Darkness had a taste.
It wasn't a metaphor, not in the way poets use words. It was a real taste, tangible, that filled Thomas's mouth like stagnant water and left a coppery, moldy aftertaste on his tongue. It hurt to swallow. It hurt even more to remember that once, darkness had no taste at all.
Thomas awoke blinking against the absolute black, his breath coming in gasps as if every molecule of air had become denser, heavier. He didn't remember where he was, or how he'd gotten there. His name, yes. Thomas Voss. Thirty-two years old. Former diplomat of the Terran Federation. Specialized in cultural negotiations with the alien species of the Outer Sphere.
All of this was written in his head like on parchment, but it seemed to belong to another man. A man who had walked under the sun of a hundred worlds, who had eaten real food, who had touched the living skin of beings who didn't want to eat him.
Because this, now, he knew with certainty: someone in this cell wanted to eat him.
"You're awake."
The voice came from the darkness, closer than Thomas expected. A woman's voice, but broken, like an old record that kept skipping. There was something wrong with that voice, something that sent shivers down his spine.
Thomas didn't answer. He tried to move and felt chains tightening around his wrists and ankles, metallic and cold like the fear rising from his chest. The floor beneath him was stone, irregular, wet with something viscous that he preferred not to examine too closely.
"Not talking, eh?" The voice grew closer, and Thomas heard the sound of something dragging across the floor. "I didn't talk either at first. Then I realized it doesn't help. Here, silence doesn't protect you. Here, silence is like screaming."
A laugh. A laugh that didn't sound human at all.
Thomas squeezed his eyes shut, as if closing them could protect him from what he couldn't see anyway. His heart beat frantically, a war drum against his ribs. He tried to think of something, something beautiful. The sun. Food. The smell of rain on the cobblestones of New Geneva, where he'd spent his childhood.
But every memory he tried to grasp slipped away like water through his fingers.
"Are you hungry?" asked the voice.
Thomas swallowed. Yes, he was hungry. A kind of hunger he'd never known before. Not simple desire for food, but a physical pain that made his stomach feel like a black hole, a void that expanded threatening to swallow everything he was. He had saliva in his mouth, but not for food. For something else. For...
No. He didn't want to think about it.
"I know you're hungry." The sound of dragging stopped a few centimeters from him. "I am too. And that's why I brought this."
A sound of something being dropped on the floor. Something heavy, that made a dull thud and then rolled until it stopped against Thomas's foot.
He touched it with his fingertips, despite every instinct screaming at him not to.
It was an arm.
A human arm, detached at the shoulder, still warm.
"No," whispered Thomas, his voice breaking like glass. "No, no, no..."
"Yes," said the voice, and now there was something sad in that tone, something desperate. "I know. I know it's wrong. But it's the only way. The only way to survive. And you know it, don't you? You feel it. You feel it inside you."
Thomas shook his head, but the stomach pain grew stronger, more insistent. And that arm... that arm gave off a smell. A smell that shouldn't have been appealing, but it was. A smell that made his mouth water.
"Who... who are you?" he managed to ask.
A sigh in the darkness.
"I was like you. A diplomat. I wanted to change the world, build bridges between cultures, create a better future." Another sound, maybe a bitter laugh. "Look where I ended up. Look what I've become."
Thomas felt something wet and warm touch his hand. The arm. The woman was lifting it, bringing it closer to his face.
"You have to eat," she said. "If you don't eat, you die. And if you die... well, then someone will eat you. It's the circle. The circle that never ends."
"I can't..."
"You can. And you will. Because the alternative is worse. The alternative is becoming like those in the lower levels, those who have completely forgotten who they were. Those who aren't even human anymore."
Thomas opened his mouth to protest, but the woman was faster. Something touched his lips, and then... then it was like an explosion.
The taste.
God, the taste.
It was like swallowing sunlight, like drinking water after days in the desert. Every cell in his body screamed in ecstasy, and for a moment he forgot where he was, forgot what he was doing. There was only the need, the hunger, the desire for more.
He bit.
He didn't want to, but he bit.
Blood filled his mouth, warm and metallic, and Thomas vomited, but the woman held him steady, whispering words he couldn't understand, and the hunger... the hunger was like a demon screaming inside him.
So he ate.
He ate while tears streamed down his cheeks.
He ate while the part of him that was still Thomas Voss, diplomat, man of peace, screamed in a corner of his mind.
And when he finished, when the arm was nothing but bones and pieces of cartilage, when the darkness wrapped around him again like a blanket of sin, Thomas cried.
He cried like he had never cried in his entire life.
"Welcome," said the woman in the darkness. "Welcome to the Eternal Prison. Forget who you were. That man is dead. Now you're just another prisoner trying to survive. Like all of us."
Thomas didn't answer. He couldn't. Words died in his throat, choked by self-disgust.
But as he lay there, in the dark cell, with the taste of human flesh still in his mouth, he felt something change inside him. A small crack, like a branch breaking under the weight of snow.
And he knew that something had broken.
Forever.