The corpse burns like a caldera as Tom Orrow Losht sifts through it, joining the ritual, searching through the innards of a man he had once dangled fishing wire alongside.

“Blessed be the mother that binds us and directs us to her cause,” the vizier reads from one of the new scriptures. “Blessed be her presence, the promise of a greater union between us and the gifts of pollen below. She has chosen us, and we will be forever grateful.”

Gifts of pollen. Maligned, as most men call them, and still will, though Tomorrow never tires of hearing these descriptions. It was poets who ghostwrote the Chant’s texts, inserting their creative flourishes as seamlessly as toddlers penciling their contributions to a master sketch. Gifts of pollen, Tom thinks again, and wishes he hadn’t.

The fisherman’s innards are soft. He closes his eyes and fiddles his hands around like he’s working, maintaining the facade. He finds more fingers, all of them exploring with purpose, all eclipsing Tom’s energy and lack of caring, though he lets none of this write itself on his face.

“The heart my friends,” urges the vizier, “the man’s heart is his most valuable contribution to our dear Mother.”

An acolyte shoots his hands up, the fisherman’s black organ severed from the rest of his body but still pumping. “I have it!” the adherent screams, and carries it over.

The vizier makes his graciousness clear, holding the pumping heart and placing a hand on the back of the acolyte’s neck. Tomorrow only needs to blink to see the heart isn’t pumping, per se, but bursting with worms. It crumbles in the vizier’s squeezing hands, the pale and eyeless animals crawling across his arms.

Tom sinks his head, only hearing the chomp of the vizier’s teeth as he welcomes the sickly heart into his body, and starts to turn.

Somehow, decades ago, the Chant of Harmony had perfected the art of turning men into maligned in a fashion that suited them. Through some process, Tomorrow has heard only in passing that the vizier had picked out the fishermen specifically. Strands exist in every cell in the body, so even a slice of the dead man’s skin would have done, but practically wasn’t the suit of cards the Chant tended to play, and the vizier indulged himself in the most ornamental, the most memorable option to perform the ritual. Practically, however, has never been the Chant’s strongest suit.

The vizier, it appears, was successful. He leans over, caught in a dancer’s gait, a diver’s preparation before they jump. His chest heaves as if breathing hard, but Tomorrow knows his bodily functions have surrendered.

An audible crunch follows, the cracking as something inside bursts through the vizier’s ribs, separating itself from the vizier’s body. The eel could swallow Tom Orrow’s warm, and it just might, the way it sneers at the audience. It crawls up the vizier’s chest, wraps itself around his neck, and becomes a scarf infused with the skin. Like a flower denying sunlight, the vizier’s chest closes.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Tom dips his hands into a fountain of water along with several other acolytes, their content at the task straightforward in the air as in their rotted smiles.

Someone prods his shoulder. “Lucky bastard,” says Gershom, towering. “Who needs the Ox when you have that thing?”

Tom guesses the vizier gained the Ox and forty other strands from that ritual. Before the amalgamation that was once the vizier would have struck out, the eel around the man’s neck remains relaxed.

“Tom Sorrow Orrow,” says Gershom, prodding Tom back to reality. “Why do you have to put a beautiful thing like that through all this?”

The subject of Gershom’s fascination is—and has been for as long as they’ve known each other—Tom’s wife, Jastina. She shits in a pew arranged in a circle observing the ritual, her own hands bloodied from an earlier performance. Jastina has been an acolyte longer than Tom has, and the dismembering hardly phases her.

“Piss off, Gersh,” Tom tells him.

During their early years of friendship, Gershom had made his intent clear through glances and quips that approached the truth. His confidence ballooned when he welcomed the Ox and remained more or less the same, much to his surprise and Tom’s.

“I’m just appreciating your hard work.” Gershom shakes his hands off and dips his head at Tom and then at Jas before joining his pew and other infused men. Yet every time Gershom leaves, Tom can’t entirely dissuade the Ox-infused from his mind, like some bad smell or the kindling of a burning house.

Tom joins Jas in the pews, her robed form surrendering herself to shadow, though her presence is unmistakable. Tom could sense it across Salvarin and would run that distance, too, and further, to see her.

“I am not a pushover you sodden clown,” Jas whispers, prattling her fingers on his shoulder. “He hasn’t tried anything. He just likes getting a rise out of you.”

Tom squeezes back, now watching the transformed vizier call up another circle of acolytes. This time, the devotee offering their body to the cause is still alive, still a dreamer, as he walks and allows himself to be lowered and chained to the ground. “There is no length I would go to protect you.”

“None?” Jas dips her head to the adherent on the temple floor, in the center of the circle of pews, and the eel-vizier standing over him.

The jest is apparent, and Tom almost blurts out in response if he wasn’t considering doing the same. He’d welcome a thousand strands into him and force malignment before he lost Jas.

The line for eager acolytes to join the rituals is longer than the ones adverse to it, for ample reason; the Chant expects complete loyalty to the Great Mother Monad Ortet, and it’s not as if they can deny her, either.

This latter line of reasoning reminds Tom and Jas of the presence lurking in their minds. It’s not as apparent as the eel clinging to the vizier, only more subtle, but just as controlling as a conductor leading an orchestra.

Tom has felt its eyes scanning him. During those moments, he chooses to remain still. Now, with that reasoning of the possibility of denying Monad Ortet, the idea that such a thing could even be conceived, that presence bubbles up from its mire and trains its eye on Tom Orrow Losht.

He does not move, but he does not bend, either.

“None?” Jas asks.

Tom squeezes back. “None.”