What Festers Beneath
Previously 💀🔮🔥
The cursed crystal shattered, unleashing wild, forbidden magic that tore through Maevhara's chapel. The siblings barely escaped, bloodied and trembling, as the Blight began to awaken in their veins 🩸🌑.
Healers begged to help — but were met with cruelty, rage, and refusal. The golden bands pulsed weakly, holding back the curse… for now ⚔️✨.
Their bodies broke in silence. Crystal grew beneath their skin. Blood turned black and sharp.
The town around them rotted. The cult worshiped them as vessels. But the siblings knew better.
They weren't vessels. They were weapons.
And in the candlelit dark, they made a vow —
No mercy. No salvation. Only blood and vengeance. 🕯️🗡️
Something ancient heard them.
And this... was only the beginning
The earth trembled beneath their feet, cracks spider-webbing outward from the ruins of the chapel. The air was thick with dust and the sickening stench of decay. From the shattered altar, a monstrous skeletal jaw emerged, obsidian teeth glinting cold and sharp beneath the pale moonlight. Ancient runes pulsed faintly with dark power, running across its bone like scars of forgotten sin.
Nyra's voice broke the silence, low and hollow:
"The curse lives in our blood," she whispered to the void, "but so does our wrath. And this… was only the beginning."
The cultists around the ruins didn't flee or scream for salvation. Instead, they chanted louder, voices raw and desperate. Their bodies twisted with the curse—veins blackened, eyes rolled back—as if they welcomed the Devourer's gaping maw. They wanted to be consumed. To become part of the sickness spreading beneath the earth.
The siblings had no time to watch. The chapel crumbled with a thunderous roar as the earth split wide beneath their feet. With ragged breaths and faltering bodies, they plunged into the rotten tunnels below—dark, suffocating, alive with the echo of their own curses.
Kael staggered, clutching his mouth before vomiting thick, dark blood onto the cold stone floor. His skin shimmered with a faint, sinister aura as the Crystal's Blight warped his flesh, veins blackening beneath translucent skin.
Aelina's hair writhed and hissed. Serpents, slick and gleaming, slithered from her scalp, their eyes burning with venomous hate.
Nyra moved with a calm limp, one hand pressed to her swelling stomach, her calm betrayed by the unnatural bulge growing beneath her ribs. A whisper not her own slithered in her mind like poison: "Feed me…"
They stumbled on.
The entrance to Maevhara's infirmary was a dim beacon in the dark maze beneath the divine domain. Healers swarmed toward them, eyes wide with horror and disgust as they took in the siblings' twisted forms.
Black veins snaked over pale skin, eyes dilated to unnatural sizes, bones creaked and shifted beneath flesh as if their bodies were rearranging themselves in defiance of nature.
Whispers ran through the healers' ranks. Some recoiled as if the siblings were harbingers of death itself.
"Are these children still human?" one asked, voice trembling.
Zephyrus arrived then, scowling as he took in the scene. His gaze was sharp and unforgiving, filled with barely concealed revulsion.
Kael, even weakened, caught the sharp look and spat dark blood onto Zephyrus' boots.
"Oops. Must be allergic to pompous idiots," he muttered, voice dripping with spite.
Zephyrus snarled back, fists clenched.
"Keep laughing, freak. One day I'll be the one driving a blade through your black little heart."
Kael only smirked, wiping blood from his lips.
"Try it, Pipsqueak. I'll let you choose which hand you want to die with."
The healers quickly presented a tray of pills—small, dark, faintly glowing—explaining with urgent voices: the pills wouldn't cure them but would suppress the worst of the curse's mutations, buying time before it consumed their minds entirely.
"We're not trying to control you," one healer said, eyes earnest but wary. "This is only to slow the Blight, to keep you from becoming… something else."
Nyra's gaze was cold steel.
"We don't want your control."
Aelina said nothing, only watching.
Kael scoffed.
"Manage us? Like caged animals? No thanks."
But the healers persisted. Their voices grew more insistent, their gazes pleading beneath clinical detachment.
Hours passed. The siblings endured the constant pestering—words like chains, heavy on their raw nerves.
Frustration simmered into fury.
Kael snapped first.
"Enough!" His voice echoed through the infirmary, sharp and commanding. "Stop pestering us like we're broken toys. We'll take the damn pills on our terms."
Nyra's voice followed, low and final.
"If you won't leave us be, then make it quick."
The healers exchanged glances—relief and fear warring in their eyes. One gently pressed a pill between Kael's lips. His jaw clenched, then he swallowed with a dry gulp.
Nyra followed, biting down on her pill like it was poison but forcing it down. Aelina, last, took hers silently, eyes unreadable.
The effects were immediate. The burning agony of mutation dulled to a manageable ache. The black veins faded slightly. The serpents on Aelina's head recoiled, coiling back like shadows fleeing light.
"We will take these again," Nyra said, voice trembling with unspoken rage and weariness. "But only to live another day… on our own terms."
Back beneath the shattered chapel, the Devourer rose in full—an abomination born of bone and darkness, its form shifting with the siblings' twisted essence.
Bone wings unfurled, torn and jagged, crowned with a warped skeleton crown pulsing with glowing runes. Its fangs gleamed like obsidian, dripping with dark ichor that hissed as it touched the shattered altar stones.
Cultists, broken and willing, threw themselves into the beast's maw. The Devourer devoured them, consuming their curses, hopes, madness.
But it was not an end. It was a beginning.
A slow voice echoed in the siblings' minds, carried on shadows and rage:
"It comes for what created it. And it remembers their names."
Visions assaulted them in the silence that followed.
Kael saw himself crowned in blood, sitting atop a throne built from corpses, eyes blazing with merciless fire.
Aelina's hands bled endlessly, crimson stains spreading across the stones—stains that would never wash away.
Nyra's vision was cruelest of all: the Devourer bowing low before her, whispering a single word: "Mother."
They awoke in silence.
No healer dared speak. The infirmary was heavy with dread.
Nyra's eyes fixed on the window, watching smoke curl where the chapel once stood. Her voice was barely a whisper, carrying terrible resolve:
"It wasn't supposed to end. It was supposed to begin."
Kael sat up, eyes faintly glowing with sinister light. His breath was ragged but fierce.
"Let them come," he whispered. "We'll burn them too."
Aelina rose silently, stepping toward the door. Bloody footprints marked her path in the sterile white floor as she vanished into the light beyond.
In a shadowed hallway, Zephyrus watched them, jaw tight, eyes dark.
"They're not saviors," his inner voice growled. "They're the curse in flesh. One day, they'll kill us all."
The air shifted with the arrival of a messenger from Goddess Maevhara.
"The Devourer stirs. The Abyss is moving. You're being sent beyond the divine border… to the place gods buried their mistakes."
Nyra's gaze didn't waver.
"We weren't chosen to save this world. We were born to watch it rot."
Call to Action
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🕷 Don't look away now. The Devourer is always watching.
📚 Save it. Or bleed with the rest
🔥 Next Chapter: The Gods' Graveyard ⚰️👁️🗨️
Banished beyond the divine border, the siblings find themselves in a realm where time rots ⏳, light lies 🌘, and even gods are forgotten 🗿.
There are no laws here ❌⚖️.
No mercy 🩸.
Only things that should have stayed buried ⚠️.
And now… something has started digging 🕳️👣