And on the throne sat nothing. But the nothing watched .

One day, she will run out of memories. On that day, the hunger will have to tell her a story. And that, she has always believed, will be the beginning of something new.

Then the Antler Throne sighed.

She asked for three things: a mirror of polished obsidian, a flask of the blackest mead ever fermented, and a leash made of her own mother’s woven hair. The elders, baffled and terrified, gave them to her.

Outside the mountain, the rivers run forward. The crops taste like honey. And the children dream of a woman with bee-sting scars and hawk feathers in her hair, sitting on a throne of antlers, smiling at the dark.

She sang of a princess who had no army but her scars. She sang of a hunger that was not evil, only broken—a god that had been born wrong, with a mouth but no mother, a throne but no kinship. And then she made the hunger an offer it could not refuse.

Suima uncorked the black mead and poured it over the throne. The liquid did not splash. It rose , coiling into threads of shadow and gold, and she began to weave. Her mother’s hair leash became the warp. The mead-threads became the weft. And she wove a story.

She smashed the obsidian mirror at the foot of the throne. In the shards, the hunger saw itself reflected for the first time. It had no form, but the mirror gave it one: a gaping maw with too many teeth, and behind the teeth, an infinite loneliness.