The sun burns. I leave the tunnels, and the sun burns. White light, beating upon my head like fists on a drum, driving out thoughts of anything but escape.
The storyteller says that it is a curse we must bear, for we are the children of Cain. She tells of a time when the sun was as gentle as the moon, and our tribe walked the lands above with nothing but stars as our firmament. Back when our homes were felt tents instead of soft loam and wooden caskets. When our food was bread and wine, instead of splintered bone and rotting marrow. Before we were driven beneath the Earth-mother's skin, and warped in her image.
I do not trouble myself with such things, nor do the others of my caste. When the sun falls and the others eat, my kin and I do not follow. There is work to be done, for we are not alone here, in the tunnels.
There are other things, older things. Those which even the earth has forgotten. Things whose blood runs cold and bitter upon the tongue, and whose bones are strange and harder than cruel iron. They are dead, like us, but with time and starvation even the shape of men has been lost to them.
They are mad with hunger.
And they never stop coming.
Ours is not the un-life of stolen feasts in the graveyards of men. That is the life we buy for those above -- a tithe we pay gladly every night. We grow gaunt with hunger. We grow wearier with each battle. But honor, and cruel necessity, demand nothing less than victory each night. We owe it to those we have sired upon this earth.
To save our children, we eat the dead.