The red moon sneered through Ironhollow's jagged skyline, casting veins of bloodlight across the cathedral's shattered ribcage of glass. Jonathan H. Simpson—Mind-Warden, butcher of delusions, and half-devoured by the Hue—knelt in a weeping alley, his grafted arm twitching like a rusted parasite.
The limb, a nest of gangrenous sinew and iron tendrils, convulsed as he drove the syringe home.
"Still," he growled.
The man beneath him—a dockhand, eyes ruptured into gleaming Hue crystal florets—screamed wet and low, bile choking his ruined throat.
"It's the moon," the man sobbed, clutching Jonathan's coat with bleeding knuckles. "It saw me—I only glanced and now it's in me, inside—"
"It's always been inside." Jonathan's voice was ash. He emptied the syringe: holy oil laced with powdered Hue, stolen from the Inquisition's black vaults. The man's spasms stilled. His sockets oozed iridescent rot.
"You'll forget your name. Your children. Everything but the screaming."
"What's the point?"
Jonathan stood, wiping his hands with a cloth that reeked of antiseptic and long defeat. "To spite the dark. Now run—before the priests sniff you out."
The man staggered into the meat-thick fog, swallowed by the pulsing alley walls—veined with tissue, weeping rustwater. Jonathan was alone again.
Somewhere, the Gore Clocktower erupted. Another gout of clotted blood rained down, ticking out the hour in gore.
---
Ironhollow breathed around him—a bloated corpse kept alive by memory-traders, limb-mongers, and the dying. Towers of bone and steel leaned like drunk prophets. Vendors howled beneath skin-canopies, hawking syringes, screams, salvation.
A gaunt woman grabbed his sleeve. Her pupils had become voids.
"Mind-Warden," she whispered, "my son hears the moon. He tears at himself at night. Can you… cut it out?"
Jonathan peeled her fingers off. "I don't cut children."
"They say you carve madness like meat—"
"They say wrong."
He walked on, his dead arm hidden beneath his coat, the stink of rot trailing behind him like incense.
---
The Whorl Market pulsed like a wounded organ. Its entrance—a leviathan's fossilized maw—dripped congealed sap. Inside, bartering was sacred violence. Stalls breathed. Lanterns screamed when lit.
A vendor held up a jar of swirling shadow.
"Nightmare essence! Squeezed from a Graszer's dying breath. Two memories—best offer."
Jonathan tossed him a vial. The vendor sniffed, eyes rolling back in reverie.
"First kiss," he murmured. "Pre-Hue. Rare."
"Keep your nostalgia," Jonathan said, pocketing the jar. "It doesn't rot the way I need."
The vendor grinned, teeth filed into scripture. "The dead trade in prettier lies than the living."
---
Father Valvete found him by the broken fountain, where children drowned coins for luck that never came. The priest wore his robe like a shroud, his face a ruin of knife-scars and fungal theology.
"You stink of defiance," Valvete rasped. "And failure."
"You stink of incense and hypocrisy." Jonathan sharpened a scalpel on the edge of the fountain.
"What does the Church want? More blood for their sermons? Another heretic to gut?"
Valvete's laugh was a crypt opening. "They want you to stop. Every mind you salvage unravels our gospel. We need despair. It feeds the machine."
Jonathan flexed his infected hand. The necrosis had reached his elbow. "Add my defiance to your doctrine, then."
Valvete held out a vial: pure Hue, liquid starlight screaming behind glass. "A gift. From the Crimson Cipher."
Jonathan stilled. The cult's symbol—a spiral, etched in dried nerve—was scorched into the vial's cork.
"You peddling cult poison now?"
"The alternative is watching you rot." Valvete pushed it into his palm. "They say you understand decay. They say you belong."
The Hue in the vial sang. His graft twitched in ecstasy.
"What's the cost?"
"A memory. One you won't miss."
---
He found the boy near the Gore Clocktower, curled beside a sewer grate. One arm ended in a rusted meat-hook, poorly fused. The infection was already blooming.
Jonathan jabbed the serum into the child's throat. "It'll dull the agony. That hook's rot is in your blood. You've got a year, maybe two."
The boy stared at the weapon fused to his bone. "Will I forget… me?"
"Yes."
"But I'll be strong?"
Jonathan stood, holstering the needle. "You'll die screaming. That's not strength—it's volume."
---
Dawn bled through the iron haze. Jonathan climbed to the cathedral roof, a silhouette against the world's rotting eye. The city below pulsed, a carcass too stubborn to die.
He uncorked the vial.
What's one more memory?
He drank. The Hue erupted inside him. Visions flayed his nerves:
The flesh-tree's mouth devouring his arm. A shard burning through his chest. The moon, laughing like a child being drowned.
When it ended, his graft was… changed. The fingers tapered into scalpels. Steel cords wove through necrotic veins.
The cult's spiral pulsed in his palm.
Welcome to the spiral, monster.
---
Night. The moon watched. The city trembled.
Jonathan moved through the curfew crowds like a rumor. A street preacher pointed at him.
"Behold! The Red Moon's bastard! He stitches minds and unravels his own!"
Jonathan vanished into an alley. Behind him, the corpses of an Inquisition patrol bled their Hue into the gutter. He crouched and began to harvest.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The city's pulse. His own.
Somewhere, a heretic burned. Somewhere, a child forgot his name. Somewhere, the moon laughed.
And Jonathan walked on—a surgeon without sanctuary, priest of no god, sewing shut the mouths of the damned.