1075: Story 1075: Flesh Altar 1075: Story 1075: Flesh Altar The chanting never truly stopped.
Even after the Crimson Reaping, when the dead walked and the skies bled rust, Old Chapel Fen remained untouched.
Not because it was holy.
Because it was feared.
The survivors said the ground there pulsed.
Said they heard bones singing beneath the soil.
And in the center of that rotting field, something new had grown.
A monument.
No stone, no wood.
Flesh.
Breathing.
Alive.
Watching.
Juno Varret, ex-scout of the Hollow Patrol, was drawn by the signals—distorted frequencies and radio screams that all centered on one location: Fen.
They said it was a “birthplace.” They said something “awoke hungry.”
She didn’t believe in gods anymore.
She did believe in threats.
Crossing into Fen was like walking through a lung.
The mist was warm, thick with iron and rot.
Her boots sank into sinew-covered soil, and every tree she passed had grown veins.
Eyeless birds shrieked from ribcage nests, and worms slithered in open air.
At the heart of the Fen stood the Flesh Altar.
A tower of melded corpses—twisted, reanimated, and fused into obscene architecture.
Tongues replaced bells.
Faces melted into pillars.
Arms curled into sacrificial cradles.
And at the top, stitched into the throne of sinew, sat a priest with no face.
Only a vertical mouth, stitched shut with thornwire.
Juno raised her rifle.
But the altar breathed in.
The dead screamed in reverse.
And every bullet she fired unraveled in midair, melting into blood vapor.
The priest’s mouth opened—not with lips, but with pressure.
A sound bled out.
A voice too old for ears.
“Kneel, daughter of marrow.
Let your flesh remember.”
Juno resisted.
She spoke the Unbinding Phrase taught to her by the Eldritch Resistors.
It burned her tongue.
It warped the sky.
But the altar only laughed.
“You are already part of me.”
And then she remembered.
Remembered building this place.
Not with tools.
With her hands.
Her body.
Her comrades.
One by one, they were sacrificed to something beneath the dirt.
Not a god.
A consciousness made of sorrow, of hunger, of forgotten promises.
She hadn’t escaped.
She had been sent back.
The ground split.
From below, the core of the altar rose—an enormous, beating heart wrapped in barbed sigils and fused skulls.
It throbbed once.
And her skin began to crawl off her body, piece by piece, crawling toward the tower, whispering its way into the architecture.
Juno screamed—until her lungs walked away, too.
Now, when the wind passes through Old Chapel Fen, it carries voices.
Not ghosts.
Remnants.
Pieces of people.
Worshiping the thing that ate them slowly.
The altar continues to grow.
Always hungry.
Always listening.
And beneath it, the womb opens once more.