The Cage has no sun.
It never did.
There's only the dark.
The cold.
And the hunger that will not die.
I've stopped pretending that "time" exists here. The days aren't marked by sunrises or sunsets only by the smell of new prey. Only by the shift in the air, when the silence twists itself into a noose around my neck. The resets blur together until they're just a smear of blood across memory.
The hunger never blurs.
When it wakes, I wake.
The black stone beneath me quivers, and the first echoes of the next wave crawl into my bones. The air is thicker now not with fear, but with challenge. They've begun sending names against me. Once-legends. The kind of souls that once made empires burn and gods grit their teeth. Now they are stripped, thrown into the Cage, and served to me raw.
I rise. Tendrils of shadow slip from my shoulders like smoke that wants to be knives. The hunger is already grinning inside my chest.
The first falls from the dark above a six-armed brute whose skin is torn open by molten bone, glowing fissures crawling like veins across his frame. His roar shakes the air, rattles the walls, but I am already moving. My tendrils spear into the soft place just below his jaw. The sound he makes is short.
I pull.
The soul is heavy heavier than I expected. It thrashes, molten heat searing my mind as I drag it into myself. It tastes like iron poured straight into the veins. Strength. Rage. Fire.
The hunger laughs.
The second comes before I can swallow fully.
The Widow in Chains.
Her arrival is heralded by the sound the scraping pull of her hooks against the stone, their rusted edges screaming. She's wrapped in lengths of chain that move like snakes, pulling her body in sickening, puppet-like jerks.
She lunges before I blink. The hooks whistle past my ear, the chains bind my limbs, cutting deep. She's pulling me toward her mouth a maw split too wide, filled with teeth made from fused bone fragments.
My abyssal shield blooms around me, black fire licking her chains, the shadows screaming as they eat metal. I feel her trying to hold on the chain links bending, resisting but they snap.
She staggers. I do not let her breathe. My tendrils impale her, pinning her against the wall. Her soul is brittle, corroded by rust and sorrow. It slides down my throat like drinking old blood.
The hunger purrs.
The third does not move.
He stands at the far edge of the Cage floor. Tall. Draped in robes sewn from skin pale, stretched, stitched into patterns I do not understand. Where his face should be is a hollow void, blacker than the Cage itself.
The Hollow Father.
The other names in the wave give him space. Even here, they fear him. The ones with claws and fangs step aside, eyes darting like prey that knows there's a bigger predator in the pit.
He doesn't rush me. He waits.
And when I step toward him, the world cracks.
It's not sound it's inside my head. His will slides into my mind like a rusted blade, peeling away memories I didn't know I still had. A flash of the first soul I ever took. A woman's face maybe mine, maybe not. Gone. Torn like wet paper.
I stagger. My tendrils thrash, but he doesn't flinch. He walks through them, slow, deliberate, until one skeletal hand presses against my chest.
I feel him trying to take me.
I let him.
Just enough.
When he digs deep, my abyss digs deeper. My will slams shut like jaws in the dark, and suddenly he is the one drowning.
It's not clean.
We rip pieces from each other, shredding soul-flesh, tasting the raw burn of shared agony. His hunger meets mine, and for a moment we're mirrors predators that understand too well what the other is.
Then he is gone.
His essence explodes inside me, flooding every nerve with raw, ancient power. It burns, but the burn is sweet.
And then I hear it.
A whisper.
A promise.
Abyssal Dominion not just to devour, but to chain. Not to destroy… to own.
The hunger stops purring. It's silent. Listening.
The next one tests it.
The Pale Archer.
I've heard of him before a ghost who could kill across worlds. His bow is made of something that looks like moonlight carved into shape. The arrow he draws is pure absence a shaft of "what isn't" and when he looses it, the Cage itself groans.
I let it hit.
Pain erupts through my chest white-hot, blinding. But while my flesh bleeds, my will is already inside him. Abyssal Dominion wraps around his soul like barbed wire. He thrashes, he resists, but the chain tightens with every breath he takes.
When it's tight enough, I pull.
He drops to his knees. His bow clatters to the floor. His scream is not human.
And then I drink. Slowly. Watching the light die in his eyes as the chain burns him hollow.
The rest of the wave comes in a rush driven by desperation or stupidity. A twin-headed war priest with hammers the size of coffins. A banshee that screams not in sound, but in memory trying to make me drown in my own past. A crawling mass of hands and teeth called the Saint of Skin.
Each one falls.
Each one feeds me.
And each one I chain before I devour. Not because I have to but because I can.
By the end, the floor is slick with shadowlight the residual glow of consumed souls, mixing with my own darkness until it's hard to tell where they end and I begin. My tendrils drag through it, leaving trails that pulse like veins.
The hunger hums low in my chest, slower now, sated but not silent. It's learning to wait.
The Cage is quiet.
Too quiet.
And then the dark parts not torn, but drawn aside, like a curtain being pulled.
A figure stands in the gate.
Tall. Masked. Wrapped in layered robes of bone-white and deep crimson. The High Soul. His presence is not loud, but it crushes the air, makes it heavier, thicker. I can feel my tendrils curling in on themselves, instinctively cautious.
He watches me. I cannot see his face beneath the mask, but I feel something like… satisfaction.
"Come then, devourer," he says. His voice is a blade, smooth but sharp enough to draw blood just from hearing it. "Show me you've earned the right to die by my hand."
The hunger growls.
So do I.
I stepped forward. And declared nah next time I need to digest my friends.
The collosal spirit burst into laughter and told me good one boy rest for now.
The air burned before I even saw him.
Not heat not fire but the suffocating scorch of a presence so vast it pressed against the inside of my skull, like someone was trying to push my brain out through my ears. My knees bent, not in submission but to anchor myself against the invisible weight bearing down.
The High Soul emerged from the fog of the Abyssal Cage with no sound, yet his arrival was louder than any scream. The world warped around him, colors bled out of the air, the ground under my feet buckled as if reality itself didn't want him here.
I had faced predators before.
Monsters. Gods. Even fragments of things older than stars.
But this
This was the weight of a throne made from a billion dead souls.
He stopped only a few steps away, and in the flicker of the abyss-light, I saw him tall, faceless, wrapped in flowing bands of light and shadow, his form constantly shifting, never holding the same outline twice. Where his eyes should have been, endless voids spun like black holes, pulling in what little light dared to exist.
"You're the one they call Voiden," his voice was not sound. It was an intrusion, slipping between the cracks of thought and planting itself deep in my mind. "The fledgling devourer who dares to crawl toward my seat."
I clenched my fists, shadows bleeding from my knuckles like liquid smoke.
"Crawl? You'll see how fast I climb."
His head tilted in something between curiosity and boredom. "Then climb, little shadow."
The pressure vanished — not because he released it, but because he moved.
I didn't see the wind-up. Didn't see the motion. Only the impact his palm slamming into my chest, bone groaning, ribs flexing like wet branches about to snap. The force ripped me off my feet, sent me crashing through a tower of black crystal, shards biting into my skin.
I rolled, coughing shadows, vision shaking.
Every nerve screamed at me to run. Every part of me that still thought in human terms said this was a fight I couldn't win.
But the hunger didn't care. The hunger wanted his soul.
When I stood, the ground under me cracked like thin ice, shadows spilling outward from my feet. Tendrils whipped up around me, coiling in anticipation.
The High Soul didn't move toward me he was already in front of me. A flicker, a blink, and he was there, fist like a hammer. I caught it with both hands, the impact detonating the ground in a radius around us. My knees sank into the fractured stone. My arms trembled under the weight of his strength, my bones humming with the strain.
He didn't stop. He twisted, elbow whipping toward my skull. I ducked under it, my own arm shooting up shadow-clad claws ripping across his chest.
The sound wasn't flesh tearing it was glass shattering, the fragments glowing with white-hot essence before dissipating into motes.
He looked down at the mark. Then at me.
And smiled.
"You can touch me," he said softly, like it was a novelty.
"Good. That makes this interesting."
He blurred again my instincts screamed, and I lashed out with a wall of shadow in every direction. His strike tore through it like smoke, but it slowed him enough for me to sidestep, letting his hand gouge a crater into the ground where I'd stood.
I wrapped a tendril around his arm, another around his throat, and yanked my shadows tightening, writhing, trying to crush.
The bands of darkness around him pulsed once. My tendrils split apart like rotting vines, severed by raw force. His free hand came up, fingers splayed a blast of soul-light erupted from his palm, catching me full in the chest.
It wasn't just pain. It was absence. For an instant, I wasn't here. My vision went white, my body weightless. Then I was on my back, every muscle spasming, shadows twitching like they'd been dipped in acid.
"Still alive," his voice slid through the fog in my mind. "That will not last."
I pushed up, teeth bared, coughing dark mist. My vision cleared enough to see him walking toward me, slow, deliberate, each step leaving a faint burning mark on the ground.
I tightened my grip on the hunger inside me. Let it rise. My shadows thickened, tendrils unfurling like wings, claws elongating until they scraped the ground.
He wanted to see how high I could climb?
Then I'd drag him down into the pit with me.