Somewhere in the smallness of a forgotten town called Wyrrah Vale, there is a cabin that leans into the soil like it wants to be buried. The roof sags. The wood swells with rain. Some nights, it groans under the weight of old memories, though no one has lived there for years. Not officially. Not legally. Not the kind of living that gets counted.

Long ago, in the thinnest part of winter, a woman bled out in that cabin, her body torn open by the hands of a man who thought he could outlive God. His name was Dr. Ronin Beau Sykes: a professor, a scholar, a man who knew far too much about the human mind and far too little about his own. He didn’t freak out when she died. He was prepared.

He cleaned her body with care. Kissed her cold cheek. Then, with the precision of a surgeon and the tenderness of a priest, he pulled a baby from her womb.

The boy didn’t cry. He blinked once. Then again.

Ronin named him Sora William Sykes. No birth certificate. No record. Just a new heartbeat, slick and hungry in the dark. From that moment on, the trees seemed to whisper differently around the cabin. Maybe the woods knew what had been born there. Maybe they knew nothing at all, and that frightened them even more.

Ronin raised the boy alone.

He taught Sora to read by candlelight. Arithmetic with stones on the floor. Psychology from memory. By four, Sora could recite entire passages from Ronin’s notes. By five, he asked if people were born bad, or if they became that way. Ronin had smiled.

“There is no good, and no bad,” he told him. “Only hunger.”

It was hunger Ronin preached about the most—how it drove people to build cities, burn them down, fall in love, kill each other. “We are hunger wearing skin,” he’d say. “The difference is, I’ve learned to feed mine honestly.”

That was also the year he fed Sora his first taste.

Just a sliver of meat, no bigger than a dime. Tender. Salted. Ronin didn’t say where it came from, and Sora didn’t ask, just ate. It was warm, and rich, and wrong, yet, that night, he found himself wanting more.

It became a ritual. Sora was told to stay in his room when the sun went down. He always listened, because he knew: when the door opened again, dinner would be waiting.

By fifteen, Sora learned his father was dying. He was moving slower, his skin was yellow. When Sora asked what was happening, Ronin didn’t flinch.

“I’m running out,” he said. “But I’ve left you everything.”

He showed Sora the cellar—rows of carefully wrapped meat, stacked and labeled by date. A safe filled with money. He explained the world outside: cities, people, danger. And then, calmly, he told his son what to do when he was gone.

On Sora’s sixteenth birthday, Ronin disappeared into the bathroom.

He took off all his clothes. Sat in the tub. Scrubbed his skin over and over again until his arms gave out. When they did, he leaned back and stared at the ceiling for a long time until his heart stopped.

Sora didn’t speak.

He stood in the doorway, watching, then he left and came back with bags of ice. He preserved the body the way he’d heard his father talk about. It took him two full days to carve the pieces. He worked slowly. Carefully. With love.

Then he ate.

That’s all he did for a while.

He ate because he was hungry. He stayed because he didn’t know where else to go.

The world felt too big. And yet the cabin felt smaller than ever. The walls groaned louder. The cellar cried. Nothing felt right.

And then, on the fifth day after his father died, someone knocked.

It was the kind of sound that didn’t make sense at first. A certain three-tap knock, too polite for how far they’d come, and too real for how dead everything felt.

Sora didn’t move at first. Just stood in the kitchen and waited.

The knock came again, and when he opened the door, there was a man standing there in a thin black coat, holding a worn black book. His eyes were warm. His smile was trembling.

“Hello,” he said. “Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior?”

Sora didn’t answer. Just stared.

The man’s smile faltered.

Then something shifted in his face, his expression fell open, and he stared at Sora’s eyes, then his mouth, then past him, into the house, as if he could see everything that had ever happened inside.

He dropped the book.

“Oh—oh, God,” he said. Not like a prayer. Like a fear.

He reached out, grabbed Sora’s hands in both of his, and asked, “When was the last time you prayed, son?”

Sora blinked. Slowly. “I don’t.”

The man’s eyes flooded.

“You should,” he whispered. “You really should. I—I can feel it on you. Something inside you—it’s not… right.” His voice cracked. “Please. Just pray. For anything. I don’t care to who. Just—please.”

Then, without waiting, he dropped to his knees in the snow, still holding Sora’s hands, and began sobbing prayers into the earth.

Sora watched him quietly.

Later that night, before his meal, he folded his hands. Just once. Just to see if it felt any different.

It didn’t.

It never did, but he kept praying, just in case something changed.

At eighteen, he packed his father’s old knife, the last of his meat, a decent amount of cash, and left the cabin, not completely sure what was next for him. He just knew he needed more, needed something better, someone who would keep him full.

He walked until he couldn’t hear the wind anymore. Until the it changed into something closer to voices, to headlights, to houses with windows and doors that locked from the inside. The closest civilization nearby.

A neighborhood they called The Sallows. The people were weird there. Nobody looked at each other for too long, and everyone walked like they were always in a hurry. Sora watched them from the woods for three days. On the fourth, he walked in like he belonged.

Nobody minded him, but he drew attention to himself with just his appearance. It hadn’t ever mattered in the woods, but here, the people looked at least presentable. He stood out with his long, bony figure, messy raven-black hair, and eyes as dark as soil. He didn’t know how to speak to people, didn’t know how to smile without baring teeth.

He found a diner and took a seat in the back. It smelled like old grease and new fear. The waitress flinched when handing Sora the menu. He just stared at the options, knowing none of it was good enough. That’s when he saw him.

He sat in a booth on the other side of the diner, hands wrapped around a chipped mug, eyes bright and wide like he was trying to drink the whole world through them. He was beautiful in that wrong way, like a car crash, or a burning house.

And then he looked back.

Really looked.

It was clear. They were one.

He smiled and walked over. Said his name was Luca, and asked if Sora was new here.

Sora just stared at him, and all he could think was: _he’d taste clean._

Luca stared, too. With his eyes he said: _You can try, but I’ll bite back._

“Nobody ever comes to The Sallows unless they were born here… or they’ve got nowhere else left to go.” Luca said.

Sora tilted his head slightly. “Which one is it for you?”

“I was born here,” Luca replied. He paused, his voice lowering like a secret. “But I can’t leave.”

The sun shifted through the window then, laying a soft, golden line across Luca’s face. It caught in his hair, lit the sharp edges of his jaw—but it was his eyes that held Sora in place.

A pale, piercing blue—so cold they almost looked silver.

Sora watched him for a moment longer. “Why not?”

“Because it’s where I belong.”

As Luca spoke, Sora focused on more than just his words. He focused on skin, how easy it’d be to cut open. He could almost taste the blood beneath.

Imagine it—warm, desperate.

Luca leaned back casually, oblivious or uncaring under Sora’s stare. “I can show you around.” he offered.

Sora’s mouth was dry. “I’d love that.” he said.

—

Outside, the air smells of rain and iron. Luca talks as they walk — little stories about who used to live here, what happened to them, why no one really stays.

“You get stuck here if you’re not careful.” He says.

Sora watches the way his ribs show through his thin shirt. Watches the way he moves.

They reach a church. Or what used to be one. Half the roof is gone, and the doors hang crooked. Luca swings one of them open ans walks inside. “This is my favorite place,” he says.

Inside, all the wood is rotting. The stained glass windows are covered in moss and bleed colored light onto the floor. Luca drops down into a pew and leans back, looking at Sora.

“You ever pray?”

Sora hesitates. Remembers the man in the snow, clutching his hands, crying and begging.

“Sometimes.” he says.

“You don’t have to believe in anything,” Luca says. “You just have to want bad enough.”

Sora sits beside him, close enough to smell the salt of his skin.

For a long time, they don’t say anything.

Sora thinks about hunger. About whether wanting something bad enough could tear the world in half.

The sky turns a little darker.

And somewhere deep inside him, something begins to shift. Luca seems to notice it.

He starts talking, “My parents used to drag me here every Sunday,” he says. “Didn’t matter if I was sick. Didn’t matter if I cried

Sora listens.

“I used to sit right here,” Luca continues, tapping the splintered wood. “And I could feel it. God’s eyes. Always watching. Like he was…waiting for something. Demanding something.”

He smiles, but it’s a terrible smile — full of too many teeth and too much memory.

“So I’d sneak off,” he says. “Go to the bathroom. Lock myself in a stall. And I’d cut. Because I hated being watching like that. I thought if I destroyed myself, he’d want to look away.”

He lifts his arm, letting the sleeve fall back, revealing thin, pink scars on his wrists and down his arms.

“I tasted it once.” He whispered. “The blood..” Then he smiles, like he knows.

Without thinking, without breathing, Sora lunges. His hand closes around Luca’s throat, he picks him up and shoves him against the crumbling wall.

He holds him tightly, his lips trembling with hunger.

Luca isn’t scared. Not even a little. Instead, he says softly, sweetly, “You wanna kill me?”

Sora stumbles back, breath hitching.

“No—No.”

But Luca steps forward, his shadow swallowing the light between them. “Please,” he says. “I want you to kill me. I want you to eat me. You want to, don’t you? I saw the way you looked at me in the diner. I know who you are.”

Sora keeps backing away, shaking his head “You don’t know me,” he says, “You don’t know hunger.”

Luca nods, tears rumbling in his eyes. “I do. I’m hungry, too, Sora. Don’t you see?”

He lifts his shirt, pulls a knife from the holster strapped at his hip. Without hesitation, he drags the blade across his arm. The skin splits open easily, blood spilling out in thick, dark ribbons. He doesn’t even flinch.

Sora’s instincts scream. His hand finds his father’s knife buried in his bag.

“You ever killed someone before?” Luca asks.“How many people have you eaten?”

Sora freezes. His mind blurs.

And then he’s moving, dropping the knife — rushing forward, grabbing Luca’s bleeding arm in both hands.

“No, Luca.” His voice is a low, breaking thing. He squeezes Luca’s wrist, trying to stop the blood. “I don’t want to eat you.”

He looks into Luca’s eyes — blue once, but now strange, burning, red around the edges, fevered with something sinister.

“No!” Luca cries, yanking away.

He doesn’t hesitate. He swings the knife in a vicious, ugly arc, and Sora feels the blade bury itself deep into his stomach. An explosion of pain, something he’s never felt before, roars through him.

Sora gasps, clutching the wound. “Why?” he whispers, stumbling backward until his head hits the wooden floor.

Luca bends down, the knife dripping. “Eat or be eaten.” he says, and then he stabs Sora again — lower, deeper. The blade pulls free with a wet sound, dragging pieces of him with it.

Sora whimpers. For a moment, he is back to the day he was born, pulled into a world he didn’t ask for. His father’s arms around him. The freezer humming.

_“We dream of softness…”_ His father once said, _“But there’s nothing soft about hunger.”_

And there, in the rotting mouth of the church, Luca sinks his teeth into Sora’s flesh. He tears, chews, sobs — a frantic gnashing that’s all need and no satisfaction.

Begging, begging for it to feel good this time.

But it doesn’t.

It never does.