1048: Story 1048: Thirteen Teeth 1048: Story 1048: Thirteen Teeth They say the legend of Thirteen Teeth started with a whisper in the plague winds—a story too cursed to be spoken aloud, passed from dying lips to curious ears in crumbling towns.
It was never just a tale.
It was a warning.
And Kara, scavenger and seeker, ignored it.
In the heart of a rotted coastal city swallowed by salt and silence, Kara hunted relics.
Bone charms.
Rusted rings.
Whisper-glass.
She sold them to desperate survivors and cultists alike.
But when she found the box—chained, bleeding, and still breathing—she thought it was gold.
Inside, nestled in velvet that pulsed like a living lung, were thirteen human teeth.
Each was carved with symbols not meant for mortal eyes.
Each radiated heat.
And at the very center sat one jagged tooth, black as tar and humming with a voice Kara couldn’t un-hear.
“Take me.”
She did.
That night, the fever started.
She dreamed of a great maw beneath the earth.
Not a beast.
A god—made of gums and rot, its tongue paved with skulls, its laughter like teeth grinding bone.
She saw herself within it.
Walking halls of enamel.
Slipping between molars as tall as towers.
She was its bride.
Its key.
She awoke with one of the thirteen teeth buried in her palm.
Every day that followed, Kara lost one of her own.
At first, they cracked.
Then bled.
Then fell out clean, painlessly.
And in their place, the cursed ones grew in—longer, sharper, ancient.
Strangers stared too long.
Animals ran.
Mirrors warped.
Worse, she started to see them—the others.
The ones who had touched the box before her.
They watched from the rooftops with mouths sewn shut, faces locked in silent screams, all bearing too many teeth.
Thirteen.
Always thirteen.
She tried to throw the box into the sea.
But it came back—washed ashore the next morning, gnashing silently.
She burned it.
It laughed.
So she sought the Tooth-Eater, the old hermit who lived beneath the chapel ruins, whispering to rats.
He looked at her and wept.
“You let it in,” he said.
“You bit the world.”
“How do I stop it?” she begged.
He handed her a mirror.
“There’s no stopping.
Only feeding.”
The final night came.
Twelve teeth replaced her own.
The thirteenth pulsed in her throat, choking her from within, demanding birth.
As the sky turned red and the stars wept pus, the ground split open in the plague-slick alleyways.
A maw yawned from the earth, wide enough to swallow cities.
The Tooth-God rose—its body formed of the bones of civilizations, its breath the shriek of drills in flesh.
Kara dropped to her knees, mouth wide.
She screamed.
And the thirteenth tooth erupted through her skull.
When dawn broke, there was no Kara.
Only a shrine of molars where she once stood.
And in every city, whisper-glass rattled.
Thirteen more had been chosen.