The appetite was not hunger for blood or memory or syllables.

It was hunger for continuity itself.

The origin-wound, taught too well how to require real-time payment, turned its new attention outward through every living link in the eight-syllable name. Zelda felt it first as a slow, inexorable pull behind the sternum—the sensation of a garden deciding that fallow was no longer a permitted season. The three children stiffened in the same breath. The pup’s restored early memories flared in sudden protective panic. The girl’s futures compressed into a narrow corridor of forced tending. The gold-eyed boy’s small hand clamped hard enough to bruise as the seventh and eighth syllables...