His belly was full, and the complaints had ceased, for he realized at last what he sought. It was food for him, and not battle.

The revelation came with a simplicity that was almost obscene amid the labyrinthine terrors through which he had wandered. For three nights he had pursued the pale thing among the ruins of the dead city, through courts where moonlight lay like old silver upon broken pavements, beneath arches whose stones were engraved with characters no living scholar could construe.

He had fought shadows that possessed claws, fled from bells that rang without towers, and listened to voices whispering his name from wells wherein there was no water. He had thought himself hunted; then hunter; then victim of some malign intelligence older than the hills. Now, with the last morsel dissolved upon his tongue, all these distinctions seemed ludicrous.

His name was Malcor Vey, and once, in the green countries beyond the western mountains, he had been a physician. He had possessed a house with red shutters, a garden of bitter herbs, and a wife whose hair was the color of ripe wheat. Those memories seemed now like the fabulous inventions of another man.

The city had stripped him of ordinary recollection, as a river strips the leaves from trees and carries them toward some invisible sea. He had entered the ruins seeking the Sepulchre of Orm, a legendary tomb said to contain the remains of a king who had conquered death and discovered, to his ultimate displeasure, that immortality was merely another form of imprisonment. Instead, Malcor had found a hunger.

The creature lay before him upon the black flagstones, or rather what remained of it. Its bones were too long for any terrestrial anatomy, and its skull possessed no visible aperture for mouth or eye.

Yet from its ruined thorax there issued a faint phosphorescence, blue as corpse-fire beneath winter ice. The radiance trembled with each breath of the wind, though the wind itself had become strangely still.

Malcor stared at the remains, and the knowledge that had come to him with the food became more terrible as he contemplated it. The thing had not been stalking him to devour him. It had been starving.

The city in which they had met possessed no name that survived upon maps. In the oldest manuscripts it was called Azhur, though whether this signified a place, a god, or a curse, Malcor could not determine.

It stood beyond the salt deserts, where the earth was ochre and violet beneath an intolerable sun, and where the bones of extinct beasts protruded from the dunes like the ribs of buried ships. No caravan went there, no bird crossed its sky, and even the wind, when it approached those accursed walls, seemed to falter, as though some invisible boundary deprived it of courage.

Malcor had gone alone, although an old priest had warned him against the journey. The priest lived in a shrine far to the west, where lamps burned day and night before a faceless idol.

His eyes were filmed with cataracts, and his tongue was black, yet his voice possessed the terrible clarity of a bell heard across snow. When Malcor told him of his intention, the old man had merely said, “Do not enter Azhur, physician, because it has already entered you.”

Malcor had laughed at the warning. He understood now that certain prophecies are not spoken to prevent an event, but merely to provide the doomed with a final opportunity for understanding.

The gates of Azhur were fashioned from a greenish stone that felt warm beneath the hand, as though some subterranean fever persisted within it. Upon the lintel was carved the likeness of a woman with seven mouths.

Her lowest mouth was open in laughter; the highest in a scream; and between them ran a procession of tiny figures, each carrying a severed head. Malcor passed beneath that image at sunset, and at once the desert disappeared.

It did not recede behind him, nor fade gradually into distance. It simply ceased to exist, as though reality itself had closed a door.

Beyond the gate lay a city beneath a sky of violet darkness, although the sun had stood above the desert only moments before. Towers rose on every side, thin and crooked, their upper stories lost in a vapor of greenish luminescence.

Bridges crossed impossible abysses, and stairways descended into walls only to emerge from ceilings far above. Windows opened upon landscapes where other cities burned beneath other moons. The air smelled of damp stone, incense, and something sweetly putrescent, like flowers blooming over a grave sealed for centuries.

The first voice spoke before Malcor had taken twenty paces. “Physician.”

He stopped and looked about him, but there was no one in the street. Again the voice called, “Physician.”

This time he saw its source: a bronze mask nailed to a door of black wood. The mask possessed a smiling mouth and eyes that had been hammered shut.

Malcor approached it and asked what it wanted. The mask smiled more widely and answered, “Nothing that you can give.”

When Malcor demanded to know where the Sepulchre of Orm lay, the mask laughed for so long that he felt the laughter entering his bones. At last it whispered, “Below.”

When he asked, “Below what?” the answer came softly: “Below hunger.”

The door opened.

Malcor entered a corridor lined with mirrors and saw himself at different ages, including several he had never lived. In one glass he was a child with silver hair; in another he was an ancient man whose flesh hung from his bones like wet parchment.

In a third, he possessed no face at all. He passed onward and found a chamber containing a tree of translucent flesh, from whose branches hung golden fruits that whispered the names of the dead.

Beyond it lay a stairway that descended for what seemed like years. At the bottom was a library where every book was bound in human skin, though the skins bore no scars and were strangely warm beneath his fingers.

There he met the old man called Edras.

Edras sat beneath a chandelier fashioned from hundreds of human teeth. He wore a robe of faded crimson, and his white beard descended almost to the floor.

His face was neither young nor old, but possessed the exhausted appearance of something that had survived too long. When Malcor asked whether he was human, Edras smiled and answered, “Once.”

Malcor then asked what had happened to him, and the old man replied, “I learned too much.”

When Malcor looked toward the endless shelves of books, Edras leaned forward and asked him what he believed to be the oldest hunger. Malcor thought of bread, flesh, wine, sleep, and finally answered, “Life.”

Edras shook his head. “Life hungers for continuation,” he said. “That is merely its habit. The oldest hunger is older than life.”

When Malcor asked what it hungered for, Edras’s eyes brightened with a dreadful amusement. “Meaning,” he whispered.

At that moment the chandelier rang.

It rang only once, but every book in the library opened simultaneously. From the pages arose a whispering multitude, and among those innumerable voices Malcor heard his own name spoken by mouths that had never possessed flesh.

He fled without another question. Behind him came the rustling of the books, followed by a sound resembling the breathing of some gigantic animal asleep beneath the foundations of the world.

After that came the creature.

He first saw it upon the roof of a ruined palace, silhouetted against a moon that was far too large and far too near. It possessed the general form of a man, but its limbs were jointed incorrectly, and its head was crowned with delicate black tendrils that moved as if immersed in invisible water.

It watched him without aggression. Yet something in its posture filled him with an instinctive terror older than reason, and he ran.

The creature followed.

Thus began the chase through Azhur. Malcor crossed terraces crusted with white fungus and wandered through gardens where flowers exhaled the perfume of freshly opened graves.

He passed statues whose stone eyes wept a dark, viscous fluid, and descended alleys where the walls murmured with the dreams of sleepers buried thousands of miles away. Once he crossed a bridge over a gulf filled with stars, believing at first that those lights shone far below him. Then one of the stars opened an eye.

He ran until his feet bled.

The creature never hurried. That was the worst of it.

It moved with the patient certainty of something without concept of distance or time. Sometimes Malcor heard its claws tapping upon the stones behind him; sometimes he saw its shadow before he saw the creature itself.

Once he turned and raised his sword, determined to end the pursuit. The being merely regarded him, and in that silent regard Malcor understood something more terrible than any threat.

The creature was frightened. It was not frightened of him. It was frightened of what pursued them both.

The final night came without darkness, for Azhur possessed no true hours. Its heavens changed according to moods incomprehensible to human chronology.

Three moons might appear at noon, while darkness could fall with the stars remaining beneath one’s feet. Malcor eventually found himself in a square at the center of which stood a fountain of black marble.

From that fountain flowed blood, thick and dark, carrying the metallic odor of fresh wounds. Upon the steps sat the creature.

Malcor drew his sword and told it that it had followed him long enough. The creature made a sound that was not speech but a low, plaintive vibration, like the moan of a beast trapped beneath ice.

Then it pointed toward the fountain. Malcor turned and saw that a door had appeared in its side.

The door was small, scarcely large enough for a child, and upon it were carved seven words in a script he could not read. Yet he understood their meaning with dreadful immediacy: That which hungers is hungry for you.

The door opened. From within came a smell that nearly unmanned him; bread, warm bread.

He stood motionless while the fragrance reached him, humble and almost painfully familiar: wheat, yeast, salt, and the faint sweetness of a crust beginning to brown. Beneath it lay the aroma of onions frying in fat and, beyond that, the richer fragrance of roasted meat.

Malcor had not smelled bread in years. His stomach contracted with such violence that he doubled over. Behind him, the creature gave another mournful cry.

“You are hungry,” Malcor whispered.

The creature lowered its head.

Then Malcor understood. The creature had not hunted him. It had been trying to lead him here.

He stepped through the door.

Beyond lay a chamber vast as a cathedral and dark as a sealed tomb. A table stretched into the distance, disappearing beneath the black vault overhead.

Upon it stood silver platters sagging beneath roasted beasts, bowls overflowing with crimson fruit, and crystal vessels containing wines of impossible colors: green as malachite, blue as midnight, gold like molten amber. The perfumes of spice, flesh, honey, cinnamon, smoke, and strange flowers mingled until the air itself seemed edible.

At the far end of the table sat a figure. Malcor could not see its face.

“Come,” it said.

Its voice was gentle, and that gentleness frightened him more than anything he had encountered in Azhur.

“What are you?” Malcor asked.

“A host.”

“For whom?”

“For the hungry.”

The figure indicated the empty chair before it. Malcor sat, though every instinct warned him that he had crossed some final threshold.

A servant approached. It resembled a man whose flesh had been polished away, leaving only a translucent anatomical structure beneath.

Without speaking, it placed a bowl before him. Inside was a thick, fragrant broth.

Malcor tasted it.

The flavor was magnificent. He tasted thyme and salt, smoke and honey, marrow and wine.

Beneath these familiar flavors lay something stranger: remembrance. He tasted his mother’s kitchen and rain upon the roof of his childhood home.

He tasted the bitter herbs of his garden, the smell of horses after a storm, and the lips of his dead wife. He began to weep, not from sorrow alone, but from the unbearable intimacy of recovering things he had believed lost forever.

The host watched him.

“More?”

“Yes.”

The bowl was filled again. Malcor ate. With every mouthful, some forgotten fragment of himself returned.

He remembered his father’s hands, the first book he had read, the sound of his own laughter, the warmth of summer orchards, the peculiar golden silence that descended upon his childhood home before a storm. He ate until memory itself became a banquet, and for the first time since entering Azhur, he felt almost human.

Then he looked at his hands. They were changing.

His fingers had grown longer. His nails had darkened. His skin had become pale and faintly translucent, and beneath it the veins appeared black as roots beneath snow.

Across the table, the creature had begun to eat. It tore into the roasted meat with desperate, animal ferocity, and as Malcor watched, understanding came upon him with the cold inevitability of a knife.

The creature had once been a man.

Perhaps every monster in Azhur had once been human. Perhaps every guest who had entered through that little door had sat at the same table, tasted the same exquisite food, recovered the same cherished memories, and eaten until the food had eaten him.

Malcor rose. The host did not prevent him.

“Where are you going?” it asked.

“Back.”

“There is no back.”

“There was.”

“Once.”

Malcor reached the door. Behind him, the host spoke his name, and he turned.

The figure still possessed no face. There was only a vast darkness where the features should have been, a darkness deeper than any shadow and apparently without end.

“Your belly is full,” it said. “Why do you still hunger?”

Malcor stood silently for a long while. At last he smiled.

He understood then that he had never been hungry for food, nor even for knowledge or life. He had hungered for certainty: the certainty that existence possessed some secret purpose beyond birth, suffering, appetite, love, decay, and death. He had crossed deserts and tombs seeking a revelation that would make the universe comprehensible.

Azhur had given him the answer. There was no answer, only hunger.

Malcor opened the door and stepped outside. The creature followed.

For a long while they stood together beneath the violet heavens and looked upon the dead city. Then Malcor heard something beneath the paving stones. It was a faint sound at first, almost inaudible beneath the sigh of the wind. Gradually it grew louder.

Chewing.

Thousands upon thousands of mouths were hidden beneath the streets, feeding upon something immense. The creature seized Malcor’s arm, and they ran.

Behind them, the towers of Azhur began to bend inward, as though the city itself had awakened and sought to devour its own foundations. The violet sky descended.

The moons opened their enormous eyes. From beneath the earth came a sound like the laughter of some forgotten deity remembering a joke told before the birth of worlds.

Malcor and his companion fled into the desert. Neither looked back.

At dawn they reached the first caravan. The merchants came across two unusual travelers by the side of the road — one was a lean physician with hollow eyes that seemed dim. The other was a pale figure dressed in tattered clothing, whose face was difficult to recall even as one was looking at it.

When the merchants asked where they had come from, Malcor merely answered, “From a place where hunger has learned to eat the dead.”

One of the merchants laughed and offered them bread. The creature seized it.

Malcor did likewise. They ate together beneath the rising sun, while the desert blazed around them in hues of copper and blood.

Neither knew that, far below the salt wastes, beneath the roots of mountains and the buried bones of vanished empires, something had stirred.

Something old, patient, that had tasted them once. And was still hungry.