THE LAST DAWN
Chapter 12: The Vision
The room did not fade.
It shattered.
The walls cracked. The floor split. The ceiling crumbled. The darkness poured through — not the cold darkness of the hall, not the hungry darkness of the Citadel, a different darkness. Older. Deeper. The darkness of memory. The darkness of grief. The darkness of the first sacrifice.
Rowan fell.
Not down — sideways. Through time. Through pain. Through the life of a woman who had died a thousand years ago.
He saw her.
Morwen.
Young. Beautiful. Desperate.
She was standing in a field of wheat, the sun warm on her face, the wind soft in her hair. Her children played at her feet — a boy, a girl, their laughter bright and clear.
She was happy.
She was loved.
She was alive.
Then the sky darkened.
The sun vanished. The wind died. The wheat turned black.
The hunger came.
Not as a monster. Not as a shadow. As a whisper.
Morwen, it said. Morwen. Morwen. Morwen.
She turned.
Her children were gone.
The field was empty.
The world was silent.
She walked.
Through the dead wheat. Through the black soil. Through the ash and dust and grief.
She reached a door.
Not a door of wood or stone or iron.
A door of bone.
Human bone.
Skulls and ribs and femurs and phalanges, all fused together, all pulsing with silver light, all watching her with empty eyes.
She opened the door.
The darkness beyond was hungry.
Come, it whispered. Come and save them. Come and feed me. Come and be mine.
She stepped through.
The vision shattered.
Rowan was back in the room.
Morwen stood before him, her silver eyes wet, her dark hair floating in a wind that did not exist.
“You saw,” she said.
“I saw.”
“The hunger took my children. It took my world. It took me.”
“It took you?”
She looked at her hands.
They were silver.
“I became the hunger. The hunger became me. We are the same.”
Rowan stepped back.
“Then the hunger isn’t a monster. It’s a person.”
“It was a person. It is a person. It will always be a person. The first sacrifice. The last sacrifice. The endless sacrifice.”
“How do I stop it?”
Morwen looked at him.
Her silver eyes were bright.
“You don’t. You become it.”