My ears pop. The floor isn’t a floor; it’s the idea of one, and it hates me. Each step steals a little balance and gives back a whisper that isn’t quite sound.
“Don’t listen,” Voren murmurs.
“To what?” Dastian asks.
“The thing pretending it’s quiet,” I say, because I hear it now. Chewing. Slow, patient chewing. It’s eating the gap between my heartbeat and the next.
The snake tightens in my bones, a low, satisfied coil.Between.
My blade hums.
The corridor kinks left, then right, then decides it’s done with straight lines. Shadows haven’t got edges here; they’ve got appetites. I pull my light in tighter, bank it hot and mean at my sternum. Dreven’s shoulder brushes mine, not an accident, his power drawing a neat, vicious perimeter round us as if to saymineto the dark, and the dark listens.
“Do you feel that?” I ask.
Voren’s eyes flare pale, the way his power does when he’s reading an autopsy in a wall. “Old fear. Stacked. It feeds on repeats.”
“Like leftovers,” Dastian says.
We hit a widening. Not a room. A pause. The ceiling evaporates into a smear of nothing; the ground thinks about not existing and then decides to try it. The gap that opens is not far. It’s close and long at once, like it wants to be a mouth.
Beyond it, something glows a sickly pearl, pulsing like a baited heart.
“Don’t,” Voren and I say together, because Dastian takes one step like he’s going to see what happens if he falls.
He smirks and steps back. “Rude.”
A shape peels itself off the opposite wall. It’s me. Not a mirror. Not a neat twin. It’s me if I hadn’t died. No gold under the skin. No snake whispering between. Slayer, pure and mortal, blade up and mouth set. She looks at me with a stubborn disgust.
“Oh, that’s charming,” I mutter. “This place has a sense of humour.”
Dreven’s shadows tense like wolves. “It’s not humour. It’s leverage.”
Voren listens to her with those cold eyes that don’t blink when they should. “She’s not alive.”
“I am,” Not-Me says, and her voice is mine. Better. Cleaner. “You’re the ghost.”
I bark a laugh that doesn’t sound friendly. “Get in line.”
She points her blade at the gap. “Cross.”
“That requires a bridge.” I raise a brow at Voren, who obliges with a ribbon of wraith-light.
It touches the gap and recoils like he tried to pet a furnace.
“Hungry,” he says. “It wants a toll.”
“What do we give it?” Dastian asks, peering into the mouth-not-mouth. “Upgrade to Premium?”
“Light,” Not-Me says, too fast. “Give it the noise.”
“No,” Dreven and Voren growl together.
The Devourer hum purrs underfoot. It heard that. It liked it.
“Try again,” I tell my neat little pre-dead version. “What does it actually need?”
Her mouth sets in the line that means she’s about to start lecturing me on proper slayer conduct. “You give it the thing you shouldn’t. You give it you.”
