The Burning Need
The forge's embers had barely cooled from Vorn's humiliation, and yet Eliana's veins still pulsed with the memory of black lightning.
It wasn't fear that gripped her anymore—it was hunger.
Not for food, nor water. Not even for freedom.It was something deeper. Something wrong.A terrible emptiness had opened within her chest, and it was growing.
The first taste of her power had been an awakening, but not a gift.It was a curse, slithering beneath her skin like a second soul—coiled, whispering, waiting.
She could hear it sometimes, just at the edge of sleep.A low, grinding voice without a mouth, murmuring in syllables older than breath.
"More… more… you are not done…"
She tried to ignore it.
But she couldn't.
Each breath she took in the filth-stained tunnels felt wrong.Too weak. Too shallow. Too restrained.The air tasted of rust and wet stone, yet all she craved was blood and ash.
She was changing.
Her skin had begun to itch. Not like a rash, but as if something underneath was writhing, pressing outward.Her nails had thickened, curled ever so slightly. Her joints ached at night.She didn't know if it was magic or madness—but whichever it was, it was winning.
She stopped sleeping.
The nights became her hunting grounds. The darkness no longer frightened her; it welcomed her.Shadows stretched a little longer when she passed. The stone whispered secrets when she pressed her palm against it.Once, she swore she saw her own reflection in a puddle—grinning, even though she wasn't.
The goblin next to her died the next day.Nobody saw who did it.
The others whispered. Murmured. Avoided her.Good.Let them fear her. Let them stay away.
She didn't want witnesses to what she was becoming.
She trained in silence, far from the overseers' eyes.Lifting broken iron beams in the dark. Dragging carcasses from the butcher's refuse pile.Testing her claws against rock until they bled black ichor.Each drop that fell hissed like acid, leaving pockmarks on the stone.
And always, the power hummed beneath her ribs.Like a second heart—beating out of sync, too loud, too alive.It wanted to be used.
No—it wanted to feed.
She remembered Vorn's scream.The way her power had erupted in that moment—like it had waited for her permission.The black lightning hadn't been cast by her hands, but unleashed by her soul.And it had liked it.
That terrified her more than anything else.
Because so had she.
The Unmaking of Flesh
The goblin city, with its twisting arteries and violent pulse, became her crucible.
It lived—breathed—like a beast of stone and blood, moaning with the weight of centuries of agony.Eliana moved through it like a shadow within a dying body, learning its heartbeat, listening to its cries.And in its decay, she found something that mirrored her own.
She tested her power in secret.
The magic responded like a beast on a chain—snarling, tugging, desperate to be loosed.It answered her emotions: fear, hate, fury.At first, it came in violent spasms—A flick of her wrist shattered a support pillar, sending boulders cascading in a deafening roar.A mere gasp of panic summoned heat from the cracks in the earth, fire licking up her arms like hungry tongues.
She bore the burns in silence. They healed within hours.
Her control was poor. But it was growing.
Worse than the magic, though, was what came with it.
Her body… changed.
Not in the way a warrior grows stronger. Not in the way a monster sharpens.This was something else. Something unnatural.
It began slowly.
Her reflection in stagnant water first betrayed the shift. Her eyes—once dull and murky—were no longer hers.They had darkened into pits of obsidian, the irises rimmed with veins that pulsed like bleeding threads of crimson lightning.
She blinked—and the reflection did not.
She stared at the image until ripples distorted it, until she could believe it was the water that lied.
But the changes didn't stop.
At night, when the tunnels quieted and her pulse slowed, the ache would begin.Deep inside her bones, something twisted—crawled—like teeth gnawing their way out.Her spine cracked louder than her breath. Her ribs burned with stretching pressure.There were nights she couldn't scream because her throat constricted from within.
She woke from half-sleeps covered in her own blood, claw marks raked down her sides.Except—she didn't remember making them.
She should've been terrified.
But she wasn't.
Because with each tear, each shift, came strength.
Her claws no longer felt foreign.They felt right. As though they'd been waiting for her to become what she was always meant to be.They lengthened, curved like sickles, hard as obsidian.She could scratch her name into stone—if she still remembered it.
Her skin no longer bruised. It thickened, layer upon layer, until it no longer felt like skin at all.It was hide—ash-hardened, blackened by the forge heat of her rage.The soft goblin rot that had once clung to her body flaked away like diseased bark.What remained was something armored, grotesque—and beautiful, in its own way.
Once, she tore open her own forearm in curiosity.
She expected blood. Instead, a strange black ichor leaked out—viscous, tar-like, pulsing with dull heat.The wound closed in seconds, the flesh knitting back together with hissing threads of steam.
She stared at her hand afterward for hours. Not in horror.
But in awe.
She didn't sleep anymore. She didn't need to.
The magic whispered in her ear now, no longer hiding in dreams.
"Your shape is only a beginning."
"What you were is dead. What you are will feed the mountain."
She welcomed the voice. Let it speak. Let it guide her.
Because she no longer feared losing herself.
She feared remembering.
Blood in the Stone:
Her first real kill was clumsy—but deliberate.
There had been no hatred for the goblin. No name to recall.He was just a cog in the machine. Another filth-stained face in a city that fed on suffering.And yet—he became her offering.
She had stalked him for hours, slipping between shadows like smoke, silent and cold.Her breath was measured. Her pulse calm. Her eyes—unblinking and distant, like something dead beneath the water.
He hadn't sensed her. Not until her claw tore through the air.
One swipe.One flash of jagged bone edged in shadows.One death.
The goblin dropped before his scream could leave his mouth, his throat sliced open so cleanly it flapped like torn parchment.But it wasn't the silence that unsettled her.
It was the sound that followed.
A song.
The way the blood hissed as it touched the cold stone—like it welcomed the warmth.The gurgling choke as his lungs filled. The way his fingers twitched, trying to grasp something invisible—hope, maybe.His eyes locked with hers for a moment too long. And in them—she saw it.
Not fear.
Recognition.
As if, in those final seconds, he realized she wasn't one of them anymore.
She was other.
When the twitching stopped, Eliana knelt beside the body.
The blood was still warm, steaming faintly in the cold tunnel air.She dipped her claw into it—curious—and something moved inside her.Not magic. Not quite.
Something older.Something deeper.
It slithered through her limbs like fire through oil, tracing her bones, curling around her heart.It didn't burn.It thrummed.
Yes, the magic inside her whispered. This is how you grow.
It wasn't just strength she absorbed.It was life.Memories. Essence. Rage. Sorrow. All of it seeped into her through the blood.
And her body responded.
Later that night, her back split open.Not from pain—she felt nothing anymore—but from necessity.
New ridges formed along her spine, like jagged mountains breaking through earth.Her senses sharpened to an unbearable clarity—she could hear ants crawling inside the walls. She could smell the rot behind every breath the other goblins took.
Her teeth fell out.And grew back sharper.
Longer.Predator's teeth.
She didn't cry.
She stood naked beneath the dripping cavern ceiling, her fingers twitching in delight, flexing claws that no longer trembled.Her eyes glowed faintly now—deep red in pitch black, like dying stars behind a veil of smoke.
The next night, she killed again.
This one tried to fight.
He screamed.Begged.Clawed at her face as if to peel the monster away and reveal the girl beneath.
There was no girl left.
His blood painted the walls. A mural in crimson. A hymn to survival.
And Eliana felt the change again.Bones shifting.Muscles weaving tighter.A second heart, maybe, forming somewhere deep within—one that only beat for vengeance.
She looked at her reflection in the pooled blood.
Her face was still her own—but not.
Something watched from behind her eyes.
And it was smiling.
The Hollow Hunger
She became a myth.No—she became the thing myths feared.
A whisper in the dark.A shadow that bled malice.The Black Flame.The Silent Maw.The Hollow Thing.
Her name, Eliana, had long since dissolved in the acid pit of memory.What remained was a shape—a hunger—etched in dread and spoken only in shudders.Even the overseers began to whisper. Not in fear of rebellion—but in fear of something worse.
The tunnels had always been cruel. Now, they were haunted.
Goblins began to vanish.
At first, they were the expendable ones—the broken, the sick, the overlooked.But soon, the capable disappeared. Fighters. Enforcers. Overseers with iron whips and blood on their hands.Gone. Without screams. Without trails.
Only the scent of iron in the air.
Only a silence so deep it seemed to press against the skull.
And in that silence, she hunted.
Oh… she hunted.
The weak died quickly—throats slit, skulls crushed.But the strong?She took her time.
Dragged them into the blind corners of the world—spaces where no light ever touched, where even the earth refused to remember what had happened.She listened to their begging, their sobs.And she fed.
It was no longer about survival.Each kill was a ritual.A communion.
Their blood was the ink.Their death throes, the prayer.And their souls…
Yes. Souls.
Sometimes—only sometimes—at the exact moment their life was torn free, she saw it:A shape.A silhouette of what they had been, writhing, shrieking, trying to flee.
A pale, ghostly outline pulled from the meat of their body—no eyes, only a mouth stretched wide in eternal scream—drawn to her like leaves into fire.
And when it touched her…
She felt it saturate her insides.Not like magic.Not like blood.
It was famine becoming fulfillment.It was cold turning to heat.And it stayed.Lurking in her marrow. Whispering through her spine. Expanding her.
Sometimes, in the quiet hours between kills, her body would seize up—spasming as bones cracked and organs rearranged.She didn't scream anymore. She welcomed it.
Her skin had turned to something like stone—but flexible, laced with obsidian veins that pulsed like arteries.Her mouth could open wider now. Unhinge, if needed. The teeth inside had multiplied.
She barely noticed when her tongue split.She only noticed how much better she could taste the fear.
The others had started to see her.Not fully. Just glimpses.A flash of red eyes down a tunnel.The glint of claws scraping stone.A faint hiss behind a closed door.
Panic took root.
They called her "The Hollow."They said she wasn't real.Then they said she used to be one of them.
But no one remembered who.
They burned corpses now—afraid she would feed on the dead.They refused to walk alone, refused to sleep deep.Even the guards sharpened their weapons with shaking hands.
It didn't matter.
She could smell them.
And worst of all… she couldn't stop.
The more she fed, the worse the ache became.A constant emptiness in her chest. Like something was missing—a hole—that no blood could fill.
Sometimes, she found herself crouched beside the torn remains of her prey, weeping—not from guilt, but from starvation.
She was full, and yet she was starving.
"You're becoming something else," the magic whispered to her, curling like smoke around her brain."You were a girl. A noble. A goblin. Now… you are the void they left behind."
She didn't sleep anymore.
She watched.
Waited.
Hungered.
And the hunger smiled.
The Reckoning
Then came Vorn.
The once-proud overseer. The brute with a cleaver's smile and breath that reeked of rot and domination.He came into the tunnels not as a hunter, but as a warlord.His armor clinked with trophies—fingers, teeth, shrunken heads of traitors.His voice was iron dragged across bone.
He brought with him the most loyal of the forge's butchers—hulking goblins twisted by years of cruelty, marked by scars and dead eyes.They believed in his legend.They thought they were hunting a thing.A cursed goblin.An abomination.
They were not wrong.
But they did not understand what had hatched in the dark.
They entered the lower tunnels.
The air there was thick—wet with decay, clinging to skin like a veil of flesh.The ceiling wept with black water that tasted of rust and old blood.Roots writhed through cracks in the stone like veins through diseased meat.
And it was quiet.Too quiet.
Even the goblins knew this wasn't right.No scurrying vermin.No whispers.Only the sound of their own breathing.And the soft drip… drip… drip…
But Vorn laughed.
He shouted into the dark, his voice echoing like thunder through a mausoleum.
"Come out, you cursed bitch! You think hiding makes you strong?!"
No answer.Only silence, folding around him like a coffin lid.
Until the first scream came.
A goblin at the rear—dragged into a tunnel too small for anything to fit through.His scream ended in a wet snap, followed by the sound of something being chewed.Bone crunched.
Then the second scream.
And the third.
It began.
She moved through the dark like a god of slaughter.
She didn't strike from the shadows.She was the shadow.
One by one, Vorn's soldiers died.Not cleanly.
One had his spine ripped out through his stomach, left twitching as his lungs gasped through the hole.Another was turned to ash—eyes still glowing with terror as his flesh disintegrated.A third had his jaw unhinged and fed his own tongue before the mercy of death.
They tried to run.
They screamed her names—The Hollow, The Flame, The Curse of Stone.
But none of them escaped.
And then there was Vorn.
She let him see her.
Not just her face—but what she had become.
Ashen skin now laced with glowing cracks of red light, like magma trapped beneath stone.Eyes black as pitch, save for slivers of blood-red that pulsed with madness.A mouth full of teeth—too many teeth—grinning in a way no living creature ever should.
His bravado cracked.He raised his blade.She didn't flinch.
He swung like a beast.
She moved like a curse—her limbs folding unnaturally, her feet silent as she slid across the stone.Every blow he made met air.Every scream he let out was swallowed by the tunnels.
She didn't strike to kill.She struck to break.
She tore his leg at the knee with a single swipe, watching him collapse with a scream that echoed like thunder through bone and marrow.Then his shoulder.His ribs.His pride.
Vorn tried to crawl.
She let him.
He whimpered. Begged. Cursed.
"You… You're not even one of us anymore… What are you?"
She crouched beside him, her claw dripping his blood.And leaned in.
Her voice was a rasp—more shadow than sound.
"I am what you made me."
Then she gripped his throat.And tore it open.
The blood sprayed like a baptism.And she whispered into the red mist, each word a needle stabbing into the soul of the mountain:
"This is for everything."
The tunnel never forgot.Even now, the stone bears a stain no fire can burn clean.A mark where something monstrous was born—not just from flesh, but from vengeance.
The goblins avoid that path.
They say you can still hear the gurgling.Still see her silhouette at the far end—watching. Waiting.
Not hungry. Not anymore.Only patient.
And the deeper you go…
The louder the tunnels breathe.
Becoming the Other
It began as a tremor.
A twitch in her left hand, subtle as a heartbeat. Then her arm jerked—snapping backward with a sickening pop. Her vision blurred. Her breath came out in shallow hisses. Something inside her was shifting.
And then it came—the agony.
Her entire body convulsed, seizing as if lightning had struck her from the inside.Her spine bent the wrong way. Her mouth foamed with blood and bile.The bones beneath her skin cracked like dry branches—one after another, reshaping, lengthening.
She didn't scream.
She couldn't.
Her throat had clenched shut, locked tight in the rictus of transformation.All she could do was twitch, spasming in the filth, as her flesh bubbled and tore—like meat left too long in fire.Her skin split at the shoulders. Black sinew writhed free, muscles crawling like worms, reorganizing.Her jaw dislocated with a crack, and new teeth pushed through the old—jagged and sharp like a predator's crown.
Her blood was black now, slick and hot, spilling onto the stone in fat, glistening drops.It hissed on contact with the ground, searing it.Her veins pulsed visibly beneath her skin, thickened by the stolen essence she had ripped from the souls of her victims.
It wasn't just a change of shape.
It was a death.And a birth.
She collapsed into a puddle of blood and filth—no longer able to tell which belonged to her.
The hours passed.
She lay motionless, save for the occasional twitch of her fingers, or the soft pop of shifting bone.Maggots crept near her still-warm body, sensing carrion.
And then—she rose.
Slowly. Unnaturally.
Her limbs bent like they had been reassembled without instruction. Her hands gripped the stone as though feeling it for the first time. Her claws scraped lines into the floor as she pulled herself upright.
What stood now was not a goblin.
But neither was it beast.
She was tall for one of their kind—lean, skeletal, elegant in the way only nightmares are elegant.Her skin, once a jaundiced green, had become a mottled grey, streaked with obsidian ridges.Her spine rose in jagged protrusions along her back, and a thin membrane of black skin stretched taut between her arms and ribs—vestigial, like wings trying to remember how to grow.
Her eyes… her eyes were the worst.
Gone was the dull gleam of fear and starvation.Now, they glowed faintly—burning coals in a skull too sharp to be kind.Red rings of fire rimmed in black.Eyes that watched without blinking. Eyes that remembered every scream.
The stone around her seemed to breathe.
The tunnels pulsed faintly with some unseen rhythm. The blood from her earlier fight had not dried—it moved, flowed, like ink in water, spiraling into glyphs across the floor.
And from deep within the earth, she heard them:
The Whispers.
Words with no sound. Voices with no tongues.They hissed not in speech, but meaning—brushing against her mind like cold fingers sliding beneath skin.
"Eliana…""The Broken Flame…""The Unseen Hunger…""Become… more…"
Her hands clenched. Not out of pain.
Out of hunger.
A hunger that went beyond food. Beyond vengeance. Beyond flesh.
She hungered for dominion.For purpose.For the undoing of everything that had bound her before—bloodlines, species, laws of flesh and magic.
She tilted her head toward the shadows of the deeper tunnels, where the real monsters dwelled. Where secrets lay buried in the bones of the mountain.
And she smiled.
With too many teeth.
Eliana, no longer goblin, no longer woman.
She was the Revenant Flame, crawling from the corpse of weakness.A force not born of mercy—but murder, mutation, and memory.
And she was not done.
Not yet.
Because evolution was not the end.
It was only the beginning of what she would become.