Void turned the page with steady fingers, careful not to tear the brittle edge. He had spent three months searching for texts on soul-binding. Most were fragments. Others contradicted themselves within a single paragraph. This one was different. The binding ritual spread across two pages in precise diagrams and clear instructions. He read the passage three times to be certain. The ritual required two people. One to bind. One to anchor. Both had to stand in marked positions and speak the words together. Without the anchor, the binding would collapse inward. The book made it clear in bold script: the anchor must be willing. Void closed the tome and carried it outside. Snow crunched under his boots as he walked into the clearing. He set up the ritual table exactly as the diagrams showed. Candlesticks at the four corners. The book open in the center. Then he knelt and drew the pentagram in the snow with charcoal, each line precise. He stood inside the circle and looked at the empty space across from him. The ritual was complete except for one thing. He had no one to ask. The hunger stirred in his chest, wrong as always, and he understood what the book had given him. Not a solution. A new problem.

Void walked for two days before he found anyone. The forest thinned into farmland, then a road, then a village too small to have a name. He kept moving. The hunger followed him like a second shadow, patient and wrong. He needed an anchor, but asking meant explaining what he was. The mansion appeared at dawn, glass towers rising from a pool of red snow. Blood trails led from the door in bare footprints, frozen mid-stride. Void stopped at the edge of the clearing. Someone lived here who wasn't afraid of being seen. He approached the entrance and knocked once. The door opened before his knuckles left the wood. Mary stood in the doorway holding a knife made of black glass. Void patterns swirled in the blade like smoke trapped under ice. She looked at him the way someone looks at a package they've been waiting for. "You're here for the binding," she said. Not a question. She stepped aside to let him in. "I'll be your anchor. But you need to understand the price first." Void followed her inside. The walls were mirrors, and in each one he saw himself standing alone in the pentagram he'd drawn three days ago. "How do you know what I need?" he asked. Mary set the knife on a table between them. "Because I know what you are. And binding your hunger to someone means they feel it too. Every time it rises, I'll know. Every time you push it down, I'll feel the weight." She met his eyes. "You came here wanting control. But control means letting someone else see what you're trying to hide. That's the price. Do you still want it?" Void looked at the knife, then at his reflection in the mirror wall. Mary already knew his nature. She'd known before he arrived. The hunger stirred in his chest, and for the first time, someone else was offering to carry part of it. Not to take it away. To witness it. He picked up the blade. "Yes," he said. "I still want it." Mary smiled, cold and certain. "Then we start tonight."

Mary led him to the east wing after sunset. The room was bare except for the pentagram she'd already drawn on the floor in chalk. Two circles waited inside it, one marked with his name, one with hers. She placed the black glass knife at the center and gestured for him to take his position. Void stepped into his circle and knelt. Mary took hers across from him, her hands already bleeding from cuts she must have made before he arrived. She reached for the knife and pressed it to his palm. The hunger stirred as soon as the blood hit the floor. It rose fast, searching for something to latch onto, but instead of flowing toward Mary like the ritual text promised, it turned inward. Wrong. The hunger coiled tighter, and Void felt it pull harder — not from him, but through him. Mary gasped. Her body went rigid, and the chalk lines on the floor began to glow red. Outside the window, the iron cross in the courtyard cracked down the middle. Thorned vines erupted from the split, wrapping around the stone until a carved heart appeared at the center, pierced with two black daggers. Mary's blood dripped from her nose. The hunger wasn't binding to her — it was feeding on her. Void tried to pull back, but the ritual had already started, and stopping meant the binding would collapse entirely. He watched her face go pale. At her feet, a small cloth doll tumbled from her pocket, its stitched smile unchanged even as a red pin pushed through its chest on its own. Void broke the circle. He kicked the knife away and grabbed Mary's wrist, dragging her out of the pentagram before the glow could spread further. The light died instantly. Mary collapsed against him, breathing hard. Behind them, the chalk turned to ash, and the courtyard cross stopped growing. A pile of old bones scattered near the window — skulls that had been stacked there long before tonight, now marking exactly where Mary had stood when the hunger reached for her instead of binding to her. Void looked at the burnt pentagram, then at Mary. The ritual had failed, but he'd learned something the text never mentioned: his hunger didn't want an anchor. It wanted a source. And if he tried this again without understanding why, Mary wouldn't survive it.