Page 15 of Marked By His Hunger
To the life that had been taken from me before I ever understood its worth.
To the moment everything I might have been collapsed into ash and bone and hunger.
Ink and blood sealed more than obligation.
It sealed remembrance.
The parchment drank deeply, the runes flaring with quiet satisfaction as my name bound itself once more to the will of the Institute.
Each signature tethered me tighter—to this place, to this existence, to the curse I carried like a second spine.
I had tried, once, to believe it was temporary.
That there would be an end.
There never was.
There would not be.
I was not chosen for greatness.
I was chosen to endure.
To bear the weight of sins I did not commit. The burden of a people I had never known. Crimes etched into fate long before my first breath—before my heart learned how to beat, and then how to stop.
The Draugen lived.
Their mates lived.
Their children were born clean—untouched by the rot that should have devoured them.
All because one soul was marked to carry it instead.
All because of me.
A cruel design.
A perfect one.
Because what better vessel for suffering than the one who never asked to exist?
I had not gone willingly.
Gods, I had fought.
When the change began—when the darkness crept beneath my skin like spilled ink, turning flesh to something colder, something wrong—I resisted with everything I had left of myself.
I tore at my own body. Tried to burn it out. Tried to outrun the inevitable as if distance could sever destiny.
As if I could become something else.
But the Fates—those cursed Norns—do not yield.
They do not negotiate.
They do not care for defiance or desperation or the cries of those caught in their weaving.
They had carved my fate long before I understood the meaning of the word.
