All Chapters of Unholy Hunger: Chapter 1 - Chapter 9

A Dark Fantasy RomanceUnholy Hunger✦Some loves are not forbidden by men.They are forbidden by gods.•••••• × •••••• × •••••• × •••••• × •••••• × •••••• × ••••••Before Time Learned to Count•••••• × •••••• × •••••• × •••••• × •••••• × •••••• × ••••••In the age before men gave names to the dark, there were nine gods of war. They did not love. They did not hunger. They simply were — vast and cold and endless as the space between stars, moving through centuries like blades through silk, leaving only ruin in their wake.Kael was the seventh.He was not the cruelest. That honour belonged to his sister, Vael, whose laughter could crack stone. He was not the most powerful — that was their father, the Warlord Eternal, whose name no mortal tongue had ever spoken and survived. Kael was simply the most thorough. Methodical. He came to battlefields like a physician comes to the sick — with precision, with purpose, with a complete absence of mercy.He had never bled. Had never wept. Had never

He should not have come.That much was obvious the moment the pull of her prayer reached him across the dead grey expanse where fallen gods were kept — not imprisoned, exactly, but stored, the way you store a weapon you're not currently using: carefully, in the dark, somewhere it can't accidentally cut anything.He should have ignored it. He had ignored mortal prayers for centuries — they drifted past him constantly, thin and desperate and terribly specific. Prayers for rain. Prayers for money. Prayers that a husband would stop drinking, a crop survive the frost. Small, human things.Hers had not been small.She hadn't been asking for anything. That was what caught him. She wasn't praying to anything or for anything — she was simply speaking into the dark, naming things she'd seen, laying them out with the calm, methodical honesty of a scholar cataloguing something strange and possibly dangerous. Here is what I know. Here is what I don't. Here is the shape of the thing on the other si

The first symptom appeared three nights after he crossed.He was drifting through the grey expanse between realms — the dead place where fallen gods waited — when he noticed a warmth in his chest that had not been there before. Not painful. Not yet. Just warmth, like an ember taken from a fire and placed somewhere it had no business burning. Steady. Persistent. Impossible to ignore.He pressed his hand against his sternum and felt it pulse.The curse, confirming itself.He had known it was coming. He had walked into it with his eyes open, which perhaps made it worse — he couldn't even claim ignorance as an excuse. He had looked at Seren across the veil and understood with complete clarity what choosing her would cost him, and he had chosen her anyway, and now the divinity in his blood was beginning the slow work of consuming itself.He found he could not bring himself to regret it.That was probably also a symptom.✦ ✦ ✦She was waiting when he crossed that night, sitting on the b

KaelHe had been careful. He had crossed only at night, only when the sanctum was empty of everyone but Seren, and he had left before dawn every time. He had been, by any measure, cautious.The gods noticed anyway.He felt it first as a shift in the grey expanse - a watchfulness that hadn't been there before, a quality of attention directed his way from somewhere above and outside the dead realm where fallen gods were kept. Someone was looking. Someone had been looking for a while and had only now decided to make it known.His sister Vael appeared without preamble, materialising in the grey like a thought given form: tall, white-haired, her laughter-cracked-stone eyes currently doing the opposite of laughing."You're an idiot," she said, by way of greeting."Hello, Vael.""Father knows," she said. "Not everything - not the girl's name, not where she is. But he knows you've crossed. He knows you've been to the mortal realm. He knows something changed in you three nights ago that should

KaelThe deep archive of the Veth Sanctum was not a place for the living. Seren explained this as she led him down three flights of stairs cut into bare rock, a lantern swinging from her hand, with the particular matter-of-factness she applied to all information that would be alarming if delivered any other way."The founding oracles built it to house records that needed to not be easily accessed," she said. "Which is a polite way of saying records that would be dangerous in the wrong hands. The way they kept them safe was to make the archive itself somewhat resistant to living bodies.""Resistant," he repeated."It's cold. Very cold. And there are wards that discourage prolonged presence they make you feel like you've forgotten something important and need to go back up immediately. Most people don't last more than twenty minutes.""And you?""I've built up a tolerance." She glanced back at him. "You may be different. You're not fully mortal and not fully divine the wards might not k