The hunger no longer screamed. It whispered—low, measured, patient—like it didn't need to demand my attention. It knew it would have it eventually.
I sat at the altar, the stone cold beneath me, and the chapel was silent around me. The candle stub near my boot flickered and died, smoke curling upward into the rafters where the faces of the old saints had once stared down. Now, they were little more than smudges in the dark, forgotten, like everything else.
The choice lingered heavily in the air. It wasn't a decision between life and death; those were simple. This was worse. It was a choice between different versions of myself: continuing as Gluttony's vessel, evolving through Consumption, driven by need, or changing, becoming something cleaner, sharper, designed rather than grown.
The temptation wasn't violent. It wasn't even loud. It came to me as clarity—simplicity. It promised that the hunger could be refined, given a purpose beyond survival. Not a gluttonous hunger, but an ordered one. A need not for blood or bone, but for completion, for shape.
Marin watched me from the far side of the chapel, near the boarded window, silent, waiting. She didn't ask questions anymore. She didn't offer answers, because she understood better than I did: this wasn't a battle anyone could help me fight. Not with blades, not with bullets—only with memory, only with choice.
I closed my eyes, letting the weight settle, allowing the hunger stretch inside my chest. It didn't claw or tear; it simply expanded, a slow, creeping pressure behind my ribs. It was a presence, familiar and now curious.
Images flickered behind my eyelids. Not dreams, but designs—blueprints of cities made from light and bone, towers spiraling into ash-pale skies, streets paved in the weave of memories not yet lived. No dirt. No decay. Only order. Only ascension.
At the center of it all was a mouth—wide, circular—not devouring, but breathing, creating. The voice came after—not spoken aloud, not heard through ears, but written across the inside of my skull in lines of gentle, unstoppable certainty: Consumption without shape leads only to ruin. Shape without hunger leads only to stagnation. You carry both. You must decide which one you feed."
I opened my eyes. The chapel walls pulsed once in the candlelight, a slow exhale, a low groan through the stone ribs, as if they could feel the choice being weighed inside me. I stood, my boots scraping softly against the stone. Marin straightened but didn't move closer; I could feel her tension, sharp and taut as a tripwire. She was ready for whatever decision I made, even if it meant she had to kill me—maybe especially then.
I crossed the floor toward the double doors leading to the cemetery—the same cemetery where we had first seen the signs of Pride's retreat, where the new symbols had begun to root themselves. I stepped outside into the pale, ash-smeared morning and listened. No birds, no distant engines, no wind—only the slow, rhythmic beat of the unseen drum below the earth, the same one I'd heard that night in the tunnel. Only now did it match my heartbeat exactly.
I moved toward the old oak at the edge of the graveyard—the one that had survived every storm, every wave of mutation, every attempt by the new order to erase the past. It was broken now, split down the center, a hollow shell, but it was still there, still real, still mine. I sat at its base, crossed my arms over my knees, lowered my head, and breathed—slow, measured—until the hunger settled into something bearable. Until the promises of ascendance faded into the static hum of my bloodstream.
Then I spoke—not aloud, not to the ash wind, but to whatever part of me still remembered before: "I am not done eating yet."
The hunger shivered, pleased—not victorious, not greedy, just present. It acknowledged that I had chosen, for now, to remain myself.
Day 27: Personal evolution stabilized. Choice made: Continuation of Gluttony-based mutation. Rejection of full Ascendancy convergence. Reason: Retention of memory. Retention of autonomy. Understanding that growth without struggle is a form of surrender. Environmental note: New Sin influence remains active. Territory continues to shift. Threat status elevated. Marin is aware of the decision. No conflict; silent support provided—personal status: Fractured, focused, hungry.
When I returned, Marin met me at the chapel gate. She didn't smile. She didn't ask. She nodded once and handed me a new ration pack: beef jerky, canned coffee, two iodine tablets. No celebration, no ceremony—just survival, as it had always been, as it had to stay.
That night, the hunger didn't fight me; it moved with me, breathing slow and steady under my skin, waiting, growing, preparing. Because the next time we met, the agents of the new Sin would not be there, and there would be no room for indecision or mercy. Only one truth would matter: eat or be eaten.