Book One – Chapter 17

There was only one thing that kept Yu from absolutely losing his shit and bolting.

Yes, he had already noticed the Listener. Yes, he had suffered a voice like this once before, a voice that grew and grew until it filled and then spilled from deepest crevice of stillness. That time, it had left him barely conscious. Regardless, none of that awareness or experience made this any less terrifying. If anything, it made it worse. Because he had spent months dreading it would happen again. And now, all that fear and madness was back. And worse still, it came from the same place the voice had taken shape, because at one point, Yu had just pushed everything down there to forever forget about it, which had been his way of conveniently non-dealing with all that trauma.

And now the fear and madness found an escape. They surged up with the new voice, latched onto it, threaded through the hunger. The hunger-voice cracked through the mental ice that had barely kept it at bay. It smashed the barrier and flooded in and surged through his skull, scattering fear and tossing madness, and then all the hunger it contained. There was no separation now. No then and now. No before and after. No voice of his own, just the Mountain King.

What made Yu hold his ground was not focus. Not resolve. Not courage. It was his fina nature. That most primal instinct, made to submit. When confronted with danger and death, this most useless suicidal instinct did not call for fight or flight, but to freeze and appease.

So Yu stayed where he was, back locked flat against the stone wall, while all that he was submitted to the hunger of the Mountain King’s. And as he took it in, he began to discern it.

There was cruelty. Cold control. Precise, procedural command — not personal, not vindictive, just structural, like a fundamental law. But there was also commitment, yes, and even … compassion. Not kindness, but a kind of obedience to care. A reverence so old it no longer resembled care.

Within that reverence, a whisper of urgency.

Within urgency, desire.

And beneath desire, underneath all of it, again —

HUNGER.

So. Much. More.

It was not in the words. The words meant nothing. They were just the froth. Surface tension, ripples on a dark current of a much deeper pull.