The stench of the sewers was a living thing—thick, greasy, clinging to the back of the throat like a parasite. Rotting waste, stagnant water, the sour tang of rusted iron. Elara pinched her nose, her heels clicking against the slick stone as she followed Jack deeper into the bowels of Twin City.
She had dressed for war, not for filth.
Black slick pants hugged her curves, the fabric straining with every step. Her crop top left little to the imagination, the white jacket draped over her shoulders more for aesthetics than warmth. Jack, in contrast, looked like a laborer—simple black overalls, heavy boots, his presence muted, functional.
"A lady must always look stunning," she had told him.
Now, with sewer water soaking into her heels, she regretted the sentiment.
Jack didn't speak. He moved with the certainty of a man who knew exactly where the shadows ended and the true dark began. The deeper they went, the colder the air became. The walls glistened, not with moisture, but with something thicker, something that pulsed when Elara brushed against it.
She yanked her hand back. "Jack—"
"Don't touch the walls," he said without turning. "They're listening.The veil has small presence in this sewer ,it can hear most and corrupt others."
Elara's breath hitched. She focused.
The brickwork wasn't just damp.
It was breathing.
---
The door appeared without warning—a seamless stretch of wall one moment, a yawning archway the next. Jack pressed his palm to a series of bricks, his fingers leaving behind smears of black that slithered into the mortar like veins. Gears groaned. Stone ground against stone.
The passage beyond was a throat.
Elara hesitated.
Jack stepped inside.
She followed.
The door sealed behind them with a wet, organic click.
Darkness.
Then—light.
Flickering gas lamps sputtered to life, their glow sickly green. The chamber was small, square, its walls lined with what Elara first mistook for rust. Then she saw the texture.
Handprints.
Dozens of them, pressed into the metal as if the walls had been molten when the hands touched them. Some were small—children's. Others were twisted, elongated, fingers too many or too few.
At the center of the room stood a single chair.
wood.
Elara's stomach lurched.
"Lose the clothes," Jack said, his voice flat.
Elara stiffened. "Excuse me?"
Jack turned. His eyes were black. Not the dark brown she was used to— now they were black, pupil swallowing iris, swallowing white. The same void-dark as the crows that followed him.
"You want the ritual? Then you do it my way." His lips peeled back, teeth too sharp in the green light. "Or you can walk back into the sewers and see how far you get before the walls decide they're hungry."
Elara's fingers trembled as she unbuttoned her jacket.
---
The air was cold against her bare skin.
Jack circled her like a butcher sizing up a carcass. His knife glinted—an ugly, serrated thing, its edge stained with old blood.
"Left breast," he ordered.
Elara cupped it, lifting. Her pulse hammered beneath her fingers.
The knife flashed.
Pain—bright, electric—as the blade carved into her flesh. Not shallow. Deep. Blood welled, thick and hot, but Jack didn't stop. He dragged the knife in precise, agonizing lines, etching a pentagram over her heart.
Elara bit back a scream.
"Good," Jack murmured. "Now the head."
The blade kissed her forehead.
This cut was different. Not pain—only raw violence. The moment the steel split skin, Elara saw things.
The Hollow Maw's jaws closing around her. Lorian's principal laughing as her bones cracked. A thousand eyes staring from the dark, whispering her name.
She gagged.
The symbol burned—an upside-down cross, a crow perched atop it, its beak buried in the intersection.
Jack stepped back, admiring his work. "Now the blood."
He grabbed her left arm, turned it palm-up. The knife slit her wrist in one smooth motion.
Elara gasped.
Blood poured into a waiting basin, too fast, too much. Her vision swam. The room tilted.
Jack watched, impassive, as the basin filled.
When it was nearly overflowing, he pressed a thumb to the wound. Darkness seeped from his skin, stitching flesh together—but not stopping the flow entirely. The blood still dripped, sluggish now, a steady rhythm against the stone floor.
"Lie down," Jack said, gesturing to the pentagram he'd drawn with her blood.
Elara swayed. The symbols pulsed, the lines twitching like living things.
She collapsed onto them.
The moment her bare back touched the blood-slick floor, the room *screamed*.
---
He was starting the Feast of Creation ritual
"DAY ONE OF CREATION: LET THERE BE NIGHT."
Jack's voice was no longer his own. It came from everywhere—the walls, the ceiling, the blood.
Darkness surged from him then a crow came out of his shoulder, a living tide of darkness and teeth. It plunged into Elara's mouth, her nose, the fresh wounds on her chest and forehead.
She convulsed.
The world vanished.
She was falling.
Through layers of reality, through memory, through the gaping maw of something so vast it had no end.
"AND THE VOID SAID, LET THERE BE HUNGER."
Elara's stomach split.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
Her skin peeled back, ribs cracking apart like a grotesque flower, revealing the writhing mass of shadows beneath. They moved, forming jaws, tongues, throats—all of them chewing, swallowing, feasting on something inside her.
The Starved Saint's essence screamed.
The demon eyeball shrieked.
Elara tried to join them, but her voice was gone.
All she could do was watch as her own insides devoured the horrors she'd carried.
---
"DAY TWO OF CREATION: THE FIRMAMENT CRACKS."
Elara's skin ruptured.
Not just the cuts Jack had made—everywhere. Hairline fractures spread across her body, veins of black ichor seeping through. The cracks deepened, widened, until she was less a person and more a vessel, a shattered doll held together by will alone.
Memories flooded through the gaps.
Her first kill at Lorian—a boy with golden eyes, begging as she drove the knife in.
The principal's voice, whispering promises as the Hollow Maw's tendrils curled around her soul.
Jack, standing over her in the graveyard, his smile a blade in the dark.
The pain was unbearable.
The clarity was worse.
---
"DAY THREE OF CREATION: EARTH'S DARK HARVEST."
Her muscles twisted.
Muscles snapped, reformed, strengthened. Bones shattered, their fragments knitting together into something harder, sharper. Her veins blackened, pumping not blood but hunger itself.
Elara arched off the ground, her body a puppet jerked by unseen strings.
Somewhere, Jack watched.
Somewhere, the crows laughed.
---
"DAY FOUR OF CREATION: CELESTIAL DECEPTION."
The inverted cross on her forehead ignited.
Red light—not holy, not pure, but the searing crimson of a wound that never healed—erupted from the symbol. It cut through the darkness, illuminating the things that now lived inside her.
The Starved Saint's stomach, pulsing like a second heart.
The demon's eye, now lidless, staring from the hollow of her ribs.
The Hollow Maw's mark, writhing as her new darkness consumed it.
Elara's jaw unhinged.
A sound tore from her throat—not a scream, not a moan, but the screech of a crow calling its flock.
---
"DAY FIVE OF CREATION: THE WATERS REMEMBER."
Her blood moved.
Not the spilled blood on the floor—the blood inside her. It surged from her wounds, black and greedy, slithering across her skin before plunging back into the cracks. With each cycle, she felt less human, more something else.
Her reflection in the pooling blood showed a stranger.
Pale skin. Black veins. Eyes like polished obsidian, speckled with starlight.
Beautiful.
Terrible.
---
"DAY SIX OF CREATION: IN HIS OWN IMAGE."
The second crow dove.
This one carried Jack's essence—his will, his thirst for power. It struck her forehead, merging with the inverted cross , speciallythe crow symbol perched on it, the symbol was burning brighter as the power settled.
Elara gasped.
For the first time since the ritual began, she spoke.
"JACK!"
His name was a prayer and a curse.
He smiled.
---
"DAY SEVEN: THE REST THAT NEVER COMES."
The shadows attacked.
Not from the room—from inside her. They clawed at her ribs, her spine, her soul, dragging her down into a void where time and space had no meaning.
"THE UNCREATION HAPPENED AND THE VOID SAW EVERY THING THAT HAD BEEN UNMADE , AND BEHOLD , IT WAS RAVENOUS."
This last part of the ritual was added to get rid of the Lorian academy's and the Hollow Maw's mark on her.
The Hollow Maw's mark fought back.
It was a losing battle.
Deep within Elara, a new mouth opened—a maw of her own, ravenous, endless. It bit down.
The mark screamed.
Then silence.
---
In Lorian Academy, the principal collapsed.
Blood erupted from every orifice, his body convulsing as an unseen force ripped something from him. The walls shook. The students screamed.
Deep in the Hollow Maw a guttural scream was heard which caused many students in the academy to bleed out of all orifices and some to even turn into hollowed ones kn the spot.
Far away, in a sewer beneath Twin City, Elara Veyra finally opened her eyes.
Black.
Star-flecked.
Hungry.
Jack offered her a hand.
She took it.
The ritual was complete.
The war had just begun.