It courses through me as warmth threading through veins that should ache with exhaustion, through muscles that should tremble with depletion. The Matriarch's feeding lingers, not as satisfaction but as anticipation. The pleasure pulls toward the frozen drones, toward movement that will resume, toward the hunt that waits.
Binah stands where the corpse should be, and I do not look at her, pushing the question down into that familiar darkness where all refused truths go. Down with the phantom mandibles and the clicking sounds and the alien memories that press against awareness, down into the Inner Hell where everything accumulates: what she consumed, what she is, what those multiplying eyes meant, all buried beneath a single resolution.
Not now.
The Matriarch's feeding changed something fundamental in the bond between construct and wielder, deepening the synchronization in ways I can feel but cannot yet name, a settling of alien instinct into human flesh that promises both power and transformation I am not ready to examine. The drones twitch as coordination returns without their Matriarch, their claws scraping stone while the Skathrith's hunger flares hot behind my sternum.
No weapon swings in my hands.
I am the weapon.
The Skathrith's light flares brighter with each step, casting jagged shadows against the trembling walls. My strikes have become instinct, an extension of the construct's will. Each gesture trails silver light as though the air itself is being cleaved apart.
The Thrynix scatter, their chittering fading into the depths of the chamber as shadows flicker and retreat at the edges of my vision where the Skathrith's false light cannot reach. The construct's hunger surges through our link, wordless and absolute.
I cut through another Thrynix, the edges of my hands glowing as they slice through its translucent body. Blood sprays and the Skathrith drinks it in midair, feeding before the husk even hits the ground. A sickening crunch echoes as the remnants collapse.
I am already moving, following the swarm as it flees deeper into a twisting corridor, weak and broken. The construct's impulse drives through me with terrible clarity: hunt, consume. I obey the pressure without questioning its source.
The air changes, as though the Labyrinth itself exhales, satisfied with the promise of more slaughter or perhaps the birthing of a new testing area. The awareness surfaces and drowns beneath the Skathrith's momentum as I chase shadows into transformed space, hunting prey that matters less than the act of hunting itself.
The walls shift, their smooth surfaces warping and folding inward with the sense of a living thing breathing around me, the air growing heavy and charged with oppressive energy that makes my teeth ache. The metal taste spreads across my tongue. I slow. The Skathrith's hum falters, its light dimming as if unsure.
The swarm disappears into the shadows ahead.
Silence falls, unnervingly complete.
Then a voice cuts through the quiet, my own voice, echoing softly at first, barely more than a whisper, each syllable carrying the weight of something ancient and hungry.
"You are nothing without me."
Laughter follows. Cruel. Mocking.
Shadows peel from the walls and coalesce into a figure that flickers between forms: my mother, my younger self, the warrior I fought before. Each face twists with malice, their eyes gleaming in the dim light as though lit from within.
The Skathrith thrums weakly, its hum subdued under the weight of the chamber.
The figure steps closer and the walls ripple around it, folding inward like the pages of a book. Its eyes fix on mine, shifting between violet and gray and purple.
I raise my hands and silver light flickers faintly along their edges. My breath catches. My heartbeat loud in my ears.
The Skathrith's need flares hot behind my eyelids: strike.
I lash out and the construct's energy slices through the figure. It dissolves into smoke, reforming behind me. Laughter echoes, amplified by the chamber's acoustics, surrounding me.
The chamber becomes a maze of shifting shadows. The figure multiplies and each one moves independently, their hands glowing with a sickly light as they mirror my strikes.
But I track them all.
Seven figures moving as one, their attacks coordinated in a pattern my eyes should not be able to follow, yet I do, tracking each shadow's trajectory, their convergence points, the gaps in their formation as information floods through me faster than thought. Instinctive. Alien.
This is not the Skathrith's hunger pressing through our link, which remains simple and direct, a predator's need made manifest. This is something else entirely, a fragmented consciousness that thinks in we instead of I, perceiving motion in dimensions I should not possess, as though I carry within me the borrowed instincts of something that hunted in swarms long before I was born.
I crush the thought. Bury it in the Inner Hell with everything else I refuse to see.
My movements falter as the construct's demands crash over me in waves: destroy, feed, take. Each one carries the weight of something older than hunger.
The illusions close in. Their laughter deafening.
One steps closer, its face flickering. Binah.
The Skathrith roars in protest, its hum flaring sharply.
I close my eyes and center myself in Horizon's Breath. My movements slow. My breathing steadies as I align with the construct's rhythm. The illusions waver, their forms flickering.
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A cold certainty presses through the link, simple and terrible: kill, consume, grow.
The smoke shifts again, solidifying into a new figure, and my breath catches before I can stop it.
Penelope.
She stands before me, platinum-blond hair cascading over shoulders that seem too solid for something born from shadow, azure eyes steady and sharp in a way that smoke should not be able to reproduce. There is a calmness to her, an unnerving composure that feels out of place in this chaos, as though she has simply walked through a door rather than materialized from the Labyrinth's psychological warfare, and the specificity of her makes my chest tighten because smoke should not carry this much weight.
She tilts her head, watching me with the same careful assessment I remember from our first meeting.
I search for the memory.
It should be there. Should be accessible. The moment we met. Words exchanged. Context that would anchor this smoke-form to reality, that would let me dismiss it as mere illusion drawing on experiences I can recall and examine and control.
Nothing.
Not absence like forgetting a name but absence like reaching for a book that once sat on a shelf and finding only empty space, the outline of where it belonged still visible in the dust but the object itself gone, removed, consumed by something that leaves no trace of its feeding.
The panic arrives brief and sharp, cutting through the Skathrith's influence like a blade through silk, and in that moment I understand what I have lost. Not the memory itself, but the space where it should have lived. The context. The foundation. Everything that made Penelope real to me beyond this moment.
"You were different," she says, her voice soft and carrying weight I cannot name. Grief, perhaps, or recognition of a path already walked to its end.
My chest tightens and the words twist inside like a blade turning slowly, carefully, seeking the spaces between ribs.
She steps closer, her presence too vivid, too tangible for smoke and shadow. I catch the scent of winter and something floral I cannot place, and the specificity of it makes my chest tighten further because the Labyrinth should not know these details, should not be able to reproduce them with such precision unless it is drawing from something deeper than conscious memory.
The Skathrith's hunger becomes a drumbeat in my blood: consume, devour, claim.
I was different. Before the Matriarch. Before the slow-time massacre. Before I learned that feeding feels like pleasure and power tastes like warmth in empty veins. The construct presses against that acknowledgment, offering justification, offering necessity, offering the simple truth that strength requires sacrifice and evolution demands cost.
She is wrong. She must be wrong.
"It will not make you whole," Penelope says. Her voice steady. Unflinching.
Her words hit like a hammer, cracking something deep inside. My hands tremble and the energy flickers along their edges, heat and cold both at once.
The Skathrith surges, tries to sing, but cannot. Songs are beyond it. Longing and fear flow through our link in equal measure. More near-words. More things I cannot place.
I swing anyway, making the choice mine and not the construct's, not the Labyrinth's, claiming agency even as I destroy what challenges it. My palm rises and falls and cleaves through her form with silver light that cuts smoke the same way it cuts flesh, and for one terrible moment before she disperses I see her eyes widen with something that might be disappointment or might be pity or might be both.
Smoke. Just smoke. Nothing but shadow and light and the Hell's cruel mimicry.
But my chest empties as she disperses, a hollow opening where something vital lived a heartbeat ago. I cannot name what I have lost or even see its shape. I can only feel the absence spreading through me like frost through water, claiming territory I did not know was vulnerable, and the Skathrith's satisfaction bleeding through our bond does nothing to fill the space that opens.
The chamber feels emptier now. Colder. The walls seem to lean inward. Pressing.
The construct hums in what might be triumph or might be hunger or might be both, its need constant and growing and never satisfied.
The illusions dissolve, leaving a single figure standing in the center of the chamber. It is me. Not me. Twisted. Shadowed. Its body pulses with dark energy and its hands trail a sickly green light that seems to sap the air around it.
It says nothing, which proves worse somehow than words, its silence carrying the weight of inevitability rather than threat.
The Skathrith's need roars through me: take, feast, evolve. The impulse drowns thought beneath instinct.
I charge. Our strikes collide in bursts of light and sound and each clash feels like hitting a mirror, not just in movement but in intent, as though I am fighting not an enemy but a reflection of what the Skathrith wants me to become, all hunger and violence stripped of every other consideration that makes killing a choice rather than merely feeding.
The shadow-me perfectly mirrors my movements. Heat radiates from each impact and the air crackles. My arms burn from the repeated blows.
The construct's whispers become a deafening chorus pressing through every nerve: feed, consume, become. The command drowns thought beneath instinct until I can barely remember why I once believed choice mattered.
The final blow lands, my hands slicing through the shadow-me's chest as its blood erupts in an inky torrent that evaporates into the Skathrith before reaching the ground.
The chamber falls silent, its walls dimming as the illusion dissolves.
White-hot pain burns behind my eyes and the torq etches its message into my consciousness:
Victorious.
Opponent: Reflected Entity.
Conquered: Blood Claimed.
Energy Assimilated: +10 Units.
Ten units. The Matriarch and her drones gave one hundred twelve, but this shadow-thing, this reflection, this test of self, yields ten units like seeds scattered for crows, and the disparity reveals something fundamental about what the Skathrith values, about what feeds it and what leaves it unsatisfied.
The Skathrith's satisfaction curdles into something sharper, not triumph but hunger, the feeding revealed as nothing against the demand that pulses through our bond with new urgency: more, always more. I understand with awful clarity that the construct will never be satisfied, that no amount of blood or power or evolution will ever fill whatever void drives its appetite, that I have bound myself to something whose need has no ceiling, no terminus, no point at which enough becomes possible.
I push the thought down into the Inner Hell, cramming it alongside the Thrynix memories and the questions about Binah and Penelope's dispersing smoke and the hollow her absence opened, everything I cannot afford to acknowledge, everything that threatens the control I maintain through sheer refusal to see what I am becoming. The space grows crowded, trembling with repressed energies that press against the boundaries I maintain.
I feel nothing.
The power floods through me, chasing away exhaustion and pain until my body hums with energy and every nerve feels alive. But beneath it all remains that hollow space where Penelope's smoke-form dispersed, growing and spreading, a void the Skathrith's power cannot fill because the construct is not designed to fill voids, only to create them, carving out everything that makes me human to make room for what it wants me to become.
Binah stands at the edge of the chamber, her violet eyes wide and filled with something I have never seen in them before. Only two eyes now, only human fear rather than the multiplying horror I witnessed during the feeding, and the reduction itself testifies to what she saw in me.
Fear.
She saw what I am becoming, just as I saw what she was. The horror runs both directions, reflecting endlessly between us like mirrors facing mirrors, and neither of us can look away from what we have witnessed in each other.
She raises a trembling hand, not to stop me but to ward me off. The gesture small and deliberate, a boundary drawn in the air between us that I understand without words, an acknowledgment that something has changed between us that cannot be unchanged.
I step toward her and she shakes her head, taking a step back that matches mine perfectly, maintaining the distance like a law of physics neither of us can violate.
Her silence cuts deeper than any longing, deeper than hunger or power or the Skathrith's promises, because it names what I have lost without speaking a word: the possibility that something in me remains worth approaching without fear.
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Nightbreak (Patreon-exclusive)
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Ablations (ongoing)