Previously… 🩸🕷️
The siblings uncovered a cursed chapel, where a monstrous skeletal jaw—The Devourer—emerged from the ruins. 🦴⚫ Cultists, twisted by dark magic, welcomed their own destruction.
Nyra whispered chilling prophecy:
"The curse lives in our blood… and this is only the beginning." 🌑
They plunged into rotting tunnels, bodies warping from the Crystal's Blight—Kael vomiting blood, Aelina's hair turning to serpents, and something unnatural growing inside Nyra. 🧬🐍
Healers tried to suppress the curse with pills—only delaying the madness. The siblings took them on their own terms. 😠💊
Meanwhile, the Devourer rose—bone wings, obsidian teeth, runes glowing with ancient wrath. Cultists fed themselves to it willingly. It remembered its creators… and called Nyra Mother. 👁️👶
Visions haunted them:
Kael crowned in blood 👑🩸
Aelina's endless bleeding 🖐️
Nyra commanding the beast 🕷️
Now, with the divine world shaken, a new order is given:
"You're being sent beyond the divine border… to the place gods buried their mistakes."
And Nyra?
"We weren't chosen to save this world.
We were born to watch it rot." 💀🔥
"Beyond mercy, beyond light, beyond memory—this is where sins fester, and gods dare not tread."
The descent began with silence. Not a calm or peaceful kind—this silence gnawed, chewed at the edges of their sanity, as if the realm itself swallowed sound before it reached their ears. Gravity twisted wrong. Steps sank into soft, fleshy ground that pulsed faintly beneath their feet like it remembered being alive. Stars blinked overhead, not in patterns, but in seizures—twitching lights bleeding through a black, groaning sky.
They had passed the divine border hours ago. Or was it days?
No clocks ticked in this place. No sun to rise. No breath to anchor.
Maevhara's ethereal image shimmered into being one last time—fragile, as if afraid to fully manifest within this realm. Her voice was steady, but strained.
"There is a relic buried in the Hollow Deep—The Heart of Unmaking. It devours memory, erases names, feeds on pain. Bring it back. Or rot with it."
Kael scoffed. "You could at least tell us why."
She only whispered, "You'll forget why you're screaming before your mouth opens."
And then she was gone.
They moved in silence.
First came hallucinations—subtle, at first. A blink, and Kael saw their grandmother, smiling. Another step, and the blood on Aelina's hands was not hers. Nyra whispered her siblings' names, repeating them like a prayer, as if fearing they'd vanish.
When they reached the Hollow Deep's edge, the pit opened like a wound—jagged, weeping shadow, a chasm that breathed in reverse.
They leapt.
Madness met them in pieces.
Kael began talking in riddles.
"Time chews its own tail," he muttered. "I had a name once. Was it yours?"
Nyra bled from the eyes. Not from injury, but from memory unraveling.
Aelina was calm. Too calm. Her silence expanded like a void.
Below, they stumbled into a nest.
Dozens of children—pale, eyeless, their mouths sewn shut with thread that pulsed with life. They did not speak aloud. They spoke in thoughts.
"Warm... like her..."
"Lie again and we'll scream."
Kael reached for his blade. "Demons. Kill them."
But Aelina stopped him. One of the children had looked up at her—blind eyes wide as if they saw her.
"I couldn't," Aelina whispered. "She looked at me like she remembered me."
Kael roared, fists clenched. "You endangered us for what? A corpse with a child's face?"
Before he could strike her, light shimmered. The healers appeared—frantic, shouting in languages too old to remember. And then Maevhara materialized, this time with weight. Her expression was unreadable.
She didn't shout. She didn't curse.
Just asked: "Why?"
Aelina said nothing.
The silence thickened.
Even Nyra looked away when Maevhara's fingers tightened into white-knuckled fists.
The cursed child was gone. Vanished into the black.
And Aelina walked alone into the next chamber.
It greeted them with screams.
The Carrion Seraph—once divine, now skeletal, rusted wings twitching, weeping ichor that sizzled on stone. Its ribs glowed with memory shards. Its voice—hundreds layered—spoke in riddled echoes:
"You were forgotten before you were born."
It attacked with thoughts—pulling memories from their minds like organs from flesh.
Kael fell first, clutching his head, shouting names no one recognized.
Nyra tried to shield him—was impaled by bone-spear wings. The Seraph leaned in and whispered:
"You're already mine, little mother of rot."
Aelina's hair-serpents screamed. One was ripped off, devoured.
She roared—not words, just fury—and ripped the Seraph's eye from its skull.
They fought like beasts, like gods who had forgotten mercy.
When the Seraph finally fell, it crumbled into spores and blood—and left Aelina cursed.
Glass veins twisted beneath her skin. And with it, a cruel law:
Any lie spoken nearby would cause her blood to weep.
They reached the relic.
It pulsed in the hollow's core—an organic heart, made of shattered memories, sealed in bone and voidlight.
Nyra stepped forward.
It did not resist. It welcomed her.
When her fingers touched it, her pupils bled away—replaced by dripping black rings. She did not scream.
Kael asked, weakly, "What… what are you now?"
She didn't answer.
The world shook.
Demons swarmed from cracks in the abyss—drawn by the relic's call.
The fight was chaos.
Kael collapsed. Aelina threw herself over him, shattering skulls, dragging her glass-bleeding body through screams.
Nyra cast rot like a crown—each flick of her hand turning demons to bone ash.
And then the child appeared.
The one Aelina had spared.
She stood at the edge of the abyss, smiling.
The demons bowed to her.
They escaped—barely.
Kael in Aelina's arms.
Nyra, clinging to the Heart.
The Hollow Deep collapsed behind them.
But something crawled out with them. A shadow. Not seen. Not named.
Narration:
They were not forgiven for sparing the child.
They were not redeemed for killing the Seraph.
And as the rotting light of Hollow Deep closed behind them…
They realized this realm did not forget. It simply waited.
Nyra, softly:
"We brought back the wrong thing."
Author's Note:
Thank you, cursed ones, for descending with us. If your memory still serves you, tell me—
Would you have spared the child? Or would you have let her rot with the rest?
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🕷 The Devourer watches those who look away.