1088: Story 1088: The Choirboy’s Maw 1088: Story 1088: The Choirboy’s Maw In the aftermath of the Dead Choir’s destruction, something was left behind.
In the village of Glenhollow, abandoned during the first waves of plague, a new sound emerged—high, clear, and sweet as a child’s voice singing lullabies through the fog.
Those who heard it found their dreams turned sour, their shadows growing teeth.
The survivors, ragged and half-mad, called it the Choirboy.
But no one had seen it and lived.
Mara Vens, a former bellringer who had once clung to faith, stumbled into Glenhollow one dusk, chasing rumors of a song that could heal—or devour—the soul.
The streets were buried in thorny vines, walls caved in as if by unseen jaws.
Everywhere, there were gnawed bones—too large to be animal, too twisted to be human.
In the center of town stood the old church, its steeple snapped like a broken finger, its bells shattered across the ground.
Yet from its hollow mouth drifted that song—a boy’s voice, calling for anyone who still remembered warmth, family, light.
Mara tightened the leather strap around her wrist—a ward against the mind-twisting melodies—and stepped inside.
The church smelled of old blood and mold.
Candles guttered, though no hand had lit them.
Figures slumped in the pews—villagers, now little more than husks, faces peeled back in silent screams, gazes locked on the altar.
And on the altar… it sat.
A small boy in tattered choir robes, no more than eight years old, humming softly.
His face was cherubic, pale, and perfect—until he opened his mouth.
It unhinged like a serpent’s, revealing a second mouth within, ringed with dozens of glassy, blinking eyes and glistening rows of teeth like shattered porcelain.
The Choirboy’s Maw.
It smiled without emotion.
And sang.
Mara dropped to her knees, clutching her head as the song clawed into her thoughts.
Images flared behind her eyelids: a world where flesh was currency, where voices were harvested like crops, where unseen gods in cracked heavens wept laughter.
Somewhere deep within, Mara’s will flared.
She crawled toward the altar, every movement a war against the boy’s music.
The Choirboy watched her, tilting its head curiously.
She reached into her satchel and pulled out the last relic she possessed—a mirror framed in iron, a relic from the days before the fall.
In its surface, the Maw’s true form would be revealed, stripped of its illusions.
With the last of her strength, Mara lifted the mirror.
The Choirboy shrieked—not in pain, but in a gurgling, eager glee.
In the glass, its reflection was endless: a spiral of mouths within mouths, each one singing, each one hungry.
The church began to convulse, walls bleeding, the ground splitting open.
The Choirboy leapt from the altar, its robes rotting into wings made of hands and teeth.
Mara laughed bitterly as the roof collapsed in a storm of broken stone and fire.
The Choirboy was buried.
But as the fog thickened once more over Glenhollow, a soft, sweet voice drifted up through the rubble—still singing.
Waiting.
Always waiting.