Page 34 of Marked By His Hunger
To prevent myself from becoming the catastrophe.
And yet—something was brewing.
The hunger was not simply growing. It was sharpening.
Like it had caught it—that strange, alluring scent—and it lusted for it with a singular focus.
I froze.
The wind howled across the battlements, carrying with it the cold breath of the fjords and the sharp sting of rain—but beneath it, threading through storm and stone and ancient magic—I caught it.
I dragged in a breath.
And a monstrous hiss tore from my lips.
There it was again.
Warm.
Alive.
Impossibly… sweet.
My nostrils flared, instinct sharpening to a razor’s edge. I closed my eyes, forcing the world away, and listened—not with ears alone, but with the thing I had become.
The Institute was never silent.
It breathed.
The Runevald grounds pulsed with layered magic—old wards carved into obsidian towers, runes humming beneath the stone pathways, the veil between realms stretched thin as silk across the sprawling campus.
Power lived here. Coiled in lecture halls.
Buried beneath the catacombs.
Whispering through the libraries where knowledge older than empires gathered dust.
Students arrived from across the multiverse—Witches, shifters, creatures that defied mortal language—and the Institute adapted to them, contained them, shaped them.
With all the new arrivals, shifts were bound to happen.
But this was different.
Beneath the regular upheaval of it was something else. Someone new.
And I heard her.
A heartbeat I had never known.
Faint.
But distinct.
It pulsed like a drum through fog—steady, unafraid, cutting through the storm as though it belonged to it.
Not prey.
Not fear.
