Chapter 4: Sub Terra, Sub Fame

Chapter 4: Sub Terra, Sub Fame

The fight in the sun-drenched kitchen had shattered the last vestiges of their partnership. Now, there was only a cold, silent truce, born of shared living space and dwindling finances. For four days, Sarah moved through their apartment like a ghost, her presence a constant, quiet accusation. Elara found her awake at all hours, the glow of her laptop screen illuminating a face pale with fear and obsession. She was no longer just scrolling; she was digging, cross-referencing dead languages and scouring digitized archives of forbidden texts.

Elara, meanwhile, scrubbed their own kitchen until her knuckles were raw, trying to scour the memory of David’s death from her mind and the phantom scent of gunpowder from the air. The vision clung to her, a residue of its own. Every time she closed her eyes, she felt the phantom impact, the memory-shattering agony. Sarah's words echoed in the silence: You invited it right into our lives.

Guilt was a heavier burden than debt. Elara knew she had to end this. She was composing a text to Liam—a terse, final refusal of any future work—when his name flashed on her screen. Her heart seized.

“Don’t,” Sarah whispered from the doorway, her eyes wide and pleading.

Desire: Elara wants to quit and repair the damage with her sister.

Elara’s thumb hovered over the ‘decline’ button. But Liam’s voice was already in her ear, smooth and preemptive. “Elara. I know you’re having second thoughts. The last job was… unfortunate. A loose end that needed tying. It’s not indicative of our usual arrangements.”

“We’re done, Liam,” Elara said, her voice tight.

“Are you?” he purred. “Because I have one final piece of work. An apartment. A bit of a hazmat situation. Very straightforward. The payment for this one job will not only clear your existing business debts but will also secure you the renewed city transit contract. A clean slate, Elara. Legitimacy. Everything you wanted before all this began.”

Obstacle: Liam's manipulation is perfect, offering Elara exactly what she wants most: a way out and a return to legitimacy.

It was a masterstroke of manipulation. He wasn’t threatening her; he was offering her the very escape she craved. He knew her weakness wasn’t fear; it was her desperate, grinding sense of responsibility. He was offering to restore the life she had failed to maintain.

She looked at Sarah, whose expression had crumpled from pleading to despair. Sarah knew they were trapped.

“Send the address,” Elara said, the words feeling like a death sentence.

The address was a high-end downtown apartment building, a sleek tower of glass and steel. The air in the elevator was scented with some calming, spa-like fragrance. It was another jarring contrast, another layer of unsettling normalcy peeled back to reveal the rot underneath.

The moment the apartment door swung open, the carefully constructed illusion of the building shattered. The smell hit them first, a chemical reek that was both acrid and sickly sweet. It was ammonia and bleach, but also something else, something organic and cloying, like meat left too long in a marinade of corrosive chemicals.

The apartment itself was a chaotic shrine. The walls were covered in complex, interlocking symbols drawn in what looked like charcoal and dried blood. Strange, twisted sculptures made of wire and bone sat on every surface. The air hummed with a low, almost subsonic vibration that made Elara’s teeth ache.

And on the floor, arranged in a triangle in the center of the largest symbol, were the remains.

There were three of them. Or, what was left. They weren’t bodies. They were human-shaped puddles of viscous, grey-brown sludge. The chemicals had dissolved flesh and organ, leaving behind only the most resilient materials: a few dark lumps of bone, the glint of a dental filling, the melted plastic of a shirt button. It was a scene of total, horrifying dissolution.

Action: The sisters enter the bizarre and terrifying scene.

Elara’s professionalism, her last shield, evaporated. This was beyond any protocol. This was an abomination.

Sarah, however, seemed grimly energized by the horror. Her fear was still there, a tremor in her hands, but it was overlaid with a new, terrifying certainty. She walked slowly into the room, her eyes scanning the symbols on the walls, her expression one of dawning recognition.

“It’s a summoning circle,” she whispered, her voice a reedy thread in the humming silence. “A big one. They weren’t just practicing. They were trying to bring something through.”

“They were delusional cultists who messed up a chemical cocktail,” Elara snapped, the denial a desperate, reflexive defense. “That’s all. Let’s just… let’s just figure out how to clean this.”

But how did you clean a person who had been reduced to a stain?

While Elara tried to formulate a plan, her mind refusing to process the full scope of the scene, Sarah was drawn to a makeshift altar in the corner of the room. On it, propped open by a ceremonial dagger, was a large, leather-bound book. Its pages were yellowed parchment, covered in hand-drawn diagrams and spidery, archaic script.

Turning Point: Sarah discovers the grimoire and the name of the entity.

“Elara,” Sarah breathed, her voice shaking as she pointed to the open page. “Look.”

Elara forced herself to walk over. The page was dominated by a grotesque illustration of a swirling, black vortex filled with teeth and eyes. Around it, the text described a ritual of appeasement, of sacrifice. It spoke of opening a "conduit" for "The Hunger Below," of offering oneself to "The Mouth That Is A World." And it gave the entity a name.

Sub Terra, Sub Fame. In Nomine Manducatoris. Below the Earth, Below Fame. In the Name of The Eater.

“The Eater,” Sarah read aloud, the words falling into the room like stones into a bottomless well. “It’s a being of absolute consumption. The ritual doesn’t just summon it. It… it invites it inside you. It’s a sacrifice. They wanted this to happen.”

“It’s nonsense,” Elara said, but her voice lacked conviction. The impossible black circle from the motel bathroom flashed in her mind. David’s last moments at his breakfast table. The pieces were slotting together into a picture she didn't want to see.

She turned away from the book, back to the gruesome remains on the floor. She had to focus on the tangible, on the mess in front of her. She knelt, her sample kit in hand, and reached for the most solid-looking fragment in the nearest puddle—a piece of what looked like a human jawbone.

The moment her gloved fingers made contact, the world imploded.

Surprise: The vision hits, revealing the horrific truth of the ritual.

She wasn't Elara anymore. She was a woman in her twenties, her heart a frantic drum of ecstatic terror. Her name was Anya. She was kneeling, her two friends beside her, their voices joined with hers in a rhythmic, guttural chant. The chemical smell was the scent of transfiguration. The symbols on the walls pulsed with a faint, violet light, synchronized to the beating of her heart.

She felt it begin as a vibration in her bones, the same hum that filled the apartment, now resonating within her own marrow. The chant wasn't just words; it was a tuning fork, aligning her physical form with a frequency that was utterly alien.

There was no monster, no demon bursting into the room. There was only a presence. It blossomed in the center of the circle, a point of absolute nothingness that began to pull reality into itself. It wasn't a physical hunger; it was a metaphysical one. The Eater didn't want their flesh. It wanted their existence.

Anya felt a thrill of pure, unadulterated terror and joy. This was the apotheosis. The chant caught in her throat as a new sensation began. A tingling in her fingertips, a warmth spreading through her veins. It wasn't painful. It was… a dissolving. Her body, her very atoms, were being unwritten. She felt her skin loosen, her muscles unspooling from her bones like thread from a bobbin.

She looked at her hand and saw it turning translucent, the symbol on the floor glowing through her palm. She was being consumed from the inside out, digested by reality itself. Her last conscious thought was not one of fear, but of triumph. She was becoming part of it. She was feeding the void.

Elara was thrown back as if by a physical blow, landing hard on the floor. She gasped for air, the vision receding, leaving behind the ghost of its terrible, ecstatic finality. She scrambled backwards, away from the remains, her eyes wide with a horror that was deeper and more absolute than anything she had ever known.

Result: Elara's denial is shattered, and she now knows the supernatural threat is real.

Sarah rushed to her side, but stopped short when she saw Elara’s face. She didn’t need to ask what had happened. She could see it in her sister’s eyes.

Elara’s gaze was fixed on the grimoire, on the name scrawled beside the terrifying illustration. She could still feel the victim’s—Anya’s—joyful surrender, the feeling of being unmade for a hungry, unseen god.

Her denial was gone, dissolved just as completely as the bodies on the floor. It was all real. The sigil. The visions. Liam. It was all connected to this… this thing.

Sarah knelt beside her, her earlier anger gone, replaced by a shared, bone-deep terror. She followed Elara’s gaze to the book.

“The Eater,” Sarah whispered, and this time, it wasn't a discovery. It was an epitaph.