The Villainess They Made

The First Hunger

"What — what is — "

"A predator, little host. Your first kill. Are you hungry?"

The pearl is back. Whatever silence the obsidian token caused has passed. The pearl in my chest has come back online with a hunger that is not mine and a clarity that is, and the clarity is showing me — through the cold black water of the upper Hollow — a shape moving at me from the deep current with a mouth wider than my new tail is long.

It is bone and teeth and a single flat eye that has been adapted to no light at all. The body is twenty feet at least. The body is older than my kingdom. It has been hunting in this trench for so long that most of its skin has fallen off. What is left is muscle, gristle, and a kind of patient hunger that recognizes me as the first prey in eighty years to ring its proper bell.

The pearl pulled it. I understand, in the half-second before it reaches me, that the pearl has been calling predators to the cairn-ring since the moment of my bonding. The pearl wanted me fed. The pearl wanted me to know I could be fed. The first kill has to come fast. The first kill has to come while the bond is still warm enough to prefer hunger over kindness.

I do not have a weapon. I have a body that knows things my old body did not, and I have a voice that the Hollow taught me to use, and I have a token in my left hand that I refuse to drop because dropping it feels — now, somehow — like losing a hand.

I sing.

Not the warm note. The other one. The one Calisto told me lives under the warm one. The note that staggered the dungeon guards in a memory I have not lived yet, that will live after I rise from this trench. The note Morrigwen used to c***k a continent before she remembered how to use her tail. I sing it because my new body knows it is there.

The beast staggers mid-lunge. Its flat eye blinks twice. Its momentum carries it past me by an arm-length, and my tail — which is sharper than I have understood, the fan of it edged with obsidian the way an artist edges a finished page — comes around in an arc I do not consciously plan and opens its belly along eight feet of old muscle.

It does not die from the cut.

It dies because the pearl in my chest reaches through me and takes the rest of what it is. I feel the moment it happens. I feel its life-force leave its body the way water leaves a held cloth — slowly, fully, with a small pressure-shift that I am going to remember for the rest of my reign as the precise sensation of the first time I killed something on purpose. Its grey scales flake into the current. Its flat eye loses its film. It sinks past me in pieces.

And the cairn-ring hums.

Approval. The seven dead before me — six of whom went mad, one of whom is sleeping in a trench off Saragossa half-mad — are pleased that I have eaten. The pearl is pleased. The Hollow is pleased. The thing under the Hollow's floor — I feel it for the first time directly — pulses once, slow and considered. Even it is pleased.

I am not pleased.

I look down at my sternum. A single black vein has appeared. The width of a hair. The shape of a branch beginning to grow from a seed. It was not there an hour ago. I lift my hand and place my fingertips against it. The vein is warm. It is faintly humming. It is the same frequency as the obsidian token in my left palm.

"Oh."

I say it out loud. The cairn-ring hears me. The pearl in my chest hears me. Calisto, somewhere in the obsidian fragment that has begun to follow me through the Hollow, hears me.

The kill is not just mine. The kill is shared. Through the token in my hand, Calisto has felt the entire drain. She has fed off it from a distance the way an older sister steals food off the plate of a younger one. Vessa was right. The token is hers, and whatever I do with this body now — whatever I drain, whatever I siphon, whatever I take — she takes a portion.

I open my fist and throw the token.

I throw it hard. I throw it the way you throw a stone you do not want to be holding. The token sails twenty feet through the trench-current, hits the far wall, bounces off in slow motion the way light objects bounce in deep water, and begins to drift back toward me.

I swim away from it.

It follows. Not fast. The way a small fish follows a larger one, at the same speed. I swim faster. It matches me. I dart left, right, up. It corrects. After thirty seconds of this — which is humiliating, because I am a queen, even a dead one, and I am being followed by a thumbnail-sized piece of stone — the token comes to rest, gently, in my open left palm.

I had not opened my left palm.

I closed my fist before I threw it. The palm opened on its own.

I close my fingers around the token. I squeeze. I squeeze with the new strength of the new body, the strength that opened the great-hall doors of Coralspire in the future I have not lived yet. The token does not crush. The token presses *back* against my palm with exactly the pressure I am applying to it, the way a held hand presses back into a held hand.

My palm splits. The blood is grey for half a second, then red.

The token absorbs the blood. The silver crescent in its center turns, slightly, and locks into a position I had not chosen.

And from somewhere very far above me — somewhere that should be three hundred feet of trench plus three hundred feet of open ocean plus the entire kingdom of Alastor — I hear, distinctly, my older sister say:

*"Thank you, eighth. That was the last piece I needed."*