When the white light faded, he found he was immense. So large it was difficult to reckon with the sheer scale of his own body.

  Deep inside him existed a mortal mind, but it lay buried beneath a consciousness even more vast than his physical form. Redmane could feel that small mind struggling to find its way through the dark, to free itself, but the will of the Lord of Hunger kept him prisoner.

  It did not speak, but the volume of its emotion made its intentions transparently clear.

  This was a punishment.

  So, great King, you see the world spread out beneath you and call it a feast.

  You claim it by murder and call strength a virtue.

  You stand atop a mountain of corpses and say, ‘Behold, I have made peace.’

  Very well. Let us be joined, and I will show you avarice.

  Redmane realized the words were his, as if he were enunciating the syllables of a primal feeling, reading from the page of a book written without language, spelled in living psychic mass.

  The Lord of Hunger had Sencis Karalis exactly where he wanted him, a wrathful God roused from slumber and a King of men conjoined in body and mind. With his prisoner helpless before the will of the Lord of Hunger, unable to even look away from the destruction of everything he’d built and the slaughter of all his subjects, the thing they called Kraal the Devourer raged across the land, consuming all in its path.

  Redmane experienced the thoughts and feelings of both Karalis and the Lord of Hunger as if they were his own.

  The King could not hide his fear and grief from the God. But the Lord of Hunger concealed much from his captive.

  The Lord of Hunger thought often of his own seditious son. Vos, the First Sovereign.

  He saw echoes of Vos in this man, and the similarities fueled his rage.

  That even in defeat, Vos inspired a chain of pretenders, dissemblers, mortals attempting to improve upon the First Sovereign’s appalling designs for the world. The world already had a natural order, a hierarchy, a sublime harmony of the sun and the moons, of tides and seasons, of seed, sprout, prey and predator.

  To be usurped and mutilated by his own child was insult enough, but to think that men, his own creations, would dare to place themselves in the position of Gods and redraw the already perfected hierarchy incensed him.

  The Lord of Hunger resolved that this would be a long and gruesome lesson.

  Then came the Five Heroes.

  Braga the Stout-Hearted, with the neck of a bull and a poleaxe most men couldn’t lift in a team of three, let alone wield.

  Danesti the Wise, a peaceable soul, more skilled with magic than with arms, wielding a slender thrusting sword that matched the precision of his mind.

  Vasarab, the ‘Knight of the Harvest,’ dark of hair and eyes, who fought with paired sickles as his tribal ancestors once had.

  Holt the Brash, youngest of the lot, who wielded a longsword and shield in the manner of the Knights of the Stahlmen.

  And the leader of their band, Belskaya the Golden, with hair like new wheat and armor of golden scales and a certain hammer in his hands.

  They were Volosi, descended from the clan chieftains who once set him free from Vos’s shackles and overthrew their would-be God emperor in ages past.

  Now they hunted him.

  And they had claimed the God Breaker. No doubt they petitioned Vos himself to acquire it.

  The moment he felt the presence of that weapon, his opinion of them diminished.

  It would have pained him to raise a hand against the sons of the men who set him free in ages past. But with the God Breaker in their hands, he would consume them all with exalted malice, and the cruel tutelage of Sencis Karalis would continue on with five more pupils in the classroom.

  Redmane sorted through the haze of these thoughts and feelings, and realized he wasn’t just swimming around in the composite mind of Kraal. He was somewhere real.

  He recognized this valley. It was where he found this Gruu burrow.

  The Five Heroes had cornered him here, and he turned to give them the fullness of his wrath.

  Belskaya, Braga, Danesti, Vasarab and Holt. Their magic was potent and coordinated, taught to them by old Omeni witches. But unlike the witches, who relied solely on their magic, these five warriors fought with a combination of strength and sorcery, their magic augmenting their physical prowess.

  They filled their bodies with primal energy, such that when they leapt, they soared through the air like birds, their muscles fueled by untamed force. Every swing of their sword or axe was a blur, their blades cutting with godly force, leaving trails of power in their wake. When attacks came, they dodged with the grace of phantoms, their senses heightened beyond human limits, or met the blows with a fortitude that defied mortal comprehension.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  An impressive feat for insects.

  Fighting them was almost entertaining.

  His own form resembled an immense worm or grub, supported by an asymmetrical army of legs both great and small. A single eye stood at the top of his head like the prow of a ship, above a massive circular maw lined with rows of house-sized teeth. And at the back of his maw, there was oblivion. A profound darkness. A place whence none would ever return, unless at his whim.

  The Lord of Hunger could change his form at will, but for the purposes of this lesson, these were the only features he required. Legs to move about. An eye to see. And a mouth to consume.

  When the Five Heroes engaged him, he introduced some more.

  Grasping arms. Clawed hands. Blades and spears of bone. Mouths that breathed fire, frost, acid, venom, cutting wind. Eyes that shot rays of death, of paralysis, of disintegrating heat. He spawned monsters from his flesh by the legion, and his spawn possessed all of these features and more.

  But none of these were what they feared.

  The Five Heroes fought fiercely, and with valor, but he could sense their hesitation. Their awareness of what would come.

  When Belskaya landed in front of him after evading a flurry of claws, his eyes immediately widened as he realized his error.

  Kraal knew it was time.

  The Devourer began to inhale.

  And as it began, there was a stirring of wind. A pull like the tide. The back of his gargantuan throat became the like eye of a whirlwind, the sprout of a horizontally oriented tornado, a vortex of indiscriminate consumption.

  First came lighter objects, small rocks, clumps of earth and grass. Young trees came next, their weak roots tearing free from the earth.

  Braga called out to Belskaya over the mounting wind, but it was too late to run.

  The leader of the Five Heroes had to root himself to the spot, and hope he was strong enough.

  The vortex intensified. Boulders and mighty trees flew past Belskaya. Smaller rocks and debris pelted him in the back. He held the God Breaker before him, eyes closed, teeth gritted in concentration as he went through the cadence of an old Omeni incantation. The hammer glowed, lending him its power. His feet carved deep furrows in the ground as Kraal’s vortex dragged him closer and closer to certain death by inches.

  It would only be a matter of time…

  But then he felt a flash of tremendous pain.

  Braga, Danesti, Vasarab and Holt struck him at the same time, in the same place, with the same weapon.

  Fire.

  These five had learned their lessons well.

  How ironic that the consumptive force of fire should be his bane. He, the all-consumer.

  Fate was not without a sense of irony.

  The fire burrowed deep into his flesh. There it festered and sizzled, cauterizing his ability to change form in the place he’d been burnt, delaying regeneration. It also distracted him long enough to make the strength of his vortex waver, and Belskaya seized that moment as his opportunity to escape.

  He took to the air, the God Breaker held high, and the stroke of his hammer blasted an enormous arm clean off of Kraal’s torso.

  Redmane watched the arm hurtling through the air from the vantage point of the arm itself.

  Then he realized in a flash that these recollections, all of this knowledge and emotion lived in the very arm that had been severed. As if even the tiniest scrap of the body of the Lord of Hunger possessed the totality of his divine being.

  It made sense, he supposed.

  How else could a Spawn move and act of its own volition, or be imbued with a soul as its pilot.

  The immense arm landed, cratering the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust and debris. Redmane saw the rest of the Devourer’s body move on, the battle raging throughout the valley, the Five Heroes pursuing it at supernatural speeds, leaping after it and landing on its back only to do battle with hordes of fresh spawn and the very flesh they stood upon.

  The severed arm itself was aware of what was going on, indeed Redmane now understood that he was within this arm, watching the battle unfold from its vantage point.

  But the blow from that hammer injured more than just the flesh. It struck his mind. His soul. He felt jarred, his connection to himself blurred, and the farther the main mass of Kraal strayed from him, the weaker it became.

  Until, at last, there was no connection at all.

  There was only hunger and rage, with no purpose, no cause.

  He split into a thousand pieces, attacked himself, devoured himself over and over. There was no sense of the passage of time. This savage cycle of gathering and separating, coming together and ripping apart, feeling teeth pierce flesh as both the eater and the food, it could have gone on for days or weeks or centuries.

  Until it halted.

  A great ripple of power washed over him from somewhere far away, and he slept.

  It was a troubled sleep. His fractured mind tried to fix itself, to make sense of the broken pieces. But the picture remained incomplete, and so for an age his dreams were chaos.

  Then something else happened.

  A small creature, chained to a post in a cell, sank his teeth into Divine Flesh, and in that moment a powerful working of magic shattered.

  In that instant, many things happened all over the land of Volos. One of those things was the awakening of the Lord of Hunger’s severed flesh, once cleaved by the power of the God Breaker, suppressed by the Ritual of Sealing, awakened anew by Astral Communion.

  But still purposeless, still lost. Still separated from itself. Now, however, there were other things to devour, so it would spread and grow, cover the land…

  Redmane’s eyes snapped open.

  He was back in the chamber of Grandmother Gruu. But the Grandmother and all of its spawn were no more. The room glowed crimson, and there were streams and arcs of red substance in the air like trails of smoke. Redmane realized what it was. It was the stuff of the Gruu themselves, dissolved and swirling around him.

  But ‘Gruu’ was a mere name. As was ‘Kraal the Devourer.’

  They were one and the same.

  And its name in this age would be Redmane.

  The moment Redmane understood what it was, as if it awaited that very moment of recognition, it surged into him.

  A stream of glowing red struck Redmane full in the stomach and his eyes went wide. He felt the power flowing into his body like a river, lifting him off his feet. Pietr fell onto his backside and scooted away, his eyes wide with wonder as he beheld swirling beams of dissolved Gruu-substance shooting in from the many circular tunnels surrounding the Grandmother’s chamber, all of them striking Redmane, their true master. Their true self.

  The streams of power joined with each other and swirled around Redmane like an immense serpent, gradually growing shorter as it fed itself to him. When it was over there was a flash of red light and a wave of force that blew outward in a sphere, and then Redmane fell to the ground, crouched in the spot the Grandmother occupied moments ago.

  Corpus: 22,202

  Might +2

  Grace +2

  Fortitude +2

  Evasion +20

  Pietr leaned forward, fearful but curious. “My lord? Are you alright?”

  Redmane opened his eyes, shifted his gaze to Pietr.

  Despite his great devotion, the priest of Kraal shrank from the force of that stare.

  “We’re ready for the Sphinx,” said Redmane.

  PATREON