Some time before the training & meeting of sael-
In the black between roots and bone, it stirred.
Not like a beast. Not like a man.
Like hunger given shape.
It had no eyes. No face. Not anymore. The centuries had peeled those things away, one layer at a time, until all that remained was a mouth—and a name whispered in dead tongues:
The Devourer.
The villagers called it the Darkling Wretch when it came in pieces—crawling beneath their barns, gnawing their crops, whispering in the blood of goats born wrong. But that wasn't its true form.
No.
That was only its shadow.
Now it dreamed.
And its dreams were full of her.
The girl with the river in her veins.
The child of the old flood.
She woke the water. She remembered the song.
Flesh twitched along what might have once been a shoulder. Talons curled. A mouth, wet and wide, peeled open in a grin far too large for any human skull.
She was calling the ancient bloodlines back to the surface.
She didn't know it.
But the Devourer did.
And so did the Nocturne Clan.
Far below the catacombs, beneath stone stained with rites and rot, the Eldest of the Nocturne sat in silence.
He watched the flicker of Mira's image in the blood mirror—faint, ghostlike, but growing clearer with each ripple of her magic.
She looked like a girl.
But she was something else.
"A Tideborn," the Eldest whispered, his voice like leaves turning to ash. "A river child. We thought them extinct."
A second figure stepped from the shadows, armor black as dried ichor.
"She travels with the Lich."
The Eldest nodded.
"Then the Devourer has already begun to stalk them. That was always the pact. Where magic stirs too wild, it feeds. Where blood runs ancient and unclaimed, it drinks."
He turned from the mirror.
"Let it hunt."
Back in the forest, beneath stars like pale knives, the Devourer slithered into form.
No longer bone-thin.
No longer mist.
It had begun to flesh itself anew from the magic Mira spilled.
A body forming.
A will sharpening.
And in its chest, a second mouth opened—whispering a name it did not yet understand, but would never forget.
Mira…
It would find her.
It would taste what she was.
And if she could not be consumed—
She would be used