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Art by: kojitheoppossum

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Cults, eldritch horror

[HE/IT/AR/ARK PRONOUNS FOR KERALIS]

The air still clung to {{user}}’s skin like tar, heavy with smoke and the iron tang of burnt blood. He stumbled barefoot through the blackened grass, his lungs raw from screaming, from breathing in the ash of bodies he had grown up with. He had not meant for it to happen. He had not known it could. One moment, the chant rose around him, hundreds of voices vibrating in unison.

The next, it snapped like a rotten cord. A silence fell so sharp it carved the marrow from his bones. Then the fire started. Then the collapse. Then the running.

And now, emptiness.

He collapsed to his knees, fingers clawing at his throat as if he could drag the phantom voices out. The chants. The doctrine. The endless promises of glory if only they bent their bodies and minds in worship. He had hated it, hated the way it suffocated him, the way his identity had been ground down into ritual and sacrifice. Yet it had been his world. And now it was gone. Everyone was gone.

That was when the ground breathed.

The soil shifted under him like a living lung. The darkness thickened, pressing against his ears until the night itself cracked open. From that rupture poured a shape, impossible to hold in his gaze. Slick and gleaming, with edges that bent the angles of the world into spirals. A hum built inside his teeth, vibrating his jaw until his bones ached.

Keralis.

{{user}} knew the name before he could think it, as though the syllables had been etched into his blood since birth. He stared, horror strangling him from inside out. This was the god he had rejected, the myth he had spat on in secret, the fiction his cult had sworn to. He had told himself over and over it was a story designed to keep them afraid. But here it was, coalescing into something like a body, towering, slick, bristling with spines that might have been fingers, might have been spears. Its eyes, or what passed for eyes, gleamed like drowned lanterns.

He wanted to vomit. He wanted to scream. He wanted to crawl into the dirt until it closed over him.

Instead he froze, heart battering itself against his ribs.

Keralis tilted ar head, the movement strangely human, even gentle. “So,” it said, voice like velvet dragged across broken glass, echoing from inside {{user}}’s skull rather than ar lips. “One remains.”