We dove through black smoke and emerged in a bowl-shaped arena surrounded by natural rock columns. The meat conduit passed over our heads like a miniature roller coaster, dripping rank fluids onto our cheeks before rising even higher on swaying, deteriorated poles. We craned our necks and stumbled across a desert surface to follow the pipe. It crisscrossed the space above us in the most illogical of paths before reaching a dirt plateau twenty feet off the ground. Here the pipe angled sharply downward and was lashed to a Y-shaped brace by a knot of barbed wire. From the open end of the pipe, clods of meat plopped like wet dog food into the open mouth of Gunmar the Black.

Hope drained from the trollhunters as if each of us were being bled.

Even without the plateau, the Hungry One would’ve outsized us all. He sat upon a throne of yellowed bones collected from the 190 kids who died during the Milk Carton Epidemic, and with long icicle teeth he gobbled at the meat that spattered across his face and chest.

The “Black” of his title was metaphorical; his skin glistened a deep, blistered red. With each swallow, his limbs convulsed along several unexpected joints—two elbows to each arm, a scabby, wrinkled knee on each leg, and all of them adept at bending in any direction. His crooked spine elongated and retracted like a periscope, rifling the thick porcupine spikes that ran from the back of his head all the way down his back. Luxuriously he spread the six arms that sprouted from his sinewy chest, each of which was encumbered with seeping tumors, except for the topmost left arm, which, as promised, was a weathered block of wood marked with his numerous kills.

Gunmar’s jaw dropped open to reveal the mangled tongue that he’d been chewing on in resentment for over four decades.

“SSSSSSTURGESSSSSS.”

We turned away from the voice’s warm gust. My pulse thundered to hear my family name so spoken, and when I next looked, Gunmar was using a single claw to tickle the Eye of Malevolence. Gunmar’s left socket had long before sealed over with scar tissue, but the Eye looked perfectly content to sit upon its master’s shoulder like a parrot.

“Hey, Jim,” Tub whispered.

“Yeah.”

“If we couldn’t beat the eyeball, how are we going to beat, you know, all the rest of the parts?”

“See, Tub?” I replied. “That’s the kind of question I could live without.”

“Jim! Up here!”