The baker's memory lasted three days.
It dissolved slowly, like lard on a hot stone. First the sound of the cellar scratching faded. Then the smell of the neighbors' fear turned sour, then bland, then vanished. Last was the warmth of the oven—the ghost of that false approval lingered as a greasy film on Cassian's mind before it, too, evaporated.
And then the hunger returned.
Not a stomach-hunger. A nerve-hunger. A vibration in the roots of his teeth, a dry scrape at the back of his eyeballs. The world grew sharper, meaner. Colors drained further. The grey road became a scar of mud and shattered stone. Every sound was an intrusion—the caw of a crow, the whisper of wind through dead grass, the distant, rhythmic thud that meant an army was near.
That thud was the itch.
His tongue, the dead slab of meat in his mouth, pulsed in time with it. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Not a heartbeat. The heartbeat of a wound. A place where too much blood had been spilled too fast, and reality hadn't yet closed over it.
War. Not a battle. A sustained, grinding slaughter. A feast of fresh, uncomplicated anguish.
The Glimmer bobbed beside his head, its light dim. It didn't whimper. It seemed… resigned. It knew where they were going.
By dusk, he crested a hill and saw the source of the thud.
Not an army camp. A butchery in progress.
A makeshift fortress of wagons and sharpened stakes was besieged by a larger, more organized force. Men in mismatched armor—the defenders—were packed tight behind their barricades. Outside, ranks of soldiers in the livery of some petty lord advanced in waves. Arrows darkened the sky. The thud came from the siege engines: heavy mallets driving sharpened logs against the gate.
But Cassian didn't see tactics or loyalty. He saw layers.
The air above the battlefield shimmered, a visible haze of misery. Anguish, raw and undigested, rose like heat from blood-soaked mud. It was a crude, screaming energy—the pain of split bellies and shattered bones, the fear of the boy about to die, the rage of the man who just saw his brother fall.
To his cursed senses, it smelled like ozone and opened copper.
His mouth watered. A thin, bitter saliva coated his ruined tongue. The hunger in his teeth became a sharp ache.
He was a leech drawn to a fresh cut.
He descended the hill, not toward the fighting, but toward its fringes. The Glimmer followed, a cold spot of dread at his temple.
He found the source of the itch at the edge of a trampled copse. A small, filthy stream ran red. Here, the wounded of the attacking army were dumped. A surgeon's tent, little more than a blood-crusted sheet strung between trees, hummed with flies and low moans. A heap of severed limbs smoldered in a pit, giving off a sweet, revolting smoke.
And there, kneeling by the stream, was a soldier.
He was young, his face pale under grime. He held a metal cup, dipping it into the pink-tinged water. His eyes were fixed on the siege, wide and empty. In his other hand, he clutched a small, hard biscuit.
Cassian's Brand pulsed. Not for the soldier. For the story clinging to him.
It was a small, ugly story. A fresh one. Cassian could see it like a grease stain on the air around the boy.
He stepped closer. His shadow fell over the soldier.
The boy looked up, flinched. He saw the hollows of Cassian's eyes, the grim set of a mouth that never smiled. He saw the sword hilt over Cassian's shoulder. Fear, sharp and animal, flashed across his face.
"I'm… I'm just getting water," the boy stammered. His voice cracked.
Cassian pointed a finger slowly, deliberately, at the biscuit in the boy's hand.
The boy's grip tightened. "My ration," he said, defensive. "From last night. I was… saving it."
Liar.
The word didn't need to be spoken. Cassian tilted his head, his gaze boring into the boy's. He let a fraction of his own emptiness show—the void where the Eclipse had scooped him out.
The boy's resolve crumbled. His shoulders slumped. "It's Ewan's," he whispered, the words falling into the stream. "My mate. He… he got it in the neck this morning. In the first wave. Fell right next to me." He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "He dropped his pack. This was in it."
Cassian said nothing. The silence pressed.
"I was hungry," the boy hissed, sudden venom in his voice. "He's dead. He doesn't need it. I have to fight. I need the strength." He was trying to convince himself. The story around him writhed, a thin, pathetic serpent of guilt and justification.
It was a tiny betrayal. A theft from a corpse. A choice made from fear and a gnawing gut. The kind of sin that breeds in the mud of every war.
To Cassian, it was a breadcrumb.
The hunger in him zeroed in on it. This small, shameful pain. It was nothing compared to the baker's curated horror, or the echoing vastness of his own damnation. But it was here. It was fresh. And he needed it.
He took another step.
The boy scrambled back, dropping the cup. "Stay away! I'll call the guards!"
Cassian moved. Not with speed, but with inevitability. He closed the distance, his hand shooting out. He didn't grab the biscuit. He grabbed the boy's wrist.
Skin contact.
The story flooded in.
The scream cut short. Ewan's eyes, wide with surprise, then nothing. The warm spray across the boy's cheek. The heavy thud of the body. The frantic scramble in the mud. Fingers fumbling at the pack buckle. The hard shape of the biscuit. The crushing guilt, immediately buried under a louder, more immediate thought: I am so hungry.*
Cassian drank it. He pulled the thin stream of anguish into himself—the shock, the fear, the petty, shameful hunger. It was like swallowing a shot of cheap, bitter liquor. It burned going down, a hollow, transient heat.
The boy gasped, his eyes rolling back. He didn't feel pain. He felt emptiness. The sharp edge of his guilt was gone, blunted, leaving only a numb confusion. He slumped, staring at his own hand as if he'd never seen it before.
Cassian released him. The boy's small betrayal was now his. A flicker of fuel. It quieted the gnawing in his teeth for a few moments.
He turned away, already searching for the next source. The battlefield haze beckoned, a banquet of unrefined suffering.
He never saw the sergeant.
The big man emerged from behind the surgeon's tent, his face a mask of disgust. He'd seen it all: the strange, hollow-eyed man looming over one of his shocked boys.
"You! Ghoul!" the sergeant roared, drawing a notched cleaver from his belt. "Feeding on the shaken, are you?"
Cassian turned, assessing. The sergeant carried no story worth consuming. Just brute anger. A mundane obstacle.
"I'll give you something to chew on," the sergeant spat, and charged.
It was not a duel. It was butchery. Cassian didn't draw Last Silence. Its weight was for truths, not meat.
He sidestepped the clumsy cleaver swing. As the sergeant stumbled past, off-balance, Cassian drove his elbow into the man's kidney. A brutal, efficient strike. The sergeant grunted, rage turning to shock. Cassian grabbed the wrist holding the cleaver, twisted. Bone snapped. The cleaver fell.
The sergeant screamed, a raw sound of pure, animal hurt.
And the battlefield heard him.
The raw, undirected Anguish in the air—the fear, the pain of hundreds—rippled. It focused, for a fleeting second, on that one sharp point of agony.
Cassian's Brand on his tongue ignited.
It was like biting a live wire. The diffuse energy of the wound—the collective scream of the siege—surged toward him, channeled by the sergeant's cry and his own cursed nature. It didn't enter him gently. It rammed into him.
His vision whited out. Sound became a solid thing, pressing on his skull. He was drowning in a thousand fragmented terrors:
The split-second knowledge of the arrow's path.
The crush of a boot on a fallen man's hand.
The lonely terror of dying far from home.
The blind, red rage of a killer.
It was too much. Too crude, too loud, too chaotic. It wasn't a story; it was noise. It swelled inside him, a pressure with no release. He felt his own seams straining. His fingers tingled, numb. His jaw locked.
The sergeant, cradling his broken wrist, stared in horror as Cassian began to shake, silent vibrations wracking his frame.
The Glimmer shot forward, buzzing frantically around Cassian's head like a bee trying to ward off a bear. It couldn't stop the flood.
Cassian did the only thing he could. He redirected.
He dropped to one knee, placed his palm flat on the blood-soaked mud. He focused the surging, screaming energy down his arm, through his hand, and into the earth.
The ground shuddered.
Not an earthquake. A localized spasm. The earth within ten feet of him liquefied, turning into a churning, sucking mire of mud and gore. The sergeant sank to his waist with a choked yell. The heap of severed limbs slithered into the porridge-like soil. The surgeon's tent collapsed as its poles sank.
The energy spent, the connection severed. The white noise in Cassian's head cut off.
He knelt, breathing in ragged, silent gasps. The hunger was gone. In its place was a sick, overstuffed feeling, a nausea of the soul. He had gorged on garbage.
The sergeant was thrashing, screaming for help. Men from the camp were starting to look, pointing at the inexplicable patch of quaking ground.
Cassian pushed himself up. His limbs felt heavy, foreign. He looked at his hand. The mud clinging to it was already drying, cracking. It felt no different.
He had learned something. His curse was not just a magnet. It could be a conduit. A dangerous, unstable one.
The Glimmer settled on his shoulder, its light guttering weakly. It felt cold. Disappointed.
He turned his back on the sinking sergeant, on the battlefield's roar, on the cheap, filling meal of mass suffering. It left a foul aftertaste, coarser than the baker's refined guilt.
The itch on his tongue had moved. It was subtler now. A cold pull, not a throb. Leading away from the war, into the deep, silent hills to the north. Toward something older. A story with colder teeth.
He walked, leaving the wound in the land to heal its own way. The hunger would return. It always did. But next time, he would seek a cleaner pain.