1082: Story 1082: The Preacher’s Husk 1082: Story 1082: The Preacher’s Husk In the town of Hollowmere, no one spoke of the church anymore.
Once the beating heart of the settlement, it now stood choked in creeping vines and silence, its bell tower crooked like a broken finger pointing skyward.
It was said the last sermon echoed through bone and marrow, long after the congregation was gone.
The preacher’s name had been Father Orlin Vex, a man who once wielded scripture like fire.
But the plague came—a rot of flesh and soul—and one by one, his flock began to change.
Their eyes turned milky, their voices hollow.
They wandered the pews as if sleepwalking.
Praying to something beneath the chapel floorboards.
Orlin’s faith cracked.
Desperate to save his people, he locked the doors one stormy evening and began what he claimed would be “the sermon of salvation.” No one left that night.
The candles were still burning days later.
And when the constables broke in, they found no blood, no bodies—only Orlin, standing at the pulpit, unmoving.
He had become a husk.
His flesh was there, eyes open, lips parted as though still mid-sermon.
But his insides were gone—emptied like a vessel.
He never blinked.
Never breathed.
And he never decayed.
Some said his soul had been tithed to something beneath the pulpit.
Something ancient and patient.
They buried him in the cemetery behind the church, sealed in a coffin bound in iron and scriptures.
But strange things followed.
Fog began seeping from the grave every night.
Whispers bloomed in the dead grass.
Children started dreaming of a figure in black robes with a voice like cracking wood and a face without features—just an open wound where a mouth should be.
Years passed.
The town withered.
Only a few remained, clinging to superstition and memory.
Then Lucien Mor, a folklorist, arrived, eager to document the town’s “living relic.” He unearthed records, diary entries, even a photograph of Father Vex before the transformation—eyes fierce, hands bound in rosaries.
Lucien should have stopped there.
But curiosity pulled him to the grave.
On the third night, during a blood moon, he dug it up.
The coffin was open.
Inside was not Orlin, but Lucien’s reflection, aged, eyes gouged out, mouth sewn shut with scripture threads.
Behind him, a shape rose from the earth—a figure draped in rotting vestments, with ribs carved like altars and a pulpit nailed to its back.
The Husk had returned.
Now, each night, Hollowmere trembles with a sermon that no one can hear but everyone feels.
A pressure in the skull.
A throb in the ribs.
Those who listen too long begin to mimic the gestures of a preacher long dead—mouthing the words of a god with no name.
They say if you pass through Hollowmere, and the fog parts just right, you’ll see him standing there still—preaching to a congregation of shadows, his hollow voice summoning believers from beyond the veil.
And if you hear the sermon…
you never stop listening.