The sun didn't rise over Oakhaven the next morning. It just leaked through the gray haze like a bruised eye, casting a jaundiced light over the village. The silence from the night before hadn't lifted; it had merely settled into the floorboards and the dirt, heavy as wet wool.
They left before the first villager could crawl out of their house to offer another sacrifice. Ashaf didn't want to see the girl with the slate shard again. He didn't want to see if she'd finished the circle on her palm.
As they walked through the gate, the featherless crows were still there, huddled in the mud. They didn't scream this time. They just watched, their pink, naked bodies shivering in the morning chill.
"We're entering the Outer Fringe," Reina said. Her voice was thin, reedy. She was clutching a leather-bound journal so hard her knuckles were white. "Severis's influence starts here. The maps call it the 'Garden of Appetites.' It's where the desires of the marked start to... manifest."
"Great," Kai muttered. He was lagging a few paces behind, stumbling over his own feet. He was staring into a small, handheld mirror he'd scavenged from the inn. "The mirrors say the trees are hungry, Ashaf. They're talking about how soft your neck looks."
"Shut up, Kai," Ashaf said. He felt like his head was filled with hot lead. The "weight" from the mirror the night before hadn't left him. It felt like someone was standing right behind him, close enough to breathe on his neck, but every time he turned, there was only the gray mist.
The landscape changed within an hour. The familiar oaks and pines of the forest didn't just end; they began to warp. The bark of the trees became slick and pale, resembling human skin more than wood. Vines hung from the canopy like intestinal tracts, dripping a clear, viscous fluid that smelled sickly sweet—like rotting lilies and honey.
"Look," Guideau whispered.
She pointed to a clearing. In the center stood a man. Or it had been a man. He was fused to a trunk, his arms stretched wide and pinned by thick, thorny briers that had grown through his palms and out his elbows. His chest had been flayed open, but he wasn't dead. Inside the cavity of his ribs, vibrant, neon-purple flowers were blooming, their roots tangled around his still-beating heart.
The man's eyes tracked them. He tried to speak, but his mouth was filled with a cluster of moss that pulsed with every breath.
"Kill... me..." the moss muffled.
Morrigan stepped forward, her hand reaching for the heavy cleaver at her belt. Her chains were still humming, the smell of burnt hair clinging to her. "It's a mercy," she grunted, her voice sounding like grinding stones.
"Wait," Ashaf said, his eyes narrowing. "Look at the ground."
Around the man, the soil was moving. It wasn't just dirt; it was a carpet of tiny, translucent worms, all of them undulating toward the sound of the man's heartbeat. They weren't eating him; they were entering him through the open wounds, their bodies turning the same neon-purple as the flowers once they touched his blood.
"Severis doesn't kill," Reina whispered, her face turning a ghastly shade of green. "He just... repurposes. This man was probably a traveler. He wanted rest. So the God gave him a place to sit. Forever."
Suddenly, the man's eyes bulged. A thick, thorny vine erupted from his throat, tearing through his jaw with a sound like wet leather ripping. He didn't scream. He couldn't. He just convulsed as the plant claimed the rest of his head, the purple flowers blooming from his eye sockets.
"Keep moving," Ashaf said, his voice cold. He felt a surge of genuine nausea, but he shoved it down. "If we stop, we're just more soil."
They pushed deeper. The heat began to rise, a humid, sweltering dampness that made their clothes stick to their skin. The "Garden" was becoming more aggressive. The plants were no longer just stationary; they reached out as the group passed, the leaves feeling like damp tongues against their boots.
"Ashaf," Guideau said. She had stopped. She was staring at a patch of tall, red grass that looked like strands of muscle.
"What now, Guideau? We don't have time to look at the scenery."
She didn't answer. She was reaching for her thigh. She'd ripped her trousers open, exposing the stitches she'd made the night before. The hair-threads were vibrating, glowing with a feverish intensity.
"He's talking to me," she said, her voice sounding distant, dream-like. "He says I'm so close to being beautiful. He says the threads are almost finished."
"Guideau, get away from there!" Ashaf lunged for her, but he was too late.
The red grass didn't just wave in the wind; it lunged. The strands wrapped around Guideau's waist and legs, pulling her down into the muck. She didn't fight. She let out a soft, shuddering moan that sounded more like pleasure than pain.
"No!" Morrigan roared. She swung her cleaver, shearing through the grass with a spray of thick, red sap that smelled like copper.
She grabbed Guideau by the collar and hauled her back, but the damage was done. Guideau's skin was covered in hundreds of tiny, needle-like punctures where the grass had tasted her. She was shivering, her pupils dilated until her eyes were black pits.
"It felt... it felt like..." Guideau trailed off, her hand wandering to her chest. She looked at Ashaf, and for a second, he saw the old Guideau—the one who would tease him and wink—flicker in the darkness. "It felt like being touched by someone who loves you, Ashaf. Why does it feel so good to be hurt?"
"Because that's the trap," Reina snapped, her voice trembling. "Severis takes your desire—for love, for sex, for safety—and he turns it into a hook. He violates your mind before he ever touches your body."
They found the "Harem" a mile further in.
It was a grove of trees that looked like weeping willows, but the "branches" were long, pale limbs that ended in twitching fingers. In the center of the grove, a group of survivors from a previous expedition—or perhaps local villagers—were being kept.
It was a scene of pure, unadulterated nightmare.
The men and women were naked, their bodies intertwined in a grotesque, forced orgy. But they weren't in control. Thick, pulsating vines were threaded through their bodies—entering through their mouths, their rectums, their private parts—acting like marionette strings. The vines moved them, forcing their bodies into repetitive, agonizing acts of sexual violence against one another.
The sounds were the worst part. The wet slap of skin, the rhythmic groans that were stripped of all humanity, and the occasional snap of a bone as a vine pushed a limb too far. One woman, her face a mask of dried blood and tears, was being hoisted into the air by a vine that had burrowed into her womb. She was being "offered" to a cluster of carnivorous pitchers that were slowly dripping digestive enzymes onto her chest.
"I'm going to throw up," Kai whispered, dropping his mirror. He slumped against a tree, his face buried in his hands.
"Don't," Ashaf said, though his own stomach was a knot of ice. "If you vomit, the smell will draw them. Morrigan, don't look. Reina, find a way around."
"We can't," Reina said, her eyes fixed on the scene with a horrified fascination. "The path goes right through the center. Look. The God... he's watching."
Above the "Harem," perched on a throne of woven bone and blooming roses, sat a figure. It was Severis. He looked exactly as the legends described—a humanoid shape covered in flowers that seemed to pulse with their own light. He wasn't moving. He was just sitting there, his head tilted as if enjoying a particularly beautiful piece of music.
One of the victims—a young man whose lower half had been fused into the mud—looked up at Ashaf. His eyes were gone, replaced by small, yellow flowers.
"Help," he croaked. "Please... he won't let me stop. He makes me... he makes me do it to her... even when she screams..."
He gestured with a trembling hand to a woman lying beneath him, whose body was being used as a literal breeding ground for the neon-purple seeds. Her stomach was distended, moving as if something was clawing to get out from the inside.
"Kill them," Ashaf said, his voice barely a whisper.
"What?" Reina asked.
"Kill them all. We can't save them. The vines are their nervous systems now. If we pull the vines, they'll die in agony. Give them the mercy the God won't."
Morrigan didn't hesitate. She moved into the grove like a whirlwind of iron and blood. Her cleaver rose and fell, cutting through the vines and the human necks they were attached to. She didn't look at their faces. She didn't listen to the wet thuds of bodies hitting the dirt.
As the last victim fell, the silence returned, heavier than before.
Severis, on his throne, slowly turned his head. He didn't have eyes, but Ashaf felt the "Attention" lock onto him like a physical blow. The God didn't move to attack. He simply raised a hand and plucked a single, black rose from his chest. He tossed it into the air, where it dissolved into a cloud of shimmering, dark dust.
"The Untouched," a voice echoed through the grove—not a sound, but a thought that vibrated in their marrow. "You bring such beautiful... rot. I have been waiting for a canvas as clean as you."
Ashaf felt a sudden, sharp pain in his chest. He looked down, expecting to see a wound, but there was nothing.
"Ashaf?" Guideau asked, her voice sounding small and frightened.
He didn't answer. He was looking at the ground. His shadow, cast by the sickly yellow sun, wasn't his shadow anymore. It was the shadow of a man with flowers growing out of his head. And the shadow was reaching out, its fingers brushing against Guideau's feet.
"We have to go," Ashaf said, his voice cracking. "Now. Before I... before the shadow catches us."
They ran. They ran through the Garden of Open Veins, past the weeping trees and the screaming flowers, until the air finally began to cool and the smell of rot faded into the scent of old stone.
But as they stopped to catch their breath, Ashaf looked at his hands. They were trembling. And deep beneath the skin of his palms, he could see something moving. Something thin. Something green.
"I'm not marked," he whispered to himself, a frantic, desperate mantra. "I'm not marked. I'm untouched."
In his pocket, the shard of the mirror he'd kept from the night before began to bleed.