The bells of Hollow Vale did not ring for the dead—not anymore. Once, they marked the passing of children, kings, and seasons. Now, they rotted in their towers, as silent as the gods that had forsaken them.
Seren walked barefoot through the husk of the market square, each step stirring up soot from fires long extinguished. Charred bones crunched beneath her feet. Her cloak, stitched from old bedsheets and dyed in the blood of beasts, swayed behind her like a flag of surrender. But she had not surrendered—not yet.
Hollow Vale stank of rot and rust. Once a haven for pilgrims and merchants, its soul had been ripped open when the Mercy took the skies. A living curse, the god that bore no flesh and no eyes had unmade the world in seven days. What remained was a kingdom of grief and torment, governed by its bastard sons—humanoid beasts with no love for the world that birthed them.
Seren knew the Sons well. Too well.
She had been a child when the war ended—though there were none who could call themselves children after The Mercy's triumph. Her village, a soft cluster of cottages outside Vale's border, had resisted. The men went to war. The women stayed.
And the Sons came.
They had no names. No voices. Just jagged teeth, black breath, and hands slick with blight. They didn't speak—they didn't need to. Their actions carved scripture into the skin of the world.
Seren had watched her mother flayed alive, her skin nailed to the prayer tree, her screams echoing as lullabies in Seren's nightmares. They took her sister, who was only seven. They broke her bones, one by one, to hear how the sound changed. Her father? Hung from the rafters by his own intestines. He had lasted the longest.
Seren had been spared.
"Spared" was a word the poets used. A mercy.
What they meant was kept.
The Sons made her theirs, not with chains or cages, but with ritual. They branded her back with a mark—a spiraling sun with one black eye in its center. It burned into her spine, and it still itched when she thought of them.
For years, she existed in the whorehouse of the Mercy's Keep—a place not of pleasure, but punishment. Mortals were broken there. Bent until their minds unraveled and their bodies turned to husks of meat. The Sons watched. Always.
But Seren watched, too.
And she remembered.
She trained in secret—first with knives hidden in bread, then with steel stolen from the belt of a dying guard. She memorized the way their necks bent, the way their shadows fell, and the timing of their patrols. When the Sons grew bored and left her chained for days, she bit through her own lip and used the blood to write escape plans on the floor.
And when the oldest whoremother, Leda, told her, "No one gets out," Seren responded with a broken jaw and a kiss of fire.
She killed her first son on the night the red moon rose.
It was not glorious. She did not fight with honor.
She tore his throat open with her teeth.
Now she walked, alone, toward the Castle of Mercy, where the god's corpse still bled into the earth. The Sons ruled from its spires. And she would end them all.
The people of Hollow Vale watched her pass. Hollow-eyed wretches, bent and twisted by years of plague and divine punishment. They did not speak. They no longer remembered how.
She passed a square where children once played. Now, the rusted bones of cribs lie in the mud. One still rocked with the wind. From its depths came a sound like weeping.
She did not stop.
A priest passed her, crawling on all fours. His eyes were gone, sockets filled with worms. He whispered prayers in the old tongue to a god who had eaten his own angels. Around his neck hung a chain of fingers.
She did not stop.
When night fell, it fell hard.
The stars refused to shine. The sky became a canvas of ash.
Seren reached the outer wall of the castle.
It was not stone. Not anymore. Flesh had grown over the ramparts—pale, veiny, and pulsing with the breath of the god within. Teeth lined the gateway. Eyes blinked in the towers. The Mercy had fused its own dead god-body with the castle walls.
A son greeted her at the gate. It wore a mask of stitched faces and a robe made of children's skin.
"You are not welcome," it rasped.
"I never was," Seren replied.
They fought.
Steel clanged. Fire bloomed. Blood sang.
Seren lost three fingers. She gained a throat.
She entered the castle, dragging the son's corpse behind her, and began to climb.
Each level was worse than the last.
On the first, women were used as conduits—chained and hollowed, forced to birth horrors that sang lullabies in reverse.
On the second, men were crucified upside down, their bellies sliced open, their entrails feeding the roots of a massive black tree that wept milk.
On the third, children wandered, eyeless and pale, humming tunes they should not know. They called her "Mother."
Seren killed them anyway.
Mercy, after all, was dead.
She reached the throne room before dawn.
It was not a room.
It was a womb.
The Mercy lay there, its body a mass of infinite tendrils and broken wings. Its skull was a cathedral. Its voice, when it spoke, came from within her mind:
"Why do you hate me, child?"
She spat. "Because you named suffering holy."
"I gave your kind purpose."
"You gave us pain."
"And you survived. That was the gift."
She screamed, drawing the blade Leda once used to cut her wrists in the brothel. She had reforged it in fire and hatred.
She plunged it into the god's eye.
The world shook.
The Mercy laughed. Its tendrils seized her, pierced her skin, and flooded her with every death, every rape, and every scream it had ever caused.
She endured.
And she cut.
And cut.
And cut.
Until silence.
Until black.
Until peace.
She awoke in a field of ash.
Above her, the sun rose red for the first time in centuries.
The mark on her back was gone.
So was her name.
She was no longer Seren.
She was something worse.
And the world would know it.