My Femboy System

There are silences you can taste.

Not the sweet kind, no—this one was dry, brittle, sandpaper-thick and sun-stale. Such a silence came slowly as the second game concluded, again with my loss. It curled in the back of my throat like cracked parchment and the slow death of dignity.

A silence that watched, that waited, like a coiled predator with the patience of ages.

I sat in Oberen’s den, the devil’s cardroom carved out of rot. Every inch of the table before me felt soaked in someone else’s sin—sweat, tears, and desperation pressed into the grain like blood in the wood of an alter.

And across from me, behind a mountain of gleaming chips and that maddeningly serene expression, sat Oberen himself.

Old.

Bent like a tree that had weathered too many storms, fingers knotted like roots. His breath was slow and shallow, as if rationed.

But behind those rheumy eyes?

Madness. Humming, glinting madness.

Greed—not the desperate kind, but ancient, patient, the kind that didn’t need to rush because it knew it would win eventually.

There was also control. Not of the room. Not of the cards. But of the game itself. He didn’t just gamble, he devoured. He consumed opponents not with skill, but with inevitability. He had a way of smiling like the game was already over and he was simply watching the credits roll in slow motion.