The rot wasn't just in the brickwork anymore. It lived in the wine goblets, swimming in vintage bloodwine like fat, lazy leeches. It curled behind the noblewomen's silk corsets, their ribcages stitched so tight you could hear bones creak when they laughed. And oh, how they laughed—high, tinkling sounds that cut through the Hall of Ancestral Teeth like broken glass through flesh.
Baroness Elsira Mortlock stirred her drink with a fork carved from her great-grandmother's femur. The bone clicked against crystal, a sound like teeth chattering in the cold.
"They're hoarding it," she murmured, lips barely moving. The candlelight caught the mercury in her smile, making her teeth gleam like wet knives. "The priests. Hue extract. Gallons of the shit."
Across the banquet table, Lord Ralf de Vyr crunched down on a candied beetle. Its carapace popped between his molars with a sound like a tiny skull cracking. "They say a lot of things, Elsira." He licked gore from his fingers. "They also say your fourth husband didn't 'vanish'—that you fed him to the Hue-trees in the west garden. Personally?" A slow, greasy smile. "I find both rumors... delicious."
The nobles tittered. The ones who didn't pretended not to hear, focusing very hard on their plates of rust-basted swan and memory-smoked hare. Above them, chandeliers made from gilded jawbones swayed, dripping hot wax onto the lacquered skeletons of dead pets mounted along the ceiling. The walls wept slow, artisanal blood—a fashionable addition from last season's Moonlit Jubilee.
Elsira's nail—sharpened to a point and dipped in widow's ink—tapped against her glass. Tink. Tink. Tink. "They're consolidating. The Church. The Cipher. Even the gutter-scum are whispering louder these days." Her eyes, black as Hue shards, scanned the table. "Something's shifting in Ironhollow. And it doesn't smell like our perfume."
Ralf dabbed his lips with a strip of black velvet. "Don't tell me you're scared of the poor, darling. They can barely afford to eat their own fingers this season."
Lady Crysanth—thin, hairless, her skin waxy and pocked from flesh-fever—leaned in. The scent of rotting lilies rolled off her in waves. "The Crimson Cipher carved their mark into the Magistrate's doorstep this morning. No ash. No cleansing." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "They didn't even hide it."
Ralf snorted. "The Cipher's just another gang of schizophrenics who drink piss and call it god's milk."
"No one calls it milk," muttered a lesser lord near the end of the table, his face half-melted from a bad Hue graft.
Elsira stood abruptly, her silhouette a razor-cut against the firelight. "They're moving like they own the fucking streets now. Our guards vanish in alleys. Our blood shows up in their rituals. And the rabble—those maggot-ridden wretches—they watch. They cheer." Her fist clenched around her bone fork hard enough to crack the ancient femur. "If we wait any longer, Ironhollow will forget who its true gods are."
The Cathedral's Weeping Crypts
Bishop Hadran knelt before a shrine of stitched mouths, their lips sewn shut with threads of sanctified hair. The candlelight—mutton-fat and marrow, the good stuff—made the shadows whisper psalms in backwards Latin.
"You mock the faith," Sister Vallace spat, emerging from the north alcove. Her habit was stiff with dried blood, the hood casting her face in perpetual midnight. "Your prayers are theater now."
Hadran didn't rise. "Isn't that what it's always been? A stage play performed on the grave of reason?"
Vallace's knuckles cracked as she clenched her fists. "You let them fester. The Cipher. The flesh-saints. Their roots are tangling through our catacombs."
The bishop turned slowly. His robes—stitched with the teeth of dead popes and blessed ash—whispered secrets as he moved. "I do not let anything happen in this city, sister. I calculate."
"They're stealing our flock!"
"They offer hope," Hadran corrected, smiling faintly. "We offer... penance."
Vallace spat a glob of blackened blood at his feet. "Then we burn them. Like the old days."
Hadran's face twitched. A nerve? A tic? Or something deeper, rattling behind his eyes? "This isn't the old Ironhollow. The nobles trade memories like currency. The gutter-men chew on dream-bones. The city's heartbeat has... changed."
"Then make a new rhythm," Vallace hissed. "One that breaks them."
The Sewer Archives
The Crimson Cipher convened where the bones of dead kings gathered dust. No names here. Only roles.
The Speaker's helm—fused infant skulls, their empty eye sockets weeping black sap—turned slowly as he addressed the circle. "The city ripens. The hue ferments. The Mind-Warden walks the edge of revelation."
A masked acolyte shifted, his gloves slick with something that wasn't water. "The nobles are preparing countermeasures. Rituals. Poisonings. Even... diplomacy."
The Speaker's laugh was the sound of a coffin lid scraping open. "Let them."
Another figure stepped forward, drenched in ichor that smelled like burnt copper. "The Bishop still breathes. Shall we... correct that?"
The Speaker raised a skeletal hand. "No. Not yet. Let them sharpen their knives. Let them bleed each other white. When the gutters clog with their waste, when the nobles scream and the priests beg the moon for silence—" The skulls grinned in unison. "Then we take the heart."
Silence.
Then laughter. Wet. Guttural. Unhinged.
And somewhere above them, the city trembled like a diseased heart in a rotting chest.
The Spire of Law
The Spire jutted from Ironhollow's skyline like a broken spine, its shadow staining the noble quarter in perpetual twilight. Inside, beneath chandeliers of frozen tears and condemned men's breath, the aristocracy sipped bloodwine and plotted over the clink of crystal.
Baron Clask—a bloated tick of a man, his skin stretched tight over a lifetime of other people's feasts—waved a gloved hand. "The cultists are getting bold. Preaching in the slums. Handing out Hue-laced hope to gutter rats." His lip curled. "It's... vulgar."
Lady Morinth—all razor cheekbones and venomous grace—sipped from a chalice shaped like a screaming mouth. "False hope is still more filling than your taxes, Clask. And don't pretend your men aren't buying spells from the Cipher after dark. We all fuck devils here. Some of us just don't kiss them after."
A ripple of uneasy laughter.
General Orson Flint—his boneplate lacquered with the faces of dead enemies—slammed his fist on the table. Wine sloshed like fresh blood. "This isn't about trade! The Cipher wants the city's mind. They've been smuggling pure Hue into the Foundry School. Our students dream in fucking spirals now!"
Morinth's smile was a scalpel. "Better dreamers than obedient corpses."
Orson stood, his blade half-drawn—
"Sit your ass down," Chancellor Grell rasped. The oldest lord in the room, his face a roadmap of old wars and older betrayals, glared from beneath brows like stormclouds. "We're not here to measure cocks. The city's rotting. The gutters are breeding something. The Red Moon's so close I can taste its fucking breath. And you're squabbling like butchers at a famine sale."
Silence.
Then—
A servant boy, his eyelids crudely stitched shut, spoke in a voice not his own:
"The Spiral watches. The Spiral waits. The feast has only begun."
Blood erupted from his ears. He collapsed. His soul was already gone.
The Chapel of Unanswered Prayers
Father Valvete scrubbed blood from his hands in a basin of holy water gone stale. The pews groaned under the weight of the faithful—some missing limbs, others missing minds.
"We are at war," Valvete intoned, his voice gravel wrapped in velvet. "Not with steel. Not with flesh. With thoughts. The kind that burrow. The kind that hatch."
A woman with gauze where her face should be raised a trembling hand. "What of the nobles, Father? They feast while our children hear the moon whisper."
Valvete's smile was a wound. "They are food, sister. Food for the gears. Food for the silence. Their minds break from indulgence. Ours break from truth."
"But the Crimson Ci—"
Valvete's fist came down on the pulpit with a crack like a breaking spine. "Do not speak that name here."
In the rafters, two acolytes whispered:
"You hear? They say the Cipher's building a city beneath the city. That they'll take anyone who remembers their past lives."
"Bullshit. I heard they flay the faithful and paint timelines with the blood."
"My brother's kid—the one who spoke in tongues? Vanished last week. Left a spiral carved into his own spine."
"Praise the gears."
"Praise rot."
The Gutter Warrens
Beneath the city, where the stone wept black sap and the rats whispered in dead languages, three figures met in a meat cellar thick with smoke and old screams.
The cult's envoy—a woman with hollow eyes and a tongue too long to be human—called herself Draahl. The name tasted like spoiled milk and old coins.
The Church sent an Archivist—a paper-man, his flesh half-parchment, words rustling under his skin like trapped insects.
The nobles sent no one. Cowards. Or worse—traitors watching from their glass towers.
"Something's moving under the bones," Draahl whispered. Her tongue flicked out, tasting the air. "Time's... slipping." ...