> "Bone is shackle, blood is filth, pain is the path to the Holy Flesh."
– Opening verse in the Tongue-Twisting Codex, a handwritten scripture on the skin of a woman roasted alive in the ritual known as "The Moaning Purity."
---
Origin Within Flesh
Before the Head-Turned One opened the third eye and reversed the cycle, before the Pillars of Blood sprouted in the rotting heart of the holy sanctum, there was a name — or rather, a soul chained in flesh — called Seravion.
He was not noble, not born in saintly blood, bore no inherited halo. He was a lowly monk, who daily scrubbed the blood of the self-flagellating from prayer walls, breathing in the stench of burnt flesh without daring to grimace.
But on a night when the moon rose in reverse and the central candle of the chapel extinguished thrice, he heard a voice rise from within his blood.
> "You are the body. I am the hunger. Cleanse me... by destroying everything you possess."
Seravion knelt in the mud, screaming. But the voice did not depart. It grew sweeter with every ache he felt.
---
Thirty-Three Nights of Purification
Night One – Destroying the Lineage
> He shattered each knuckle with a ritual hammer, believing each joint held the inherited curse of sinning ancestors.
Night Seven – Peeling the Back's Veil
> He hooked all the skin from his back with blood-hooks, hanging it like a vestment on a rack so the gods could "read scriptures from the scars."
Night Fourteen – The Word of Darkness
> He boiled sacred wine until it smoked, then poured it into his eyes. Blind, he painted the word "Salvation" on the wall with eye-blood, in reverse.
Night Twenty-Three – The Broken Tongue of God
> He cut out his tongue and replaced it with a vulture bone, then bit off his lower lip to never again speak lies.
Night Thirty-Three – The Formless Origin
> He removed every bone from his body, chewed them into pulp, mixed with blood and holy clay, forming the Pillar of Cleansing Bone – a column carved with verses made of rotting flesh.
When the pillar was complete, he was nothing but a trembling mound of meat, hung by dried sinews on the column. In that moment, he smiled — for the first time in his life.
---
Dark Light and the Mutation
The sole survivor that night — a chapel watchman — recounted that as the first sunlight rose, a black beam descended from the sky, scorching every living cell in Seravion.
There was no scream. No plea. Only a string of bizarre moans echoing from each opened blood-hole.
From the red-oozing ashes crawled a form that could not be named:
Boneless. Eyeless. Tongueless.
A faint halo drifted around it, formed from groans collected across hundreds of nights of self-mutilation.
> "I have seen the light… in the heart of darkness."
– Final words of Seravion, recorded by the lone survivor — who later self-immolated "to hear that sound once more."
---
From That Day On, the Church of Blood-Flesh Was Born.
They believed the soul can only attain absolute purity when there's no place left to hide. Only through unbearable agony can the body be forced to shed the soul like a ripened fruit bursts its skin.
Some core tenets of the Church:
Every new monk must remove at least one vertebra, carve the god's name into it using a bone needle, and insert it into the Oathbone Pillar at the church capital.
High priests must weave vestments from preserved small intestines soaked in ash — symbolizing "the heart wrapped in decay."
Orphaned children chosen as future vessels must have their ears removed — so they "cannot hear the whispering of flesh."
---
Relics and the Twisted Word
An extremist sect — The Sanctified Impaled — believes Seravion never died. He sleeps beneath the Mountain of Blood, awaiting rebirth in the Absolutely Pure Body — a being with no form, no name, no memory.
They scour the land for deformed newborns, calling them the Fourteenth Flesh-Spots, to see if Seravion's soul resides within.
---
The Blood Inscriptions
> "To touch the divine, you must cut away every part of your identity."
"To be saved, you must learn to bleed in the shape of an inverted star."
"Only the formless may behold the truth."
These verses are tattooed in rotted blood, reversed, onto the foreheads and chests of clergy. When hung upside-down in the chapel, gazing into blood mirrors, they read the teachings in the correct direction.
---
Finale: Eternal Purification
No one knows if Seravion still lives.
But every Feast of the Finger, thousands of followers gather beneath the Pillar of Cleansing Bone, singing through slit throats, praying that one day they may bleed until they become light.
---
Pope Larian walked alone through the black corridor, where no light could penetrate, where the ceiling was etched from fingernails of the dead, and the walls wrapped in the sinews of heretic priests.
He stopped before the bone-door, placing a hand upon the lock made from the pelvis of an unbaptized child. The door opened with a faint scream — not from the hinges, but from the souls imprisoned in the wood.
The Forbidden Library.
Larian removed his gloves. Beneath the fabric was a hand stripped of skin — only crimson muscle and exposed joints, trembling as if in prayer.
He touched a book bound in ancient skin, its seams stitched with thread taken from the hair of burned infants.
On the cover, only one line:
> "Hymn of the Unacknowledged Child"
Author: Lioren — written in his blood, and by blood, he will awaken it again.
Larian whispered, mouthing the archaic tongue:
> "When the world praises light, I see only fire devouring my guts.
When they speak of Gods, I see only rotting infants beside altars.
When they call me hope… I know I am the crack in Truth."
He turned each page — blood seeping into his flesh, as though the book were still alive.
Each chapter, a labyrinth of moans — the blood-soaked diary of a child born to be killed, yet stubbornly living like roots growing in human corpses.