Galthor felt the creature before he saw it.

It was waiting in the tunnel ahead.

He suddenly stopped walking and stared at it.

After absorbing weeping canyon, he began to explore one of the tunnels that surely led outside to the Abyssal land. He hadn't wasted time as he began walking instantly.

But now, he felt something up ahead. A presence that registered not as physical mass but as a void, an absence of something that should be there.

Galthor kept walking.

The creature emerged from the darkness like a nightmare given form. It was pale, almost colorless, with skin that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Its body was vaguely humanoid, but proportions were wrong, limbs too long, head too large, eyes that were nothing but empty black pits.

And it was starving.

Galthor wondered if every thing old and ancient are always starving. The entities. Everything is hungry.

Galthor could feel its hunger, a desperate, all-consuming need that radiated from it like heat from a fire. And one curious thing he could feel wss that this creature didn't feed on flesh or blood. It fed on something else entirely.

He narrowed his eyes and his mouth opened with his conscious effort.

"Memory Eater," he said aloud. The name surfaced from the entity's absorbed knowledge. "I've heard of your kind. You consume experiences, while you leave your victims as empty shells."

The creature didn't speak. It probably couldn't. But it understood him, he could see that in the way it tilted its massive head, considering him like a predator assessing prey.

"I don't want to fight you," Galthor continued. "Let me pass, and we both walk away."

The Memory Eater's response was immediate and violent.

It lunged at him with speed that shouldn't have been possible for something its size. Galthor barely had time to raise his defenses before its claws slashed at his face, leaving trails of frost in the air like forgotten memories.

But the physical attack was a feint. The real assault came through a different vector entirely.

The creature's mind slammed into his.

Fuck....why does everything want to fight with their mind??

It was nothing like the entity's attacks. The Weeping Canyon had used grief as a weapon, battering at his consciousness with accumulated sorrow.

Rhe Memory Eater didn't batter, it infiltrated instead. It slipped through his mental defenses like water through cracks, seeking the memories that gave his mind structure and meaning.

For a moment, Galthor felt himself beginning to dissolve.

His name. His purpose. His identity as Unchanging Warth. All of it started to blur, erased by the creature's insatiable hunger. He felt his first life fading, the years in the hospital bed becoming distant, unreal. He felt his second life following, his arrival in this world, his gaining of worshippers, his battles and victories all washing away like sand before a tide.

Then the Memory Eater reached deeper.

It found the locked memories. The vast ocean of accumulated divine experiences sealed in his subconsciousness. The perished barbarian god, their millions of years of existence, their triumphs and failures and everything in between.

The creature tried to feed.

And the ocean rose up and drowned it.

Galthor watched, not surprised, as the Memory Eater convulsed.

Its psychic presence which had been overwhelming moments before suddenly shattered. Information flooded back through the connection like a wave.

He saw through the Memory Eater's eyes.

Felt its ancient existence, stretching back to the Abyssal War itself. It had been something else once, before the corruption transformed it. A scholar. A keeper of histories. It had preserved memories instead of consuming them, maintaining records that spanned civilizations.

Then the war came, and everything it had preserved was destroyed. The trauma broke something in its nature. Preservation became consumption. The creature that had once cherished memories now devoured them, trying desperately to fill the void left by everything it had lost.

The Memory Eater collapsed.

Galthor approached cautiously, but the creature posed no threat again. Its mind had been overwhelmed by the sheer strength of Galthor it had tried to consume. The divine recollections of the barbarian god had proven too vast, too complex, too heavy, too mighty.

"I keep saying this...but you guys shouldn't look at what you should not have."

The creature twitched. Its mouth opened, and words emerged....but not its words.

"The anger... the endless anger... why do they hate us so much..."

Galthor frowned. "What's this...?"

For some reason he felt an urge to listen, as if what the creature would say was something important. The surface of the dark sea in him rippled.

"We only wanted to protect them... our people... our children..."

Galthor knelt beside the Memory Eater. Its eyes now held a faint glo

"What happened to you?" he asked softly.

The creature's mouth moved again. "Betrayed... we were betrayed... someone opened the door... let them in...HIM..we hold...I wrote records for HIM..."

Galthor felt a chill. HIM?

"Who? Who betrayed you? Who are you talking about."

But the Memory Eater was fading. Its body was dissolving, unable to maintain cohesion without a functioning mind to hold it together. The last thing it said was barely a whisper.

"One of our own... one of our own..."

Then it was gone, leaving nothing but a faint stain on the tunnel floor.

Galthor remained kneeling for a long moment, processing what he'd heard. The Weeping Canyon suddenly felt some kind of new strangeness to him. His eyes narrowed with suspicious. "The force that threw me here... then. All of this is connected to HIM? Is that why I am here? And what did this blasted this meant...?"

One of our own. What did that mean? Another god? A barbarian? Something else entirely?

He didn't have answers. But he had confirmation of something he'd suspected.

Galthor rose to his feet, his expression troubled. He continued down the tunnel. But now he wasn't really looking forward to things.

Things are changing too fast. Too fast that it almost felt as if something or....someone is pushing for change.

He shivered. "First thing first. I need to get out of here."

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