The hunger is a live wire in his teeth.
It's not in his gut. It's in the marrow, in the back of his eyeballs, a hollow, ringing need that tastes like static and old blood. Cassian walks, and the world is a smear of grey and rot. The sky is the color of a week-old bruise. The air smells of wet stone and distant shit.
His tongue is a dead thing. A branded, scarred lump of meat. But it thrums. It's a tuning fork struck by a hand he can't see. Today, it hums toward the west quarter of this stinking, walled town. Toward the smell of baking bread.
The Glimmer flickers by his ear, a pinprick of bruised light. It makes a sound like a moth dying in a web. He ignores it.
The bread smell is wrong. Under the warm, golden scent of hearth-fire and grain is something else. Something cloying. Sweet, like overripe fruit just before it ferments. The smell of a lie you want to believe.
He finds the bakery. "Hearth's Comfort," the sign says. The paint is cheerful. The windows are warm. People pass by, their faces soft, doughy themselves, clutching loaves to their chests like children.
Cassian stands across the muddy street. He doesn't plan. Planning is for people with futures.
He sees the baker through the window. A big man. Round face flushed with heat and what looks like kindness. He's laughing, handing a roll to a grubby child. The child beams.
Cassian's tongue cramps. A sharp, vicious spasm.
There.
He sees it. A flicker. The baker's smile doesn't reach his eyes. His eyes are deep, dark wells. In that moment, handing over the bread, his gaze is on the child's throat. Not with hunger. With… evaluation. Like a man checking the ripeness of a melon.
The pattern reveals itself. Cassian's curse lets him see the stitches in reality's fabric. This street… too quiet. The happiness too uniform. Two doors down, a curtain twitches. An old woman watches the street, not with fear, but with a blank, waiting emptiness. She's already been eaten. Not her body. Her story.
The Glimmer zips to his other ear, a frantic, cold spark. Whimper-whine.
"Quiet," he grates. The word is mush, shaped by a ruined muscle. It tastes of iron.
He crosses the street. The bell on the bakery door jingles a bright, false note.
The warmth inside is a physical slap. It smells of safety. His body, traitorous, wants to relax. His shoulders try to unbunch. He forces them tight.
The baker looks up, smile ready. It freezes when he sees Cassian's eyes. The smile doesn't fall; it calcifies. "Welcome, stranger! Chilly out. A loaf to warm the bones?"
Cassian says nothing. He lets the silence stretch. He watches the baker's eyes. The darkness in them stirs.
"I… I have a lovely rye, just cooled," the baker says, the joviality thinning.
Cassian takes a step forward. His boot grinds flour into the wooden floor. He points a finger, not at the baker, but at the cellar door behind the counter. A heavy door. Bolted from the outside.
The baker's face drains of its carefully crafted warmth. The flesh seems to sag. "That's… just storage. Flour sacks. Nothing for a customer."
Liar. The word isn't spoken. It echoes in the thick air. Cassian's Brand pulses, a hot, sick beat. It calls to the thing inside the man.
The baker's hands drop to the counter. They are big, capable hands. Strong from kneading. The knuckles are white. "You should leave," he whispers, and the whisper is full of rustling, of dry, desperate hunger. "Take a loaf. For free. Just go."
Cassian shakes his head once. A short, sharp movement.
It's the permission the thing needs.
The baker's body sags. Not in defeat. In release. His jolly cheeks tremble, then begin to swell. His apron strings snap with soft pops. His skin loses its pores, becoming smooth, uniform, the color of unbaked dough.
"I was so hungry," the man gurgles, his voice bubbling as his throat distends. "You don't understand. The siege… the sounds from the cellar… they were so loud. The bread… it was so quiet."
He is inflating, a monstrous, yeasty balloon. The smell of baking bread becomes overpowering, suffocating. The sweet-rot stench beneath it blooms into something vile.
The dough-flesh oozes over the counter, across the floor, warm and insistent. It doesn't attack; it engulfs. It is the embrace of oblivion. The promise of no more cold, no more fear, no more gnawing emptiness. Just warm, soft nothing.
Cassian stands his ground. The Glimmer shrieks, a needle of sound, and buries itself in the collar of his coat.
The dough reaches his boots. It flows over them, warm as a bath. It climbs his legs. A profound, cellular lethargy whispers to him. Yes. Stop. This is what you want. An end to the hunt.
For a second, he considers it.
Then a memory fractures through. Not his own. A leak from his Brand. Elara. Not her face. The texture of her trust. The calloused feel of her palm sliding into his, a perfect fit. A real thing. A true thing.
This warm nothing is a lie.
The dough is at his waist, his chest. It presses, gentle, suffocating. The baker's face is a distant moon in the rising mass of flesh. "Join us," it sighs. "Be full."
Cassian brings his sword, Last Silence, to his lips. The cold, pitted iron kisses his mouth. He bites down on the unsharpened edge.
He bites through his own dead tongue.
The pain is bright, white, and clean. A singular truth in the world of soft lies. Black blood, thick with cursed memory—memory of the Eclipse, of a betrayal so vast it scarred the sky—wells up and drips from his mouth.
He lets it fall onto the dough-flesh engulfing him.
The reaction is instant.
The dough screams. A high, tearing, yeasty shriek. Where his blood falls, it doesn't burn. It ferments. The warm, pale flesh bubbles, turns grey, then a foul, acidic yellow. The smell of fresh bread curdles into the eye-watering stench of vinegar and spoilage.
The Apostle's composure shatters. Its hunger is violated by a pain infinitely more profound, more artistic than its own petty survival. It recoils, the dough pulling back like a tide of spoiled milk, shriveling and hardening.
Cassian is left standing in a ring of cracked, sour crust. The main mass of the thing quivers in the center of the room, shrinking, deflating. The baker's form re-emerges, small and naked, covered in a glistening, sour paste. He is weeping.
Cassian walks to him. The man looks up, eyes wide with a horror that is now self-directed.
"What…" the baker croaks, "what was that taste?"
Cassian doesn't speak. He can't. He points to the man's mouth, then presses a fist hard against the man's chest, over his heart. He makes a slow, tearing motion away from his own body.
Taste your own truth.
Understanding dawns in the baker's eyes. A terrible, final understanding. With a sob that cracks his chest open, he nods. His hands, trembling, rise. They are not dough now. They are just hands. He digs his fingers into his own sternum.
There is a wet, tearing sound. He does not scream. He pulls, and from the cavity of his own being, he extracts a small, hard, petrified lump. It is shaped like a tiny, perfect loaf of bread. His Seed of Betrayal. He holds it, looking at it with a mix of revulsion and longing, and then he dies. The light leaves his eyes, still fixed on the fossil of his cowardice.
Cassian pries the Seed from his cold fingers. He crushes it in his fist.
The memory floods into him, not as an image, but as a sensation:
The dark cellar. The scratch of rats. The sound of his neighbors—the cobbler, the weaver's daughter, the old soldier—softly crying in the dark, just beyond the door he has bolted. The smell of their fear. The overwhelming, greasy smell of the bread baking upstairs for the conquering soldiers. The warmth of the oven on his face. The way the warmth felt like approval. The way the silence from below, eventually, felt like peace.
It is a cheap, tawdry, pathetic pain. The anguish of a small soul who chose a full belly over a clean heart. It is barely a morsel. But it is fuel. It floods Cassian's hollow places, a greasy, temporary heat. The ringing hunger in his teeth quiets, for an hour. Maybe two.
The Glimmer drifts down, casting its feeble light on the ruined baker, the sour crust, the peaceful, empty face of the man who chose bread over people. It lets out a soft, pulsing whimper of grief.
Cassian turns and walks out. The bell jingles again behind him.
Outside, the grey world is unchanged. The people still shuffle, clutching their loaves. But the air is different. The comforting smell of Hearth's Comfort is gone, replaced by the permanent, lingering odor of vinegar and burnt flour. The town's trauma has been refined, not cured.
His tongue throbs, a dull, familiar ache. Already, the greasy heat of the baker's memory is fading. The hollow feeling returns. In the distance, at the edge of his branded senses, a new itch begins. A sharper, colder pattern. A story with more teeth.
He adjusts the weight of Last Silence on his back. It feels heavier. He walks north, into the wind. The Glimmer follows, a tiny, weeping star against the bruise-coloured sky.
The hunt continues.