Chương 86: 85 - Hunger

The office was silent for a moment. Alexandra stared at Raymond. He knew about Willow stealing books from the library. She always thought that to be the case. But, somehow, the confirmation hit her hard.

"You…" she trailed off. Raymond shook his head.

"You don't have to worry about your friend. A few books here and there are a cheap price to pay in order to secure the support of Goodpeak." He paused.

"Their elders know what book they can take. Furthermore, they're just books. Books can be copied." She frowned.

"Then why let this charade continue? You could share the books yourself."

"I'd like to. But I'm stuck managing the sensibilities of several parties. Where the people of Goodpeak want to spread knowledge, other factions want to restrict it. The status quo works better for everyone. Something else you should keep in mind for when you take my seat."

"You keep saying that like it's settled."

"It isn't. But the people who would oppose it are fewer than you'd think." She studied him.

"Is that a warning or a pitch?"

"Both. They'll come to you before they come to me, once word spreads."

"I won't do it." He smiled.

"We'll see." Raymond spoke with Alexandra for a few more minutes until duty called and he had to send her away. Qafit led her back to the academy, leaving her at the refectory where she gathered a bag of provisions. She attended her morning classes, returned to the refectory for more food, and went to her room. When she sat down to work on her curses, she found herself unable to focus. She took out Clarity of Mind from her drawer. It helped, but even that wasn't enough for her heart to calm down.

She sighed, closed the book and put it back in place. Something felt wrong, and she didn't know what it was. Alexandra walked out of her room. She grabbed a sword from the armory, just in case, and exited the Iron Library. She went down the stairs to Kator, crossed the city, and found herself back on the beach where she'd fought the Thunder Vipers. However, this time, she hadn't come to fight. She looked at the sea, the overcast sky blended with the grey waves on the flat expanse of sand.

Long tide pools split the beach, creating sand banks in between her and the sea. She looked at Kator. Then in the other direction. The beach seemed to extend forever. She needed to let out some steam, so she ran. The sand shifted under her feet. She pushed harder, let it burn in her calves, and kept her eyes ahead where the beach curved out of sight. She passed the tide pools. Passed a rusted anchor half-buried at the waterline, chain gone. Her breath steadied into the run. The cold air tasted of salt and kelp.

The beach narrowed where the dunes pushed closer to the water. She angled toward them, slowing only when the sand deepened and her feet began to sink with each step. She climbed without stopping, grabbing at a tuft of grass when the slope steepened. She crested the dune and stopped. Below on one side, the beach ran in a long pale strip until it dissolved into haze. The sea was the same grey as the sky.

On the other side, the land dropped into a shallow depression and then rose again into a tree line of dense, dark conifers. She stood between the two, wind pulling at her hair, chest heaving. Kator was a smudge behind her, the Iron Library a dot on the tallest hill. She sat down on the ridge of the dune and looked at the water. She missed the flowery plains. Everything seemed so simple back then. She shook her head. That wasn't true. She'd already been running from problem to problem back then. Alexandra exhaled.

She was tired. Tired of the curses weighing upon her. Tired of Raymond and his expectations.

"I just want to do my quests in peace," she said out loud, her voice drowned by the wind and the waves. She never wanted to be a heroine, and she certainly didn't feel like one. Yet, she saw the writing on the wall. Soon, the knowledge of her identity would spread through the academy, and she wouldn't have a moment of anonymity again. She felt the pressure. Wanted none of it. Yet she had to stay. Not just because she didn't have anywhere else to go, though it did play a role. But also to cure her malediction.

"With how much I need to eat, I can't strike out on my own." She grabbed a loaf of bread from her bag and chewed on it. The bread was dense and slightly stale. She ate half the loaf before she slowed down. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. The wind picked up. She thought about the conifers behind her. How far they ran, whether there was a road through them, where it led. She didn't know this coastline.

Didn't know what was a day's walk south, or north, or inland past that tree line. She'd arrived at Kator by teleportation and hadn't left since. The thought sat in her chest, heavier than she expected. She could walk into those trees right now. Nothing was stopping her except the malediction and the hunger it dragged behind it. She finished the bread and brushed the crumbs from her fingers. She turned her attention to her mana.

Over the past few days, she'd lost count of how many attempts she'd made at finding the source of the malediction. She stayed very still and looked closer. If there was something she wanted, it was to be rid of it. If she could run, she would. But there was no use. The malediction was inside her. It would follow her until she finally found it and unraveled it. So she did the same thing she did every day. She looked. She looked at her core, at the way mana threads were flowing out of it.

At the way they shifted every time her stomach gurgled. At the way they moved every time she despaired for freedom. The threads shifted again. She hadn't moved. Hadn't thought of anything in particular. But something in her chest had tightened, the automatic clench of a person who had remembered, mid-breath, that they were not free, and the mana had responded. She let the feeling sit without pushing it away. It wasn't the same as physical hunger.

The gnawing in her stomach when her body needed food was simple, solved by eating, if only temporarily. This was different. It had no object she could put in her mouth. No bottom she could fill. She hungered for freedom, and it couldn't be satiated. Raymond's advice came back to her. Infinity. Hunger. Concepts. She didn't know what it meant, but she could feel the answer beginning to form in the depths of her mind. Infinite hunger wasn't about food. Not exclusively. She clenched her fist.

Was the malediction growing stronger? A strong wave hit the shore. Behind her, a flock of small birds took flight from the forest and danced in the wind. She watched the threads. Another shift, faint, but there. She hadn't moved. Her stomach called again. She grabbed a pastry and shoved it down her throat. Silence. Another wave. The threads moved. Shifted. Reacted. If the malediction fed on hunger, on all hunger, physical and otherwise, then every time she wanted something she couldn't have, she was feeding it.

Every meal she ate was feeding it. Every day she spent inside the Iron Library, waiting, learning, trying to cure a thing she didn't understand, she was feeding it. It had been feeding continuously since the day it was placed inside her. Then she thought about it some more. What does it not eat? Nothing. If infinite hunger transcended the physical, then it could eat everything. Her hopes, her dreams, her despair. Her streak.

Even her attempts at understanding the malediction could be consumed by it, leaving her with nothing. The threads. They reached. Not just for her stomach, but everywhere. As her mind was spinning, she saw them spread from her core, all over her body and mind. She scrambled, pushing Mana Manipulation as hard as she could, trying to bring them back. Trying to get the threads under control. This was her mana. She was in charge. Or, at least, should be. They pulled outward from her core. More.

Like a valve had been opened and couldn't be closed anymore. Infinite hunger never stopped. It only cared to consume. The threads kept spreading. They took. They took. She grabbed her bag and ate. A heel of bread, gone. A strip of dried meat, gone. Five pastries, three sandwiches, seven apples. Her hands were shoving food into her mouth. There was no pleasure in it. No relief either. The threads didn't pull back. If anything they opened wider.

Underneath the physical hunger was the other kind, the worse kind, spreading through her chest and her thoughts. It touched her memory and took something from it, she didn't know what it was. It touched her anger and hollowed it out. It moved toward the small, careful hope she'd been carrying, the sense that she was close to something, that she had almost understood, and she felt it begin to go thin.

"No—" She clamped down on her mana. Pushed back. Alexandra reached for her bag. It was empty. Her hands were shaking, not from the cold. The threads were everywhere now, in the edges of her vision, in her arms, in her legs. In her mind. She pressed her palms flat against the sand. It eats everything. It eats everything I give it. She went still. Everything I give it. The threads were spread wide, hungry, pulling in every direction at once. She could feel them searching. That was the nature of infinite hunger.

Appetite without end. Always wanting. Never satiated. She stopped fighting it. The threads lurched, surprised, if a curse could be surprised. She felt them begin to pull harder. She let them. And then, very carefully, she pointed them. Not at food. Not at her memory. Not at her emotions. Inward. Back along the length of themselves, back toward the source, back to the thing that had colonized her core. Eat this, she thought. Eat yourself. The malediction didn't resist. It was hunger, and hunger didn't discriminate.

It was infinite, and infinity embraced all into its fold. It wanted. It reached. It took. The threads stuttered. She bore down. Everything she had, every scrap of mana she could still call hers, fed the reversal. Hunger didn't discriminate, but it wanted more than just itself. It wanted to swallow her whole, and she had to force it to focus on something else. A drop of blood onto the sand. It came from her nose. She hadn't noticed when it started.

The hunger that had spread through her arms and her legs and the edges of her thoughts began to contract. Folding in on the source, eating the very channels it had carved through her. It hurt. She hadn't expected that. A sharp, clean pain behind her sternum. She pressed a fist against her chest, supporting herself with her other hand. The threads were devouring themselves in long, unraveling loops, and every loop that closed was a part of her she got back.

Her anger came first, returning with an intensity that made her eyes water. She turned it all against the malediction that she still couldn't truly see. It didn't matter. She didn't need to see it. The pressure mounted. Higher. Higher. Then it gave. Alexandra stumbled. Fell face first onto the sand. Silence. Her mana sat in her chest, flowing in threads from her core. She pushed herself up and sat on the ridge of the dune for a long time. The blood from her nose had dried on her lip. Her bag lay empty beside her.

Below, the sea moved in slow grey swells against the sand. She was exhausted. She was also, she realized, not particularly hungry. Alexandra looked at the sea for a while. Then she picked up her empty bag, got to her feet, and began the walk back to Kator.