It was a slow night. The hearth had burned down to the comfortable orange that meant the tavern was breathing rather than performing. A pair of Nirvana monks occupied the corner, saying nothing to each other with great contentment. Elsie moved between two empty tables out of habit. And Mo'oraq sat at his table near the back, a still mass of fur and shadow and far too many teeth, drinking something that smelled of cold iron, watching the room with the patient attention of a thing that did not need to move to hunt.

The mortal had been at the bar for an hour. He was the careful kind — a man who had read about the tavern before he found it, who had not flinched at the Contract on the door, who had ordered slowly and paid in a story about his grandmother. He had been stealing glances at Mo'oraq the whole time, the way a man checks a high ledge he has decided not to look over.

Finally he set down his glass and turned to Jack, lowering his voice as though Mo'oraq across the room could not hear every word said anywhere within the brass.

"Can I ask you something. About — him. About where he's from."

"You can ask me anything." Jack took up a glass and a cloth. "Whether I answer is a different Contract."

"Voracia." The mortal said the word the way people say the name of an illness. "Is it just — that? Is everything in there eating everything else, all the time, forever? Is it just a Realm of monsters in the dark?"

Jack polished the glass. He did not answer right away, and the not-answering had a shape to it — the bartender's pause that meant the question deserved better than the first thing to hand.

"There are things in Voracia your mind would draw as smaller predators," he said at last. "Scavengers. Things low on the chain that live by being quick or quiet or not worth the trouble. That part of your picture is true. And there are things very high on the chain. Mo'oraq there has consumed gods who were sure they could not be consumed. He has eaten cytes, and demons, and ideas that never had a body to begin with. That part is true as well. So if you are asking whether Voracia has teeth — yes. It has teeth all the way down, and then further than down goes."

The mortal nodded slowly, the way a man nods when he has been told the thing he was afraid of is real.

"But," said Jack, and let the word sit.

He held the glass up to the lantern, turned it, found it acceptable, set it down. Picked up another.

"Voracia is more than that. There is intelligence there. Civilization, even — old enough that it was keeping itself in order before your Realm had managed cells that could agree to stay together. There is the dignity to consume what cannot be used, so it does not sit and rot and clot the cosmos. And there is the honor of using every part of what you take, because waste is the only real obscenity that Realm recognizes. A Voracian who kills wastefully has done something its kind would find shameful. That is not an idea you can fit inside the word monster. Monsters do not have honor. Voracia is built almost entirely out of it."

"Then why do we —" The mortal stopped. "When people are afraid of the dark. When they tell stories about the thing in the woods. The wolf that's too big, the cold thing that wears your friend's face and is starving. That's Voracia. Isn't it. We've been telling Voracia stories the whole time."

"Some of them." Jack's cloth slowed. "You're not wrong, and I'll not tell you you are. But you've got the geography backward. Voracia brushes against Umbra now and again — the Realm where what is feared strongly enough becomes real. And in the places where the two of them overlap, the named fears mix in. The wolf that is too big. The cold thing that wears a face. Those are born at the seam, where your dread meets Voracia's hunger and Umbra makes the dread true. They are real. But they are border weather. They are not the country."

He set the glass down. He did not pick up another. The mortal noticed that he had stopped, and went still himself, because some animal part of him understood that when this particular barkeep stopped polishing, the thing he was about to say was the thing worth carrying home.

"The country," Jack said, "is not the wolves. The ground itself is Voracia. The wind there does not blow, it pulls — toward the low places, the way everything falls toward the throats that drink stars. The lightning in that sky runs black and goes inward instead of out. None of that is a creature you could fight or flee. It is the Realm being what it is, and your mind drawing you a landscape because a landscape is the only thing a mortal mind can hold where the truth is. The teeth you're so frightened of are a picture. Voracia drew it for you in the only language you speak, so you'd have something to be frightened of that had edges. The Realm underneath the picture has no edges. It is consumption, the way your Realm is decay, except yours does it in its sleep and theirs has to do it on purpose, every moment, or the whole of everything chokes to a stop."

The hearth ticked. One of the monks in the corner exhaled, slowly, as though agreeing with something no one had said.

"Your kind fears Voracia because you think it is the dark full of things that want to eat you," Jack said. "And there are things in the dark, and some of them would. I'll not pretend otherwise; you'd be a fool to walk in unguarded and I'll not make you a comfortable fool. But fear it for the right reason, if you're going to fear it. Not the teeth. The teeth are the easy part. The hard part is that Voracia is the one Realm that doesn't tell you a kinder story about what eating is. Every other Realm dresses it up. Yours calls it the food chain and puts itself politely at the top. Voracia just tells you the truth, all the way down, and lets you decide what to do with having heard it."

He picked the glass back up. The spell, such as it was, eased; the room remembered it was a room.

"So no," Jack said, mild again, the too-wide smile coming back like weather clearing. "It is not just everything eating everything in the dark forever. There's an honor in it, and an intelligence, and a function the cosmos cannot do without, and a great deal that the best mind your species ever produced could only point at sideways." He tilted his head toward the back of the room without looking. "Ask him, if you've the nerve. He'll tell you the same, in fewer words, and you'll like his answer less than mine."

From his table, without turning, in a voice that arrived inside the chest more than the ear, Mo'oraq said: "Voracia is not just teeth, little human."

A pause. The suggestion of a smile that was not, quite, a threat.

"It is also the wisdom to know what to do with them."

The mortal did not sleep well that night, by his own account, recorded later in the brass. But he came back. He always, after that, came back.