The crack widened.
Splinters rained from the rafters as the ceiling groaned like a dying beast. Then, with a sound like stone tearing through bone, something punched through the wood and dropped into the chapel.
It struck the floor with no crash, no shatter—only silence. The silence was worse than any noise. It swallowed the creak of beams, the drip of wax, even the hiss of the boy's breath.
The object pulsed faintly in the dark. A shard of stone, jagged and black, its veins glowing with a pale, searing light that seemed to burn without heat.
The boy's mouth went dry. His knees bent as though dragged by invisible strings.
The hunger in his chest roared awake. Closer.
He staggered forward. His bare feet scraped on the cold stone, but he barely felt it. The shard's light stretched shadows into monstrous shapes across the chapel walls. The carved prayers blistered and flaked, their words crumbling into dust.
The shard hummed. Or perhaps it was his skull vibrating, his teeth grinding without command.
He reached for it.
The instant his fingertips brushed its burning surface, the world broke.
The chapel dissolved into a flood of visions: a sky filled with titanic carcasses, ribs jutting like mountains, hollow sockets staring down; seas boiling with ash; cities made of bone screaming without sound. The corpses in the heavens writhed, as if caught between death and waking.
And through it all, one word thundered—not heard, but carved into the marrow of his bones.
Mine.
The boy collapsed to his knees. His hand clenched tight around the shard. He should have screamed, but no sound came. Only silence.
When his sight returned, he was alone in the chapel. The candles were dead, the air thick with dust. The shard's glow dimmed to a sullen ember in his palm.
And he knew.
The hunger was no longer inside him.
He was inside it.