Kael woke to a sky bruised with twilight, the ash still drifting in lazy eddies around him. His body ached in ways fire and hunger could not explain. Knees stiff, back screaming from sleep on stone, he realized he had not dreamed.
The Sight was awake.
It lingered behind his eyelids as he blinked, a constant shimmer across the wastes. The souls he had consumed yesterday some faint, some bright tugged at him. Not with longing, but with expectation, as though he had assumed a new role without asking.
Kael stumbled forward, hand pressed to his chest. The light beneath his skin throbbed in response.
You are ours now, whispered the emptiness behind his vision.
Kael forced himself to focus on the horizon, on distant dunes and jagged rock. The echoes of his first feeding remained, a memory that was not his, and yet was. Faces blurred, laughter distorted, smells he had never known, but could remember as if he had lived them. He tried to remember his own mother's face, but it flickered, melting into ash and salt.
His humanity had a price.
The more he consumed, the more he lost. Each stolen memory, each swallowed soul, carved away at the man he had been. And yet, the power was addictive. The strength, the clarity, the absence of fear it beckoned like a lover whose touch promised everything and took everything.
Kael sank to the sand and let his forehead touch the ground. He could almost feel what he had become: neither living nor dead, neither human nor monster. The Sight whispered constantly, a siren's song in every shadow, every grain of salt, every flicker of ash.
Tears came, but they were strange and colorless, almost like condensation from his own body, not the soul inside it. He did not know whether he wept for the dead he had eaten or for the man he could no longer remember being.
The horizon cracked with movement. Survivors. A small band, huddled and fearful. Kael's body reacted before his mind: muscles tensing, hunger flickering. He could have struck them, drained them, and no one would have survived the touch. The light beneath his skin pulsed, begging, whispering.
But he stepped aside.
Not out of mercy. Not yet.
Because he remembered enough.
Enough to know that what he had done, what he would do, carried a cost far greater than survival.
Kael moved eastward, leaving the survivors behind, ghost-like, unseen. Every step pulled at the edges of his remaining humanity, and he could feel pieces of himself scattering in the wind like ash.
The night fell darker than before. The wind carried voices now soft, impossibly distant, pleading. Kael could not tell if they were alive or dead.
He closed his eyes.
And for the first time, he prayed.
Not to gods. Not to spirits. Not to himself.
To the small, stubborn spark of the man who had walked the Salt Wastes before the hunger woke.
It answered with silence.