Fire and Hunger
**
The light from the Valkyrie's cracked hull had faded to a dim, steady glow, an exhausted heartbeat. Steam drifted through the ruins, carrying the smell of metal and ash. Khalen crouched beside a dying ember, eyes sunken from a day without sleep, jaw working in slow defiance of the hunger gnawing at him.
"We need food," he said, voice rough. "Actual food."
"You're surrounded by it," OH replied from the skull on the table, tone maddeningly calm. "You're standing in the largest meat locker in history."
Khalen glanced toward the corner where the Wailer lay half-broken, ribs split and cooling, crystal still faintly steaming as if it resented being dead. Violet ichor pooled beneath it, faintly luminous. He looked back at the skull. "You can't be serious."
"Perfectly. Breathlings are dense with Breath. Eat one and your body might even remember what strength feels like."
He stared at OH like the skull had grown a second set of teeth. "You're asking me to eat monsters."
"Correction," OH said. "I'm suggesting you adapt. You are what you eat, Captain. Perhaps that's why your kind went soft, living off conjured crumbs and calling it a feast."
Khalen stood and paced, boots crunching over glass fragments. His stomach clawed, his pride clawed back. "No one eats breathlings. All food's transmuted now. Crystals, Breath, machines. It's clean."
"Clean," OH echoed, and the word cooled in the air. "Yes. I remember that one. The Titan's cities used it too. Clean energy. Clean souls. Clean hunger. You've just made starvation polite."
Khalen stopped. The ember hissed. Somewhere deep in the vaults, a distant pulse answered, slow as a drum behind stone.
"I'm not eating that thing," he said.
"Then cook something else," OH said lightly. "You still have that shard you took from its core. Try making your miracle meal."
The fragment sat where Khalen had dropped it after the fight, a jagged lump of crystal veined with red light. It pulsed faintly, as if it still remembered screaming.
Khalen hesitated, then picked it up. It was heavier than it should have been. Everything down here was. "Fine," he muttered. "Let's see what happens."
"Now that's the spirit," OH said. "Or, depending on the outcome, your last words."
Khalen focused, channeling fire through his hand. The shard flared, light bleeding into the air. The ruin filled with a low hum, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. Heat condensed between his fingers, shaping into something that looked almost edible, a pale dough-like mass that smelled sweet at first, then wrong, like sugar poured over rust.
OH whistled softly. "You're doing fine. It only smells a little poisonous."
Khalen grimaced and pinched a piece free. "If this works, I'll name it after you."
"If it doesn't," OH said, "I'll write your epitaph."
Khalen took a bite.
For half a heartbeat, nothing. Then the taste hit, metal and rot, static crackling across his tongue. His throat seized. He gagged, doubled over, and spat glowing sludge onto the ground. The mass hissed, collapsing back into liquid crystal that burned small holes into the stone like acid.
Khalen wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, eyes watering. "Observer's Law," he rasped. "Guess I didn't believe hard enough."
"Clearly I still need to teach you what the phrase means," OH said, delighted. "Belief does not turn poison into food. It teaches you where food might be hiding."
Khalen glared at the skull between coughs. "You think this is funny?"
"No," OH replied, unconvincing. "Just nostalgic. In my day, failure used to explode."
Khalen looked down at the ruined "meal," the glow fading to nothing. His stomach clenched again, emptier now than before, and he hated how quickly his body started doing the math.
"So what now?" he asked.
"Now," OH said softly, "you start hunting."
The ember at Khalen's feet sputtered and died. The shadows leaned closer as if they'd been waiting for that answer. Far away, something answered with a distant, wet sound that might have been a growl, or might have been laughter.
—
The first days taught Khalen more about silence than combat.
Silence after a kill. Silence between footfalls when the ruins paused to listen. Silence thick enough to taste, pressed with dust and Breath.
He grew lean. The raw ache in his stump faded to a steady hum, a line of heat that pulsed when he overreached. His movements sharpened into economy. Flame answered faster now, a reflex instead of a request.
Time did strange things down here. It stretched. It folded. A single long hunt could feel like a week. Sleep came in fragments and still the days kept piling up, heavy as stone.
OH said it once, like an afterthought, as if it didn't matter and it mattered more than anything.
"Six months down here can be six weeks above. Sometimes less. Sometimes more."
Khalen stared at him for a long second. "So I'm missing my own life at a discount."
"You're alive," OH said. "Try gratitude. It's a rare spice."
Somewhere along the way, Khalen stopped noticing when he should have collapsed.
One morning he braced a fractured beam with one hand and realized, halfway through the lift, that it felt… easier. Not safe. Not easy. But possible. Like his body had shifted its assumptions.
Above, people hid behind wards and glyphs and prayed the monsters never learned patience.
Down here, patience was what killed you.
The ship changed with him. He plated the torn belly with scavenged crystal scales and pinned shattered spars with fused rebar that glowed faintly when he fed it heat. He learned the sound of a seam settling true, the bite of Breath when a weld took, the way the whole frame sighed when a brace finally fit the wound it was meant to hold.
OH narrated, equal parts mentor and menace.
"Education, Captain Carnivore. Today's lesson: eat or be eaten. Tomorrow's: eat better."
Khalen wiped grit from his mouth. "You keep calling me that and I'm going to name you Paperweight."
"Fair," OH said. "But I predict you'll be too full to carry a grudge."
They hunted what could be hunted without hating themselves for it.
The first was a creature low to the ground, plated in overlapping ridges of green crystal and moving like a burrowing tank. When it curled, it shone like a seedpod catching sunlight. When struck, it shuddered but did not bleed.
"Not the ridges," OH said. "Spore sacs. Roast them sealed or you'll cultivate a garden in your lungs."
Khalen pinned it with a pulse of heat that pressed it flat without charring the meat. He gutted it on a fallen plaque, careful of pearly nodules that hissed at the touch. He roasted it over a vent and ate in small bites while his face learned how to unclench.
"Congratulations," OH said. "You've eaten your first sentient salad."
Khalen chewed, swallowed, and glared. "You are insane."
"Yes," OH replied. "But well nourished."
Next came a crystal-boned grazer that shimmered in the mist, plates catching light like glass scales. It left ringing echoes when it fled.
"Marinate in fire," OH advised. "Flash it hot so the crystal loosens the fiber. Caramelize the edges. Try not to cry at your own genius."
Khalen brought it down with a ring of heat rather than a blow, skinning plates from meat in a single practiced sweep. The flesh tasted clean and strange, like rain broken into pieces. Afterward, there was a faint brightness in his chest that held through the next fight.
They found a grove of mushrooms that hummed with Breath. Caps the color of old coins, underbellies veined with faint blue lines like maps. When fire touched them, the hum deepened into a low chord that made his jaw ache.
"Edible," OH said. "Unless you'd prefer to dream while walking. Dry them. Grind them. Use them to thicken broth, if broth existed."
Khalen set a ring of caps to dry on a shattered schematics table. He smiled despite himself when one popped like a bubble and released a clean, pepper smell, and he hated that the smile felt good.
They learned what to avoid. A needle-backed crawler that bled vapor curling into teeth. A moss patch that was a mouth waiting for a foot. OH would murmur a name and a story, and Khalen would file both under no.
The fights changed too. Twenty Carrionlings taught him their hunger and their tells. He learned to hear the hitch before the lunge, to break his rhythm before they matched it, to bait the sideways jaw into overextension and crack the hinge with a heel. He stopped overcharging stone with pride and started doing it with math, feeling for the moment density tipped into detonation and letting go a breath before it took his hand.
When he failed, the shock slapped heat up his arm and he swore.
OH would say, pleasantly, "Closer," as if praise should sting.
At night, fatigue made him reckless. In the quiet afterward, when the Valkyrie's patched ribs ticked like cooling iron and the long avenues whispered with their own currents, his mind wandered where his feet could not.
He pictured Novek at the colony gate, jaw set, refusing to leave a cliff without a shadow on it. The Guild would write the anomaly off as self-sealed geology and file a report nobody read. Novek would not. He would stand at the railing at shift change, eyes on the south trail, waiting for a fool to come home.
Khalen smirked into his food, a strip of glazed plate gone sweet at the edges. Lys and Therrin would have reached Bastion by now. Lys would pick a lock for information the way other people picked their teeth. Therrin would pretend not to worry while worrying professionally. They'd ask the wrong people the right questions and then do the reverse until an answer came loose.
He wondered which one would try to punch a Guild officer first.
He wondered, when the thought grew teeth, whether anyone would sing about a man who fell and then walked the earth underneath it.