Prologue
The abyss was never silent.
It whispered through teeth it did not possess. Breathed with lungs it had never grown.
Light dared not crawl so deep. Here, time did not flow—it festered.
There was only instinct.
Only the edge.
The creature was small.
Too thin to bite. Too fast to be bitten.
She had no memories. She needed none.
She woke. She hunted. She hid.
She slept, if the darkness allowed it.
The abyss had shaped her with teeth and scars, teaching her the only truths that mattered:
The slow have no future.
The living earn no rest.
Yet tonight... tonight was different.
The air trembled.
Not with the growl of a predator. Not with the shriek of prey.
A new sound. High. Piercing. Rhythmic.
Laughter.
She froze.
Hunger gnawed at her—always—but something deeper held her still. A throb behind her skull. A twitch in her marrow.
She did not understand laughter.
But something in it burned.
Not fear.
Not hunger.
Doubt.
For the first time, she ignored the scent of blood.
She followed the sound.
Through jagged rocks and gnarled roots she crept, leaving the safety of the known, drawn toward the wrongness of the unfamiliar.
And when she saw them—tall, fire-bearing figures—she did not run.
She watched.
They spoke. Shouted. Laughed.
One kicked a hollow nest. Another set flame to old bones, their laughter crackling like kindling.
She did not know their words.
But she knew contempt.
That language, she understood.
When the laughter came again, it did not spark curiosity.
It ignited something hotter. Darker.
Rage.
Then—
A scream.
Not hers.
Not human.
From the shadows came the shriek of another—small, thin, fast like her. One of her kind.
Then another.
And another.
The humans had found a nest.
Her nest.
Torchlight flooded the crevice, cruel and hungry. Blades flashed. Bones snapped.
Siblings—brothers? sisters? words she did not know—were dragged into the light, their half-formed bodies crushed under boots, their flesh seared by fire.
A voice barked orders.
A soldier grinned as he ground a writhing form beneath his heel, its cries dying in a wet pop.
She could not move.
Her claws carved grooves into the stone.
The heat in her chest swelled, pulsing, a second heartbeat made of teeth and venom.
She did not know why.
She had no words for it.
Only this:
"They laugh... while we die."
Her eyes—pale as moon-bleached rot—locked onto them.
This time, she did not want to watch.
She wanted to break.
She did not know it yet, but her first thought had been born.
And with it...
Vengeance.
CHAPTER 1:
The nest burned.
Not with flame, but with shrieks. With breaking. With the wet snap of cartilage giving way under iron-shod boots.
They had found them—her kind.
The creature watched from the shadows, her body a blade pressed between stone and darkness. No breath. No tremor. Only the slow drip of venom from her clenched jaws.
She had followed the humans, drawn by that sound—laughter—the same that had once prickled her skull with alien curiosity.
Now it carved into her like a rusted hook.
They dragged the small ones into the torchlight. Pale limbs. Half-formed wings still slick with birthing fluid.
A soldier crushed a skull under his heel—too soft, too young—and the sound was not unlike an egg bursting. Another tossed a squirming sibling into the fire, their laughter rising with the stench of charred flesh.
The same laughter.
The same that had birthed her first thought.
Now it birthed something else.
Something gnarled.
Instinct screamed at her to run. To fade into the cracks where predators never lingered.
But her claws dug into the rock. Her ribs ached, as if her own bones sought to pierce her from within.
One soldier turned—careless, swaggering—his armor glinting like the carapace of some overfed beetle. He reeked of smoke and sweat and certainty.
He never saw her.
She gave him no time to.
Her body uncoiled. No strategy. No grace. Just hunger and hate fused into motion.
Her fangs found his throat.
Warm. Softer than she'd imagined.
Blood flooded her mouth—thick, cloying, sweeter than any marrow she'd ever cracked. The abyss itself seemed to sigh in approval.
Screams erupted. Steel hissed from scabbards.
She was gone before the first blade could find her, melting into the labyrinth of stone.
But she did not leave empty.
She carried more than blood.
She carried a truth.
It curled behind her eyes, a thorned thing taking root:
"Why do they decide who lives?"
The creature dragged itself into a fissure, her body trembling—not with exhaustion, but with a new, nameless fever.
Human shouts echoed in the distance, but they did not follow. Cowards.
She stared at her claws.
Red.
Not the fleeting red of a fresh kill. This clung. Stained.
Something inside her twisted. Not fear. Not hunger.
Why does this feel like drowning?
Before, killing had been instinct—mechanical, inevitable as breathing. But this… this had weight. A choice.
She licked the drying blood from her talons.
Iron. Salt. Something hotter beneath—
Power.
The abyss knew no stars, no moon. Yet now, she dreamed.
Fragments assaulted her:
—A light that did not burn.
—Voices with no mouths.
—An ache in places no blade had touched.
Once, she dreamed of wings. Not the stunted, skeletal things of her kin—but vast, shadowed, capable of swallowing the sky.
Another night, she dreamed of words. Not the guttural snarls of beasts, but language—sharp and deliberate, cutting the dark like a knife.
She woke gasping, muscles coiled, scanning for threats that weren't there.
Only the darkness remained.
And the echo of something she could not name.
In a cavern long abandoned, she found a pool of black water.
Still. Waiting.
She approached, nostrils flaring. No scent of prey. No rot. Only her own rippling shadow.
Then—
Herself.
Gaunt. Scarred. Eyes like moonlit poison. Fangs bared in a perpetual snarl.
She raised a claw. The reflection mimicked her.
Is this what I am?
A wrongness prickled down her spine. Too small. Too broken. Too…
Alone.
She struck the water, shattering the image.
But the question remained.
Days later, a sound stopped her mid-hunt.
Not screams. Not tearing flesh.
Music.
Low. Guttural. A dirge woven from the abyss's own throat.
She followed it, silent as the grave, until the tunnel spilled into a cavern where the air itself vibrated.
There, in the center, lay a creature twice her size—wounded, its obsidian scales weeping luminescent bile. From its throat spilled that song, a sound so heavy it seemed to press against her bones.
She did not understand.
Yet she stayed.
And for the first time, she felt something beyond rage.
Sorrow.
The song faded with the dawn. The great beast died in silence, its massive chest stilling.
But as she turned to leave, her foot brushed grooves in the stone—claw marks, deliberate, arranged in…
Patterns.
Symbols.
She traced them with a talon.
A word surfaced, unbidden:
"Loneliness."
She did not know its meaning.
But the word was hers.
And for the first time, she possessed something that could not be eaten or broken.