Black Claw: Bound by Fate
The children, now old enough to suspect their own eventual replacement, stared at the sprouting thing with reverence and panic, like worshipers at the altar of a joke spun too far.
Centuries later, when the city finally, truly collapsed—when the tunnels filled and the spires ground down to stalactite dust—the last living child scooped a handful of the blue-veined growth from the nursery wall and ate it. She was not hungry; she was only curious. The taste was subversively sweet, shot through with the granules of every memory the city had ever refused to let die.
And in that taste, for the first and final time, the city was at peace: its need, at last, a little less than infinite.
Sikat na Kabanata