With every howl, the crack in its soul split open again.
The soul fragments already on the verge of falling apart peeled away from the edges, drifting through the darkness like snowflakes, like ashes.
It hurt when they fell away—hurt so badly that its phantom form jerked violently, as if shocked by electricity.
Then those fragments slowly drifted back, sticking to the edges of the crack and growing back on. But it was not healing. It was adhesion.
The places where they adhered were weaker than before. The next time it howled, the crack split wider.
Its three scarlet eyes were embedded in the front of its phantom form—one where its forehead would be, and two on either side of the crack.
The one on its forehead was the largest, as big as a walnut. Fine cracks covered the surface of the eyeball, like an eggshell that had been smashed but not scattered.
Dark red light flowed through those cracks, like lava, and like blood.
The two eyes on either side of the crack were smaller, but brighter—bright enough to sting the eye.
They stared at the barrier between life and death above them, stared at the human world beyond it, stared without wavering. Their eyeballs did not turn, their lashes did not move, not even their pupils contracted.
They simply stared, never looking away for even a second.
Only two things remained in Malaka's world: hunger and the barrier.
Hunger was branded into its soul, like a red-hot iron pressed into flesh again and again, until that flesh had charred, carbonized, and could no longer feel pain. Yet the hunger remained.
Its consciousness had been ground into ruins by howling and hunger, like a bombed city with not a single intact building and not a single passable road.
But