Chapter 1 – The Taste of Shadows

The taste of a maddened soul is black ash and starvation.

It slides down my throat, tearing at the tissue, fighting to remain separate from the void inside me. I crush it. My jaws snap shut, breaking the immaterial spine of the rogue shadow. The eclipse overhead bleeds a bruised purple across the sky of the Underworld, but down here on the obsidian paving stones, there is only the wet, tearing sound of my own hunger.

I shift. The scales and void-fur melt into human skin. I drop to my knees, gasping as the shadow’s final, desperate desire burns its way into my flesh. The left side of my ribs sears. I grip my side, feeling the fresh scar raise itself under my fingertips. The words etch into my bone, radiating a heat that makes my vision go white. A scream dies against my teeth. The beast inside me thrashes, fed but never satisfied, amplifying the raw, feral instinct to claim, to possess, to lock the gates of this realm so nothing can ever escape me again.

Then, the air pressure drops.

The stench of ozone and bright, sterile sunlight cuts through the smog of the black river.

I look up, wiping a smear of shadow-ichor from my mouth.

She stands at the edge of the riverbank, the dark waters parting around her boots as if terrified to touch her. Lien Chau. A magistrate of the Sun Court, wrapped in immaculate white and gold silks that have no place in my domain. In her hand, the magistrate’s eclipse-seal hums with an authorized, lethal geometry. The law of the living world pressing down on the law of the dead. She has burned a dawn—a piece of her own future lifespan—just to cross the black water and stand on my stones. The audacity of it tightens the muscles in my neck. She holds a warrant. I can see it in the rigid line of her shoulders, the absolute certainty that her court’s jurisdiction extends to the Eclipse Eater. She thinks her rules apply in the dark.

I push myself to my feet. The metallic tang of the consumed shadow lingers on my tongue, sharp and coppery.

Blood.

The smell hits the back of my throat and my breath stutters. The stone beneath me suddenly feels too cold, too vast. For a fraction of a second, I am not the queen of this realm. I am crawling on the jagged floor of the nascent Underworld, the sky darkening with the very first eclipse, listening to the echoing footsteps of the god who made me as they walked away. The silence of the gates slamming shut. The absolute, suffocating terror of being left behind.

I press my hand harder against the burning runes on my ribs, forcing the physical pain to drown out the memory. I will not be abandoned again. I own this realm. I own every shadow in it. I eat the sick ones, the starving ones, so the rest stay locked safely in my grip. No one leaves.

A crowd of shadow-citizens has gathered at the periphery of the square, their featureless faces turned toward the sun-bright intruder. They are shivering, drawn to her light but terrified of my presence.

I straighten my spine, letting the beast’s aura bleed through my human skin. Shadows elongate and snap toward me. I walk down the steps, my bare feet silent on the obsidian. I do not wipe the rest of the ichor from my chin. Let her see the monster she came to judge.

"Magistrate," I say, my voice echoing off the cavernous walls, layered with the growl of the eclipse beast. "You bring the stench of the sun into my city. Have you come to offer your remaining dawns to my citizens, or are you just lost?"

The shadows murmur, a collective hiss of anticipation. I stop a mere breath away from her, towering just slightly, forcing her to look up. I let the weight of my court—the thousands of souls I command and consume—press against her solitary, righteous stance. The authority of her sun-forged seal flickers, suddenly looking very small in the endless dark of my territory.

Lien Chau does not flinch. Her eyes, the color of a bruised sky, lock onto mine.

"I am here for you, Ta Uyen," she says, her voice a perfectly measured blade. "For the theft of three thousand shadows."

I smile, a slow, predatory baring of teeth, and raise my hand to show her the hardened, crystalline core of the shadow I just devoured—the only part of a soul that cannot be digested. I intend to crush it between my fingers to mock her warrant.

But the core pulses in my palm. The inner light of the crystal fractures, revealing a tiny, intricate sigil locked at its dead center.

I freeze. The breath leaves my lungs in a violent rush.

The sigil is an exact, flawless match to the one glowing in her hand. It bears a name, etched in the very architecture of the madness I just swallowed.

Lien Chau.