The Rot Beneath a sky choked with rust-colored clouds, where once-proud spires of forgotten gods now lay broken like teeth in the mouth of the earth, the vulpahri made their descent. The air stank of old divinity and something fouler—flesh that refused to rot, and yet screamed to be remembered. Iven Callas coughed ash into his sleeve. “This temple’s wrong,” he muttered, his voice scraped raw from disuse or discontent. “Something’s alive here. Not breathing. But aware.” Lira knelt beside a shattered glyph-stone, fingers brushing ancient carvings with the reverence of a surgeon unpicking scar tissue. “Alive is subjective. It could just be—” “It’s watching,” Violet cut in. Her voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. The stillness that followed bowed around it. She stood at the edge of the chamber, where roots—gray and veined—spilled like intestines from the cracked ceiling. One twitched as she approached. They were deep in the corpse of Ish'revahl, a god once worshipped as the Fleshweaver, now spoken of only in whispers by those who bled into stone and came back dreaming. Iven’s tail twitched violently behind him, unaware of the dust it kicked up. “You’re both missing it,” he said, manic glint in his amber eyes. “This isn’t a ruin—it’s a lab. An altar. A heart.” Lira exhaled sharply through her nose. “You think everything is a lab.” “Because it was! They were gods, yes—but gods obsessed with form, mutation, resurrection! Why else preserve muscle across centuries? Why build temples where the walls pulse like they remember blood?” Violet was already moving. She didn’t wait for any general agreement. She rarely did. Her boots landed silent on flesh-stone as she descended the inner sanctum, where the ceiling wept viscera and prayers long out of date. What she found wasn't a tomb. It was a womb of something that was never born. Suspended in threads of nerve and bone, curled like something unborn and half-formed, was a vulpahri, sleek and silver—but stretched grotesque, extra joints in all the wrong places. Its eyes were sealed. Its mouth, fused. Iven approached like a moth to a flame. “It’s beautiful.” “No,” Lira breathed, dread sinking into her bones like cold. “It’s unfinished.” The gods had not died. They had been—forgotten, discarded. And in their isolation, they had tried to rebuild themselves in the only image they remembered. Theirs. Violet raised her eyes to the pulsing chamber above. She whispered, barely audible. “They remember us wrong.” Suddenly, the thing’s eyes snapped open—blank and pale and hungry. The temple shuddered, not from collapse, but from birth. Iven laughed, then choked, the sound warping as the god-flesh began to sing. And the song was not one of worship. It was a memory. A curse. A calling back. They ran. Or tried. Violet led, tail whipping like a scythe behind her. Lira burned through glyphs with shaking hands, scarring the walls with counter-spells. Iven—he hesitated. Just long enough to say, softly: “They didn’t forget. We did.” And then he was gone, swallowed by a god who had learned nothing except how to wait. -Written by me [4/23/25] -Shared today instead
