Ash woke to the taste of blood and burning metal.
His body ached as if he'd been disassembled and clumsily put back together. The shrine's ceiling swam above him, the ancient stones pulsing like a living thing.
"You're awake."
Caela's voice was flat, but her grip on her chain-blade tightened. Ash followed her gaze—and froze.
The ground around him wasn't disturbed.
It was gone.
A perfect circle of nothingness stretched five feet in every direction, the earth erased down to smooth, glassy bedrock. The edges were unnaturally sharp, as if reality itself had been cut away.
"I did that?" Ash croaked.
Caela didn't answer. Instead, she tossed him a waterskin. "Drink. Then stand. We're leaving."
They traveled north, toward the Bleeding Ridge—a jagged spine of rock where the sky itself was said to weep. As they walked, Caela finally spoke:
"The Cage isn't just using you. It's testing you."
Ash frowned. "Testing?"
"All god-fragments have wills. Yours is no different. Every time you use its power, it learns. Adapts."* She glanced at his chest, where the black veins had spread further. *"Soon, it won't need your permission to act."
Ash opened his mouth to retort—
—when the ground shivered.
A low, wet sound echoed from ahead, like meat being torn from bone. Caela's hand snapped to her blade.
"Feast Site," she muttered. "Right on time."
The valley beyond was wrong.
The air shimmered, thick and syrupy. Trees bent at impossible angles, their bark split to reveal glistening, vein-like strands beneath. And at the center— a Fracture.
It had been human once. Now, its flesh was translucent, organs visible and moving on their own. Its mouth stretched ear to ear, filled with rows of needle-teeth.
It turned.
"Hungry," it rasped.
Ash's mark burned.
The Cage whispered:
"FOOD."
The Fracture lunged.
Ash reacted on instinct—his hand slashed upward, and the space between them ripped.
The creature's arm vanished mid-swing, severed at the shoulder. No blood. No wound. Just absence.
The Fracture didn't scream. It laughed.
"Yes," it gurgled. "Feed us."
Then it charged—and Ash erased again—
—but this time, the Cage stirred violently.
His vision shattered.
Suddenly, he wasn't Ash anymore. He was the hunger. The void. The teeth in the dark.
And the Fracture?
Prey.
—
Reality snapped back like a broken neck.
Ash was on his knees, his mouth full of copper and smoke. The Fracture was gone—not just dead, but unmade, its existence scrubbed from the world.
Caela stood over him, her chain-blade coiled around his throat.
"That," she hissed, "was not control."
Ash gasped. The Cage purred in his skull, sated—for now.
Caela yanked him upright. "You let it take you. Never do that again."
Ash wiped his mouth. His fingers came away black.
"Or what?" he grinned.
Caela's eyes darkened.
"Or I put you down before you become something worse."
Far away, in the depths of Ultherra, Kirell of the Hollow Grin felt it—the moment Ash feasted.
His hollow eye wept black tears, the thing inside it writhing with delight.
"Beautiful," he murmured, licking the tears away. "The Cage remembers what it is."
His servants trembled as his grin widened.
"Soon, little fracture. Soon, you'll hunger for more than scraps."