Page 162 of Demon’s Snack

Vaerith turns his head just enough to let contempt show. “Desperate minds cling to convenient interpretations.”

“Convenient?” Syrenya’s laugh carries through the storm, bright and vicious. “You are standing beside a summoning circle large enough to bankrupt three minor houses and calling it weather.”

The devourer moves.

Conversation dies instantly.

Its head tilts toward Corin with horrifying slowness. There is no face as I understand faces, only a recessed plane of shifting dark beneath the antlered crown and a mouth opening vertically where throat and sternum meet. The hollow chest pulses once, and the soul-consuming pull sharpens from a distant tug to an active draw.

A guard near the outer rail collapses to one knee.

Corin does not turn toward him.

He keeps his gaze on the creature.

“Rhazek,” Corin calls, voice rough but steady. “Anchor line?”

Rhazek stands near a broken ward post, infernal script burning along both arms as he reads the circle’s geometry. “Beneath its left hand. Secondary conduit under Vaerith’s dais. Do not take the full pull.”

“Planning to be reasonable.”

Sable, crouched behind a cracked stone barrier with two civilians pressed behind her, shouts, “Liar!”

Corin’s mouth pulls into the barest grim smile. “Supportive family.”

I move toward the circle.

Someone catches my sleeve.

Lady Othrel’s attendant, face gray with fear, grips the fabric hard enough to stretch it. “Lady Dareth, don’t. That thing is feeding through the air.”

“Yes,” I say, easing his fingers loose. “That is why I need to reach him.”

“You’ll die.”

“Eventually, everyone does. I am hoping to be difficult about the timing.”

He stares at me as if I am mad.

Fair.

I push forward through the panic, folio clutched tight against my side, boots slipping slightly on rain-slick stone. Each step closer to the devourer makes the hollow pull worse. It brushes against memory, against warmth, against anything inside me that has ever been alive enough to hurt. My vision flickers at the edges. The bond to Corin, however, burns stronger than the pull, a line of heat through my ribs that refuses to be dragged into the devourer’s chest.

The creature lunges.

It moves toward Corin first, drawn by his hybrid essence with hideous certainty. One enormous hand tears free of the breach and sweeps across the circle, claws dragging through active runes. The attack is not only physical. A wave of devouring force slams ahead of it, black and red and almost invisible except for the way the rain bends around it.

“Corin!” I shout.

He plants both feet.

The wave hits him.

Gold light explodes around his body as he absorbs the first force of the attack. The blow drives him backward several feet, boots carving twin tracks through scorched stone. His shoulders bow under it. Flame gutters from his hands and then roars back brighter as the devourer’s energy pours into him, violent and ancient and eager to turn his own hunger against him.

Through the bond, I feel his structure buckle.

There is no better word for it. Something in him flexes under impossible pressure, the infernal architecture Rhazek warned about stretching as the devourer’s force tries to settle where lesser energies have been absorbed before. Heat builds inside Corin with terrifying speed. It climbs through the bond in layers: hunger, pain, recognition, rivalry, protective fury, and a growing pressure that has nowhere safe to go.