When Veydras, the Maw of Avarice meets those who mirror him most, the air thickens. And Elyra, the Unfading Bloom enters not as ornament, but as resistance.

Here is their tale:

The Feast of the Hollow Table

The world’s leaders and billionaires gathered in a chamber of glass and steel, high above a city whose lights pulsed like a dying star. Their table was vast, black stone veined with gold and upon it lay banquets of every kind: caviar, lamb, fruits imported from forests already ash, water stolen from deserts, wine pressed from vineyards guarded by drones.

They spoke in numbers. Profits, percentages, growth curves soaring ever upward. They laughed in currencies. They measured power in the length of their shadows across the earth.

And then, the walls groaned.

A shadow moved between the skyscrapers, blotting out the moon. With a sound like a thousand stomachs turning inside out, Veydras appeared.

The Maw of Avarice unfurled itself into the chamber. Its mouths opened in spirals, tongues slick with hunger, each one chanting: more, more, more. The billionaires fell silent, some in terror, some in awe. One whispered: It is us.

Veydras bent low over the table and every dish, the meat, the fruit, the wine, vanished into its mouths before the guests could raise a hand. But it did not stop at food. The jewels on their fingers, the titles in their pockets, the mansions in their names, all were devoured, ripped from them in invisible threads, as though swallowed from their very identities.

“Who are you?” a trembling leader asked.

“I am your truest desire,” Veydras replied, a chorus of mouths speaking as one. “I am the shape you carve into the earth with every act of taking. I am the endless banquet you crave, the void you try to feed with nations, oceans, futures. I am what you have already made.”

The billionaires shuddered but some, steadier now, leaned forward.
“If you are hunger,” one said, “then we are your priests. We know your ways. We will serve you.”

At this, Elyra stepped through the cracked glass of the chamber.

She was no taller than a mortal woman, but her presence stilled the air. From her shoulders bloomed roses that never wilted, lilies that never bowed, wildflowers that carried the scent of untouched meadows. Her eyes were pools of sky.

She looked at Veydras not with fear, but pity.

“You were never meant to be worshipped,” she said. Her voice was the sound of rain after fire. “Hunger without beauty is ruin. And beauty without hunger is fragile. But together they can balance, if you let them.”

The billionaires laughed, hollow and brittle. “Beauty? That is our tool. We buy it, brand it, auction it. We put it in glass cages and call it ours. Look around you, do you not see our mastery?”

Elyra did not argue. Instead, she touched the black stone of the table. And from every vein of gold, flowers erupted, breaking stone, spilling blossoms onto the floor. Their fragrance filled the chamber.

The billionaires tried to seize them, pluck them, own them. But the flowers dissolved into air the moment hands closed upon them.

Veydras, for the first time, hesitated. Its mouths gnashed but what dissolved could not be consumed.

Elyra turned to the billionaires. “You may serve hunger, but you will never own me. And as long as even one flower blooms beyond your grasp, your feast will never be complete.”

The leaders and billionaires shrank in their seats, unsettled. Veydras roared in frustration, its countless throats echoing like storms in caverns. But Elyra’s blossoms kept blooming, unstoppable, from cracks in the walls, from between their clenched fists, from the very breath they exhaled.

And so the night ended with the chamber split. Half a banquet devoured into nothingness, half a garden bursting where no garden should grow.

Mortals who hear the tale say this:
Hunger will always sit at the table of power. But Beauty will always find the crack and grow where hands cannot hold her.

The Aftermath of the Hollow Table

When dawn rose over the city, the glass-and-steel chamber lay in ruins. Half the black stone table had collapsed into dust, while the other half was strangled in flowers that bloomed without soil or sun.

The billionaires and leaders stumbled down to their waiting limousines, shaken, but already their minds began to split the vision into shapes they could hold.

One, pale and trembling, muttered:
“It was a dream. A trick of light. Too much wine, perhaps.” And with every denial, he rebuilt his fortress of certainty.

Another, sharper, already called her marketing team.
“Did you see the blossoms? Viral campaigns. Luxury fragrances. Eternal Bloom™. We will sell the vision back to the people and they will thank us for it.”

A third knelt in secret, clutching a petal that had lingered in his palm. He wept, for he saw in it the hollowness of his empire. That petal dissolved into air, leaving him emptier still, but also lighter as though the burden of wealth had cracked.

Others whispered plans to capture Elyra, to weaponize Veydras. Schemes of extraction spun even from visions meant to unmask them. For they had learned to turn even myth into profit.

But not all.

A guard at the chamber’s door carried home a single flower hidden in her pocket. It bloomed still, glowing faintly, and when her child woke in the night, afraid of hunger, she placed it beside the bed. The child slept, dreamless and safe, for the first time in many weeks.

And in alleys below the skyscrapers, rumors spread:
That hunger had a thousand mouths.
That beauty could not be owned.
That something had cracked the high table where power feasted.

Some laughed. Some believed. Some carried the tale like a seed.

And though the billionaires met again, rebuilt their chamber, polished their golden veins,
flowers kept finding their way into the cracks.