The bells began ringing before anyone saw him.
Not the slow toll of ceremony.
Not the steady call of prayer.
These bells screamed.
Their frantic bronze voices crashed across the rooftops, shattering the morning calm of the city.
Merchants froze mid-sale.
Bread baskets slipped from nervous hands and rolled across cobblestones.
Priests faltered in the middle of sacred chants.
Because something was coming through the jungle.
And everyone could feel it.
A pressure spread through the streets like cold water filling lungs.
Breathing became harder.
Hearts pounded.
Instinct, older than thought, older than reason, whispered the same terrible truth to every living thing in the city.
Run.
Beyond the gates, the jungle began to die.
Leaves shrivelled and curled.
Vines sagged like severed veins.
Grass turned grey and brittle beneath slow, deliberate footsteps.
Then the man stepped out of the trees.
He was enormous.
Not merely tall, immense.
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Broad shoulders wrapped in tattered robes the colour of rot and moss. His skin was carved with glowing tattoos that pulsed with an eerie glow.
And around him rolled an aura of hunger.
It moved like a storm front, invisible yet undeniable.
Where it passed, life withered.
Guards on the walls shouted orders.
Archers nocked arrows.
Someone screamed for the gates to be closed.
Too late.
The first volley darkened the sky.
Hundreds of arrows screamed downward.
They struck him from every direction, chest, throat, shoulders, even the face.
One buried itself deep in his eye.
The city held its breath.
The giant did not stop walking.
He reached up slowly and plucked the arrow from his eye.
The wound sealed instantly. The eye regrowing.
He pulled another shaft from his chest.
Another from his neck.
Flesh knitted closed as if nothing had happened.
Then something even stranger occurred.
The arrows still embedded in his body began to move.
His flesh pushed them out.
One by one the shafts slid free and clattered to the ground like discarded twigs.
The archers stared in silent horror.
The giant continued walking.
The cavalry charged next.
Hooves thundered through the gate.
Steel gleamed.
War cries echoed against stone walls.
The horses collapsed first.
Mid-stride.
Mid-breath.
They simply folded as life drained from their bodies in an instant.
Riders tumbled across the dirt.
Their screams lasted only seconds.
Skin shrivelled.
Flesh tightened against bone.
Eyes sank into hollow sockets.
By the time the bodies hit the ground, they were already dead husks.
The giant walked through them without slowing.
Life fled before him.
A silent storm of hunger swallowing everything in its path.
Panic exploded through the city.
Crowds surged through the streets.
Families dragged children by the arm.
Servants abandoned their masters.
Guards threw down their spears and ran with everyone else.
Then a voice rose above the chaos.
“Run!”
A woman stood atop a rooftop, black hair whipping in the wind.
She moved like a shadow given form, leaping from building to building.
“Run north!” she shouted.
“The Devourer has come!”
The word spread like fire through dry grass.
Devourer.
The giant continued walking.
Unhurried.
Unstoppable.
Arrows falling from his body.
Life dying beneath his feet.
A god of hunger moving through a city of the living.
No army could stop him.
No wall could hold him.
The Devourer had come.
And he would devour everything.
Then the giant stopped.
For the first time, his head turned.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
His gaze lifted.
Not toward the fleeing crowds.
Not toward the burning city.
But upward.
Toward something unseen.
Toward someone.
A faint smile crept across his scarred face. As if he remembered.
And somewhere far away…
Elias Ward screamed as the world shattered around him.
