Page 5 of Marked By His Hunger
The runes remember what I am.
What I’ve done.
What I cannot stop.
“Indeed, the Institute knows your hunger well,” she says calmly, as though she’s commenting on the weather.
As though my curse is nothing more than a passing inconvenience.
My jaw tightens.
Hunger.
Such a simple word for something so endless. So consuming. So… alive.
“It is time to renew our covenant for the upcoming term,” she said calmly. “Signature required. Ink and blood.”
Of course it is.
It is always blood.
The heavy oak door seals behind me with a deep, resonant thrum, the sound echoing through my bones like a closing tomb.
Not that I could leave even if I wished to. Not really.
I have never truly been free.
I move further into the chamber, boots silent against the stone floor, though silence has never been something I earned.
Not with the way my existence screams beneath the surface.
The tower study stretches wide and high, carved from black stone and ancient magic, overlooking the fjord-lit skyline of Asgarheim.
Beyond the arched windows, the sky burns with ribbons of green and violet—aurora twisting like something alive, something watching.
Something knowing.
The spires rise jagged and sharp against the heavens, rune-carved parapets catching the ghostly light.
Beautiful.
Dead.
Just like me.
My gaze drifts downward.
Far below, barely visible through the mist and magic, the portal shimmers.
A fracture in reality.
A wound between worlds.
Earth.
So close I can feel it sometimes—like a phantom limb, like a memory I was never meant to keep.
To humans, it’s nothing. Just fog curling between trees.
