.
"…I will feed."
Far below, something in the darkness moved...vast, slow, and watching.