Page 128 of Marked By His Hunger
That was what unsettled me.
What fractured the careful control I had carved for myself over years of discipline and blood.
Because beneath the hunger?
There was something else.
Something new.
Something unbound.
Hope.
The word felt wrong in my mind.
Foreign.
Dangerous.
The curse did not allow for such things.
It thrived on absence. On emptiness. On the slow erosion of anything that resembled light.
And yet, she had carved something into me simply by existing.
A presence that did not bow to the darkness.
A thread that did not obey the curse.
Unfettered.
That was the only way to describe it.
Not controlled.
Not contained.
Not shaped by fate or the Norns’ cruel design.
It simply was.
And that made it more dangerous than anything I had ever faced.
Because I did not know how to fight it.
My hand dragged down my face, claws scraping my own skin as I forced myself still, forcing the instinct to turn back—to break through the wards, to return to her—to take what the hunger demanded.
The Witch, Professor Kenna, was powerful.
Within these walls, she was law.
I could feel her magic threaded through the stone, pressing against me, holding me at bay.
I could break it.
Gods, I could feel it—coiled in my limbs, in the hunger itself, urging me to tear through the barrier and claim what had already been marked.
But I did not move.
