“A Void Wyrm.” Matter’s eyes lock onto his. “An entity from the threshold where the Astral frays into older, hungrier things. It doesn’t kill cleanly. It unthreads a life. Your fate. Your fortune. The fortunes of everyone karmically tied to you. Every avenue by which your circumstances might improve.”
Aster laughs once, sharp and joyless. “Right. Of course. We’ve passed complicated and gone straight into cosmic identity theft.”
Matter ignores that.
“When the Forgotten first crossed into the Astral Plane in their dreams. It killed a lot of them. The place was a storm of raw thought and predator instinct—nothing stable, nothing human. They had no defences and were cursed to return every night to fight for their lives. Over and over again, for generations… that was, until they discovered something that changed that, Faith.”
He says the word like it deserves a capital letter.
“Faith is different from the psychic muck that leaks out of humans every second. All the emotional runoff leaking into the Cradle—is one kind of energy. Faith is another. More potent. More stable. It’s what forms when enough human belief condenses around an idea and gives it weight.”
“Faith is focused belief. Pure, condensed meaning. When humans collectively agree that something has value—whether it’s a god, a law, or a shiny bit of metal—that belief crystallizes in the Astral as energy. Power.”
Aster’s brow furrows.
“Religion?” he says slowly. “Like prayer?”
“Yes. Worship. Devotion. Collective belief. The Forgotten learned to anchor it into idols, totems, and constructs—things that could collect and hold Faith like reservoirs. It gave them leverage against the Astral. Let them carve out stable territories, push back against the chaos—domesticate it. That’s how they survived.”
He pauses, giving Aster a beat to digest it before continuing.
“And as our species grew, they industrialized it. Religion became a mass-production engine for Faith. Every prayer, every act of devotion, every ritual added fuel to their strength on the Astral side. It was humanity’s first real foothold in this realm.”
Aster lets out a low whistle, half in awe, half in horror.
“So… religion is basically an Astral battery farm.”
Matter doesn’t smile, but the flicker in his eye says: Now you’re getting it.
“Yes. And later, as human civilization advanced, they stumbled onto another source of Faith production without even realizing it….”
Aster narrows his eyes. “Please don’t say capitalism.”
Matter doesn’t smile. “Money.”
Aster groans.
“Think about it. A gold coin has no intrinsic value. It only works because people believe it has worth. That belief, spread across billions, feeds the Astral Plane with the same kind of energy that prayers are capable of. Faith doesn’t care if it’s born from a god or the stock market. Belief is belief.”
Aster’s chest tightens as the implications hit.
“So every cent in my bank account… has a kind of Astral echo?”
Matter’s lips press into a thin line.
“Yes. Your bank balance, your house, your job status—every material thing that gains its power from human consensus that it holds value—creates an equal exchange of value in Faith. And when someone spends or uses that Faith on the Astral side…”
He draws a breath through his nose, voice going dark.
“Fate intervenes to balance the books.”
Aster’s skin prickles. “Meaning…?”
Matter’s gaze pins him.
“Meaning if you spend that Faith—use that power—the Material Plane takes it back. Maybe you lose your job. Maybe your roof collapses. Maybe you get sick. Fate finds a way to equalize the value. Every time.”
Aster’s mouth goes dry as he finally gets it.
“So if someone, say, me, had their life fall apart—financially, career-wise, physically—over and over again… that would mean…”
Matter’s voice drops to a quiet growl.
“That something is draining your Faith constantly. Feeding off it. And in your case, it’s the thing buried in your chest—a Void Wyrm.”
Aster staggers back like he’s been punched.
“This thing… has been feeding on me my whole life?”
Matter doesn’t soften it or offer some gentler version for civilian consumption.
“The Wyrm feeds off the Faith of the Host, corrupting their fate and souring their luck. The symptoms start small. Missed chances. Failed ventures. Deals collapsing under pressure. Then it escalates. Fortunes disappear. Bodies break down. Entire bloodlines get bled dry.”
Aster can’t breathe properly.
His whole life begins to rearrange itself in his head, every disaster slotting into place with obscene, horrifying precision.
The failed jobs.
The business collapse.
The endless sickness.
The foreclosures.
The feeling—always—that something was waiting just around the corner to take the next thing too.
Matter keeps talking, because apparently there are still fresh layers of horror to excavate.
“When it has drained enough Faith,” he says, “the Wyrm reaches chrysalis. That happens when the host’s spirit matures—usually around twenty-one. At that point it tears free, devours what remains of the host, and forces a breach between the planes.”
Aster’s mouth goes dry.
“My birthday.”
Matter nods.
“Yes.”
The words don’t feel real.
Neither does the rest of it.
Matter exhales through his nose. “The things that chased you when you left the house—the metal hounds, the sirens—those were Wyrm-Eaters tasked to eliminate the parasite and its host.”
Aster drags his gaze up.
“They are manmade construct predators. Flesh, bone, and machine spliced together and tuned to detect Void distortion. A growing Wyrm bends probability around it. It warps fate. The Eaters can sense that. The sirens coordinate them. That’s why more kept arriving after you were discovered.”
Aster rubs both hands over his face. “So I’m basically carrying a magical distress beacon for cosmic hell hounds.”
“More or less.”
“And who made them?”
Matter’s jaw tightens.
“The Aware didn’t build them for charity.”
The answer settles like poison.
“There’s an organisation,” Matter says after a pause. “Officially sanctioned by the Celestial Council. Their stated purpose is to identify Void infections before chrysalis and eliminate them. They’ve done so for generations.”
Aster waits.
“They’re called the Void Hunters.”
That sounds exactly as reassuring as it should.
“The families who control them,” Matter continues, “have access to infected hosts, chrysalis-stage entities, failed extractions—things no one else gets near to. Too much access. Too little oversight. This isn’t exactly public knowledge, but there is a growing link between them and the infections…”
Aster’s eyes narrow. “So the people hunting the thing in me might also be the people who put it there.”
“I think the families involved in hunting the Wyrm and the families involved in breeding, trafficking, or weaponizing it overlap more than anyone wants to admit.” Matter’s expression darkens.
Aster goes very still.
The silence that follows is ugly and heavy.
“If anyone comes to you wearing authority,” Matter says, “offering protection, offering management, offering to take this burden off your hands—you ask who profits from controlling what’s inside you. And whatever you do, don’t trust the Mesha family, they aren’t all directly involved but their fingerprint is all over the infection, yours particularly”
Aster says nothing.
He can’t.
Because now every catastrophe of his life has shape. Intention. Teeth.
This wasn’t random.
It wasn’t life being cruel in the generalised, impersonal way life usually is.
It was engineered.
Systematic.
Predatory.
Matter watches him absorb it, then speaks again, quieter now.
“The Wyrm started with your family’s money,” he says. “Drained it over years. You probably remember moving from bigger houses to smaller ones. Things getting tighter. Your parents cutting corners you pretended not to notice.”
Aster’s throat closes.
He doesn’t answer.
Doesn’t need to.
He remembers.
Matter’s next words hit harder.
“After the money,” he says, “it moved on to their health.”
Aster stops breathing.
“It killed your mother. Then your father. Then everyone else in both family lines it could reach through karmic connection.”
Something inside Aster folds in on itself.
His father’s face flashes in his mind—tired eyes, worn hands, the look of a man permanently trying to hold a collapsing roof up by himself.
And now there’s a reason for that too.
They’d been dying by inches because of him.
No—not because of him. Because of the thing inside him. But his body doesn’t care about the distinction. Guilt lands anyway, hot, immediate and vicious.
Across from him, Matter’s face is tight with strain. His eyes look suspiciously bright, though he blinks it away with visible irritation.
“Your father made me promise,” he says, voice roughening, “that I’d keep you alive long enough to break this thing. I did what I could. I redirected what I could. Wove small pockets of fortune where I could to keep the Wyrm fed without letting it finish you. But it’s not enough anymore.”
His hands clench.
“Your new house. Your bank account. Whatever stability I’ve managed to pile around you—it won’t hold for long. Maybe a year, if you were very lucky.”
Aster lets out a laugh that sounds wrong even to him. “And I assume I’m not.”
Matter’s expression doesn’t budge.
“No. You’re not.”
Aster closes his eyes.
For one deranged second he wants to laugh hysterically until his lungs give out. For another, he wants to throw up. For a third, he wants to crawl back into the attic and pretend he never lit the pipe.
Instead he says, “So what’s the fix?”
Matter is quiet for a beat.
“There’s one shot.”
Aster opens his eyes.
Matter steps closer, voice lowering.
“I can try to integrate the Wyrm into your Astral Vessel before it hatches. Bind it into you rather than letting it erupt out of you. A ritual surgery. Dangerous. Experimental. Completely untested. But if it works, you live.”
Aster stares at him.
“You wouldn’t just survive. You’d inherit it. Control it. And with it, the dormant legacy your parents hid away for you to inherent.”
Aster blinks.
Then laughs.
It’s not a happy sound.
“That’s your plan?”
Matter’s expression hardens. “Yes.”
“You’re telling me I’ve got a cosmic tapeworm in my chest and your proposed solution is magical chest surgery.”
“Yes.”
“Do you hear yourself?”
Matter opens his mouth.
Aster barrels on.
“Because from where I’m standing, this sounds less like salvation and more like the most ambitious organ trafficking scam in human history.”
Matter stares at him.
Actually stares.
“How,” he says at last, voice climbing half an octave, “how in the everloving fuck did you get organ trafficking from any of that?”
Aster throws up his hands. “I don’t know, Matter, maybe the part where the mysterious attic wizard explains that my life has been ruined by a secret monster and the only cure is to let him cut me open? That felt like a clue.”
“For fuck’s sake.”
Aster is already backing away.
“Nope. I’m done. Thanks for the psychosis, the existential collapse, and the demon capitalism lecture, but I’m out.”
He makes it exactly three steps.
“Don’t panic,” Matter mutters.
Then he slams a hand against Aster’s chest.
And the world tears open.
One second Aster’s on the roof.
The next he’s nowhere.
Or everywhere.
Or inside something so catastrophically wrong his brain stops trying to classify it.
The thing in front of him is the size of a mountain and somehow still gives the impression of being cramped.
Chitin plates grind over one another like tectonic shelves. Hundreds of legs click and twitch, each one the size of a train carriage. Its head is an abomination of mismatched nightmares—dragon, centipede, larva, beetle—stitched into a single hateful design. A cross-shaped horn juts from its face. Mandibles clack wetly. Multi-lensed eyes turn and fix on him all at once.
The pressure rolling off it hits like deep oceans and space vacuums.
Hungry.
Ancient.
Patient.
And horribly, intimately familiar.
Aster’s breath catches.
That wrongness—that low, choking dread that’s followed him through every collapse of his life, every inexplicable disaster, every moment of waiting for the next blow to land—
It’s this.
The Wyrm.
It has always been this.
For a moment his knees threaten to buckle.
Not from fear.
But from rage.
Pure, white-hot, marrow-deep fury detonates through him so violently it almost blacks out his vision.
This thing.
This thing took everything.
His family.
His health.
His future.
Every decent thing he’d ever managed to build with blood, sleep deprivation, and sheer bloody-minded refusal to die quietly.
Every failure. Every collapse. Every ruined opportunity.
All of it leads back to this parasite-shaped atrocity looming over him like a monument to cosmic malpractice.
His fists clench so hard his nails cut into his palms.
He wants to tear it apart with his hands.
He wants to scream until the thing ruptures.
He wants to make it suffer in ways that would concern a therapist and possibly a war crimes tribunal.
Then a memory cuts through the fury.
His father.
Tired eyes. Kind voice. The shape of a man who’d still spent his dying breath trying to keep Aster alive.
And with that, the rage shifts.
Not gone.
But sharpened.
Tempered.
A blade instead of a wildfire.
He doesn’t want vengeance because he’s angry.
He wants to live because his father fought to buy him that chance.
The world snaps back like a rubber band.
Aster is on the roof again, gasping.
Matter stands in front of him with his arms folded, wearing the deeply irritating expression of a man who has just been proven right in the most dramatic way possible.
He doesn’t say I told you so.
He doesn’t need to.
Aster drags a shaking hand over his face.
No more denial. No more reflexive sarcasm. No more pretending the universe is merely rude instead of actively infested.
It’s real.
All of it.
He meets Matter’s eyes.
“Okay,” he says, voice wrecked but steady. “I believe you.”
The words leave him and something in his spine seems to give out. He drops onto the roof, legs folding under him.
His hands are still shaking.
His eyes aren’t.
They’re fixed now. Focused. Terrified, yes, but no longer running.
He looks up at Matter.
“What do I need to do?”