Echoes of Weakness
Eliana stood frozen at the threshold of the tunnel's mouth, the stale, death-slick air of the true goblin kingdom washing over her like a curse. Before her stretched a cavern so vast it made the forge-pits of her old colony seem like a child's grave. A thousand tunnels bled into it, branching out like the veins of some colossal corpse, pulsing with the movement of monsters. Not beasts. Not creatures. But entities that had grown, adapted, murdered, consumed—and survived.
She swallowed, throat dry. Her bones throbbed with phantom pain, echoes of every whip strike, every claw, every desperate hour spent in chains. Her body bore the trophies of her rebellion—scars etched like crude runes across her flesh, muscles torn and reforged in the fire of war. And yet, she felt small. So small.
She had once believed that killing the Goblin Lord had shattered her chains. That becoming an orc had placed her among the apex predators of this festering world. That the blood she had spilled had meant something.
But here—now—she realized with crushing clarity: she had never even seen the summit.
The Lord was a sentinel. A warden guarding a cage.
And she was still inside.
Her knees threatened to buckle under the weight of revelation, but she gritted her fangs, forcing herself forward a step. Then another. The tunnel behind her vanished into the shadows, swallowed whole by the kingdom's maw. There was no going back.
All around her, the deeper cavern breathed. Not metaphorically. Not imaginatively. The stone walls exhaled warmth. Moaned softly when the larger beasts passed. The ceiling above was ribbed like the inside of a gullet, and the pale fungus that clung to its surface pulsed with a sickly light, revealing jagged silhouettes moving in the dark.
She saw them.
Goblins—but not like those she had known. These were enormous, hunched monstrosities with blade-like fingers and eyes that gleamed with cruel intelligence. Hobgoblins moved in packs, whispering in guttural tones too structured to be mere grunts. And the orcs—Gods. The orcs were mountains in motion, some armored in blackened bone, others wrapped in tendrils of living fungus that hissed and spasmed with every breath.
Eliana stepped back into the shadows instinctively. Her breath hitched. One of them turned toward her. Just a glance. Its nose twitched. It growled once, low, dismissive. Then it moved on.
Not threat.
She had once been pitied as a weak goblin. Now she was pitied as a weak orc.
Her fists clenched until blood trickled from her palms. Her chest rose and fell in silent fury.
Was she destined to always be beneath someone's boot? Always climbing, never rising?
But then—beneath that fear, that rage—something else stirred.
I survived the forge.
I outlived the screams.
I killed the Lord.
I evolved.
No one gave her this body. She stole it from fate, tore it from the mouth of death. She wasn't gifted power. She bled for it.
Eliana turned her face back to the kingdom. Her eyes narrowed.
Let them mock her. Let them look upon her with disgust, with dismissal. She would give them a reason to never look away again.
She would ascend. Again. And again.
Until even the Kizin would whisper her name in fear.
But first…
She stepped forward into the living dark, where even echoes feared to travel.
The path of the beast had only just begun.
Whispers of Hunger
The tunnels groaned like a living thing. Their walls breathed out cold winds that dragged over Eliana's skin like unseen fingers. The deeper she descended, the more the stone changed. No longer the carved, moss-bitten earth of her childhood—this was ancient, fossilized hatred pressed into blackened bone. The ground crackled with old blood. The walls wept rust. The ceiling loomed with stalactites shaped like jagged teeth, ready to snap shut.
Something in the dark watched her. Not one thing—many. Countless. Their presence slithered along her spine, unseen but suffocating. They whispered through cracks and alcoves, voices without mouths. Words without breath.
"Too small."
"She bleeds easy."
"Unripened meat."
Her footsteps echoed with defiance, but her heart hammered betrayal. Not fear—never again fear—but something colder. Realization. That she was prey here. Not because she was weak… but because she was new. Unripe. Still soft beneath the skin.
And then she saw them.
The true goblins.
They walked like predators in prayer—still, slow, deliberate. Their forms grotesque and glorious. Some had spines that coiled like serpents down their backs. Others bore limbs too long, too sharp, too fluid to be natural. Horns grew like twisted branches from skulls split and reformed. Eyes like coals. Muscles that twitched with restrained carnage. Their armor was bone. Their weapons were not always separate from their bodies.
She pressed herself into a shadowed crevice as they passed. A dozen of them. No, more. She'd stopped counting after her pulse drowned the numbers.
They didn't spare her a glance.
She was a stain on the wall. An echo in the void. Worth less than the blood beneath their claws.
And it stung.
It burned deeper than any wound. Rage curled in her stomach like a starving worm. Her fists clenched, not in fear—but in fury. Invisible? After everything she had endured—every scar carved into her skin, every soul she had crushed—she was nothing to them?
The hunger returned, but this time it was not for flesh. It was not for warmth, or vengeance, or even survival.
It was for presence. To be seen. To be felt. To be feared.
She didn't want to become one of them.
She wanted to become something they feared to become.
The path forward grew narrower, veins of black ore pulsing faintly beneath her feet like the circulatory system of a dead god. The air thickened. Her vision blurred, not from fatigue, but from something far worse—desire. A lust for violence so pure it tasted like iron.
Screams erupted again from deeper tunnels. Guttural. Triumphant.
Something powerful had just died.
Or something more powerful had just been born.
Eliana stepped forward, one foot into the void.
Her stomach groaned. Her blood howled.
And her soul whispered back to the tunnel—
"Watch me."
Eyes in the Dark
The tunnels twisted like intestines, coiling tighter the farther she ventured. The walls dripped with some glistening ichor—slick, warm, reeking of something alive. The air had long since stopped carrying anything resembling breath. It was thicker here. Clotted. As if the deeper she went, the more she waded into the belly of something sleeping, waiting to digest her.
And yet she pressed on.
Then, like a throat coughing her into a wound, the passage opened. A chasm split the earth—a vast village carved into a gnarled fissure that breathed with industry and pain. Shacks of bone and sinew clung to the stone like parasites. Fires burned without smoke, casting shadows that slithered even when nothing moved. Chains rattled—not from wind, but from living bodies hanging like meat on hooks. Goblins. Hobgoblins. Orcs. Some missing limbs, others with skin flayed in intricate patterns. Still breathing. Always breathing.
A grotesque ogre patrolled the cages, dragging a whip made from braided spinal cords, each vertebra stained with the history of screams. Its eyes were hollow—no malice, no pleasure, only function. When a slave moaned, it struck without hesitation, reducing sound to silence. Pain to compliance. The bodies didn't even flinch anymore.
Further in, children sparred. Oni spawn, barely the size of her torso, but already covered in scars. One slit another's throat with a sharpened femur. An elder nodded in approval. The dying child gurgled, thrashed, then stilled. No one moved to help. The victor grinned with bloody teeth and was handed another bone.
Eliana didn't speak. Didn't blink.
She walked.
Straight-backed. Balanced. Calculating.
The eyes were everywhere now. In windows made of stretched skin. Behind firelight. Beneath hoods and horns and twisted visors. She could feel them probing, dissecting her soul from the inside out. Judging the rhythm of her breath, the weight of her stride, the trembling heat behind her mask of resolve.
She was being measured.
And not one of them saw a warrior.
Yet.
She walked slower. Deliberate. Not from fear—but message. Every step was a syllable in a silent language:
I am not food. I am not sport. I am not prey.
Still, her thoughts spun like blades. Pride could not save her. Stubbornness would not raise her above these monsters. She needed to understand.
Who ruled this necrotic kingdom?
Where were the breeding pits, the crucibles where evolution was forced through fire and blood?
Where did the warlords gather, and what gods did they slaughter to become more than beast?
And deeper still—where was the throne? Not of gold or stone—but of bone, and shrieking, and crowned in silence?
Where was the true king?
She clenched her fists and moved forward, not with confidence, but calculation. She would not ask questions. She would watch. Mimic. Consume knowledge like she consumed her enemies.
The longer she survived, the more she'd become something the watchers regretted ignoring.
And one day, one of them would speak her name.
Not in laughter.
But in warning.
The Law of the Deep
The market was no marketplace. It was a shrine of rot and ambition. There were no stalls—just pits, slabs, hooks. No coin—only flesh, spells, secrets, screams. And no guards—only watchers, waiting to see who would kill and who would be killed. Eliana stepped through the chaos like a ghost, eyes devouring more than her words ever could.
A hobgoblin with six arms bartered with a merchant stitched from two bodies—its mouth opened vertically, tongue scrawled with ruin-sigils. The trade soured. Words became snarls. Then blood. The six-armed brute gripped the other's skull with three hands, cracked it open like fruit, and slurped out its brain with a gurgle of contempt.
No one flinched. No one screamed.
Wrong had been proven. The stronger was right.
A deal sealed in crimson.
She took note.
Power was permission.
Violence was proof.
A goblin with eyes stitched shut whispered curses into glass vials. A warlock or a madman—here, it made no difference. Another creature—massive, skin like scabbed obsidian—hauled a cage of chittering limbs that might once have been children. It traded them for a pouch of black sand that breathed.
One merchant offered her a chunk of raw meat. When she didn't respond, it sniffed her. Tasted the air. Then simply turned away—disinterested. Not food. Not threat. Just… irrelevant.
She bit her tongue until blood filled her mouth. Not yet.
Whispers followed her like a cloak. The Kizin. Always that word, low and reverent.
They weren't rulers. They were legends that ruled through existence alone.
They bled black flame.
They bent minds without touch.
They made monsters kneel with a glance and made gods weep in sleep.
They were what came after evolution.
Ogre. Oni. Even kings… they aspired to reach Kizin. It was more than a form. It was shedding the skin of what one was and becoming a weapon against the world.
No chains. No masters.
Only hunger that could swallow suns.
She did not fear them. Not because she was brave. But because fear meant hesitation.
And hesitation was weakness.
Eliana would not dream of becoming Kizin.
She would devour her way to it.
Bone by bone.
God by god.
Name by name.
The market pulsed around her, and she stood still, heart roaring beneath her ribs, eyes gleaming with something dark. Not madness. Not hope.
Intention.
Let the watchers look. Let them whisper.
They would speak her name too.
Soon.
Predator's Oath
She sat alone, deeper than breath, deeper than memory. The stone chamber around her throbbed with a pulse too ancient to name, carved by something older than war, older than hate. The only light came from the fungi clinging to the walls—pale, sickly blue, pulsing faintly like open veins. Water dripped in the dark. A steady beat. A countdown to something monstrous.
Her knees ached. Her chest burned. Her reflection shimmered in the oily puddle below her, warped, grinning wide with teeth too sharp, eyes too hollow.
"I will not become a beast," she whispered, more to herself than the dark.
The reflection moved its mouth first.
You already are.
She didn't flinch. She stared, jaw clenched so tight her molars groaned.
No more lies. No more illusions. She had killed to escape a cage, slaughtered to evolve, devoured to survive. She was a beast—but not theirs. Not one born to serve some ancient cycle. Not a pawn in the game of kings.
She was the aberration.
The fracture in their design.
She stood slowly, each vertebra clicking like a lock turned too far. Her hand pressed against the stone wall—it was cold, yes, but alive. Breathing with the whispers of ten thousand evolutions. Creatures clawing through history to ascend, failing, falling, feeding the roots of this hell with their corpses.
Eliana would not feed it.
She would starve it. Burn it. Rebuild it in her image.
"I will become a monster they can't ignore," she said louder this time, voice rough with rage. "One that remembers. One that burns."
She closed her eyes and breathed in the rot, the poison, the promise of this place. Her path was soaked in blood—would need more. Each warlord, each ogre, each snarling tyrant that ruled these tunnels… she would strip their power, peel it from their bones like old skin, and wear it like a crown.
And when she rose from the deep—if the surface still dared to exist—she would not crawl back as the girl who bled in chains. No.
She would return as a cataclysm.
A walking extinction.
She reached into the dirt, gripped a jagged shard of obsidian, and carved a mark into the wall. Not a rune. Not a symbol of power. Just a name, scratched in raw rage:
Eliana.
Let the tunnels remember it. Let the gods hear it and tremble.
Because she wasn't done.
She was just getting hungry.