Chapter 19 Teeth
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TEETH
Time has teeth.
Not the sharp kind that pierce, but the slow, grinding kind—patient, methodical.
It doesn’t rip. It doesn’t tear. It chews.
It gnaws at the edges of your mind like a beast too ancient to rush its feast, wearing down thought, scraping bone from the soul in long, savoring bites. It always starts gentle, almost kind—a sigh in the silence, a hush in the stillness.
You almost welcome it.
You almost wish for it.
But it was made for this.
Time was born to hollow you out, one breath at a time.
It feeds on memory first—the warm ones, the bright ones.
A sister’s lullaby, the taste of summer, the shape of someone’s smile.
It eats those slowly, lovingly.
Not out of cruelty, but hunger.
And it is oh, so hungry.
Hope comes next, and that is bitter meat.
Time chews on it with a kind of reverence, as if hope were sacred, and consuming it a dark rite.
You feel it leave you—not all at once, but in splinters.
A thought here. A heartbeat there.
Until even the idea of surviving feels blasphemous.
Time then begins to unravel itself.
What were once hours blur into an unending dusk, the kind that doesn’t end in stars, just more dark.
You forget how long you’ve been here.
A day? A year? A lifetime?
The hours bleed into each other like ink in water, shapeless and slow. You sleep and wake and sleep again, but the dreams are wrong—too sharp, too cold, like someone else’s grief wearing your face.
Faces blur. Names slough off like dead skin. You reach for them—those you loved, those you lost—but your hands pass through mist. They become ghosts you almost remember, like stories once told and long forgotten. They do not speak to you. They only watch.
And still, it eats.
It eats your thoughts, your voice, your very will.
You forget how to want.
How to fight.
How to care.
Even pain becomes distant, just another echo in the dark.
At last, you are no longer a person.
You are a shape. A shadow. A breath caught between moments.
A whisper in your own skull, floating in blackness too thick to scream through.
And still—
still, it is not full.
Still, it eats.