The first light of dawn did not bring beauty when it touched the grey carcass of the village. It brought definition. It carved out the long, desperate shadows of broken chimneys against the skeletal remains of houses. It illuminated the gossamer veils of spiderwebs spanning empty windows, and the thick, cloying mist that clung to the dead bushes like a shroud. Most of all, it revealed the silence—not a peaceful quiet, but a dense, suffocating presence. It was the sound of a clock that had stopped ticking, of a held breath that had lasted for decades.
In the decaying mansion on the village's weeping edge, nestled in a corner where the floorboards had rotted into a soft, damp pulp, a small form lay curled.
A violent, full-body shudder racked it—a convulsion that had nothing to do with the morning cold. It was the final, protesting spasm of a nervous system being violently rebooted, of life being poured into a vessel that had been utterly, clinically empty. Leo's body drew in a first, ragged breath that scraped like sandpaper down a ruined throat.
---
Consciousness returned not as a memory, but as a sensation. A heavy, wet cold that seeped up from the stone beneath him and into the marrow of his bones. Then came the pain: a bright, pulsing agony on the right side of his skull, a constellation of aches across his ribs and back, a raw fire in his throat. He tried to move his fingers. They twitched, alien and uncooperative, scraping against grit.
Where…?
The question formed in a mind that felt cavernous and echoingly empty. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, the world tilting and swimming. Blurred vision resolved into a nightmare of neglect. Above him, the mansion's ceiling was a map of collapse—great, peeling patches of plaster showing the lathe beneath, from which hung funeral draperies of dust and web. A single shaft of grey light, thick with motes, cut through a broken shutter, landing on his hands.
He stared at them. Small. Pale. Streaked with dirt and something darker that had dried under the fingernails to a rusty brown. They were a child's hands. They were his hands. But they felt like borrowed gloves, ill-fitting and strange.
A deeper, more primal ache twisted in his gut, sharp enough to make him gasp. Hunger. But underneath it, thrumming in time with his newly-beating heart, was another need. It wasn't for food. It was a hollow, pulling yearning, a psychic vacuum desperate to be filled. He had no name for it. He only knew it hurt.
Gritting teeth that felt too large for his mouth, he forced himself to stand. His legs were sticks of jelly, threatening to buckle. He stumbled, catching himself on the splintered frame of a doorway. The movement sent a fresh lance of pain through his head, and with it, a flash of… something else. Not a memory. A texture. The feeling of chains, cold and heavier than worlds. The taste of lightning and ash. It was gone before he could grasp it, leaving only a metallic tang of ozone on his tongue and a profound, disorienting loneliness that clenched around his heart like a fist.
Why am I so alone?
The hallway before him was a tunnel of decay. Thick dust, undisturbed for years, lay on the floor like grey snow, marked only by his own stumbling footprints. The air was thick with the smell of damp rot, mold, and something faintly sweet and terrible—the last ghost of decomposition. He shuffled forward, drawn not by purpose, but by the dim light at the end of the hall. The grand staircase leading down had collapsed into a jagged maw of broken wood.
He found another way—a servant's staircase, narrow and treacherously slick with damp. Each step was a victory. Each breath was a struggle. The physical hunger gnawed, but that other hunger, the soul-hunger, was beginning to whisper. It had no words. It was a direction, a magnetic pull.
He emerged into what was once a grand foyer. Now, it was a tomb furnished with the skeletons of furniture. A massive table lay on its side, three legs snapped. Tattered curtains, bleached by sun and stained by time, hung like forgotten flags. And there, in the center of the floor, was a large, dark stain. It was old, blackened into the wood grain. But as Leo's eyes (were they his eyes?) fell upon it, the stain seemed to pulse. Not visibly. It was a pulse he felt in that hollow place inside his chest. A faint, fading ember of profound anguish.
He jerked his gaze away, a cold sweat beading on his neck. He didn't understand. He was afraid.
Stumbling out the front doors, which hung crooked on their hinges, he was met with the corpse of Willow's End.
The village wasn't just abandoned. It was defeated. Weeds had cracked the main road's cobblestones. Houses slumped in on themselves, their thatch roofs caved in, their gardens overrun by monstrous, thorny brambles. The silence here was even deeper, a watchful, resentful quiet. It was broken by a sound—a soft, hopeless sobbing.
Leo turned. By the village well, its stone rim green with slime, under the skeletal embrace of a dead cedar tree, a man was crying.
Except he wasn't a man. Not anymore. He was a thing of mist and memory, translucent and wavering like a heat haze. His form was grey, but his edges bled a sorrowful, dark blue light. His face was turned up to the empty sky, mouth open in a silent, perpetual wail. His hands clutched at his chest, pulling at a shirt that wasn't there.
The soul-hunger inside Leo screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a compulsion, an instinct as fundamental as breathing. His feet moved without his command. His fear was drowned out by a tidal wave of need. This grey, weeping thing… it was what the emptiness inside him craved. It was water for a desert.
He didn't think. He reached out a small, trembling hand.
His fingers passed into the spectre's chest.
The world dissolved.
---
He was Haron.
The ache in his shoulders from a long day tending the south field. The smell of turned earth and his own sweat. The warm, golden light of a summer evening as he walked home, the hope of a hot meal and his wife Elara's smile lifting his feet.
Then, the scream from the cottage. Midwife Marta's grim, blood-smeared face at the door. The long, terrible night. The dawn that brought not light, but a final, shallow breath from Elara, and then… stillness. The tiny, silent bundle in Marta's arms.
The grief was a physical weight, a stone in his belly that made food taste like ash. Then the blight came. Not a pest or a drought, but a grey, creeping rot that turned healthy potatoes to foul-smelling sludge and wheat stalks to hollow, brittle sticks. The laughter died in the village. Eyes that once held sympathy now held suspicion. Haron's grief brought it, the whispers said. He offended the earth spirits.
Debts mounted. The landlord's man came, his voice cold, his eyes avoiding the empty cradle. The community feast he wasn't invited to. The final walk, in deep night, to the cedar tree he'd planted with Elara the first spring they were married. The rough feel of the rope. The last thought, not of despair, but of a desperate, foolish hope that he might find her in the darkness…
---
Leo gasped, stumbling back, wrenching his hand away as if burned. He fell to his knees, retching, but nothing came up. Haron's life—the love, the loss, the crushing weight of failure—echoed inside him, a thunderclap in the hollow chamber of his self. It was foreign, yet it settled into his bones as if it had always been there.
The weeping spectre by the well was gone. In its place was a faint, shimmering afterimage that faded into the morning air.
And Leo felt… changed.
The sharp, physical hunger was muted. The throbbing in his head had dulled to a whisper. A trickle of warmth, of vitality, moved through his limbs. He felt stronger, more present. But the cost…
…all for nothing… the soil is cursed and I am cursed… why did she leave me here alone…
The voice was in his mind. Clear. Desolate. It was Haron's internal monologue, the tape of his despair, now playing on a loop in a corner of Leo's consciousness.
"Stop," Leo whispered, pressing his palms to his temples. "Please, stop."
The voice didn't listen. It only faded slightly, becoming a background hum of misery, a new layer in the silence of his mind.
Horror, cold and slick, washed over him. What had he done? He had… consumed. He had stolen a man's final moments, his very essence, to feed a hunger he didn't understand. He was a monster.
But as the horror crested, the soul-hunger yawned wider, awakened by the taste, now ravenous. It pointed him, like the needle of a compass, away from the well. He looked up, his new vision—their vision—seeing the village not as a collection of ruins, but as a gallery of ghosts.
In the window of the blacksmith's forge, a broad-shouldered shadow stood forever at a cold anvil. By the doorstep of a collapsed cottage, the faint, small shapes of children flickered, playing a game no one remembered. Near the overgrown common, a cluster of greyer, angrier shades argued soundlessly, their gestures sharp with a bitterness that had outlived them. Every building, every lane, held a captive echo. The air was thick with their stagnant emotions—regret, loneliness, fury, love unfinished.
The hunger pulled him towards each one. They were meals. They were solace for the void. He took a step towards the blacksmith, then locked his knees, trembling with the effort of resistance. No. This was wrong. This was a violation. He was not a… a vulture.
He turned and ran. He fled past the silent, watching houses, past the graveyard where two newer, gentler shades—an old woman and a boy holding hands—watched him pass with curious sadness. Their pull was softer, sweeter, and somehow more terrifying. He ran until his lungs burned and the last of the crumbling fences was behind him.
He found a dirt road, winding its way up into forested hills. He didn't know where it led. He only knew he had to get away from the banquet of souls he was terrified to crave.
For hours, he walked. The shock of what he'd done gave way to a numb, grinding exhaustion. The questions circled like carrion birds: Who am I? What am I? Haron's memories were a confusing, grief-stricken film over his own nonexistent past. He remembered the taste of Elara's stew, the callus on his own (Haron's) left thumb, the particular smell of a coming rain on dry soil. But he didn't remember his own mother's face. If he ever had one.
As dusk painted the sky in bruised purples and oranges, he saw it. Far ahead, nestled in a distant valley where the hills parted, a thousand points of light began to wink into existence. A city. Life, noise, movement. People. Perhaps there, amid that chaos, he could lose himself. Perhaps there were answers, or at least a place to hide from the terrifying appetite within him.
His soul-hunger, momentarily quieted by his flight and his fear, stirred again. It looked towards the distant city lights and whispered a single, undeniable truth: There… there is so much more to eat.
He sank to the ground by the roadside, his energy spent. The cool evening air carried the scent of pine and damp earth. And then, another scent—decay. He looked down. Beside a mossy stone lay the small, feathered corpse of a sparrow, ants already at their work.
Around it, like a faint, dissipating mist, hovered half a dozen tiny, simple sparks of light. They held no complex memories—only the faint echo of flight, the instinct for seed, the brief, bright flash of fear before the end. They were insignificant. Barely anything at all.
The soul-hunger didn't care.
Before Leo could think to stop it, his hand moved. A tiny, sucking vortex opened in his palm. The minute soul-sparks streaked towards it and were gone.
There was no vision this time. No voice. Only a tiny, barely perceptible influx of vitality, like a single drop of water on a parched tongue. It was nothing. And it was everything. It proved the hunger could be fed with things that wouldn't scream inside his head.
He stared at his hand in the gathering dark, no longer feeling the urge to cry. The emptiness inside him felt a little colder, a little more accepting of its nature. A profound, chilling calm settled over him.
He stood up, brushing the dirt from his ragged clothes. His eyes, reflecting the last of the twilight, held no more childish confusion. They were the eyes of something ancient and ravenous, looking out from a child's face.
He began to walk again, his steps more certain now towards the city's beckoning glow. Behind him, in the dead village of Willow's End, the ghosts felt a sudden, inexplicable shift. One of their own was gone, not to peace, but to a different kind of prison. And the silence that remained was no longer just the silence of death.
It was the silence of a larder, after the first bite has been taken.