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It was greener now. The scars on the land had healed under layers of grass and time, but the memory of the famine still lingered, a vibration of old hunger that resonated with my own. The stone walls that lined the fields, stacked by hands long since turned to dust, were still the same. The rain still fell with the same relentless, soaking misery that had washed the celestial blood from our broken backs.

Nothing had changed really—just the nature of the hunger.

We walked until the land itself seemed to buckle and fold inward, the green hills rolling like waves and hiding their secrets beneath layers of moss and mist. Oweynagat waited for us not as a grand entrance but as a muddy, gasping throat in the earth. It was the Cave of the Cats, a place where the veil between the mortal world and the Verdant Courts was worn so thin it was little more than a translucent membrane.

Leta went first, her small form sliding into the darkness with ease. I followed, and the descent was a suffocation, a physical manifestation of the crushing weight that had settled upon my soul since the moment I signed my name in blood on Malakar’s parchment.

The mud was slick and cloying, smelling of rot and stagnant water. It coated my hands and knees as I crawled through the narrowing passage. It felt as though the earth was trying to digest me, to swallow my existence whole.

There was no light here, only the pressing, absolute dark that mirrored the hollowness inside my chest. It did not frighten me though because I carried a deeper colder night within my own ribs.

When the tunnel finally widened, it did not open into a cavern of glittering crystals or wondrous sights but into a twilight realm of twisted roots and phosphorous fungi that glowed with a bruised violet light. The air was thick. It had the perfume of a kingdom that had been starving for eons.

Since we had crossed the threshold, we were in the underbelly of the Verdant Courts, the domain of the unseelie. Here, trees were petrified bones and weeping willows, their leaves as sharp as glass and softly chiming in a wind that smelled of old blood.

The court did not assemble to meet us. Instead, it emerged from the shadows like a fever dream taking shape. They were beautiful, yes, but they were a beauty sharpened by hunger, honed to a razor’s edge by centuries of deprivation. Fae with skin like polished obsidian and eyes like pools of quicksilver watched from the gnarled branches, their ribs pressing against their attire and their movements fluid but desperate.

The forest conspired. The ancient oaks shifted their stances, their roots dragging through the deep soil to reshape the ground. Branches that had clawed at the sky now bowed, knitting together to form a vaulted ceiling of living timber that shut out the gray light. The air grew heavy and stagnant, smelling of crushed leaves and ancient blood. The chaotic undergrowth receded, smoothing into a floor of polished ebony that reflected the pale, hungry faces watching us from the shadows.

The wilderness itself had warped into a mockery of civilization.

Tables grew from the earth like mushrooms, long and banquet ready, though they held nothing but dust and tarnished silver goblets. And at the center of it all, seated on a throne carved from the skull of some primordial beast, sat the unseelie king.

He was a towering figure, his skin the color of a bruised plum. His hair was a cascading waterfall of black spider silk that floated around him as if he was suspended in water. His crown was a wreath of iron thorns that wept black ichor down his temples.

Leta stepped forward and bowed low, her voice a respectful murmur that echoed in the silent court. She presented me not as a guest but as a solution to a problem.

Mud-streaked and hollow, I stood before King Donn, my soul heavy with the damp of the mortal world. I did not bow. I had bowed enough. I had knelt before angels and demons, and it had gotten me nothing but scars. So, I met the king’s gaze instead, his eyes a swirling nebula of stars.

He drifted from his throne like smoke, his movements silent. He circled me, and his long clawed fingers reached out to brush the air around my skin. He then inhaled, a sound like a drowning gasp, and his eyes widened with predatory excitement.

“You are a hole in the world, Daughter of Michael,” he whispered, his voice a chorus of snapping twigs. “A breach.”

“I am empty,” I replied, my voice flat.

“No,” the king said, his smile revealing teeth that were too many and too sharp. “You are a vessel. The tribunal locked the doors to the soul stream. Built walls of light we cannot cross to preserve Limbo. They starved us to keep us weak, to keep the balance tipped in their favor. But you…you are the space between.” He reached out and touched my chest, his finger as cold as winter. “You can walk where we cannot. Can slip through the cracks. You can cross the barriers, go into the spaces where souls drift before they are collected. You can be the thief in the night. Pure void is unburdened by walls or barriers.”

The realization settled over me, cold and inevitable. Leta had been right. I was not a warrior here nor a refugee. I was a tool. A utensil. The straw through which a starving kingdom could drink.

“I can hunt,” I said, the words tasting of iron.

“You can help feed my people,” he purred. “And in return, we will hide you. We will wrap you in shadows so deep that even the archangels’ eyes cannot penetrate them. You will be a ghost in their court, a legend in ours. You can be the soul hunter.”

I accepted. I did not hesitate.

There was no moral debate left in me, no lingering attachment to the sanctity of the soul. I had seen what the “righteous” did with souls—torture them, barter them, and use them as batteries. Why should the unseelie starve while the Limbo gorged?

The caves became my home. I did not stay in the king’s palace because I preferred the solitude of the tunnels, the quiet dark where the only sound was the dripping of water and the beating of my own treacherous heart. I found other entrances, other thin places in the earth—a sea cave in Cornwall where the tide roared like a dying dragon, a fissure in the Black Forest that smelled of pine and fear, a cellar in Paris that had once been a catacomb—and I claimed them. Warded them with my strange void-touched magic.

And then I hunted.

It became a rhythm, a grim necessity. I would slip through the veil, and I would find them—the souls of the wicked, the lost, and the bounties posted by the king for exiles who had fled his court. I snatched them from the air, from the bodies of the dying, carried them back across the threshold, their essence humming against my skin, and fed the court. I watched the fae grow stronger, their magic thickening the air, until the Verdant Courts began to resemble what could terrify the seelie again.

Years bled into decades. The worlds above changed—wars began and ended, cities rose and fell—in a frantic blur. But in the caves, time was a stagnant pool.

I watched the courts’ politics shift. The seelie, once so arrogant in their towers of light, sent ambassadors to the unseelie. I saw them, tall and glittering, walking through the twilight woods with forced smiles and offering treaties and alliances with their desperation hidden under layers of silk and protocol. They feared the rising power, never realizing that the power came from the broken thing they had cast out. The shit was the same everywhere. It was all just a game of power, a cycle of corruption.

I existed. I survived. I did not live.