Night hang low like a severed noose.
No stars. No moon. Only the scar in the sky. Bleeding black across the heavens.
beneath it, they stirred, The broken. The branded. The beaten.
Their wounds had not healed.
They had hardened.
their eyes no longer look for salvation. But they burned with purpose.
The Void had touched them.
Not with kindness.
But with memory.
Pain carved through their veins like fire through parchment, and from that fire, new shapedformed. One woman vomit shadow, A boy's scream tore bark from trees. A blind man's tears slithered like vipers.
They did not thank Zelf'th.
They knelt to no god.
He had not offer them mercy.
Only the Truth.
"The gods gave you silence" Zelf'th said, voice quiet as a grave.
"I gave you rage."
And the Inquisitor came.
He did not ride a horse.
He dragged one. Flayed. Still breathing. Tied to his chariot by intestines.
His armor gleamed, drenched with virgin blood. His eyes glowed, not with divinity... But lust.
Every village he passed was marked with screams.
A woman, impaled. Still alive, screaming through her gushing throat.
A boy, nailed to a doorframe, hands flayed open to resemble angel wings.
A man, skull crushed beneath the inquisitor's boots while hymns dripped from his smiling mouth.
Their bodies discarded like broken dolls, their eyes wide open looking at the gods that never came.
"Piety," he whispered, stroking a severed breast. "Is sacrifice."
He liked his fingers.
And rode on.
He arrived at the ashes of the temple.
Smell the rot of holiness undone.
And smile.
"Blasphemy," he said "Delicious."
The Broken Rose
They did not wait for him.
They met him in the field.
A woman with her breast carved off, who move like smoke.
A boy with no eyes, whose laugh broke glass.
A father with half of his face, his other half coated in shifting blackflame.
They screamed not words but memories.
Each strike they gave him was not a wound. But a testament.
And for the first time...
The inquisitor bled.
but he was no mere man.
He called upon the gods.
And they gave him light.
A beam of searing flame cut through a line of rebels, Vaporizing bodies mid-scream. Another turned to molten gold, bleeding from every orifice, eye bubbling like soup.
Still, they came.
Still, they clawed.
Still, they burned.
He laughed, lips dripping with red. his sword split a boy in half, vertically, entrails decorating the altar.
"MORE!," he groaned. "MORE!"
And then Zelf'th walked forward.
The Inquisitor turned, drenched in holy gore.
He rise his blade.
Zelf'th raised his hand.
And the blade melted.
"Your gods are deaf," Zelf'th whispered.
"But the Void hears everything."
The ground split.
Black tendrils emerge, gripping the inquisitor's limbs.
He snarled, spat, cursed.
"You can't! I am righteous! I am BLESSED!"
But the VOID remembered.
It remember the girls. The sobbing, the blood, the pleading.
It remember every hole he opened.
Every soul he shattered.
So it gave him his punishment.
Not fire.
Not blades.
Desecration.
He was dragged into the pit screaming, and in the abyss—beasts awaited.
Pigs.
Grotesque, bloated, void-spawned swine with human teeth and priest's eyes. Their hooves dripped semen. their snouts sniffed his fear.
And they mounted him.
Again.
And again.
And again.
"This," the Void said, "is justice."
He screamed.
The pig oink in choir.
Each time he died, he returned—his body hole, his soul ragged, his mind intact.
No end.
No peace.
Only the divine reversed.
Aftermath
Silence.
The village stood.
Blood ran like rivers.
But the people did not cry.
They stood.
Each holding a piece of themselves.
And behind them, the void whispered.
"You no longer weak."
Zelf'th turned away from the pit.
Fel stood waiting.
Covered in black fire.
silent.
Together, they look at the sky.
The gods did not speak.
but somewhere.....
They began to tremble.