Page 24 of The Guardians of Dreamdark (Windwitch #1)

Across the forest, the hungry one was restless in his crevice in the rock awaiting the onslaught of night.

He didn’t sleep and didn’t dream and never had.

If he had dreamed in the Dawn Days, perhaps things would have been different.

It was dreams that, like threads, had embroidered the others to this world, while he had roamed and ranged, always restless, bound to nothing.

Such were the humble beginnings of the end of the world: the absence of dreams.

Later, in his prison, in the endless tossing ocean, dreams might have been a companion.

Instead, every moment of every millennia had passed, waking and dreamless, in the company of two entities: his hunger and his vengeance.

And, having nothing else to play with, he had nurtured them with singular devotion.

When the seal on his bottle had unexpectedly fallen open, it was his hunger that had first burst forth.

But those creatures on the boat, they were like water from a wine bottle, an unsettling gulp of nothing.

He knew now that they were called humans —a new thing, and they interested him not at all.

His hunger and his vengeance had led him like a pair of leashed tigers: sometimes pulling in opposite directions, sometimes prowling for the same doomed prey.

In Rome his hunger had led him to the devil-ripe catacombs beneath the city to feed; his vengeance had guided him to the Vritra.

The Vritra had always been the weakest of the Djinn, but it was still a shock seeing him fallen to such a state.

How simple it had been to command a wind to extinguish him for good!

The wind had tried valiantly to resist, but in the end it was a slave to its secret name, and the hungry one knew all the secret names.

And now he knew more secrets. For the delirious Vritra had babbled in his dreams and told him what he needed to know to unlock the world.

How wonderful.

A pomegranate! How long had he searched before the faeries had at last caught him in their bottle?

He would have gone on searching too and would never have guessed that what he sought was a pomegranate.

A fruit! Truly, without the fire and color of dreams of his own, he was ill-equipped to imagine the whims of Djinn.

But now he didn’t have to imagine. He knew.

The world hinged upon a single pomegranate.

The world, such as it was. The Tapestry was threadbare, the Djinn were guttering out, Fade and the other dragons were dead, the champions were long gone, and the faeries that remained, while not as flavorless as that pest species, humans, were a far cry from the faeries of the Dawn Days.

Once, a single faerie would have sated him for days, but now he couldn’t fill his bottomless hunger no matter how many of them he had.

It riled him. The gnawing hunger distracted him from vengeance.

It was primal, inconvenient, an unexpected consequence of his.

.. evolution . He had been a very different sort of creature once.

The Magruwen might have imprisoned him, but this thing he had become, it was his own creation.

Through sheer force of will, through vengeance, bitterness, and rage, he had warped himself into what he was now.

He was the Blackbringer.