Whispers Beneath the Walls
It began with the cold.
Not the seasonal kind.
Not the bite of winter wind or the gentle sting of frost on skin.
This cold crept deeper. It sank through stone, through iron, through bone. It settled into the heart of Halgrith Citadel like a cruel god—silent, slow, and starving.
Then by whispers.
Not words. Not yet. Just the kind of noise that lingers behind the ears.
The Slag, the Citadel's underbelly, felt it first.
Hunger was nothing new down there. Hunger was the language of the Slag. They chewed moldy bread and rat bones like they were communion wafers.
Children learned early that food didn't beg for forgiveness. The place had always feasted on itself.
But this—this wasn't mere starvation.
This hunger had direction. Purpose.
It didn't kill to feed. It fed to kill.
This was consumption.
And so naturally, it started with the food.
Meat turned black before it reached the butcher's knife.
Grain sprouted silver maggots in seconds, the kind with too many legs and eyes that blinked back.
Eggs cracked with the sound of bones breaking, and spilled out yolks the color of spoiled snow. Even the water tasted wrong—faintly sweet, faintly moving.
Still, they ate.
And they died.
Their bodies swelled, split, then hissed into stillness. From open mouths and torn bellies, frost began to bloom.
Cold mist rolled from their corpses, curling low along the stones like smoke in reverse.
The rats were the first to flee—clever little traitors. Then the dogs. Then the beggars who ate the dogs.
And still, no one understood.
Until the market screamed.
Grell the Fishmonger always smelled like a corpse that got bored of dying.
He had always been a bastard, but at least he'd been a reliable bastard.
His teeth were knives, his breath always wet, and his fish sometimes moved even after death—but no one in the Slag asked too many questions.
A young man ate it.
His mouth froze shut mid-chew. His stomach spasmed outward, ribs cracking through her skin like snapped icicles. He died coughing mist.
They found Grell the next morning curled inside his stall like a child in a womb, humming lullabies in a voice that echoed twice.
His was skeletal thin, as if something had eaten at him from the inside.
A knife—his own—was jammed between his teeth. His breath still steamed.
The market burned that afternoon.
It didn't help.
Fire made the frost retreat for a heartbeat, but it always returned—hungrier, colder, patient as the grave.
---
The whispers began after that.
In the Church of the Eightfold Light, the priests tried to hold their flock together with promises of divine trial. They spoke of purification through suffering, faith through famine. *Endure,* they said. *Endure and be reborn.*
They worshipped the eight true gods of the citadels, which was ambitious, considering one of the citadels had just been devoured.
Perhaps it was time for a rebrand. "Sevenfold Light" had a nicer ring anyway.
The priests spoke of trials. Divine purification. A famine of the flesh to feed the soul.
Then the tithes stopped.
No bread for communion. No wine to sanctify. Just hungry tongues licking the dust from cracked altar stones, whispering through split lips that bled with every syllable.
Worshippers began to murmur the same word, over and over—soft as prayer, sharp as bone:
"Feed."
The clergy panicked. Naturally.
Priestess Veyra -- high priest of the outer city church -- ordered the Citadel Guard, to intervene.
They did.
They didn't come back.
The High Priestess locked the doors. She thought it would protect the clergy.
But the faithful clawed anyway. Their nails broke on the wood and stone. Their mouths bled. They moaned through the cracks, begging not for mercy—but for meat.
The cold was not done.
It rose.
Into the towers of the forsaken elite—the golden parasites who ruled the Slag from high up with grapes in their mouths and fire in their hearths.
They feasted still, pretending the Slag's rot couldn't climb marble.
But frost laughs at stone.
Lady Tovis was the first to see it. Her mirror lingered. Not her reflection—her mirror. It stared too long.
Opened its mouth wider than any mortal jaw should.
When she stepped back, it didn't.
She smashed every mirror in the manor. It didn't help.
That night, her husband served supper.
Their children, roasted and seasoned.
He sat at the head of the table, napkin tucked beneath his chin, chewing slowly as the guests screamed.
He dressed for the occasion—silver knife, velvet napkin, red bib embroidered with the family crest. When the guards arrived, he greeted them like a host.
"There's no sin in hunger," he said, licking marrow from his fingers. "Only in denial."
They executed him on the spot.
The table remained set. The roast steamed for hours.
---
Pan saw it coming before anyone else.
Despite his fractured divinity leaving him only as a False God, he was the closest being to nature.
And hunger is no stranger to the wild.
He was older than the Citadel, older than the church, older than the war-saints carved into the walls. He spoke to trees. And the trees whispered back.
He felt it all. The soil cracked open. Roots trembled. Sap turned to glass. Leaves curled inwards like they were hiding from something deeper than cold.
Pan pressed his ear to the bark of the oldest tree. He did not hear wind.
He heard chewing.
A vast mouth gnawing at the edges of the world.
He immediately reported to the Principal Lyssandra, but she was still locked in battle with the Desecrated Colossus in the White Vale.
She had told him before she left that she would forge a new world for them. That she would return triumphant and lead humanity into a new age.
It had been over seven weeks, yet she was still locked in battle with the abomination.
By then, the walls themselves had begun to weep.
Frost leaked from every seam. Doors groaned under their hinges. Stone exhaled mist. Lamps refused to light. Silence fell like snowfall—soft, suffocating, final.
The people in the outer city stopped speaking. Words froze in their throats. Thoughts slowed. Skin turned gray, then white. Then cracked.
Those who ate went mad. Those who didn't went hollow.
And beneath it all—beneath the Slag, beneath the Citadel, beneath the bones of dead gods—something moved.
It had no name, only appetite. It had no voice, only hunger.
At night, it whispered.
Not in words. Words had no meaning anymore.
It whispered in frost.
In the brittle snap of finger joints.
In the soft crunch of lungs hardening in sleeping children.
In the silence that follows the last scream.
And when it spoke, the stones shivered.
Because the cold was not just cold.
It was something's arrival.
A memory older than fire. A feeling that had existed since the first living creature.
A stillness that waited patiently beneath the modern world until we forgot how to fear it.