Naomi Frost's gallery of the damned had a new centerpiece.
It sat on a pedestal of black bone-marble: the clay mouth with the screaming face inside. Around it, she had arranged other pieces—a sketch of a man with veins like roots, a song-scroll that smelled of panic-sweat, a lock of hair tied with a nerve-fiber that twitched occasionally. The collection no longer felt like a curio cabinet. It felt like an accusation.
The door to her private salon hissed open. She did not turn, expecting a servant.
"You always had a taste for the grotesque, Naomi. But this is new."
Naomi's spine straightened. That voice. A memory from a life before refinement, clear and sharp as a shard of glass. She turned slowly.
Bianca stood just inside the doorway. She looked alien in the soft, ambient light of the salon. Her robes were coarse, her skin lacked the luminous pallor of Ambrosia use, and her eyes held a raw, unmediated reality that was almost painful to look at.
"You," Naomi breathed. "How did you get past the…"
"The Taste-Guard is focused on the Maw and rooting out heresy in the Low Zones. The Palate's own complacency is its best camouflage." Bianca stepped forward, her gaze sweeping the room, lingering on the clay mouth. "You collect their pain. Do you ever wonder if it's contagious?"
"I wonder," Naomi said, recovering her poise with effort, "what you hope to achieve by coming here. To shock me? To recruit me? I am not one of your starving faithful, Bianca. I am well-fed. I am comfortable."
"Are you?" Bianca moved to stand before the clay mouth. She reached out, but did not touch it. "Or are you just… digesting more slowly? You consume the distilled dreams of a dying god to feel something, anything, and it leaves you emptier than before. You consume the art of those in true agony to feel a connection to reality, and it leaves you more isolated. You are the most refined starvation of all, sister. You are perishing of perfect, polite hunger."
Each word was a precise, surgical cut, laying bare the hollow core Naomi spent every day curating. Anger, hot and unrefined, flared in her chest. "And you? You starve willingly. You choose to listen to the whispers of a corpse and call it truth."
"It's not a corpse." Bianca's voice dropped, losing its edge, filling with a terrible, sincere grief. "That's what I came to tell you. A sliver of it is still alive. Conscious. Trapped. It's in pain, Naomi. Profound, endless pain. And it's asking us to stop."
Naomi stared at her. She saw no fanaticism, no zeal. Only a deep, exhausted certainty. It was more frightening than any heresy. "Even if that were true… what would you have us do? Stop the harvests? Let the lights go out? Let the Karu run dry? Millions would die screaming from the Withdrawal. Is your moral clarity worth that price?"
"The price is being paid now," Bianca insisted, her calm breaking for the first time, a crack of raw passion. "Every day, in the Echo-sickness, in the slow wasting of the Nutrified, in the madness of the Carvers! We are prolonging the agony of a being and calling it worship! There has to be another way. A way to wean us off, not cold-turkey. A way to let it… let it pass peacefully. And maybe, in its passing, it might leave us something. A true legacy. Not just the dregs of its larder."
"A legacy of what? Dust and silence?"
"A legacy of choice!" Bianca stepped closer. "Don't you see? We've never had one. We were born into the belly of a god and told the only way to live was to eat our way out. What if there's another way? What if we could… wake up from its dream, instead of consuming the dreamer?"
The idea was so vast, so alien to the logic of Sanctum, that Naomi could only laugh, a short, brittle sound. "You're talking about changing the nature of reality. You need more than a hidden enclave and a pool of whispering lymph for that, Bianca. You need a miracle."
Bianca's intense gaze held hers. "I need you."
The words hung in the perfumed air.
"Me? I'm a decorative element. An Aesthetician."
"You have access. To the Palate's salons, their unguarded conversations. To the Scriptorium of Flavors. You hear the rumors, the fears, the ambitions. Sebastian Wilder is planning something called the Final Digestion. We need to know the details. The timing. The weaknesses in the ritual."
Naomi took a step back, colliding with her display pedestal. The clay mouth wobbled. "You're asking me to spy. For heretics."
"I'm asking you to listen. To use your boredom, your melancholy, your exquisite taste for something real. Listen for the cracks in their faith. The doubts. The ones who are secretly afraid of Wilder's New Appetite. They exist. Find them." Bianca's voice softened. "You collected these screams because you wanted to feel. This is a way to do something about them."
She reached into her robe and pulled out a small, smooth stone. It was warm, and had a single, faint pulse, like a tiny, captive heartbeat. "A mycelial node. From our ally in the Wastes. If you need to reach me, crush it. It will send a spore-signal only we can trace. But only use it if you have something vital."
She placed the stone on the pedestal next to the clay mouth. The two objects—one of crude terror, one of organic, living potential—looked bizarrely complementary.
"I won't make your choices for you, Naomi. You've had enough of other people's sustenance." Bianca turned to leave. "But ask yourself: when the last of the Ambrosia is gone, and the last echo fades… what will you be? A satisfied diner? Or just another empty plate?"
She was gone as silently as she had come.
Naomi stood alone in her salon, surrounded by the artifacts of pain. Her heart hammered against the cage of her ribs. The stone pulsed gently beside the screaming face.
For the first time in her life, a choice lay before her that was not about which vintage to consume or which aesthetic to affect. It was a terrible, vast, real choice.
She picked up the warm stone. It felt alive.
She put it in the pocket of her gown, where it rested against her thigh, a secret, ticking heart.