The crater breathed around him.
It pulsed—not with life, but with the memory of it. Wet, wheezing flesh stretched above like a collapsed lung, veined with thick cords that twitched to a rhythm too slow to be a heartbeat. The air wasn't air. It stank of fermenting ichor, mucus, and old copper. Every breath scraped his throat raw.
He opened his eyes to a ceiling of bone.
Cracked ribs arched over the hollow like the cage of some titanic womb, each one carved with symbols that shimmered—not light, not heat, something else. Something that moved inside the back of his skull. The sigils were not meant to be seen. His pupils shrank. His gut churned.
He tried to move. Nerves remembered before muscles did.
Pain was the first gift.
His spine buckled with a seizure. Limbs twitched. A scream coiled at the base of his tongue but never escaped. He rolled onto his side, bile catching in his mouth, and saw the ground wasn't ground at all. It writhed. A mat of braided flesh-veins, some thicker than his wrist, slithered between clots of translucent membrane and slick, twitching pores. Some opened. Some wept.
A pulse ran beneath him. Not of blood. Of memory.
Something spoke, just outside hearing.
"…fa…ther…"
His throat locked. Not from fear—he didn't know enough to be afraid. Only that the word made his teeth ache. It struck bone. He tasted metal.
Another voice joined it. Then another. A thousand layers of whisper, all wrong.
"…our flesh… his… home…"
His stomach turned. The hunger hit next.
It wasn't hunger for food. Not really. It was a gnawing at the edge of identity. A knowing that something had been taken—stripped from him before he was born. Or perhaps because he was born. His body didn't remember food, but it remembered emptiness. His tongue ran over sharp teeth that hadn't been there moments before.
The echo-haze thickened.
It coiled in the crater like fog made of oil and heat. Shapes moved within it—sometimes limbs, sometimes too many. Sometimes nothing at all. He tried to stand. The crater disagreed. Veins curled around his ankle like umbilical roots, resisting.
That's when he saw it.
Crawling toward him. No—dragging.
A humanoid figure, wrong in all its joints. Too long in the arms, too soft in the chest. Skin that peeled in scales, as if it had tried to molt and failed halfway. Its face was not a face. No mouth. Only bone where a jaw should be, etched with the same sigils as the ribs above. One eye dangled loose, watching him.
It gurgled.
"Fa…ther," it said in the echo-language, though there was no mouth to form the sound. The word came from its chest. Or its spine.
He backed away, but the crater offered no retreat. The veins sucked at him, slow and patient.
The creature reached out.
Black blood streaked the floor beneath it. One arm ended in a weeping bulb of tendon. The other was bone, sharpened to a point. Not a weapon. A tool. A story. Carved.
It pulled itself closer, inch by inch, ribs clicking with effort. The echo thickened around it. The whispers hissed louder.
"Father…seed…wake…"
The creature touched his bare foot.
Heat. Then cold. Then—
The thing's hand—if it could be called that—pressed to his foot with a weightless finality.
Its flesh split open at the seam. Not from damage, but as if by design. The skin parted down the arm, all the way to the shoulder, peeling back in petals slick with brine and decay. Beneath, there was no muscle. Only nerve. Filaments of lightless grey shimmered like webbed fungus, twitching with latent thought.
A breath, not his, shuddered up through the veins of the crater.
Then—silence.
The creature stilled. Its twisted body slumped forward, resting its empty head on his ankle like a child begging forgiveness. No pulse. No breath. But the flesh didn't cool. It stayed warm. Sticky. Wanting.
Something slid into him.
He didn't see it. Didn't hear it. It was sensation without surface. A spike of memory not his own plunged through his spine and out his throat, latching on to every nerve and pulling tight.
His mouth opened—too wide.
A voice screamed out. His voice, but not his words.
"—ka'rithth ven-ah! SAEL!"
The crater roared back. Not with sound, but color. The haze above flared red, then violet, then the color of old teeth. The sigils along the ribs ignited. They didn't burn—they bled, glowing like open wounds in the bone.
His body seized. Limbs convulsed against the vein-floor. His chest cracked. Not metaphor. Real bone—breaking, shifting, rearranging. Something was forcing its way through him from the inside. A seed cracking open. A chrysalis with no insect. Only hunger.
More memories poured in.
He saw—no, felt—a womb of stone. A field of mouths. Hands reaching toward a throne that bled from the seat. Screaming children. A woman made of mirrors breaking herself open. And all of them—all of them—looking at him.
Calling him father.
Not in love. Not in hatred. In need.
He vomited.
Black fluid splattered across the floor-veins. They drank it instantly. Sucked it down with audible thirst. His throat closed. His spine twisted. Fingernails tore away as his hands clawed at the sigils beneath him, trying to escape the glow.
He was not allowed to.
The echo inside him latched. Found the marrow. Curled into it.
And then it began to grow.
He felt it. A heat beneath the ribs. A crawling just under the skin, like vines climbing his organs. Something inside him was being born. Not flesh. Not yet.
Intention.
He arched backward. A sound like wet cloth tearing echoed through the crater. From his shoulder, a line of black bone pierced upward and folded back into his skin.
The sigils flared once more—and then went dark.
The body at his feet collapsed into ash.
The crater pulsed.
And his eyes opened—again.
But this time, he was looking.
The ash still clung to his skin when the crater's mouth opened.
A sudden jerk—movement. He barely registered it before the veins snapped back and the flesh-floor gave way. Something grabbed him. Not the gentle worship of the echo-touched, but rough hands, calloused and cursing. He heard bone clatter, smelled rot and sulfur. Then darkness wrapped him like a blindfold pulled tight.
The drag was not far.
He felt each shift of terrain: the snag of veinroot against his thigh, the crunch of dry gristle beneath their feet, the rattle of loose sigil-bones against his back. Down a slope, through a tunnel. Flesh gave way to marrow-stone. Heat thickened. The air here stank of old oil and spore.
They stopped.
A wheeze. Spit.
"Too fresh," the voice grunted. "Too awake. Damned Seedspawn never die proper."
The hand dropped him. He landed hard, shoulder-first, skin tearing open on something sharp. He groaned. Tried to rise. A kick met his ribs.
"Don't bother. Ain't gonna carve you yet. Need to see if your spine's still got song."
He blinked. The cavern spun into view.
Rib-cages. Stacked like nests. A ceiling made of femurs woven into a dome. Shards of skull strung on sinew lines like wind-chimes—though they never rang. No wind. Only breath. Only heat.
And the scavenger.
He was smaller than the voice suggested. Wiry. Wrapped in descaled hide stitched with veinwire. His face was half-covered by a mask made from a child's jawbone, the teeth filed down to stumps. One eye was gone, the socket filled with hardened amber. The other glared.
"You ain't got words yet, do you?" he hissed. "Figures. They never do. Born so loud and dumb."
The MC tried to speak. Nothing came. Just the ghost of a scream, buried in the back of his throat.
The scavenger crouched beside him. Prodded his chest. Then his face. Then—paused.
"Wait. Your marrow…" He sniffed. Recoiled. "No. No, gods-split—you're leaking."
"What…" the MC rasped. "What am I…"
The scavenger didn't answer. His hand had started to tremble.
"You're not just echo-touched. You're fresh-fused," he whispered. "That's wrong. That's wrong. Shouldn't happen this fast—"
He took a step back. Too late.
The MC's fingers, still slick with ash and bile, brushed his wrist.
That was all it took.
The infection wasn't sharp. It was gentle. A coiling of heat. A whisper from under the skin. The echo wanted more than him now—it reached. Curious. Greedy.
The scavenger staggered.
His eye dilated. His back arched. Veins blackened beneath the skin like ink spilled under parchment.
"No—no, I didn't take—I didn't take anything!" he screamed.
Then he did something the MC hadn't seen before: he laughed and sobbed at once.
His flesh bubbled.
"I see it," he croaked. "I see the throne that eats its children—I see the field—I see you."
The MC tried to crawl away. The scavenger lunged.
Knives drawn. Bone-hilted, wet-bladed. Teeth bared. His mind was gone. His body hadn't realized it yet.
The MC didn't think.
His hand moved on its own.
Flesh folded around his palm. Nails split. Something sharp slid free—a splinter of ribbone, grown in the shape of a fang. He didn't know how he made it. Only that it was his.
He drove it into the scavenger's throat.
The man gurgled. Twitched. Dropped.
The MC stared at what he'd done. What he'd made.
The rib-blade crumbled to dust.
The rib-blade crumbled in his hand, and silence swelled in its place.
His breath caught. The scavenger's corpse twitched once, then stilled. The amber eye cracked open—not with light, but with sound. A soft hiss echoed from it, low and wet, as if something ancient was exhaling through him.
He didn't stay.
His body moved before his thoughts could form. He stumbled through the marrow-bone door, past the skull-chimes, down a tunnel that pulsed as if it had veins behind its walls. The air thickened, each breath like inhaling old milk. He did not care. The fear was dry now, cracked like an old husk. Only motion mattered.
Down.
The floor steepened. Bones beneath flesh, flesh beneath stone, and below that—something older. Something waiting.
He felt it before he saw it.
The space widened. The pulse changed. And then—
The altar.
It wasn't built. It was grown. A platform of fused pelvises, ribcages twisted into a cradle, vertebrae stacked like spiral roots descending into a pulsing, translucent basin. From the center rose a stalk—a spire of femurs split open lengthwise, each filled with marrow that glowed a dull, violet red. Not with heat. With want.
He fell to his knees.
The ground here was soft. Not dirt. Flesh. Scabbed and healing in patches, raw and slick in others. Veins pulsed beneath the surface like thoughts beneath skin.
They surrounded him.
Children.
Not alive. Not dead.
Failed.
They crouched in alcoves of bone and tissue, their forms twisted by incomplete echo-fusion. One had three mouths and no eyes. Another wept blood from her navel. Some whispered. Others only stared. All recognized him.
"Father," they said—not with joy. Not even sorrow. Just truth.
He couldn't speak.
The altar responded.
The basin filled—not with fluid, but with image. His face. But not as it was now. As it might be—crowned in thorned bone, eyes hollowed, mouth sewn shut but still smiling. Behind him: a shape too vast to be real. A womb the size of a world.
And the voices.
Not the children's. Older.
They came from the marrow itself.
"SEED IS INTENT—NOT GIFT."
"THE BODY REMEMBERS WHAT THE MIND FORGETS."
"CALL, AND THEY WILL COME."
The MC gripped the edge of the basin. It pulsed beneath his fingers. Not just warmth now. A rhythm. A memory. A language without words.
Something in his blood shifted.
He didn't understand the words, but his bones did. The marrow hummed. His throat opened—not for speaking, but for releasing. The memory of the scavenger. The echo from the dying one. The heat of the crater. The pain. The birth. The death.
He let it spill.
The altar drank.
And it answered.
The basin rippled. The femur-stalk curled. From the marrow glow, three cysts began to rise—each the size of a clenched fist. Veined. Slick. Beating.
They weren't alive yet. But they would be.
His children.
His first.
The cysts pulsed.
Each beat came slower than the last, deeper. The marrow-basin steamed with scent—hot iron, rotted milk, the sweetness of fresh blood. Veins that had been dormant beneath the altar's floor stirred, twitching toward the cysts like worms hungry for a host.
He crouched beside them.
The first cracked open.
Not violently. Gently. A flower splitting at dusk. The flesh peeled back in spirals, and from it rose a figure—small, smooth, sexless, and still slick with birth-gore. It did not cry. It breathed. Once. Twice. Then opened its eyes.
They burned red.
Not with heat. With memory.
The child stood on legs that had not yet learned balance, but held him like a promise. It tilted its head. Observed him. A grin split its face. Too wide. Too knowing.
He felt the name—not as a thought, but as a pressure behind his eyes.
Vaelrix.
A hunger. A flame.
The second cyst burst.
Fluid splattered across the altar. This child screamed—not from pain, but fury. Her body was sharp where it should have been soft. Shoulders too angular, fingers clawed, her mouth wide with rows of teeth that looked more like broken glass. She crawled first, then stood, then watched.
Her gaze found him.
She didn't smile.
She nodded.
Solviya.
A wound. A shield.
The third took longer.
It pulsed once more—then stilled. For a moment, he thought it dead. But no. The cyst shivered, sagged, and fell away like wet cloth.
The child inside did not rise.
It sat. Cross-legged. Watching him with eyes already open. Its skin was darker than the others—mottled, veined with thin lines of gray. It breathed slowly. Too slowly. Not like a child. Like something pretending to be one.
He took a step forward.
It spoke first.
"I dreamt of you," it said. The voice was wrong—too deep, too old. "You wore a crown made of skin. You walked through my blood like it was your garden."
He stared.
The child smiled.
Tirn.
A whisper. A mirror.
Something inside the child shifted.
He saw it—not with his eyes, but his marrow. A flicker. A tremor in the echo that did not belong. It wasn't his memory shaping this one. It was someone else's. Another father. Another intent.
Corrupted.
He opened his mouth to speak.
The child beat him to it.
"Father must die," Tirn said softly, "before the second sunrise."
The other two children turned.
Silence fell.
No one moved.
The altar ceased pulsing.
And beneath the floor, something listened.