All Chapters of REGRET THE HUNGRY GOD : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The bone burned against my palms.Not with heat. With want. It hungered for the regrets inside me—the chorus of dead voices, the boy who asked for his mother, the woman who whispered warnings, the fragment of Margot that had grown teeth and ambition. It wanted to consume them all. To leave me empty. Peaceful. Free.Don't, Margot's voice pleaded. It was smaller now. Frightened. The confidence she'd worn like a crown was cracking. You don't understand what you're holding. That bone is older than the curse. Older than the Voidborn. It doesn't just eat regret. It eats meaning. Everything you've learned. Everything you've become. Gone."And what have I become?" I whispered.The stones hummed around me. The symbols carved into their black surfaces glowed faintly, pulsing in rhythm with the bone. They didn't answer my question. They didn't need to. I already knew the answer.I had become someone who mattered.Not because of the Null blood. Not because Kael had touched me in an alley. But bec

The finger bone sat in its velvet bed like a accusation.I couldn't stop staring at it. Small. Delicate. The knuckle still slightly rounded with the softness of youth. A child who had never grown old enough for their bones to harden into adulthood. Someone had carved the Salt Coast symbols into its surface with painstaking care—each line precise, each curve deliberate."Whose is it?" My voice came out thinner than I intended.Kael hadn't moved since opening the box. He stood over it like a statue, his face unreadable, his hands frozen at his sides. The Echoes on the walls were watching. I could feel their attention like a physical weight. Even they seemed to be holding their breath."I don't know." His voice was hollow. "But the symbols... they're not just copies. They're active. I can feel them humming."I stepped closer. The binding symbols Kael had drawn on the floor pulsed faintly, keeping whatever power lived in the bone contained. But even through the barrier, I could sense it.

The Conclave was held in a place that didn't exist on any human map.We traveled for two days. First by car through winding mountain roads, then on foot through a pass that seemed to appear only when the moonlight hit the stones at a certain angle. Fenra and three of her strongest wolves accompanied us—silent, watchful, their golden eyes scanning the shadows for threats that never materialized but always felt present.Kael walked beside me. He hadn't spoken much since we left Fenrir territory. His silence wasn't cold—it was focused. The silence of a man preparing for war.On the morning of the third day, we reached the Thorns.The Conclave grounds sprawled across a hidden valley surrounded by peaks that clawed at the sky. Ancient trees lined the perimeter, their branches woven together to form natural walls. At the center stood the Great Hall—a structure of white stone and dark timber that seemed to have grown from the earth rather than been built upon it. Thorned vines covered every

The memory swallowed me whole.One moment I stood in the moonlit garden, the stone fragment burning cold in my palm. The next, I was somewhere else. Somewhen else. The world dissolved into color and sound and sensation that wasn't mine but felt more real than my own skin.I stood in a forest.Not the tame, cultivated woods of the Conclave valley. This was a wilderness that had never known human hands. Trees rose like cathedral pillars, their branches woven so tightly that only slivers of starlight pierced the canopy. The air smelled of damp earth and wildflowers and something older—magic so raw it hadn't yet learned to be subtle.A woman walked through the trees.She was young. Barely more than a girl, really, with hair the color of autumn leaves and eyes like forest shadows. She wore a simple dress of woven grass and carried a basket of herbs. Her feet were bare. Her face was unlined by time or care.Sylvaen, I realized. Before she became the Matriarch. Before the thorns and the Conc

The mirrors swallowed us whole.One moment I stood in the black stone chamber, surrounded by the bloodlines and their hungry eyes. The next, the world dissolved into silver light and fractured reflections. I was everywhere and nowhere. I was myself and I was her—the girl Sylvaen had been before the thorns and the centuries and the hunger.The Rite had begun.I floated in the memory like a ghost, watching as the forest took shape around me. The same ancient woods from the stone fragment's vision. The same cathedral trees. The same raw, untamed magic that hadn't yet learned to be cruel.And there, walking through the dappled shadows, was Sylvaen.Young. Barely a woman. Her hair was autumn leaves and her eyes were forest pools. She carried a basket of herbs and hummed a tune that sounded like birdsong. She was beautiful in the way wild things are beautiful—unselfconsciously, completely, without any awareness of her own power.The watching bloodlines saw her too. I could feel their collec