The space stretched wide in all directions. Walls rising from nothing into a high ceiling. Stone—smooth like polished marble. And worms. Worms everywhere.

  They moved beneath the floor's surface, visible through the stone like blood through pale skin. Never still. Never quiet. Just that constant wet shifting that I'd learned to ignore. The space had changed since the last time I'd been here.

  The ocean of worms was gone. No more churning chaos, no more drowning in pale bodies. There were walls now. Structure. A throne room.

  The throne sat at the far end. Still made of worms, still shifting and alive, but more solid than before. The faces were still there… Cedric, the wyrm, the ice trolls, the goblins, the countless dead things I'd consumed. They watched me with empty eyes. Expressions frozen in whatever they'd felt when the worms took them.

  And at the crown of the throne, dominating everything else, was a dragon's head. Not Klaus. The one from the cave. The one whose corpse I'd just collapsed on top of. Its massive skull sat above the lesser faces like a king above peasants. Jaws half-open. Teeth the length of my forearm. A permanent snarl that said

  Good luck with that.

  The marble floor felt solid under my boots, but I could see the worms moving under me. Off to my left, where the small house used to be—

  I stopped walking. The house was gone. Just a foundation now. An outline on the floor where walls had been. A scar on the marble where something important used to stand.

  That house had been Rell. The memory of her. The guilt I carried like a stone in my chest. The last piece of my sister that I'd managed to keep.

  Gone. Eaten. By my own fucking worm.

  My hands clenched. My jaw locked tight enough to crack a tooth. I forced myself to keep moving. Forced myself to focus on the throne. On the dragon's head. On anything but the empty space where my sister used to live.

  At the center of the throne room, between me and the throne, something new had formed.

  A mass of bloated and swollen worms. Coiled around each other in a slow spiral. They were huge… bigger than any I'd seen in here before. Each one thick as my arm, pale and ridged, pulsing with something that felt like power and looked like a tumor.

  They were building something at their center. Compressing. Forming something dense and hard. I stopped a few feet away. The worms didn't react. They just kept spiraling, kept building, focused entirely on whatever horror they were making.

  Heat radiated from the mass. Not burning. Just warm. Like standing near a fire after being cold for too long. I could feel it in my chest. A pressure. A weight settling behind my sternum that hadn't been there before. Something taking shape inside me that wasn't just worms anymore.

  The worms at the center compressed tighter.

  I saw it clearly now.

  A core. Roughly the size of my fist. Pale and ridged like the worms themselves, but harder. Denser.

  Cold white text appeared in my vision. Sharp and clean.

  [ORIGIN ADVANCEMENT DETECTED]

  System messages were new. I'd never gotten one before. Not during the Trial. Not in the Shattered Front. Not when I'd consumed Cedric or the wyrm or any of the other things that should have triggered one.

  [GRADE 5 → GRADE 4]

  I was Grade 4 now…

  The dragon had pushed me over. All that essence, all that life force the worms had drunk down while I was too broken to stop them—it had been enough.

  [EVOLUTION: OSSEOUS TYRANT]

  [ATTRIBUTE GAINED: Bone Scales]

  The text expanded.

  The core finished forming. The worms pulled back, their work complete, and the pale ridged sphere floated free. It drifted toward me. Slow and steady. Like it knew where it belonged.

  I reached out.

  My hand touched its surface.

  Warm. Smooth. Alive in a way the dragon's core hadn't been. This wasn't stolen power. This was mine. Built from the dragon's essence but shaped by my worms into something new.

  I pulled it into my chest. I felt it settle behind my sternum. Slotting into place like it had always been there. Like it had been waiting for me to be ready.

  The pressure increased. Then released. Warmth spread through my torso. Down my arms. Into my legs. Into parts of me I didn't know could feel warm anymore.

  [CORE INTEGRATION COMPLETE]

  The throne room went quiet. Just me and the worms and the empty space where Rell's house used to be.

  I sensed something behind me. I turned to find Mabel.

  Not the small worm that usually rode my shoulder. The full-sized version I'd seen here once before. She coiled near the throne's base, her eyeless head raised to meet my eyes. Bigger than me. Bigger than most things I'd killed.

  "Well," she said. "Look at you. All grown up and Grade 4. I'm proud, really. You exceeded my expectations."

  Something in her tone had changed. The snark was still there—Mabel without snark would be like fire without heat—but underneath it was something else. Something I couldn't name. Something that made my skin prickle.

  "What do you mean, 'exceeded expectations'?" I asked.

  "I mean you were supposed to die." Her segments clicked as she shifted position, coiling tighter. "Multiple times, actually. The dragon should have killed you. The wyrm before that. The Keeper. Klaus. Take your pick." She tilted her head—a gesture that shouldn't have been possible without eyes, but Mabel had never let anatomy stop her. "But you kept not dying. Stubborn bastard."

  "Gee, thanks."

  "Take it as a compliment." She moved closer. Segment over segment, that slow curving motion she'd always had. "Most people would have quit by now. Given up. Let the monsters win."

  "Most people don't have a sarcastic parasite living in their head."

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  "True. You're welcome, by the way."

  I looked at the empty foundation. At the scar on the floor where Rell's house used to stand.

  "Do you know why the house is gone?"

  Mabel went still.

  "Because I ate it," she said.

  My hands clenched. "You ate Rell's house."

  "I ate the memory construct. Yes." Her head tilted again. "It was in the way. And you didn't need it anymore."

  "That wasn't your decision to make."

  "Actually." She moved closer. Close enough that I could see the individual segments of her body, the pale ridges, the way light moved across her surface like oil on water. "It was. I lived here too. And that house was holding you back. You were using it as a crutch… something to cling to when things got hard. A reminder of what you lost instead of what you still have."

  "It was all I had left of her."

  "No." Mabel's voice dropped. Soft in a way I'd never heard before. "It wasn't."

  She moved again.

  Her body coiled and compressed. Segments rearranging in ways that didn't make sense. Bone-white plates shifting, folding, changing. Her form condensed.

  Shrank.

  And then she wasn't a worm anymore.

  A girl stood where Mabel had been.

  Red hair. That same shade of red I had. The same shade that used to hang in my face when she'd pin me down and demand I say uncle. The same shade our father had.

  Gold-brown eyes. The ones that used to narrow at me across the dinner table when I chewed too loud. When I talked with my mouth full. When I existed in a way she found it insufferable.

  A face I knew better than my own. Because I'd grown up staring at it. Memorizing it. Hating it. Loving it. Watching it disappear down our father's throat in wet red chunks while I did nothing.

  My sister stood in my Sacred Soul wearing a dress I'd never seen her wear—something simple, clean, the kind of thing she would've mocked as "funeral clothes" back when she was alive to mock things.

  "Hey, Fish," she said.

  My legs just stopped working. I hit the floor hard—palms slapping marble, ass hitting stone—and none of it registered. My body was somewhere far away. I was watching it from a great distance, like a man watching his house burn and realizing he left something important inside.

  I told myself.

  "What the fuck," I said.

  Not my finest work.

  "You're not real." The words came out broken. Pathetic. "You can't be real."

  "I'm as real as anything in here." She walked toward me. Her footsteps made no sound on the marble. "Which, admittedly, isn't saying much."

  I couldn't breathe. My lungs had forgotten how. "Mabel. You're Mabel."

  "I was Mabel." She knelt in front of me. Close enough to touch. I couldn't move. Couldn't reach for her. Couldn't do anything except stare at her face and feel my chest collapse inward like a building falling down. "I needed a form. Something you'd accept. Something that wouldn't break you when you were already broken."

  "So you became a worm."

  "So I became a worm." The corner of her mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "A voice in your head. Annoying, sarcastic, helpful when you needed it. A partner."

  "You lied to me."

  "I protected you." Her eyes met mine. Those gold-brown eyes I used to know better than my own. "If you'd known who I really was, you would have done something stupid. Tried to bring me back somehow. Gotten yourself killed in some heroic bullshit gesture that would have accomplished nothing."

  "You don't know that."

  "I know you, Fish." Her voice stayed gentle, but there was steel underneath. The same steel she'd always had. The same stubbornness that used to drive me insane when we were kids. "I know exactly what you would have done. And I couldn't let you."

  I shook my head. “You should have told me."

  "When?" She spread her hands. "When you were starving in the SDC cell? When you were fighting for your life on the Shattered Front? When Klaus was trying to eat you? When exactly was the right time to say, 'Hey, by the way, I'm your dead sister living in your head as a parasitic worm'?"

  She sat fully. Crossed her legs. Looked at me with that infuriating calm she'd always had. The look that said she knew something I didn't. That she'd already figured out the puzzle while I was still staring at the pieces.

  She'd always been smarter than me. Even dead, even fragmented, even hiding inside my skull as a goddamn worm… she was still smarter than me.

  "I'm not whole," she said. "You need to understand that. I'm a fragment. A piece of what I used to be. Dad consumed most of me when he—" She stopped. Swallowed. For the first time, something cracked in her composure. "When he ate me. But I managed to hide a part of myself. The largest piece. I buried it deep, and when your Trial started, I followed you in."

  "How?"

  "I'm your sister." She said it like it was obvious. Like it explained everything. "We shared blood. Shared a womb. Shared everything that mattered. When the Trial pulled you in, I grabbed hold and followed."

  "I've been guiding you ever since," she said. "Protecting you. Waiting until you were strong enough to survive without me."

  My throat closed. "What do you mean, 'without you'? You said I needed to be strong enough to survive without you. What does that mean?"

  Her face changed. The composure cracked a little more. "I have to leave, Fish."

  "You can’t just leave me again."

  "I have to." She reached out. Her hand touched my face. Warm. Solid. Real in a way nothing in here had ever been real before. "Dad is still out there. Growing stronger. Consuming one Sacred after another. Still hunting you."

  "Then we'll fight him together."

  "We can't." She pulled her hand back. Gently, like she was handling something fragile. "I can't hunt him from inside you. I need a body. My own body." She paused. "Or one that's close enough."

  The image flashed through my mind. Mabel burrowing into Sadie's chest. Those rings of needle-teeth. The way Sadie's body had jerked. Gone still.

  "Sadie," I said. The word tasted like ash.

  Rell nodded. "She was dying. There was no saving her… not the way she was. But her body was intact. She was strong."

  "Is she still in there?" My voice came out rough. Scraped raw. "Any part of her?"

  Rell was quiet for a long time.

  "I don't know," she said finally. "The integration is still happening. I'll know more when I wake up on the other side." She met my eyes. "But I don't think so. I think she's gone."

  "You're going to wear her corpse."

  "I'm using her body to hunt the man who killed our mother and ate our family." Her eyes hardened. The steel was back. "She was dead, Fish. Her heart had stopped. Her brain was shutting down. I didn't kill her… the dragon did. I'm just not letting her death be wasted."

  "That's monstrous."

  "Yes." No hesitation. No justification. No apology. "It is. And I'm doing it anyway. Because Dad needs to die. And I'm the only one who can get close enough to make it happen."

  I looked away. Stared at the floor. At the worms moving beneath the marble surface, building and rebuilding in patterns I'd never understand.

  "We could fight him together," I said. It came out small. Desperate. The voice of a boy who'd already lost everything and couldn't stand to lose one more thing.

  "No." Firm. Final. "You're not ready. Grade 4 isn't enough. Not against him. You'd die, and then everything—Mom, me, all of it—would be for nothing."

  "So what? I just let you go? Let you walk into a fight you might not survive?"

  "Yes." She stood. Held out her hand. "You get stronger. You keep moving. You take care of that girl… Zo." A small smile. "She's good for you. Keeps you from drowning in your own bullshit."

  "She's not—we're not—"

  "Fish." The smile widened. "I lived in your head. I know exactly what you feel when you look at her."

  My face went hot. Even here, even now, even with everything falling apart… my dead sister could still make me blush like a twelve-year-old caught with his hand somewhere it shouldn't be.

  "And when I come back," she continued, "—if I come back—you'll be ready to help me finish what we started."

  I looked at her hand. At Rell's hand. The sister I'd lost. The fragment that had been hiding in my skull, guiding me, protecting me, pretending to be a sarcastic worm because it was easier than the truth.

  I took her hand.

  Let her pull me to my feet.

  "Good." She pulled me into a hug. Arms around my shoulders. Her head against my chest… she'd always been shorter than me, even when we were kids, and it drove her crazy. She felt real. Warm. Solid. Alive.

  I wrapped my arms around her and held on.

  "I love you," she said. Her voice muffled against my chest. "I should have said it more when I was alive. I should have said a lot of things."

  "Rell—"

  "Don't." She pulled back. Just enough to look at my face. "Don't make this harder than it already is."

  I wanted to say it back. I wanted to say something worthy of the moment. Something a better brother would say. Something that would make her stay.

  "Don't die again," I said. "It was annoying the first time."

  She laughed. Wet and broken and real. "I'll try." She stepped back. "Take care, Fish."

  Then she started to come apart. Edges first. Her outline going soft, grey. I grabbed for her arm and my fingers closed on nothing.

  "Rell—"

  "I'll find him." Her voice was fading. Going thin and distant. "I'll make him pay for what he did."

  "Rell!"

  But she was already gone. The throne room went quiet. Empty. Just me and the worms and the space where my sister used to be.

  I stood there for a long time. Staring at nothing. At the air that still felt warm from where she'd touched me.

  The dragon's head watched from the throne. Jaws frozen in that permanent snarl. The faces of the dead stared with their empty eyes.

  I was alone in here.

  For the first time since the Trial, I was completely alone.

  No Mabel. No Rell. No voice in my head telling me I was being an idiot. Just me and the worms and the weight settling in my chest where the core had integrated.

  I sat down on the marble floor. Let my back rest against the base of the throne. The worms moved beneath me—that constant wet shifting I'd learned to ignore—and I closed my eyes. Somewhere out there, my sister was waking up in a dead girl's body. Walking into a frozen wilderness. Hunting the man who'd killed our mother and consumed our family.

  And I was sitting in my own head, useless, waiting to wake up… at least the dragon was dead.