Amatsu sat by the cracked window, his gaze drifting through the fractured skyline. Cold light seeped through the jagged concrete—thin, gray, feverish. Dust floated in the air, swirling where shadow pooled deepest. Shapes forming, unraveling, like dreams strangled at birth. The world outside was all angles and rot. A decayed labyrinth where strength and hunger ruled, relentless and unfaltering. A crow croaked somewhere beyond the ruin, its call swallowed by silence.
Dreams.
Eto had one.
A feverish, stubborn ember buried beneath cruelty and decay. She scratched it into old notebooks with ink-stained fingers. Her writing frantic, feverish—sentences bleeding into one another, tangled by desperation to seize something she could barely grasp. Words splintered and scattered but threaded with a hope so fierce it bordered on madness.
A book. A dream that maybe, with writing, she could reach something beyond the labyrinth of violence.
The Maw's corridors trembled under the weight of their inhabitants. Monsters gnashing in the dark. Driven by instincts sharpened to fangs by starvation. Amatsu had grown used to the stench of blood and sweat. The chill that seeped through stone.
But Eto's room was different. Always buzzing with something intangible—an energy that crackled between her frantic scribbling and whispered thoughts. For a moment, only the distant drip of water echoed through the stone.
He could hear her. Muttering fragments of sentences to herself. Erasing and rewriting with a child's reckless conviction. Her voice cracked the silence with something alive. Something Amatsu could never quite grasp.
"Maybe… if I write it right, they'll understand," she whispered once, her eyes glinting like shards of glass. "Or maybe I'll understand." Her laughter cracked, brittle and splintered. Twisted by something buried far deeper. She scribbled faster. The paper tearing under her grip.
The scratching of her pen was like claws scraping bone. Desperate. Her breathing shallow. Ragged. Words expelled like gasps between drowning fits. Each scrawl sounded like tearing sinew. The notebook trembled under her iron-hard grip. Pages warped and splattered with ink that resembled congealed blood.
Creation, Amatsu thought, looked almost like violence.
But dreams.
He tasted the word. Bitter. Alien. Dreams were for creatures with futures, weren't they? Things with lives stitched together by warmth and memory. Not the disjointed shamble of carnage and calculation that comprised him.
Deep down, he had a dream once. Yes, before all of this. Before thought and hunger braided themselves into him like thorns. The first time he woke to the world. Broken and trembling. His body unfamiliar and sharp-edged.
His voice rasped from his throat with absolute certainty—Hunger was no longer his to feel.
But the world had other plans. Hunger was his. Himself. A sickness grafted into his bones. Twisted through marrow and nerve. Until it became something inseparable from thought and will. A constant thrum. A pulse heavier than blood.
It was not just a craving. It was an orchestra.
At first, the sound was distant—faint and indistinct. A low hum threading itself through his bones. Not unpleasant. A murmur at the edge of thought, like a half-formed memory clawing its way back to the surface.
Then it grew.
The thrum deepened, turned sharper. Sinew stretched tight, nerves strung like taut wire. It poured into his marrow, a pressure swelling until his skin felt thin, stretched over something too vast to contain.
And then it split open.
Music.
Not the crude, howling notes of starvation, but something refined. A symphony coaxed from pain and power alike. It was rhythm and violence intertwined—each heartbeat a percussion, each breath a keening note wrung from flesh and rot.
But—
It wasn't a wound to heal. It wasn't a sensation to endure. It was a force. A flood tearing through him, cleansing and consuming. And with every devoured body, the music swelled.
A crescendo that clawed at his mind, demanding more. Always more.
He could feel it threading itself into him. The sound shaping thought, sharpening instinct. A melody of blood and marrow and gnashing teeth. It coaxed his muscles to coil, his tendrils to writhe and lash. Pleasure bled into pain until the two became indistinguishable.
Sometimes, it was brutal—raw and savage. The splintering of bone. The wet rupture of flesh. Notes struck so violently they left fractures rippling through his skull.
Other times, it was elegance itself. Smooth and relentless. The song of something precise and terrible. Slicing through air with surgical grace, each movement a chord, each kill a verse.
And at its worst—
It was beautiful.
So pure it ached. As if it's was not a curse but a gift. A truth carved into him with every drop of blood spilled.
Amatsu could almost taste it. The sweetness folded into agony, the clarity that came only when the hunger was sated. But it was fleeting—an echo that slipped away the moment his teeth left flesh.
He closed his eyes. Listened.
The song grew louder. Swelled and twisted. A storm devouring all else. And somewhere within it, his own voice rose. A whisper, distorted and warped until it sounded more beast than boy.
It urged him forward. It urged him to feed. To tear and swallow and gorge himself until nothing remained.
But the symphony was not just sound. It was weight. Pressure. A force that coiled around his lungs, tightening until his breaths grew shallow and clipped. He could feel it winding through his veins, a pulse heavier than blood.
It spoke in sensation. A hunger so profound it bordered on rapture.
He should have feared it. He should have recoiled from the force bleeding into his thoughts, coiling through his words, fracturing his own sense of self.
Instead, he reveled in it.
A smile twitched at his lips. Eyes glinting with something sharp. Something that understood the hunger wasn't his enemy.
It was his nature.
And to resist it would be the true agony.
For a heartbeat, the world seemed distant, muted. The sound of his own breathing filled his ears.
Dreams.
Could he even call it that? Or was it just the twisted desire to consume everything? To devour until he could no longer feel the lack? The hunger wasn't something to sever, but to absorb. To devour. The first time he woke to the world, he knew he was no longer human.
He ate for survival.
He survived.
The next time, he didn't hesitate.
The third time, he killed. And he smiled.
But the ache did not fade.
It sang, and he enjoyed.
Now, as he watched Eto scribble furiously—ink staining her fingers black, her hair tangled and wild—he couldn't help but marvel. She was scribbling something incoherent. Sentences half-formed and viciously scratched out. But there was a will in her movements. Something brighter and sharper.
She wrote like someone clawing toward salvation. Fingers trembling as if the words might slip away the moment she paused. Her desperation was its own kind of hunger. Her breathing shallow. Ragged. As if each sentence she formed was snatched from the air before it could dissolve.
Her knuckles whitened. Her grip iron-hard. The notebook trembled beneath her fingers. Pages crinkling where she pressed too hard. Ink splattered like bloodstains. Smudged and smeared as she scrawled line after line with feverish intensity.
"Maybe if I write it," she murmured. Her voice hoarse with exhaustion and something like hope. "They'll hear me. Or maybe I'll hear myself."
Amatsu stared. That final question echoing in the silence. Would her dream survive the world's cruelty? Would his?
He closed his eyes.
Would he ever find something worth dreaming for? Or would he simply devour until nothing remained? Perhaps the dream he searched for wasn't something to create or achieve. But something to consume. To swallow whole and make part of himself.
Maybe even dreams could be devoured. And maybe, deep down, he already was.
The Famine Serpent stirred within him. As if laughing. As if reveling in the decay of the world's frail hopes. And maybe he laughed along with it.
Amatsu spoke, his voice low and cold, the words coiled with something feral. "I do not wear the mask. I have become it. And I will never take it off."
He stood alone in the dark. But he was not alone.
the ache coils around him, through him, within him. It isn't a sensation—it's a condition. A truth wound tight through his veins, threaded into his thoughts.
Not held in his stomach, but laced through his marrow, woven into his bones. It breathes with him. It beats with him. It is him.
And she sees it.
Eto has always seen things others can't. The quiver in a voice, the tremor in fingertips, the heaviness of a word left unsaid. She feels people, their fear, their joy, their rage—vibrations in the air, heat against her skin.
But this—
Amatsu does not feel human.
He does not feel like anything she has ever known.
A person, even a ghoul, has edges—boundaries that define them, a core that holds them together. But he has none. He is a hollow thing, a presence stretching beyond what flesh should hold. No edge, no shape.
And the hunger—
It isn't separate. It doesn't cling to him like a burden. It surges through him, pure and unyielding. A voice threaded into his own, stitched into the marrow of his words. Not something to hide. Something to wield.
A shiver ripples up her spine. Not fear. Something else.
Curiosity.
Fascination.
Something darker.
She should be afraid. She should recoil, feel that instinctive dread that whispers wrong, wrong, wrong. But she doesn't. She only watches. Eyes wide. Breath slow.
Amatsu speaks in a voice that sounds like the hunger itself.
Low. Gravel ground fine. Every word an act of devouring, of claiming. As if language is a thing to consume, tear apart, and swallow whole.
The words settle. Heavy. Final.
"I do not wear the mask. I have become it. And I will never take it off."
The silence swelled, thick and sharp-edged. A stillness before something shatters.
Her heart beats once, twice, and then—
She laughs.
It bursts from her, light and breathless, like something startled free. Softer than it should be. Gentler. Not mocking, not cruel. A child's delight twisted by something older, something deeper.
Amatsu turns.
His eyes gleam, shadows swallowing the light. For a moment, there is nothing behind them. No malice. No recognition. Just emptiness.
And then—
Something shifts.
The faintest flicker of awareness. A glint of amusement, a question that doesn't need to be asked.
Eto tilts her head, eyes half-lidded, fingers brushing against her lips as if to catch the remnants of laughter.
"You sound like a character in a book," she says, her words light, playful. But beneath them—beneath them is understanding.
She sees him.
She sees what he is, what he has become, what he will become.
And she does not flinch.
Does not look away.
Instead, she smiles.
"Do I?" he finally speaks, his voice like the scrape of bone against stone. "Then tell me, Eto—how does the story end?"
Her eyes gleam, green swallowed by shadow. She steps closer, head tilted, that ever-present, unreadable smile never fading.
"That depends," she whispers. "Will you let them write it for you?"
A challenge. A question without a question mark.
Amatsu exhales. Slow.
"No one tells my story but me." Slow and certain.
The air between them felt heavier, weighted by something neither could name.
He has already decided.
He will not be written.
He will write.
And the world—the world will read in blood.
But she only smiles.
Eto's fingers twitched, curling and uncurling like claws straining against flesh. Not from fear. From something else. Something electric and fevered, gnawing at the edges of her mind, carving itself into her ribs like a story not yet written. Her nails scraped against her palm, pressing crescent moons into her skin.
Yes.
She would write this.
Not as fiction. Not as fantasy.
As truth.
A truth that writhes, that breathes, that devours.
Her lips curled slowly, creeping upward in a grin that didn't quite fit her face—too wide, too jagged. His words tangled with her own, their edges threading together like barbed wire.
"I will name my first book Hunger," she murmured, the words drawn out like the pull of a blade through flesh. Her voice tasted of ink and marrow, of something inevitable. Her eyes gleamed, fever-bright, pupils sharp as pinpricks. That smile remained unfinished, its edges frayed and fevered, stitched together by the wildness in her gaze.
Amatsu watched her, his own expression unreadable. Shadows clung to his features, carving hollows where there should have been warmth. His eyes tracked her every movement—each tilt of her head, each curl of her fingers, as if even her breathing held some secret he needed to unravel.
Eto leaned closer, her shoulders hunched forward like a predator waiting to pounce. Her breath fogged the air between them, the chill only sharpening the heat in her words. "You know... I think you're right. About writing your own story."
Her fingers danced through the air absently, tracing shapes only she could see. Threading words into place like sinew woven through shattered bone. Her voice cracked with something sharp and gleaming.
"But stories are strange things, aren't they?" Her grin deepened, half-mad, half-sincere. "They tend to... twist. Bite back when you're not looking."
She watched him with eyes that seemed to drill through him, searching for something she couldn't name. Her expression flickered, momentarily uncertain, before the madness resurfaced.
A pause.
A grin that teetered on the edge of sanity. "I wonder which of us gets the last page."
Amatsu's smile split his face open like a wound reopening. Slow. Cruel. Something feral lurking beneath.
"Whoever's still breathing."
His voice cut through the silence like a blade dragged across stone.