Midnight in the tannery smelled of old blood and spoiled hides, the stench so thick it coated the tongue like rancid oil. The moon bled through broken roof slats, painting jagged silver stripes across the ritual circle carved into the warped floorboards.
Elara stood at the center, her boots grinding dried lime into the grooves. The design was smaller than Jack's grand works—more intimate, more vicious—the lines forming jagged wings that seemed to twitch in the flickering candlelight. She'd spent days perfecting every curve, every sigil, ensuring the pain would be maximized, the transformation absolute.
Suia knelt naked at the circle's heart, her straw-colored hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. The butcher's heart lay before her, blackened and pulsing unnaturally, kept alive by the Starved Saint's power thrumming through Elara's veins. The girl's breathing came in ragged gasps, her marked left eye fully black now, the pupil split vertically like a cat's.
"You'll call him now," Elara said, pressing the jagged ritual knife into Suia's trembling hands. The blade was forged from a crow's wing bone, its edge honed to monomolecular sharpness.
The girl's throat worked as she stared at the weapon. "H-how?"
Elara traced the half-healed runes carved into Suia's palm days before. "With pain. Always with pain."
The door creaked open with the sound of a breaking bone.
Jack stood silhouetted against the moonlit street, his black overalls streaked with fresh blood from his tower experiments. His crows perched along the rafters in perfect silence, their star-flecked eyes reflecting the candle flames like a constellation of hungry voids.
"Begin," he commanded, stepping inside. The shadows in the room deepened at his presence, stretching toward him like worshippers to an altar.
---
The knife flashed in Suia's unsteady grip.
Her first scream tore through the tannery as the blade bit into her left palm, reopening the half-healed runes. Blood—blackened at the edges—splashed across the butcher's heart, which convulsed like a dying animal, its veins squirming toward the hot droplets.
"Again," Elara commanded, her voice flat.
The girl sobbed but obeyed, dragging the serrated edge across her forearm. The flesh parted like overripe fruit, revealing glimpses of bone before the wound knitted shut—too fast, too wrong, the skin puckering with raised scars.
Jack circled them with predatory grace, his boots leaving no prints in the blood-slick lime. "You're being gentle," he murmured, his breath cold against Elara's neck.
Her jaw tightened. She grabbed Suia's wrist and plunged the knife deep into the girl's thigh, twisting. The serrations caught on muscle fibers, tearing rather than cutting.
The scream that tore from Suia's throat shook dust from the rafters. The crows stirred, their feathers ruffling in approval.
"Your name," Elara demanded, twisting the blade another quarter turn.
"S-Suia Vel—"
The knife slid between her ribs with a wet crunch.
"Your true name."
The girl's remaining blue eye rolled wildly. Something inside her *shifted*—the corruption responding to the demand, the pain, the hunger. When she spoke again, her voice was layered with something older, hungrier:
"She Who Waits in the Dark."
The butcher's heart burst open like a rotten fruit, vomiting forth thick black tendrils that latched onto Suia's wounds with a sound like starving leeches finding flesh.
---
Suia's back arched off the ground as the tendrils burrowed deeper, her mouth stretched in a silent scream. Elara watched, fascinated, as the girl's ribs began to move beneath her flesh—shifting, rearranging, forming a hollow cavity where her sternum should be. The skin stretched taut, then split with a sound like tearing parchment.
Jack crouched beside them, his fingers trailing through the pooling blood. "Now the fun part."
The girl's entire body spasmed as something beneath her skin rippled from the contact—a wave of corruption racing down her spine like a serpent uncoiling.
The first wingbone erupted between her shoulder blades with a wet crack that echoed through the tannery.
Suia's scream turned guttural, inhuman. Her fingers clawed grooves into the floorboards as the second bone followed, punching through flesh in a spray of blackened blood that sizzled where it struck the ritual circle.
Elara gripped the girl's chin, forcing her to watch in the puddle of her own fluids as the bones stretched, forming jagged, skeletal wings that gleamed like polished obsidian. The tips scraped against the ceiling, leaving deep gouges in the wood.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Jack murmured, tilting his head to study the trembling wings.
Suia's response was a wordless keen, her human mind fracturing under the transformation. Strings of saliva dripped from her lips as her jaw unhinged slightly too wide, her teeth sharpening into needle points.
---
The wings thrashed wildly as Elara pressed the knife to Suia's lips.
"Feed," she commanded.
The girl sobbed but opened her mouth. Elara shoved the blade inside, slicing deep into the tender flesh beneath the tongue. Blood poured down Suia's chin in a hot rush as the wound sealed instantly—too fast to heal properly, leaving the skin twisted and scarred in a way that would forever alter her speech.
Jack produced a single crow's feather from his pocket, its edges shimmering with unnatural darkness.
He said he wouldn't help Elara , even now this feather was what elara had requested after telling him bout her ritual.
He pressed it into Suia's bleeding palm, where it dissolved into her bloodstream like ink in water.
The effect was instantaneous.
Suia's wings snapped taut, the bones elongating with a series of sickening pops. The spaces between them filled with a substance too thin to be membrane, too thick to be shadow—a living darkness that pulsed with each heartbeat. Her blackened veins swelled as the corruption spread, climbing her throat, framing her face like a grotesque mask.
When she opened her eyes, both were voids—the left speckled with stars, the right pure darkness. Her fingers ended in hooked talons that scraped against the floorboards as she struggled to her knees.
"Who do you serve?" Elara demanded, gripping the girl's hair to force eye contact.
The thing that had been Suia Vel smiled with too many teeth, her voice layered with the whispers of the crows in the rafters:
"The Crowfather."
"And you, my mistress." She answered with slowly but then posed a question.
"Mistress whom should I say I was sent by when I'm finishing of those whom offended you?" Elara hadn't thought much about giving herself a name other than her given name but now she thought of a perfect one.
"The Starved Princess"
---
Dawn found the tannery silent save for the slow drip of blackened fluids from the rafters. The air hung heavy with the metallic tang of blood and something darker—the scent of opened graves and spoiled miracles.
Suia crouched in a corner, her new wings folded tight against her emaciated frame. The transformation had left her gaunt, her ribs pressing sharply against skin now mottled with feather-like patterns that shifted when not observed directly. Her breathing came in short, rasping gasps, each exhale carrying the faintest whisper of crow's wings.
Jack studied her with clinical interest, circling the trembling creature like a butcher assessing livestock. "She'll need to feed soon," he observed, tilting her chin up with one bloodstained finger. "Human flesh, preferably. The fresher the better."
Elara wiped her bloody hands on her trousers, leaving dark smears across the fabric. "She'll get it," she said, watching as Suia's star-flecked eyes tracked every movement with feral intensity.
The girl, the creature ,let out a soft crooning sound when Elara spoke, her taloned fingers twitching as if desperate to touch, to worship, to devour.
Jack turned to leave, his crows following in a rustling wave of feathers and whispered secrets. At the door, he paused, his silhouette framed by the rising sun.
"You passed," he said simply.
Then he was gone, leaving Elara alone with her first true disciple.
And the hunger.
Always the hunger.
---