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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Patriarchy" data-source="post: 59320" data-attributes="member: 162">At the edge of the Fenlands, where dusk was no more than a purple bruise on the horizon, Elwin and Mira labored side by side beneath the ever-thickening fog. Each stake pounded into the marsh was accompanied by a muttered prayer, alternating between the brittle cadences of the Agony and the softer, older words that their mothers and grandmothers had whispered in the birthing huts. The black oil shimmered in the lantern light, iridescent, refusing to mix with the water that seeped up from the roots.The others kept their distance. They watched from the shivering circle of the village, eyes ringed with exhaustion and suspicion, clutching charms against their necks. Even young Jem, who claimed to fear nothing, kept a wary space between his muddy boots and the wetted boundary Elwin was staking out.By midnight the wind died, and the bog grew unnaturally still. Mira’s breathing was labored, her body spent by fever and dread, but she forced herself upright at the center of the marsh, holding the relic-tome open with hands that shook only a little."Is this the place?" she asked, voice lost among the reeds.Elwin nodded, though the spot looked the same as every other in the sodden hell of his childhood. "It will do. The Agony prefers ground that remembers pain." He uncorked the phial. The scent was heavier than pitch, sour and sharp, and it made his tongue itch to speak the words even before he looked at the script. He poured a spiral of oil around their feet, as prescribed, and set a single black candle at the northernmost stake.The ritual had sounded dramatic in the High Priest's cold voice, but now, under the dead stars, it felt childish. Still, Elwin began the chant, and Mira joined him, their voices weaving through the dark.On the second round, the marsh began to stir. The water near the southern stake trembled. The silt shifted, a slow burble, as if a creature the size of a wagon was crawling beneath the peat toward them. From the village, a child screamed. Old Tamsin spat and drew a circle in the air with her ruined finger.Elwin tried to focus on the words. Each repetition twisted the world tighter: reeds bending in submission, frogs falling silent, even the ever-present whine of insects going mute. Only their voices remained, thin and scraping, scraping at something just under the skin of the world.And then, without warning, the water between the stakes erupted.A thing rose, slow and deliberate, as if aware that it had all the time in creation. At first, it looked like a bundle of roots and river-wrack, trailing centuries of mud and bone. But as it straightened, it shed its slime with an indolent grace, and the lanterns along the bank illuminated a shape almost human, though stretched and twisted in the way of things seen through too much water. Its hair was a tangle of black eel and willow, its fingers long enough to curl around a man's thigh. Its eyes, when they found Elwin, were pale and milky, but blazed with purpose.Mira dropped the tome and fell to her knees, clutching her stomach as if the fever had suddenly turned to fire. Elwin, for all his years of hunger and humiliation, could not move, could not even lower his gaze. He could only watch as the being regarded him with something like amusement."Which of you suffers most?" it asked, the words lapping out of its mouth without movement, as if it spoke in the language of cold water and memory.Elwin tried to speak, but the reeds in his throat would not let him. Mira's lips bled with the effort to answer, but all that came was a sob.The thing sniffed the air, thoughtful. "You both reek of loss, but only one of you clings to hope. I am not here for the hopeful."It glided closer, never disturbing the spiral of oil on the water's surface. Its mouth widened, and something that might have been a smile fissured its face. "You have called me with the rites of the Agony, but those words are no longer my tongue. Still, I am bound to answer, for pain is pain and hunger is hunger, even among the dead gods."Elwin's voice cracked out. "What are you?"The creature seemed almost offended. "Once I was the wisdom in this marsh. I took the shape of your need. In another world I was queen, or monster, or solace in the dark. Today, I am the only thing that remembers how to listen. The Agony thinks it owns suffering, but that is a lie. Will you learn the truth, or do you wish only for your child to live?"Mira, eyes rolling, whispered, "Please—just let it end. Let him grow strong."The being reached down, and its hand rested gentle on Mira’s head, as if in benediction. "You beg for death, but you fear it too much to taste it. This is why your priests grow fat, and your fields rot: you have mistaken pain for purpose."It turned its gaze on Elwin, appraising, the way a wolf might a bleeding rabbit. "You I like. You have lost so much that there is nothing left to sell but your soul, and yet here you are, willing to pay the price. That is the old faith, the faith before this Church of pretty wounds."Elwin’s lips moved without his consent. "Tell me the price."The being leaned in, so close its hair brushed his cheek, slick and cool and smelling of ancient rains. "The price is memory. The cost is witness. Take what I give you, and you will not merely feed your kin, but you will remember every face that dies in your name. You will become the root, the seed, the rot that births the next world. You will not be thanked. You will not be loved. But you will never be forgotten."A terrible clarity split Elwin’s mind, as if a new language had been etched into his skull, all spikes and hunger and luminous, coiling need. The vision was not of crops or children reborn, but of a village in flames, of blood and flood and the slow, lovely gnaw of decay turning every suffering into fresh, fertile promise.He understood then what the High Priest must have known: miracles were not for the meek, and every answered prayer was a birth cry for the next agony.He nodded, and the being pressed its palm to his brow.The world upended. For a moment, Elwin stood atop a tower of bone, looking down on a continent writhing with chained cities, black rivers running through open veins, and a sky so dense with the smoke of burning flesh that even the stars were afraid to shine. He saw himself in the nave of a cathedral, robed in a garment of rawhide and wire, leading a congregation that screamed with joy as they whipped themselves bloody on the flagstones.He saw his children, not as children but as saints, as martyrs, as fodder for the machinery of salvation.He saw the High Priest, Ingersol, standing naked on a hill of skulls, looking up at him with love and terror, the both of them crowned by the same crown of thorns.When the vision passed, Elwin knelt in the marsh, skin burning with a hundred shallow wounds, and the oil on the water was gone. The being hovered above him, serene."It is done," it said. "Go home. In three nights’ time, your child will awaken, hungry and whole. Feed her, and all the others, until the marsh is empty. Then come to me again, and I will teach you how to eat the world."It melted back into the water, leaving the reeds untouched, the spiral unbroken. Elwin staggered to his feet. Mira clung to him, sobbing, but her fever was already fading, and her hands, though raw, felt alive again.From the village, a low moan of relief rose as the clouds split, letting down a drizzle as clean and sweet as a lover’s parting breath.Far away, in the heart of the basilica, Ingersol woke from a nightmare that tasted like truth, blood running from his nostrils and the word “witness” burning on his tongue. He stared at the ceiling for a long time, too afraid to sleep, and for the first time in years, he doubted that suffering alone would save the world.Three days later, the harvest in the Fenlands was bountiful beyond hope, though every potato and leech-root came up veined in red, and the water fowl grew enormous, eyes too bright for peace. The children healed, but their laughter was edged with something sharp, and the elders watched them with awe and a kind of animal fear.At the new moon, Elwin took his family to the marsh, dressed in the same rags and bruises, and sang the old songs that weren’t in any book. The being appeared, this time with a crown of flowers woven from the bones of drowned men, and it smiled as it set Elwin’s daughter on its knee."Do you see?" it asked the girl, stroking her hair. "Pain is just the soil. What matters is what grows from it."The girl laughed, and in her voice was the hunger of all the world.High Priest Ingersol read the reports from the Fenlands in silence, eyes skipping over the numbers and prayers, hunting for the ghost beneath the text. He saw the pattern immediately—miracles that curdled into menace, blessings that demanded a tithe of suffering. He felt the cold hand of prophecy upon him, and knew his only choice was to claim the heretic, or see his faith consumed by it.He donned his blackest cassock, summoned the Chain-Bearers, and made ready for pilgrimage.Because that, he knew, was the only way to bear witness: to suffer, to conquer, to kneel before the face of the god that comes after all the old gods have died.In the heart of the Fenlands, beneath a sky the color of old wounds, Elwin waited.</blockquote>

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