Page 30 of Marked By His Hunger
I stared at him a beat too long.
He shifted.
“Right then,” he muttered, lifting his hands in surrender. “Suit yourself.”
The others laughed and drifted toward the lower terrace that housed Buckie’s—an ancient tavern warded against implosion, hexing, and student duels.
Whatever.
Ale would not dull this.
Nothing dulled this.
My hunger was no longer a gnawing thing.
It was a living creature beneath my ribs—clawed, pacing, restless.
It scraped the inside of my spine. It licked the back of my throat.
It whispered.
Feed.
I clenched my jaw until my fangs cut into my lower lip.
Blood filled my mouth.
The taste only sharpened it.
Hangry.
That word had once amused me.
Now it mocked me.
The Asgarheim Runevald Institute was the most prestigious graduate-level magical institution across realms—where Witches refined rune craft, where ancient Monsters mastered restraint, where descendants of gods wrote doctoral theses on blood pacts and dimensional fractures.
And I stood above them all, a relic of something far older.
The Draugr.
The bony crown hovered just beyond my reach, but I felt its weight already pressing into my skull.
My father had told the tale countless times.
The avalanche.
The ice burial.
The six months beneath frozen stone.
The hunger that drove them to consume their own.
“How could they do that?” I had once asked him.
“How could they not?” he answered.
Buried alive in winter.
