Devoured: A Dark Monster Romance Novella (Pythonissam Filia), page 2
Songs rose to cut through the pain, but one was louder than the rest tonight:
When moonlight calls across the mere,
beware the Devourer drawing near.
Within the wildwood he waits alone,
to swallow you whole, blood and bone.
Strike your bargain with curse and plea,
he’ll take your price, but none go free.
So guard your sorrow, maiden fair,
lest eight-legged shadows taste despair.
“The Devourer feeds on despair,” my mother’s voice whispered in memory. “When the veil thins, he grows stronger.”
But what was the Devourer compared to this? What was one ancient hunger compared to the daily feast these monsters made of my suffering?
The men spoke around me and through me as if I were not there, discussing their plans with the casual cruelty of men who had forgotten what it meant to see suffering and feel shame.
“—stretch it out this time—”
“—the heated rod worked well last—”
“—see how long before she breaks—”
The wind rose again, and this time I heard something else in it—a calling—deep and thrumming. A new song that sounded like destruction—and satisfaction.
“She’s not listening,” one of them complained. “Look at her eyes. She’s gone somewhere else.”
A hand struck my cheek, sharp enough to bring tears, and I was dragged back to the heated floor and the circle of leering faces.
“Better,” Tiberius said, his fingers tangling in my moon-cursed hair. “We want you present for this, wife. We want you to remember every moment.”
They always did. They fed on the memory as much as the moment, taking pleasure in the way I would flinch days later at a sudden sound, at how my hands would shake when I heard their footsteps in the corridors.
But something was different this time. As Marcus pressed my face into the mosaic tiles, as Gaius’ knife traced patterns in my flesh, as hands and mouths and worse violated every boundary—something inside me began to shift.
The pain was there, sharp and immediate as always. But beneath it, something else stirred. A hunger that wasn’t mine. A rage that tasted of ancient forests and forgotten gods. When Gaius cut too deep and blood ran hot down my leg, I found myself thinking not of escape but of teeth. Of how fragile his throat looked. Of how easily it would tear.
The thought should have horrified me. Instead, it sang through my veins like ice.
“She’s not crying,” one of the strangers observed, sounding vaguely disappointed. “Usually they cry by now.”
Tiberius studied me with those cold eyes. I lay crumpled on the blood-smeared tiles, every inch of me a symphony of pain, but he was right—no tears came. Only that strange hunger, growing stronger with each heartbeat.
“Perhaps we’ve finally broken her completely,” Marcus suggested, giving me a final kick that sent white-hot agony through my ribs.
“No,” Tiberius said slowly. “No, I don’t think so.”
He crouched beside me, gripping my hair to force my head up. This close, I could see the fine lines around his eyes, could smell the wine on his breath mixed with something else—was that fear? Just a trace, but unmistakable.
“What are you thinking, wife?” he whispered. “What goes on behind those witch-eyes?”
I smiled then. I couldn’t help it. Because at that moment, with blood in my mouth and pain singing through every nerve, I knew without a doubt what I would do. I was tired of being prey. Tired of flinching at footsteps, of anticipating pain, of praying to gods who either didn’t exist or simply didn’t care. Roman gods, pagan gods—what difference did it make? None had answered my prayers for mercy or death or even simple sleep free from nightmares.
But perhaps there was another kind of prayer. Perhaps what I needed wasn’t a god at all, but a demon.
I heard it clearly—the calling from the forest. Come to me, it whispered. Come and learn what it means to be the one who devours.
I closed my eyes and let the call wash through me like dark water, drowning the sound of laughter and the bite of pain.
Devour them, I thought as the shadows deepened. Devour me.
For the first time in months, maybe years, I fought back. I swiped my nails down Tiberius’ face, and watched as small bubbles of red appeared in their path. He staggered away, his face turning ugly.
“Barbarian bitch. She’s all yours now, men.” Hands gripped harder, wrenching apart my legs as the night’s true entertainment began. But even as I let my mind flee the heated chamber and its human monsters, I held tight to that silver thread of hunger.
I wasn’t strong enough to fight them all, to even really hurt them. But there was someone who could, who would devour them all.
And in the wind’s answering howl, I heard something that might have been laughter—but not human laughter. Something unhinged and slow that spoke of hungers older than Rome, and vengeance sharper than any blade these mortal monsters could imagine.
Darkness enveloped me, cold and comforting, as I swore to myself that no matter the cost, I would have my revenge. Even if that cost was my life.
Chapter 3
Flavia
Iwoke in the early hours of the morning, my face stuck to the tiled floor with wine and dried blood. They had been drinking heavily and grown bored quickly tonight, leaving me in my state of disassociation long before the moon had set.
Marcus and the others had worn themselves out early, but Gaius had lingered. The new cuts on my arms stung, but after I’d stopped responding, he’d pulled one of the new slave girls into his room. I could still hear her faint crying in the distance.
I pushed myself up on straining limbs and hobbled over to the nearest window, flinging open the shutters.
The terrible heat of the room was cut by the frigid night air, and I gazed up at the full moon that now hung just over the treetops. It was red. A blood moon on Samhain was a sign that the spirits hungered.
The cold air bit into my wounds, but I welcomed it. Pain meant I was still alive, still capable of choice. The blood moon hung heavy above the forest, painting everything in shades of rust and shadow. When the harvest moon bleeds, the old paths reveal themselves to those who dare to walk them.
I gathered nothing but the clothes on my back. There would be no return from this journey. But I would escape. My death would be my own. My bare feet swept along the floor without a sound; years of trying to avoid notice had taught me how to move like smoke through these halls.
The villa’s eastern gate was guarded, but the guards were deep in their cups, celebrating Samhain in the Roman fashion with wine and dice rather than the proper reverence the night demanded. I slipped past them like a ghost, my pale hair covered with a stolen cloak.
The lake stretched before me, its surface turned to molten copper under the blood moon’s gaze. I didn’t pause at its shore this time. The calling came from deeper, from the ancient heart of the forest where Roman roads feared to venture. I skirted the water’s edge, following game trails and clinging to the shadows.
The tree line loomed overhead, but as I drew closer, something shifted. There—between two massive oaks—a gap that shouldn’t exist. The darkness there was different, older, breathing with its own rhythm. And at its threshold, I saw them: the marker stones.
Three standing stones, each no higher than my knee, worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. But the symbols carved into them were still clear in the blood moon’s light—spirals and serpents and eight-legged shapes that seemed to dance in the moonlight.
The old paths remember those who remember them, mother had whispered. Blood calls to blood, hunger to hunger.
Between the stones, the forest floor was different. Where everywhere else lay thick with fallen leaves and undergrowth, here was a path of packed earth, worn smooth by pilgrims on a doomed quest. How long had it been since someone had last walked this path, heading straight to their demise?
I knelt at the threshold, my wounds singing in pain, and placed one trembling hand on the center stone. The carved spider seemed to pulse beneath my palm, and for a moment I could have sworn I felt it move, eight legs shifting in welcome—or warning.
The wind rose then and the trees groaned and swayed, their branches creating a tunnel of shadow over the hidden path.
Behind me, I heard the distant sounds of the villa—a shout of laughter, the crash of something breaking, a servant girl’s muffled sobs carrying on the night air. Ahead lay only darkness and the promise of something worse than death.
Or perhaps, something better than the slow dying I’d endured for so long.
I rose on unsteady legs, pulled the cloak tighter around my shoulders, and stepped between the stones onto the ancient path. The moment my feet touched that strangely warm earth, the sounds of the Roman world faded as if swallowed by thick wool. There was only the forest now, only the blood moon’s light filtering through branches that seemed to reach for me with grasping fingers.
The path wound into the darkness like a snake losing itself in the long grass. Each turn was obscured by the trees before it, and the part of my mind that was always looking for danger was screaming. My body knew I wasn’t Flavia. I was prey.
The woods were loud, the leaf litter rustling with the sound of thousands of small feet. Creatures of all manner watched me from the darkness, and I felt the pressure of thousands of tiny glowing eyes.
What a fool you are, they seemed to say. Turn back while you still can.
The moonlight solidified into silver threads, guiding me forward. Guiding me to my doom—and my salvation.
They wound deeper still, past trees whose trunks were wider than the villa’s walls, their bark etched with symbols that I didn’t understand, but I didn’t need to know their meaning to comprehend their power; spirals and knots that spoke of old magic, more wild than these woods.
Between the trees, small lights danced. Will o’ the wisps, calling me deeper. They were old magic spirits, and I found comfort in them. Had they come out to see me to my journey’s end? My heart slowed, and the panic that had been rising in my chest subsided. The magic of my mother’s people was all around me. A small comfort, but it was a comfort none-the-less.
I followed the glowing trail, and white flowers started to litter the forest floor. In the pale moonlight, I couldn’t identify them. They glittered in the silver light of the moon, delicate petals scattered like offerings. I stepped carefully among them, not wanting to disturb their fragile beauty.
The lights danced closer, weaving between the trees. I reached out to one, enchanted by its golden glow, and my fingers brushed against something I couldn’t see. Something thin and sticky pulled at my hand.
I jerked back, but more strands caught my arm, my shoulder. The dancing lights weren’t wisps at all—they were fireflies, dozens of them, trapped in threads so fine they were nearly invisible. Their struggles made them flicker and dance, creating the illusion of guiding spirits.
The white flowers beneath my feet crunched wrong. Too hard for petals. I looked down and my stomach turned—not flowers but bones, small ones, scattered and bleached by time. Bird bones, rodent bones, all who had once been caught in this trap. Just as I had.
I tried to retreat but more threads ensnared me—in my hair, across my waist, tangling my legs. The silver moonlight hadn’t been a beautiful shadow. It had been illuminating a web so vast it filled the spaces between trees, so perfectly woven it appeared as a mere trick of light until you were already caught.
I thrashed, tearing through the silk with desperate strength. The threads were stronger than they looked, but they gave way under my frantic pulling. Fireflies tumbled free around me, their light fading as they fled. More web caught me even as I destroyed it, and I realized with growing horror that I was moving deeper, not escaping.
The ground suddenly wasn’t there.
I plunged through the curtain of web into open space, landing hard on ground carpeted thick with bones—not small ones now, but human-sized, some still wrapped in tattered cloth. The impact drove the air from my lungs, and I lay gasping among the dead, looking up at a dome of silver silk that blocked out the stars.
The web above was a masterwork of predatory artistry. Threads as thick as rope formed the main structure, while finer strands wove between them in geometric patterns that bordered on artistic. And caught in this deadly masterpiece, cocoons of wrapped silk. Some small, some the size of boar and some…some very distinctly human shaped. Dozens of these victims hung over my head, the web still singing with vibrations from my fall, and from somewhere in the shadows came a sound like laughter—or just the wind through old, hollow bones.
I had found my destination, though not as I’d intended. The hunter’s grove had caught its newest prey.
I stood in the center of that terrible beauty, surrounded by the remains of whoever had come before me, and felt the weight of ancient eyes upon my skin. I understood with crystal clarity that I had been guided here as surely as any fly drawn to its doom.
But I was no unwilling victim. I had come seeking this place, seeking him. And as the shadows between the trees began to shift and coalesce into something that might have been a figure, I lifted my chin and spoke the name my mother had whispered in the old tongue.
“Ysu.”
The web above shivered in response, and from the darkness came that same sound, but now it was clearly a deep, amused chuckle.
It was accompanied by the scurry of one thousand jointed legs, and the forest floor around me moved in waves as spiders all scurried away from the darkness looming before me.
“What prey has wandered into my web tonight?” A deep voice echoed from the space between the trees before me, so deep I could feel it in my bones.
“I come to make a bargain with you, Devourer.”
The darkness between the ancient oaks shifted, and he emerged from that primordial shadow.
The spiders that had carpeted the bone-strewn ground continued to part before him like subjects before a sovereign. Some were as large as dinner plates, others no bigger than coins, but all fled with the same urgent reverence.
When he finally stepped into the grove’s spectral light, I understood why my mother’s stories had always ended in warnings.
The Devourer stood taller than any man should, his frame broad in ways that suggested not mere muscle but something denser, more substantial than mortal flesh should be. His skin held the greyish pallor of deep cave mushrooms, of things that grew in spaces where sunlight was merely rumor. But it was the marks that drew my eye—black patterns that crawled across his exposed flesh like living things, organic whorls and spirals that seemed to shift when I wasn’t looking directly at them. They weren’t tattoos or scars but something integral to his being, as if darkness itself had taken root beneath his skin and bloomed into these terrible designs.
His face might have been handsome once, in the way that ancient gods possessed a cruel beauty. Sharp cheekbones cast shadows that seemed too deep for the available light, and his jaw held a deep angular severity. But his mouth—his mouth was too wide, the corners extending just slightly beyond where human anatomy should have allowed, giving every expression a manic cast that made my stomach clench in trepidation.
A dark robe draped over his shoulders, hung with an unnatural stillness despite the night breeze that stirred the leaves above, and something about its drape suggested it concealed more than it revealed. The way it bunched at odd angles, the subtle movement beneath its folds that didn’t match his visible motions—my mind shied away from what else it might hide.
He settled onto an ancient stump that nature had carved into something resembling a throne, the wood so old it had taken on the quality of stone. The ease with which he claimed it, the way his presence seemed to transform dead wood into a seat of power, spoke of centuries of dominion. His thick legs crossed with casual elegance, but even in repose, he radiated the coiled potential of a predator merely choosing not to strike.
Yet it was his eyes that truly betrayed his nature. In the glow of his web, they appeared almost entirely black, but as he tilted his head to study me, I caught glimpses of something worse—pupils that reflected light like a cat’s, with the same slit pupil. When he blinked, it wasn’t quite synchronized, as if multiple sets of eyes shared the same sockets, taking turns to observe the world from behind that almost-human face.
“A bargain.” His voice, when he spoke again, carried harmonics that resonated in my chest cavity. “How refreshingly direct. Most who find their way here merely scream or beg. Tell me, little human, what it is you desire from me?”
He looked down at me, resting his chin on one hand, his face cracked into that too wide grin.
“Revenge.”
Those unnatural eyes surveyed me. “Revenge? How very human. And who has wronged you so deeply that you would seek me out?”
My fists balled at my side. “My husband, and his men.”
“Ah, yes I thought I smelled those Roman fools on you. So the pretty little human is married to a brute.” He held so unnaturally still, a spider waiting for me to fall into his trap. “And you desire my aid in what? Killing them all?”
“Yes.” I didn’t break eye contact with him, despite how very wrong those black eyes were.
“You come here seeking a boon, but carry no purse or treasures. I wonder…what is it you intend to trade with me?”
The grin that split his face told me that he knew what I intended, but wanted me to debase myself by saying it. Fine, I would play his game. Any shame I had was burned away by my husband long ago.
“I trade myself. I offer myself as your bride.”
Chapter 4
Flavia
There was a long pause, and then he laughed. It was a slow, mocking laugh that rumbled deep in my belly as heat and something much darker mixed.
