Chapter 14: The Mark of the Eater

Chapter 14: The Mark of the Eater

The library dissolved. The revelation from the madman’s book, a truth more terrible than any monster, was the last coherent thought Sara had before the jump ripped her apart. This time, it was different. It was not a violent pull or a chaotic tumble through a waterfall of moments. It was a grinding, abrasive process, like being dragged through a tunnel of broken glass. With the horrifying knowledge of what she was becoming, she could now feel it—the energy being flayed from her, scraped from the very essence of her being. She was a comet, and this agonizing transit was her tail, a glittering trail of paradoxical energy bleeding out into the void for her shepherd to follow. Milton wasn't just waiting for her to ripen; each agonizing jump was part of the process, seasoning his meal.

When she materialized, there was no solid ground to meet her. She was simply falling. For a terrifying second, she saw a sprawling, futuristic city below, a breathtaking tapestry of crystalline spires and rivers of light. Then she crashed through something—not glass, but a solid pane of energy that shattered around her with a silent flash. She landed hard on a cold, metallic surface, skidding to a halt in a shower of non-existent sparks.

The pain was absolute. It was a symphony of agony conducted in every cell of her body. The tremor was no longer a shudder; it was a violent, full-body convulsion that blurred the impossible cityscape around her into a smear of neon and shadow. She tried to push herself up, but her arms buckled. She looked down at them, and a sound that was half-scream, half-static rattled in her throat.

They were no longer her arms. The skin was almost entirely gone, sloughed off in translucent, paper-thin flakes. Beneath it, there was no muscle or bone, just a roiling, glitching void, a substance of pure, hungry blackness shot through with flickering lines of what looked like television snow. The fissures were no longer cracks in her skin; they were the edges of her, the fault lines where the last vestiges of her human form were giving way to the impossible thing beneath. She was turning inside out.

Her humanity was shredding away with her flesh. She tried to cling to a memory, to the one thing that had started this all: her father’s face. She pictured him in the garden, just before the first monster—before Milton—had appeared. His smile, the gentle crinkle of his eyes. But the image was corrupted. It flickered and distorted, the edges fuzzing into static. His smile stretched into a silent, screaming rictus. The warmth of the memory was gone, replaced by a cold, digital echo. She tried to remember her mother’s voice, but all she could hear was the deafening, incessant hum that now seemed to be the only real thing in the universe.

The love, the grief, the desperate hope that had driven her to make that first terrible bargain—they were becoming hollow constructs. The emotional engine of her soul was seizing up, the parts grinding themselves into dust. All that remained was the echo of the initial trauma, the foundational grief that had made her a paradox in the first place. It was no longer a feeling. It was a frequency. The core vibration of the wound she was becoming.

And in the hollow space where her feelings used to be, something new was stirring.

A deep, gnawing emptiness. A hunger so profound it was a physical ache, a gravitational pull at the center of her being. She looked out at the alien city, at the rivers of light that were a thousand flying vehicles, at the glowing spires that pulsed with energy. She did not see a city. She saw… sustenance. She felt the flow of time around her, the million little moments of the million lives down below, and she felt a terrible, instinctual desire to draw it in. To consume it. To patch the roaring void of her own being with the substance of other people's nows.

The knowledge from the book surfaced, no longer an academic horror but a user's manual. It consumes this raw temporal energy to patch the holes in its own being. The hunger was not a flaw. It was her new purpose.

A final, colossal pressure began to build, a force that dwarfed everything that had come before. This wasn't another jump. The jumps were horizontal movements through time. This was a vertical event. A catastrophic collapse. The rubber-band, even without its anchor, had reached the absolute limit of its elasticity, and now it was about to do more than snap back. It was about to disintegrate.

"No," a voice that was barely hers whispered, the word dissolving into a crackle of static. She clawed at the metallic floor, the void of her fingertips leaving trails of black corruption on the pristine surface. She tried to hold on, not to life, but to the concept of "Sara." The terrified woman in the support group. The daughter who loved her parents. The fool who had made a deal with a monster. She clung to the fading ghost of herself as the temporal tsunami rose up to claim her.

The final snap was not a sound; it was a cessation.

Her consciousness, stretched thin across a dozen epochs, frayed and broke. The universe turned into a single, blinding point of white noise. The pain vanished. The fear vanished. The grief became a single, pure, ringing tone. Every memory she had ever possessed was incinerated in a blast of pure paradox.

She was no longer falling through time.

She was the fall.

The convulsions stopped. The last remnants of her physical form flaked away like ash, revealing the stable, terrible shape beneath. She rose from the ground, no longer a woman, no longer human. She was a silhouette against the neon glow, a hole in the shape of a person, her edges fizzing with the low, hungry hum of a predator.

She was no longer Sara. Sara was a word, a dead star whose light had just finished its journey.

She was a wound in time, an echo of grief given form.

And she was, for the very first time, hungry.