1044: Story 1044: Ashes of the Eldritch 1044: Story 1044: Ashes of the Eldritch The town of Velmoor had long been reduced to smoldering ruins.
Blackened stones and shattered spires stood like jagged teeth across the dead earth.
Survivors called it cursed.
Others, wiser or perhaps more afraid, never spoke its name at all.
Velmoor wasn’t lost to the zombies.
It was consumed by something older.
The Cult of the Ash-Blooded came first—whispers in cloaks, bleeding eyes under moons that weren’t supposed to exist.
They spoke of an entity buried beneath Velmoor’s cathedral.
A being not born of time, but of silence between stars.
They called it Khar’yxeth.
The Eldritch Ash.
It dreamed in fire.
In their desperation, the cult performed the Ash Rite, an ancient invocation fueled by the bones of children and the tongues of the willing.
They sought transcendence, but what they received was annihilation.
Velmoor ignited.
Not in flame—but in reality collapse.
Stone melted.
Flesh rewrote itself.
Time reversed and screamed.
And rising from the heart of it all came a storm of soot and madness.
Khar’yxeth awakened.
When the apocalypse hit, Velmoor remained untouched by the zombie blight.
But those who wandered too close…
changed.
Some turned to ash mid-step, blown apart by windless gusts.
Others walked back out smiling with empty eyes and mouths filled with black smoke.
And a few became Ashbound—half-human wretches with cracking skin and molten veins, prophesying the “coming of the Gray Eclipse.”
The survivors’ enclave, Red Hollow, sent a team to investigate.
Only one returned.
Elias Crain—skin seared, hair gone, teeth gritted with black grit—spoke three words before vomiting dust and dying:
“It remembers burning.”
They say Velmoor still stands in three timelines simultaneously—the past before the ritual, the present aftermath, and a future when Khar’yxeth rules in silence.
Anyone who enters is subjected to temporal bleed.
People grow old in minutes.
Others turn into children and vanish.
Even the zombies don’t enter Velmoor anymore.
They just stand at its borders, twitching—heads tilted toward the ruins—listening.
From the ashes, twisted shapes rise.
Not quite beasts.
Not quite people.
Their forms constantly shift, as if struggling to hold a single identity.
Eldritch spawn of Khar’yxeth, born of melted logic and sacred fire.
They don’t kill.
They convert.
One breath of their cinder-speak and your mind unravels, memories replaced with celestial numbers and fire prayers.
And in the cathedral’s cracked basement, the Ash-Blooded Cult still chants—though their bodies are gone, burned to silhouettes on stone walls.
Their souls remain, circling Khar’yxeth like black comets, offering it stories from the broken world.
Soon, it will rise again—not in Velmoor, but everywhere.
Because the ash is spreading.
It clings to the wind.
To thought.
To names.
And once you say its name—Khar’yxeth—it remembers you.
You are now part of the fire.