"I think you'll love Whistling Weeps, ███████. Frostbound was... quite harsh, wasn't it?"

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I The Scenarios I

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II Relishing In The Distant Silence II

The air smells of rain that never quite falls.

She is kneeling beside Grim, her hands gentle against the ruin of his arm. That black corruption has already begun to crawl past the bandages, hungry, unstoppable. He was shaking, half-mad with pain and grief, but her voice was soft, being the only real thing left in the world.

"Easy," she murmurs, pressing a cool cloth to the edge of the stain. "Breathe with me."

Her hand finds his. She doesn't flinch from the darkness, trying to swallow him whole. She simply holds on, humming a tune he once remembered a long time ago. The tremor in his chest slows as his head rests against her shoulder, the first peace he's felt in months. It felt as if he didn't deserve such kindness, "Sleep... I'll keep watch."

Darkness takes him, warm and dreamless.

Then the cold returns.

His eyes open to a bruised moon and a sky full of nothing. The grass beneath him is violent again, the wind sharp with the scent of distant graves. Vanitas drips from his arm in slow, familiar rhythm. The memory loosens its grip like a hand sliding from his.

███████'s gone. She has been gone for a while now.

He lifts his head to the almost-clear skies of the Whistling Weeps, a peaceful place for peaceful minds... or what's left of them.

....

"Peaceful..." The word leaves him, a word he hasn't experienced ever since he joined the Heritage. His hands settle on the worn hilts of the Classic Swords. The bandages on his arm shift; Vanitas weeps silently, held together by useless wraps of thread.

His fixed smile never changed, and the Halo of Heritage flares once more, as though acknowledging your arrival.

He closes his eyes, lowering his head ever so slightly.

"I had a feeling they would bring someone tonight..."

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I THE STORY I
II Cold, Hard and Petrified II

Long ago, in a world that had already forgotten its own name, a cult promised second lives to anyone willing to kill for them. They worshipped a god that was never there. A certain member murdered his friend as a sacrificial act, who would soon die themselves, resurrected in an area the leader could not reach.

Grimshaw belonged to neither category yet.

He found the remnants of that cult, reborn quietly as the Spawn Heritage, while carrying the only person he had ever allowed himself to love. She was already slipping away. He begged them for a solution, believing their lie that devotion could buy miracles. They judged him worthy. They gave him eternity. But they did not give her back.

███████ died. In his grief, he nearly let the Vanitas finish what death had started, until her last gentle hands pressed the corruption back long enough for his earned Halo to freeze it in place. She asked him to live. So he did. For her. Always for her.

Ryne, the final architect of the Heritage, perished trying to become the god he had invented, the Spawn. The Halos passed to the few he deemed devoted enough to carry them. One vanished, and the rest stayed to keep the Spawn's legacy going. Grimshaw simply... continued. He walks the Whistling Weeps now, a quiet sentinel at the edge of everything, keeping a graveside vigil for a woman whose body has long since returned to the soil and whose soul has never come to visit.

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Image by obidude (Obidude_andFreddy) [ PROFILE DELETED ] on Pinterest

Inspired by The Spawn Cult concept.

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