The wind carried a chant that night—not just any chant, but an ancient, maddening hymn that seemed to rise from the very marrow of Ironhollow itself. Its verses crawled through the air like diseased rats, half prayer and half incantation, echoing from the crumbling monument that stood like a festering wound stitched crudely into the horizon:
"Take my flesh and let it rot,
On Your altar, left to clot.
Spill my breath in choking groans,
Nail my sins to burning stones—
Nail my sins to burning stones.
Take these hands, once drenched in red,
Let them twitch among the dead.
Crack each knuckle, twist each bone,
'Til they serve Your wrath alone—
'Til they serve Your wrath alone.
Take my tongue, my venom's gate,
Split it sharp and seal my fate.
Let me speak in guttural cries,
All my psalms are butchered lies—
All my psalms are butchered lies.
Take my thoughts—infected, vile,
Boil them in Your wrath awhile.
Scrape my skull with rusted grace,
Brand Your name across my face—
Brand Your name across my face.
Take my will and bleed it dry,
Hang it screaming from the sky.
Pluck my heart from rib and chain,
Let it throb beneath Your reign.
Let it throb beneath Your reign.
Take my love, diseased and torn,
Curse it with a crown of thorns.
If it pleases You to kill,
Let me writhe, but make me still—
Let me writhe, but make me still."
The hymn's dark litany seeped into the ruined streets like poisoned honey, worming its way into the shadowed hearts of the faithful—and the damned. The words didn't merely echo; they burrowed into the minds of all who heard them, leaving behind a residue of dread that no amount of scrubbing could ever cleanse.
---
Rising from the edge of the ruined district, the monument stood—not merely a cathedral but a grotesque testament to decaying grandeur and mechanical faith. It looked as if some forgotten god had pressed its rotted hand against the firmament in its death throes, leaving behind a scar that refused to heal. The structure towered narrow and cruel, a gothic tapestry of rusted iron and blackened stone that had weathered centuries of agony. Its jagged steeples stabbed upward like broken fingers clawing at a bruised sky, while twisted archways yawned below like broken ribs protecting some foul, beating heart.
Its outer shell was a patchwork of metal and stone, not just corroded but seemingly infected by centuries of acid rain and whispered prayers from tongues that should have been cut out long ago. Massive gears—once part of a divine clockwork apparatus meant to calculate the exact moment of salvation—protruded from the foundation, half-entombed in ivy that seemed to pulse with a sickly hunger. Pipes snaked along the walls, writhing like metal intestines; some hissed steam that reeked of oil and rot, while others whispered secrets in the stagnant air—secrets that would drive the sane to madness and the mad to ecstasy.
Windows ran long and narrow, their glass stained not in holy blues and golds but deep crimson and smoky gray like old scabs and fresh bruises. Instead of saints, the glass depicted suffering with an obsessive attention to detail: contorted bodies with tendons pulled taut beneath translucent skin, hands reaching upward with broken fingers, mouths frozen mid-scream with teeth shattering from the force of their agony. Many windows were shattered—wounds left purposefully open as if to confess the truth of endless decay to a sky that had long ceased to care.
Dozens of statues lined the facade, each a testament to twisted devotion crafted by hands that must have bled while working the stone. Kneeling figures with hollowed eyes stared back at visitors with an unnerving sentience. Bound souls carved in gray limestone wept silently, their tears having worn actual channels into the stone over decades. Flayed effigies whose broken robes told stories of sacrifice stood alongside figures whose faces were partially worn away—not by weather, but by the reverent, desperate touches of the faithful who believed that rubbing the stone might transfer their suffering to the already tortured statues. Crows had made their nests in the outstretched palms of these stone martyrs, their glossy black feathers occasionally catching the light as they fed their young with meat of questionable origin. Creeping moss claimed the broken toes of these eternal sentinels, the verdant green a stark contrast to the monochrome suffering it climbed.
Atop the rust-choked entry arch, a massive mechanical bell—its iron mouth permanently sealed shut by time and corrosion—hung amid spiked gears arranged like a halo of thorns. No one alive remembered the last time it rang, but the oldest citizens of Ironhollow spoke of dreams in which they heard it toll, awakening with blood trickling from their ears. Below it, a single heavy chain dangled, stained red by something far darker than rust—something that still glistened wetly in the right light, as if it had never fully dried despite the passing years.
The air around the monument was thick and oppressive, a miasma that clung to the lungs and coated the teeth with a metallic film. It tasted of old iron and bitter incense, as if one were standing at the threshold of a forgotten god's tomb while it decayed from within. Though it appeared abandoned, the cathedral pulsed with an unsettling, living presence—watchful, expectant, patient. Not inviting, but calling. Not safe, but sacrosanct in its corruption.
---
Beneath the fractured ribs of this blasphemous monument lay the Sanctum of St. Ferrin—a place where the corrupted faith of Ironhollow was laid bare in all its perverted glory. Here, the red moon's malignant influence was held at bay not by holy words but by ancient curses and ritualistic despair that had crystallized into a form of inverse prayer. Father Halwen, the oldest living priest of these forsaken halls—though "living" might be too generous a term for his state—kept his quarters deep within this festering gloom.
Halwen's cell was not merely a room but a cavern of crumbling stone and shattered stained glass that cut the sparse light into bloody fragments across the floor. Dust fell like ash from the ceiling with each distant footstep above, and the smell of decayed parchment, rust, and slow, festering rot clung to every surface like an invisible film. His chamber was lined with journals—not ordinary books but volumes bound in human skin of varying shades and textures, their spines notched with vertebrae and sealed with prayer-wax mixed with crushed bone—a meticulous record of every sorrow and heresy that had passed through these catacombs since the first fracture. It was said that Halwen no longer slept, that he merely waited between labored breaths like an automaton haunted by ghosts, his consciousness drifting somewhere between this world and whatever hell awaited beyond.
No one questioned him—not the acolytes who brought him his meager meals, not the scribes who transcribed his mumbled revelations, not even the inquisitors who patrolled the outer limits of the congregation with iron-tipped whips and brands heated in green flame. And yet, beneath his kindly, if often eerie, smile lurked a hunger—something unholy that went beyond mere appetite, a void that food could never fill.
By day, Father Halwen limped through the sacred halls, his spine curved like a question mark beneath threadbare robes, beads clutched in wizened hands that bore scars in peculiar geometric patterns. He mumbled half-forgotten hymns through teeth stained yellow with age and substances best left unnamed. He blessed infants with trembling reverence, his gnarled fingers leaving behind a faint scent of copper on their foreheads, and nodded at grim-faced guards who crossed themselves when he passed—not out of reverence but instinctive protection. His eyes, clouded yet oddly kind, betrayed nothing of the dark hunger that stirred at night beneath his papery skin.
But by night, Halwen fed. The secret stairwell behind the altar—a passage known only to him and the rats that sometimes followed the trail of his robes—descended in a tight, nauseating spiral into the hidden Research Reliquary, where the very first fracture of the Hue had rippled through reality like a stone thrown into a still pond. The walls there pulsed softly with veins of fossilized amber that glowed and dimmed in time with some unheard heartbeat, as if the very fabric of time and decay sang a tormented lullaby for those with ears to hear.
They thought he came only to study the relics of forgotten epochs—the calcified remains of extinct creatures that had once thrived in the spaces between realities, scrolls written in languages that caused nosebleeds in those who tried to decipher them, geometrically impossible devices that continued to function despite missing key components. In truth, Father Halwen's true purpose was far more sinister, more intimate. For within him lurked a presence—an entity that called itself Virexil, though that name was merely the closest approximation human vocal cords could produce of its true designation. It wore his skin like a soaked shroud, bending his spine into unnatural configurations when no one was watching, whispering in guttural tones that reverberated through his blood rather than the air. At night, when the chapel was hushed save for the occasional sob of a penitent locked in the confession booths until dawn, Virexil spoke with wet, clicking laughter woven from deranged nursery rhymes and the last words of the dying.
---
One night, as the red moon hung bloated in the sky like a tick gorged on celestial blood, a young scribe named Brother Elian was sent to deliver censored translations to Father Halwen. Elian was a timid, devout boy of sixteen with a fervor that belied his fragile frame—bones showing through alabaster skin like twigs ready to snap at the slightest pressure. His eyes, large and liquid brown, still retained a spark of genuine faith that had not yet been corrupted by the church's true nature. In the dim candlelight of the Reliquary, navigating narrow passages where the ceiling dripped with condensation that smelled faintly of salt tears, he carried scrolls inscribed with desperate warnings and sacred equations meant to calculate the exact rate at which hope was dying in Ironhollow.
"Father Halwen?" Elian's whisper barely stirred the heavy darkness as he approached, candle trembling in his small hand, casting monstrous shadows that seemed to move independently of its source. "The scrolls on neural recursion... You asked—"
Halwen turned slowly—too slowly, as if his joints needed to remember how human limbs were meant to move. His gaunt face broke into a smile that was both welcoming and terrible, teeth slightly too numerous and arranged with an unsettling evenness. "Ah, my boy," he intoned, his voice a disquieting mix of tenderness and dread that made the hairs on Elian's neck prickle. "Come closer. Show me your words of truth."
He took the scroll gently, his papery fingers brushing against Elian's with deliberate pressure, stroking the boy's cheek with a hand that trembled not with age but with a secret ferocity barely contained beneath his skin. For a long moment, there was silence, filled only by the rasp of dripping water hitting stone and the distant echo of the monstrous hymn from outside, carried through pipes and passages that should not have connected.
Then something shifted. The air grew dense, almost gelid, difficult to draw into lungs. As Elian turned to leave, a cold, unforgiving darkness enveloped the narrow corridor like viscous ink poured from above. Halwen's smile widened unnaturally—stretching far beyond the limits of human anatomy until it nearly touched his earlobes—as he closed the door behind him with a soft click that sounded obscenely loud in the confined space. In one swift, horrifying moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, his jaw unhinged with a wet, popping sound. With a sickening series of snaps like green branches breaking, his mouth split apart, the lower mandible dropping down to his chest while the upper portion receded into his skull, revealing a gaping maw lined with rows of mirror-like, translucent fangs glistening with a slick, iridescent substance that smelled of rotting dreams.
Elian froze in terror, his muscles seizing as his mind struggled to process the impossible geometry of what had once been a human face. "Mom—" he choked out in a voice suddenly childlike and raw with helpless pleas, regressing to his most primal instinct for safety.
But the transformation was complete. Halwen staggered forward, no longer even attempting to mimic normal human movement, his limbs moving with unnatural, serpentine jerks as if controlled by strings pulled by a puppeteer with too many fingers. His eyes, once cloudy with age, now gleamed with an ancient malice—slitted pupils dilating in the darkness to reveal irises that shimmered with fractured rainbows like oil on water. His fingers, elongated and glistening with moisture that sizzled faintly where it dripped onto the stone floor, curled around Elian's head with the precision of a surgeon preparing to operate.
The poor boy's pleas dissolved into muffled cries as the monstrous priest—now merely a vessel for Virexil's hunger—devoured him with methodical, horrific precision. The sound of tearing flesh and the clatter of breaking bones echoed off the ancient walls like a perverted percussion. Elian's struggles weakened, his legs kicking feebly against the stone as his lifeblood pooled beneath him, forming patterns that resembled sigils from certain forbidden texts. A candle toppled from its holder during the macabre feast, its flame sputtering into the dense gloom before dying with a final hiss that sounded almost like a sigh of relief.
Hours later, when the silence had settled like a shroud over the scene and the only sound was the occasional drip of something viscous hitting stone, Father Halwen re-emerged into the chapel proper. His robes were stained with more than candlewax now—splotches of dark, congealed blood marred the sacred fabric in patterns that, if viewed from certain angles, formed words in a language older than human tongues. His skin glistened with perspiration and the slow exudation of decay, and his eyes were vacant, as though his soul had been dented by the act—or perhaps pushed aside to make room for something else that now peered through those human windows.
He rang the mechanical prayer bell—a small replica of the great sealed bell above—producing a sound like metal grinding on bones, and the gathered faithful, a few scribes and sisters who had risen early for morning devotions, all too familiar with unspeakable horrors to question the stains or the smell that clung to him, murmured a quiet benediction.
"May the Mind Wardens guard your thoughts," he whispered, voice flat and measured, as if reciting a well-rehearsed litany for a congregation of ghosts. And none remembered Brother Elian. Not the scribes who had worked alongside him, not the sisters who had tended his childhood fevers, not even the boy's own mother in the infirmary who had sometimes woken in the night calling his name without knowing why.
Some say that on that night the Hue Crystals embedded in the cathedral's foundation shone with an extra brightness—flickering like a memory just barely held on—and that the cathedral pipes carried faint echoes of a child's suppressed giggle, a ghostly melody in a place where hope had long since withered on the vine. But such things were common in Ironhollow, where reality itself had begun to fray at the edges, and no one paid them much mind.
Father Halwen, or what remained of him, simply sat there after the morning prayers, slowly idly thumbing his beads of human molars while whispering to himself in a voice that sometimes split into two distinct timbres:
"Feed the faith.
Feed the flesh.
Feed the forgotten."
---
Far away from the cursed cathedrals, in the barren outskirts of Ironhollow's western quarters where acid-scarred tenements leaned against each other like drunken mourners at a funeral, four weeks had crawled by like a death march. The air tasted of copper and ash, and the sky had taken on a permanent yellowish tinge as if the atmosphere itself were bruised. Words spread through back-alley taverns and opium dens that Jonathan H. Simpson—the relentless Mind-Warden whose presence had begun to shift the balance of power like a tumor growing in the brain of the city—had been making frequent pilgrimages to Father Velvete's secret conclaves hidden beneath abandoned bathhouses.
Murmurs grew louder among the Crimson Ciphers, those tattooed zealots whose eyes gleamed with the fervor of mathematics and whose fingers constantly traced equations in the air: that Simpson had been commissioned to find the perfect arithmetic—the lost, original calculation that had summoned the decay of the old gods and birthed the endless rot that plagued the realm. They said his dreams were filled with numbers that bled when written down, that he had begun to see time not as a river but as a corrupt ledger that could be audited and corrected.
The nobles were getting jittery in their moldering mansions and fortified compounds. In lavish meeting halls with peeling bloodied wallpaper and fetid backrooms where mechanical insects scuttled across floors slick with unidentifiable fluids, they argued in harsh, bitter tones over numbers and prophecies while servants with hollow eyes and strange scars poured wine the color of old scabs into crystal glasses that had begun to cloud with an inner corruption.
"Tell me why the perfect sum ever cost us the fall of the old gods!" one haggard noble demanded, slamming his fist on a table inlaid with bone, amid a torrent of creative swearing and spilled wine that hissed where it touched metal. His face, once handsome, now bore the marks of experimental rejuvenation treatments—skin pulled too tight over cheekbones that seemed to be slowly dissolving beneath.
"Because it is written in blood and ruin, in the forgotten pages of a war that ended in misery before our grandparents drew their first putrid breaths in this cesspool," another hissed in response, his eyes wild with paranoia, fingers constantly checking that the protective amulets hanging around his neck hadn't been tampered with during his momentary lapses in attention.
"Everyone knows Jonathan's grafted arm hums with temporal power," someone remarked from a shadowed corner, voice trembling with both awe and dread. "He's discovered ways to manipulate time—maybe to reverse it, even, or at least slow its decay. I heard he aged a cat backward until it was a kitten again, then forward until it was dust, all while it was still alive and screaming."
The conversations were raw and impassioned, each word a mixture of curses that would make sailors blush, desperate hope that threatened to crack their cynical veneers, and the unmistakable stench of despair that had become as familiar to them as their own reflection in warped mirrors.
In a dimly lit back chamber of a crumbling palace where the ceiling leaked substances that sometimes moved of their own accord, a clandestine meeting was convened beneath swinging lamps filled with bioluminescent fungi. A small circle of sympathetic nobles with twitching eyes and renegade clerics whose sacred tattoos sometimes rearranged themselves while they slept gathered to plot their next move around a table carved from a single piece of petrified wood that predated humanity.
"Simpson is now both our greatest hope and our worst nightmare," one grizzled noble declared, his voice raspy from decades of inhaling Mercury laced burnt worms.