"Not all monuments were built for worship.Some were built to feed what was never meant to die."
The inner chamber welcomed them like a mouth.
Its walls closed in softly, lined with a strange, pulsing tissue—slick, dark red, and beating to the same rhythm that had echoed through the shrine since they entered. The ceiling hung low, weeping faint trails of clear fluid. Veins crisscrossed the surface like roots pressed under skin.
The silence here wasn't peaceful.
It was pregnant.
Matte walked first, hand on his blade, steps cautious but deliberate. Violet followed behind, her eyes unfocused, lips parted as if murmuring to something only she could hear.
"They're speaking again," she whispered.
Matte glanced back. "What are they saying?"
She blinked slowly, then smiled—a twitchy, unnatural motion.
"Nothing in words. Just… teeth. Everywhere. So many teeth."
They passed into a circular chamber, the walls curved like the inside of a skull. Symbols pulsed faintly around them, etched in concentric rings—each deeper, darker, and older than the last.
Violet drifted toward one of the symbols.
Her fingers hovered just inches away.
"Don't touch it," Matte warned.
"I already have," she said softly.
Matte stepped forward, but before he could say more—
The chamber changed.
A vision crashed down like a tide of memory not their own.
The chamber grew taller. The walls straightened. Torches lit themselves in a flicker of violet flame. Figures moved around them—human silhouettes, robed in black, their faces hidden.
A voice—low and distant, but human—echoed through the shrine.
"We offer the first blood of the willing."
One of the robed figures stepped into the center of the room.
Another held a massive, deformed fetus, its body quivering with unnatural life.
The robed one spoke again.
"Let the womb be fed. Let the forgotten dream again."
The illusion snapped.
Violet screamed, staggering backward, hands clawing at her face. "GET THEM OFF! THEY'RE IN MY EYES—MATTE—THEY'RE IN MY EYES!"
Matte caught her, held her tightly, whispering her name over and over until she calmed—barely.
Her breath was ragged. She didn't look at him. She stared at the walls.
"This isn't just a shrine," she gasped. "It's an incubator."
They moved deeper.
Now the architecture had changed completely—not carved, but grown. Rib-like structures arched over them. Pockets of suspended fluid floated in mid-air, filled with fetal silhouettes that weren't human anymore. Limbs too long. Heads split down the middle. Pulses of light drifted through the veins of the shrine like fireflies lost in bloodstreams.
The floor beneath them turned soft, sinking with every step.
Matte helped Violet forward. Her legs were barely working.
He saw it in her eyes.
She wasn't breaking anymore.She was cracking open.
Another chamber. Smaller. Round. Centered around a massive stone tablet etched in blood.
Matte approached slowly, tracing the edges of the text—not with fingers, but with his essence.
The words revealed themselves.
And they weren't from this time.
Not even this world.
Here, we fed the first.Here, we buried the mother.Here, we await the return of our skin.
"Matte…" Violet whispered.
He turned—
And saw her standing too still.
Her shadow cast against the wall… wasn't hers.
The figure mimicking her was taller. Horned. Twisted. It moved before she did.
"What do you see?" he asked.
Her voice was soft. Distant.
"My reflection… is smiling. But I'm not."
Then—
The shrine began to shift.
Stone pulled back. Walls breathed outward. And at the far end of the corridor, a massive gate opened—not with noise, but with silence so complete it felt like the world ended inside it.
Beyond it—darkness.But within that darkness…
Movement.
Heavy. Slow. Coiling.
A breath.
A pulse.
A sliver of something massive stretched just far enough for Matte to recognize it:
The Amalgamation.
But only its shadow.
Only a whisper of its true form.
Waiting.
Feeding.
Growing.
Matte pulled Violet away before she could step forward. She didn't resist.
Not anymore.
She only whispered:
"That's not a god."
He looked back.
Eyes narrowing.
"No.It's more like a devil.
"That's not a god," Violet whispered again.
Her voice barely held shape. It quivered like a flame on wet stone—flickering, trying to hold its form.
Matte's hand never left his blade, but it felt like a toothpick in this place.
"No," he said, eyes locked on the slithering shadow beyond the gate."It's something gods are afraid of."
The chamber responded.
Not with sound.
With pressure.
A low-frequency pulse rumbled through the shrine's bones—through their bones. Violet dropped to her knees, clutching her ears, but there was no sound. Just that heavy vibration that made thought difficult. That wanted to overwrite language.
It was communication.
Primitive.
Vast.
Intimate.
"We see you."
The words didn't echo aloud.
They pressed directly against Matte's essence. Not like a voice—but like a memory trying to replace his own.
He staggered back, dragging Violet with him, deeper into the corridor branching away from the gate. Behind them, the gate stayed open—but nothing advanced.
Not yet.
The shadow just shifted.
Waiting.
Unfolding.
They ran until they reached another hollow space—small, misshapen, like a tumor formed inside the shrine. The walls were lined with faces, all inlaid into the surface like fossils. Matte didn't recognize any of them—until he saw one that looked like himself.
But it was older.
Eyes open.
Mouth sewn shut.
Violet backed into a corner, curling in on herself. She had stopped responding to the world around her—her lips were moving, but Matte couldn't hear the words. He moved to her side, gently resting a hand on her shoulder.
"We're not staying here long."
She didn't blink.
Didn't nod.
Just whispered, over and over:
"It's wearing me... It's wearing me... it's wearing me..."
Then the shrine went cold.
The miasma thickened. The breath of the place pulled inward.
And from the hall behind them, the gate's voice returned—no longer a whisper. Now, it sounded like skin being stretched across the sky.
"You walk in what you were meant to become."
Matte turned.
He didn't see the creature.
But he felt it moving toward them now.
Heavy.
Slow.
Not crawling.
Descending.
The shadows spilled into the corridor like ink in water, and the breath of the shrine shifted from deep to sharp. The rhythm changed. Like something waking up in pain.
He grabbed Violet.
"We move. Now."
They didn't run far.
Because the hallway began to pulse—walls shifting inward, floor sloping downward. Not caving in… guiding them.
They weren't running from the Amalgamation.
They were being delivered to it.
The ground flattened at the base of the spiral, and there—spread across an obsidian floor—was a massive, circular arena built from bone and root and ash. The ceiling was impossibly high, and yet... it felt too close.
Above, the shadows peeled away like torn silk.
And from them...
It dropped.
The Amalgamation.
Its body was a monument to wrongness.
A mass of torsos twisted together, forming limbs that bent and jerked like dying puppets. Its head—if it could be called that—was a shifting crown of screaming faces, each one fading in and out of flesh like memories being erased. Bones jutted from its shoulders. Entire arms—human arms—hung from its ribs like jewelry. Its chest opened and closed like a mouth, teeth twitching.
And from its center:
One massive eye.
Red.
Focused.
Hungry.
It stared directly at Matte.
"We wore your face before you had one.""We are the shape your gods feared.""You are the final breath of a body long dead."
Violet screamed.
Not out of fear.
Out of recognition.
"I've seen it before, Matte—in my dreams. In my head. It was there before I was born!"
He stood in front of her, blade out, essence flaring like a pulse of light trying to push back the ocean.
"Then we kill it before it remembers why."