Tide of Corruption Story

This short story was unlocked through progression during the Tide of Corruption event. It included in-character voice acting for every chapter. Citations to the recordings can be found in the first line of every chapter.

## Chapter 1 : Sofia

*Addressed to Lulu Bassett*

*Translated from Spanish*

*Written Over Newspaper Clipping of 1893 Hurricane*

We would rather stay dead.

Why Death has chosen us to come back to life, we don't know, but we are disgusted by its uncertain hand. We want answers. We demand punishment.

I'm with a trio: the Reaper, Worm Bite and the French mother, that crooning old Bone Mason. Worm Bite was working on a fire that would burn anything forever--gravestones, poems, bodies. The Reaper's heart has changed. Something about his work being unmade doesn't sit well with him. The Bone Mason is enraged too. Death sets her free while ignoring who she wants to bring back.

We witnessed a death at Pitching Crematorium. A stain reeked off it in our Dark Sight. We gathered to sit in a circle around the corpse, stoking a cookfire, eating rabbit.

"Do you think it will rise?" Worm Bite asked.

The Reaper stabbed the body with his scythe and it spurted blood on the Bone Mason's bonnet. He apologized, tried to wipe it off her face. She bit his finger. I think I like her.

"I feel old memories," the Reaper said. "I feel my childhood again."

"You should cherish your childhood," the Bone Mason replied. "It is good to feel."

"I never want to feel again," the Reaper replied.

Worm Bite kicked the body like it was a sad dog in the kitchen.

"This *Land of the Dead*," he said. "Could we find someone who has been there? Could they give us some key to shut its door?"

I set two hot embers over the corpse's eyes.

"Forever dead," I told them. "Forever missed."

Our Pact is forged. Our mission is true. We will sneak through Death's house, take advantage of its shadow, and learn truths of this *Land of the Dead*. We will find a way to keep the coffins closed.

P.D.

I miss you. I close my eyes and see you sweetly, I see a skull painted on the wings of a moth. I see an alligator eat that moth. I see a boat eat the alligator. I see a thousand fires eat the boat. I see the night eat the fires. And then I see a sculpture. I rip the tongue out of it. I rip the tongue out of everything.

## Chapter Two: Butcher's Cleaver

*Near Illegible Text Scrawled in Burned Notebook*

*Author Unnamed, Undated*

Chisel these words into the inside of your eyelids:

We vow to let the Sculptor make of us the Sculpted. May we speak with the throats of insects and seep in the wishes of their many thousand eyes.

The rough tongue of the Murmurstone cracks and breaks and secrets come out. They rush my hearing with heat and promises--and oh. Strike a match and stick it inside too. Push its flame to the center of my mind and let it hum of hymns and the snapping of so many spines *the world just stops*.

Stops its *tick tick ticking*.

The Murmurstone licked my mind from within the three-Pact showdown at the *Delphine*'s grave. The Rotjaw sizzled in sweet black fire with that Gar, Queen of the Primal, banishing of top of her lizard belly. Those fumbling Smugglers rummaged through the *Delphine*'s debris looking for guns and gold, but I found *it* first.

Some ignorant and unblessed call it a relic, trying to sound learned. But us chosen know it as thre Murmurstone, for only we can hear its scripture. The stone spoke to me, and I pulled from its mouth a steaming cleaver. *The cleaver*.

The stone told me a place where this prize would become blessed: The Butcher's Den. The Temple of Meat and Flame.

My followers, demented and hungry, didn't believe me. They whispered and clacked and nipped at my ankles, but I showed them. I showed them at the Slaughterhouse what I *promised*. Cleaver held to the sky, the divine lightning crashed down on me, **burning those who tried to flee and I breathed them in and turned them into more fire inside the Murmurblade.**

I carried the blazing metal outside, with the true believers kissing my boot prints, and the false believers kissing twice as hard. The Inferno unraveled itself as a tornado does. It spread to the soil and trees in search of the land's most precious, hidden parts.

I will be the edge that pries apart those secrets. When the world's skull splits open, I will not look away: I will drink from it.

## Chapter Three: Burnt Marshall

*Forestry Burn Log*

*Handwritten, Original*

*Undated*

We didn't have long. We vowed to rage against flame with flame. We exploited chaos. We lacked the discernment of fire, and in its spreading took whatever victories we touched.

The corn husks were dry and coarse against my hand. Embers flickered high up in the dark and brooding autumn sky.

Henry scouted for signs of Chary at the windmill. His mask was on, but I could tell he was jealous that he hadn't started this Inferno: a true devil's advocate through and through.

"Henry," I called as he made his way back. "Did Chary leave a note? Anything?"

He shucked a husk and ran an ear of brown kernels across the wooden tongue of his mask.

"The corn is full of sleeping fire, and the fire is speaking my mother's name."

I threw my flare gun at him. He caught it against his chest.

"If you keep speaking nonsense like that, I'll kill you with the corn." I snapped a stalk in half. "Pull yourself together."

We climbed the ladder to the lookout platform. The windmill creaked its hot metal and sounded like a person caught between gears. Across Seven Sisters Estate, dark figures hoisted the banished remains of The Butcher atop a pyre and crawled around on all four, grunting and hopping and biting at each other.

Then the jackal laugh of a maniac came from behind us.

A Demented with a pumpkin over his head cackled and rocked back and forth on the top rung of the ladder. The pumpkin was carved with an artistry worthy of Rome:

A steamboat dragged to hell. An alligator vomiting rain. Insect limbs and mandibles, more foul than an imagination can bear, holding a sculpture above an all too familiar barn.

"We have our message, Henry." I took the pumpkin off the man's head. "I know where we need to go."

Henry forced the flare gun into the lunatic's mouth and fired. We sat and watched his eyes burn from the inside out, shadows playing against his skull. We sat and watched the devils set loose in the smoke that rose into the sky.

## Chapter Four: Butcher's Cleaver

*Near Illegible Text Scrawled in Burned Notebook*

*Author Unnamed, Undated*

"We caught him sniffing around, trappin' at our altars." The Beast Hunter tossed the Kid to the ground all wrapped up pretty in barbed wire.

"You know what we do with sniffers?" I hoisted him onto our new altar. "We remove the tool that sniffs."

We took turns spiking grubs and rat thumpers onto the points of the Kid's sharp metal cocoon.

"Why do you think these altars give us gifts?" I asked him. He sputtered bile through tight wire.

"Because we are ants," I continued. "Worthless without direction!"

I grabbed a follower--a false believer, unworthy from the doubt flittering in the pus of their eyes--and tossed him to the ground before *stomp-stomp-stomping* his skull rotten-apple smooth.

"How worthless?" I asked those who remained.

"*Worthless as the Split Piglet eaten by worms*!" they replied.

I brought out their favorite object: the Split Piglet, so small and dead. So filled with maggots and feral blood-milk. Mosquitoes drank its splendor and flew with fat bellies to feed themselves to beetles hungry in the rafters.

"Will the Sculptor turn us into art?" a follower on her knees wanted to know, brushes and dye strewn around her like a true painter.

"Yes," I told her. I dipped my fingers into the piglet and marked her forehead with the juice. "We will gut and slash and slaughter and maul and bite and tear and bash our heads into hollows that heads weren't meant to hollow inside of."

"*We'll scream inside their bodies--a prayer to set us free!*" they all chanted.

I squeezed the piglet's blessings into the Murmurstone's mouth, all the curds and blisters and red milk gore. It hummed and delivered my intentions.

"Now," I proclaimed, pressing my shotgun to the Kid's face. "Let's turn you into paint."

## Chapter Five: Butcher's Cleaver

*Near Illegible Text Scrawled in Burned Notebook*

*Author Unnamed, Undated*

The spiral stairs were draped with bird bones. Feathers fluttered and fell with the stink of egg rot and oil. My pig heart felt cradled by mantises, my face on their faces as they feasted and became holy in the hog blood. At the top, I found the Scrapper's roost, and two of them stooped there.

They wore their Target's beak over their faces. Morrigan and Midian: two tall love-birds, side by side, strapped with trash, totems and offerings. In their hands, one wingless crow, tired and bleedy.

I held out a squirming piglet, kissed its freshly sewn-shut eyes. I squeezed tight and it *squealed*, hailing my Lord of Meat and Flame. I leaned over its snout and bit its tongue and ripped it out teeth-smooth.

The Scrappers held out their fat crow, and I fed the bird the squealer's tongue, and our bond was forged forever.

"Stagnant," the left one said. "We're stuck," the right one said, petting the bird.

"Who blocks the Sculptor's wishes?" I asked them.

"There is a wounded bird out there," said one. "The old leader of the Hunt."

"He gobbles our prayers," spoke the other. "All of them."

"*Finch*," I said, and the Scrappers screeched and shivered their feathers loose.

"*Finch*," they agreed. "False bird. False leader. He blocks us from the *pathways* our Scrapbeak uses."

I nodded. "He used to lead us all fair and true. I admired him. Now he clips our wings."

"He hobbles our ankles *and pigs*!" they replied.

*Bwuh-bwuh-spittle-muuah-muuuuaaaah*, went my little piglet.

*Kreeew-kreeew-cacaw-cacaaaw*, went the crow.

We placed our pets in a Rift nest and watched the embers swirl. We shushed them to sleep. We sealed them away. We knew when Finch bled his last that they would carry our wishes to our Lord on his chittering throne, and the pathways would be cleared.

## Chapter Six: Burnt Marshall

*Forestry Burn Log*

*Handwritten, Original*

*Undated*

Infernals entered the barn one by one, singed and stinking. The fires outside had spread on the wind. The heat had purpose and weight. It was oppressive to the point of darkening the night.

I took the pumpkin from my smock and showed them.

"This is a message from Chary."

Private Eye came from the corner and inspected the carvings.

"See these moon phases?" She drew her finger along the orange skin. "Fort Carmick? And here, the Murmurstone--pigs kissing it. Looks like Chary wants us to lay siege to the Slaughterhouse tomorrow."

"You gather all that from a gourd?" Black Coat asked.

"We wouldn't have to do this at all if the captain hadn't sunk his boat and the stone." She pointed to him, the Delphine's coward of a captain. He sat on a crate of beetles to keep the lid on as they buzzed with the will to combust.

"Bad luck to let a woman speak amongst us," the captain said.

Black Coat produced a baseball bat from his jacket and swung. He hit the captain in the chest hard enough to fling him into the air. There was applause.

Henry sniffed. "Wait, what the hell is that smell?"

There was a sound of muffled screeching. We looked up to the hole in the ceiling and saw pale, gnarled toes curl over the edge of the roofboards. Above them, Monroe and Cain drooled against the harvest sky.

Then they dumped a startled Hive onto us out of a sack.

The bee lady loosed her brood and they poisoned us, killed the fire beetles. We shot open an exit through the barn as the insects exploded. On our escape, I saw a wingless crow riding a piglet's back.

Insanity was in for a season, but I knew that all seasons burn at their end.

## Chapter Seven: Burnt Marshall

*Forestry Burn Log*

*Handwritten, Original*

*Undated*

If the Demented think they know fire, they're wrong.

Llorona and I were in the clear sight of the Slaughterhouse and a dozen muzzle flashes winked from the barn roof, the doors, the windows, the piles of rotting swine.

We tossed jug after jug of flammables and each pit of fire was an oasis. Their bullets slipped into us. The flames licked them right back out and blew us kisses. We snaked through the firebreak and infiltrated the barn under waves of hot lead.

There was chaos inside. Naked men with axes. Naked men with pig heads on fire. I shot blindly into the mess, moved up the stairs, and found the Murmurstone enshrined as depicted on the pumpkin--worshiped by pigs. Living ones, dead ones, men sewed inside sow skins, too.

Llorona used a sticky bomb and leveled the shrine, I grabbed the Murmurstone, then ran to the roof. There stood the Demented leader, face to face with Chary. Our Infernal founder held firm with the flair of a magician who had just decapitated his audience.

"Don't you wonder?" Chary spoke to the Butcher's Cleaver. "Why the Sculptor let you unleash the Inferno, only for us to be healed by it?"

The Butcher's Cleaver roared. Not squealed or screamed. But *roared*. The sound of a stone animal being ripped in two shook the foundations of the compound. Chary stood petrified before such a miracle.

I jumped off the roof and retreated with the Murmurstone while the rest of the Infernal held off the Demented. The Murmurstone whispered to me in the woods as we escaped, just one word. The same one, over and over again, that only I could hear:

*Drown*.

*Drown*.

*Drown*.

## Chapter Eight: Sofia

*Addressed to: Lulu Bassett*

*Translated from Spanish*

*Written On a Page Torn from a Ship's Logbook*

We passed the Kid floating at the docks swaddled in pig meat, straw, and pumpkins. Half his face was gone. The water and mud parted like a mouth and swallowed him away.

Our search led us to Mama Maye, tending a new flower that could give us answers.

In the warehouse with catfish chandeliers, we found a board in a planter propped against a tomato trellis. It had a crooked spine grown from it, a skull, and a half-flesh, half-wooden face that blinked at us. This was wreckage from that cursed steamship, this *Delphine*. Haunted. Dreaming dead ship dreams.

Mama Maye buried severed fingers in its soil and left us to interrogate.

"Give us your name," I commanded.

The face spit seawater at me.

The Bone Mason waddled up to the board-man. She pulled a cracker from her satchel and offered it to the thing. It refused.

"Nothing matters," it rasped. "I've sailed winds born from the mouth of death."

The Reaper took the cracker for himself. Then he crooked his scythe into a soft spot in the board's skull. Lulu, did you know wood can scream? It sounds like piss on dry leaves.

"Tell us how the ship was hexed, *Jellico*." Worm Bite held a work coat, ran his thumb across its nametag.

The wood cried. It sounded as pathetic as all men's tears.

"There is a deadland underwater," the wood spoke. "I've been there forever. All dead have too. A storm dragged us there. It's ruled by an insect on the moon with a brain among the stars and a body as hollow as air."

I threatened this Jellico with a lantern. "Is this the truth?"

"We brought a monster onboard. We fed it the artifact, the holy stone, the god larva. The ship absorbed us, paddled through death's mouth, and now death is almost out of the kind of dying you want it to give."

"Who knows how to break this stone?" Worm Bite asked.

"Mr. Finch," the wood replied, coughing up more sea water. "We had the stone onboard the ship because of him. *Drown*. *Drown*. *Drown*.

Mama Maye returned with a cart.

"Time for your pruning," she said and transplanted the board. She left to the sound of rain on dry leaves.

## Chapter Nine: Sofia

*Addressed to: Lulu Bassett*

*Translated from Spanish*

Written on Correspondence Stock: Elwood Finch,

Director

We found Finch in a rocking chair at the center of a ruined house. Ruined paintings hung on the wall, rotted for centuries. A grandfather clock leaned on its side, ticking.

"Where have you been?" Worm Bite asked.

"Killing time." Finch threw a knife at the clock. It didn't stick. The Bone Mason hurled an axe and smashed the clockface.

"I stepped down to search for answers, just like you," he continued. "I spoke with the *Delphine's* captain. He failed to deliver this *Murmurstone*, and his story is a lie. But he owed me, secured my passage on another ship to the dirty corners of the world."

"You ran away," the Reaper said.

"I went to discover how to stop this, how it's been stopped before," Finch clarified. "I learned that my blood is old. It hails back to a time of cave paintings and the deep rumbling wells of the earth."

"Now you lie," I told him. "You ran from death. You went to enjoy yourself."

Finch stood and bowed.

"I made mistakes, perhaps valuing my life was the first. The last was to let Chary set his plans in my absence. The Demented thing I'm blocking them from *ascension*. Some of this Grounded Pact believe I summoned Rotjaw. Everyone wants me dead, except you."

"Don't speak so soon," I told him.

"I will be caught. There is no stopping that. I am in everyone's way."

"Then how can you help?"

"It is called sacrifice. I've learned that is how our association has always won. I know where Chary is going, how we can make him lose."

He handed me three vials of pure and ancient silver, filled with blood. His blood.

"I'm charging you with my final task," Finch said. "There will be one opening. Don't miss."

P.D.

There is a silver of bullet stuck in my arm from the day you saved me. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it's warm. Just wanted you to know, in case I don't come back: I don't think I could ever carry you in any other way.

I've etched your name on the vials. You know I never miss.

## Chapter Ten: Mr. Chary

*Wax Cylinder Transcript*

*Sealed with a Bird Feather, Sugar Stained*

*Labeled: A Singing Man Sang*

As one who enjoys the finest thespian pursuits and drama, I want to recount the last moments of a truly beloved friendship:

"Elwood," I called. "You thirsty?"

Finch hung from a high beam, wrapped in rope, cannonballs, vines, and oleander sprigs, much like a bird that had built a trap of nest around itself.

He nodded. I strapped a glass to my cane and held it up for him to sip. It was just us two--I'd sent the rest to hold a wide perimeter as our ferry drifted out into the water.

"I heard you were afraid of clouds, is that true?" he asked me. Pain flared in my leg at the thought, but his inquiry did not warrant a response. He was just trying to hurt my feelings.

"Finch," I said, "let's not strive for cruelty here. I'd much like for this to be as kind a goodbye as goodbyes can be."

I took in the scene, smelled the fine autumn flowers that were set in big arrangements of firebush and angel's trumpet. I sat down at a table set for two, lit a candle, and began to eat my duck.

"That's the same dinner we had when you signed on to the organization," he observed. "Did you bring the beignets?"

I pulled a cloth from the top of a basket and blew powdered sugar off them.

"I guess I am a bit sentimental," I said. "Who knows what's going to happen next? Between you and me sometimes I wonder if I've gone too far."

"Well, a normal man would just stop," Finch said. "But a normal man doesn't learn magic tricks." I flipped open my revolver, flourished my hand to produce a bullet. I held it to Finch, rubbed it, and it swept off into the air, spun, held still in the breeze before gliding into the chamber.

"I'd applaud if I could."

"No need." I spit out the thinnest of thin bones, and it cut my lip. "You know, for such a shallow creek, the sinkhole below us in ghastly deep. Strange things moving at the bottom."

Finch craned his neck to look. "I'll say hello to your friends down there."

"It's been a pleasure, Elwood."

"A pleasure beyond all recall," he said.

Then I shot the rope.

## Chapter Eleven: Mr. Chary

*Wax Cylinder Transcript*

*Sealed with a Cicada Husk*

*Labeled: The Storybook*

Cleopatra pulled a snake from the moon. She rode it for forty nights, eating men, soldiers, and children who cried when a breast was pulled from their mouths. The Knights Templar were birthed from an enormous witch enshrined by foundation stones. Napolean's horse, Marengo, had a ribcage that could split open and eat other horses whole. After Bonaparte burned bridges, the stallion could still canter across the ghosts of them.

The Murmurstone is a library for such tales.

It can only speak the truth, or so it says. It's presence demarcates a sacred boundary of the Sculptor's will and influence, much as the pomerium outlined the border of Rome. It is a force of physics and myth intertwined. Emperors have been driven mad with its promises.

The Murmurstone seems primed to tell the tales of women and men, but these are not the histories I am interested in. I seek epics never scribed by personkind and the knowledge hidden in them.

I wish to hear of the nameless "Silver Scarab Goliath" who pulped insectoid maidens into mercury at the first age of the Sculptor. There are fables of worms endlessly burrowing across desolate lands, sludging in unison, charting pathways and inscribing memories for a mind too big to shroud a single sky.

Still, the story I want to hear most eludes the Murmurstone's mouth.

I think it is because the question I ask is the question of a child. It is not what the Sculptor wants, but *why*?

## Chapter Twelve: Mr. Chary

*Wax Cylinder Transcript*

*Sealed with a Cicada Husk*

*Labeled: Silver Milk*

I shall re-enact our reconnaissance to make note of the Demented's care in their rituals:

"If you're not worried, why are we scouting them so close?" Private Eye asked me.

We laid atop a berm, watching a trio of Demented surround an altar. They placed a dismembered body in the mouth of it. Curious were the ornaments and decorations that covered the remains. Their attempts to divine wishes from their Lord were desperate, more intense after losing the Murmurstone.

"Candice, did you ever travel to the city of Bath?" I asked.

"Once." She looked uneasy.

"The Roman bathing pools in Bath were used to heat a unique kind of quicksilver," I said. "This was used to feed abominations bonded with the Sculptor. They used them to summon calamities, overthrow empires."

"Sounds like conspiracy and hearsay," she muttered, adjusting her scope. "Unless the mercury was explosive."

"There was a sound these creatures made. The sound of continents halving in two. It was a siren, a call to mark the end of an age. I've heard this sound now. I want to see if it is truly time for such a thing to transpire."

The trio knelt. A scarecrow rose from a stack of hay by the altar as if freshly given life. It moved stiff legged and dry and slit two of the Hunters' throats. The Butcher's Cleaver emerged from a shadow.

Again, the ground trembled. The Butcher's Cleaver placed the third kneeler inside the altar, and they burst into a pillar of flame and smoke. Far below us, in the Land of the Dead, I could feel a gurgling, a response.

Something was being digested to make room for something new.

## Chapter Thirteen: Mr. Chary

*Wax Cylinder Transcript*

*Sealed with Shred of Tattered Flag*

*Labeled: The Last Bird to Be Crushed*

I am free to do as I please. I enjoy recording these little plays, the games and clever moves we each make:

Finch is drowned, his blood sealed inside his body at the bottom of the blackest of black water. No one but he possessed the qualities needed to banish the Murmurstone. In a long line of revenges, I am balanced perfectly upon the last, blade-sharp segment.

The Burnt Marshall and Hawkshaw Jack heaved on one rope. The *Delphine*'s captain and his new crew pulled on another. The Rift at their feet glowed red, resisting their attempts to retrieve the object.

"Pull harder," I told them. "This shouldn't take all day."

"Tell you what, boss," Jack said, dropping his rope. "You tell us why you carry around that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cane, and we'll pull the shackles out faster."

They paused their yanking to hear my response.

"When I was a boy, a cloud tried to kill me."

"How?" the captain asked. Ah, how insolent children are best punished one at a time.

I lunged my cane through the captain's eyeball and clicked it to the back of his skull. He dropped, and I stepped on him as daintily as a lover steps on a jacket laid over a puddle. The Rift swallowed his dead body.

"Anything can kill you if it has will and agency," I told the rest. "Now pull those ropes."

They hoisted Rotjaw's shackles from the Rift, but I did not watch. Instead, I looked to the late November sky and its crimson burning. I hoped the Sculptor was watching. I hoped it had a thousand eyes waiting to be stabbed.

## Chapter Fourteen: Mr. Chary

*Wax Cylinder Transcript*

*Sealed with a Ticket*

*Labeled: Mise-en-scène*

Eventually we made sense of the captain's map. I knew when we stepped on the banks and discovered the remains of a bloodied circus tent. Downriver we found it, the site of the *Delphine*'s disappearance. Or rather, *traversal*.

It takes great sacrifice to travel to the Land of the Dead.

My first trip there was an accident. A city burned. The flames were spread by entities of infernal sensibility. When they burned through a person, their shadows forged pathways. And so I secured passage to the Land of the Dead by walking on the ashes of a hundred merchants.

My second traversal to locate the Murmurstone on the *Delphine* was not so kind. A live body is too resonant to traverse a Rift by normal means. It must be cut into pieces, but by bit, and sieved down into the dead world's waters.

I will not relive such shame again.

Much was learned from my manipulations to pull the Murmurstone back to the bayou. Most importantly: symbols carry weight. Souls do not just disappear, they stick. They haunt and howl to fulfill old promises. This means souls can be baited, misdirected, their energies utilized and bastardized.

The *Delphine*'s debris contain a host of souls trapped within its woodwork and corrosion. We have constructed a stage of its remains to perform our ritual and siphon their yearning.

A play of sorts must be conducted, each role carefully crafted. Some have taken weeks, some years, some gulfs of time that betray the ever-present eye of the Sculptor.

Oh, to be a member of the audience for this magic show, to see how decayed the rabbit pulled from my hat will be.

## Chapter Fifteen: Mr. Chary

*Wax Cylinder Transcript*

*Sealed with a Silver Vial*

*Labeled: Echoes of a Bird*

The stage was set. Black Coat played the role of Finch, kindly strung up from a branch. Private Eye played the Steamboat captain, spinning a help nailed to a tree. Devil's Advocate was dying to play the part of Rotjaw, so I let him roam in circles on all fours with his makeshift gator mask.

With the symbology complete, I activated the shackles and shoved the Murmurstone inside. It was instant, nonviolent. A permanent passageway to the Land of the Dead was forged.

The soul of the Navigator existed inside the *Delpine*'s remnants, longing for dead waters. The soul of Finch yearned for the Murmurstone as Rotjaw sought her master as well. These feelings were fuel and ley lines. They were so easily baited, molded into spiritual architecture.

Then the Death Pact ambushed my achievement.

They could have only learned of this site from Finch. Beetles choked the high ground. Worm Bite sniped everyone on deck. The Reaper found many soft spots on necks with his scythe. Everywhere that Bone Mason aimed put a hole in someone.

Sofia rose from the creek flotsam, dripping, her skull-face looming behind a crossbow.

I am not a coward. I must have sensed a miracle about to unfold, because I ducked, and her bolt flew and met the gateway. The silver of its casing should have been stopped by the physics at play. It's metal must have been cursed, blessed, enchanted, I do not know--because it punctured the veil and splattered red against the Murmurstone's mouth with the bright, speckled red of Finch's blood.

All I wanted was an easy-to-trod pathway. A personal back door. But even doors can be corrupted, it seems. The Murmurstone screamed wide, banished, and its connection to the Sculptor multiplied as eyes do in the facets of a stolen diamond.

Dead arms flushed from a chasm that split the shackles, the stage, the very ground itself. The arms recognized me. The bloated eyes knew my name. I smelled sulfur steaming from the *Delphine*'s captain as his spine emerged and bent at sharp angles, his hand grasping for my cane.

The clarion call of a new age rang out.

Its name was *Desolation*.

1. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=pkMFlUQOndivecOA&t=5
2. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=8QSy263dzS5OTXZ7&t=215
3. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=YYIxWSXuN-Py8wJv&t=412
4. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=DskwadZh-sAteBjx&t=582
5. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=vXgcvaRQJm30GMgF&t=751
6. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=dOx\_63DJceAcrN\_9&t=944
7. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=JWCVkK6Uh95Le8RM&t=1091
8. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=04SiLHzXYQq9fENp&t=1251
9. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=qS\_xAquwqU6GFuFo&t=1445
10. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0VKDOlrr50&t=1650s
11. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=0Cq5SlX7AYpGaGj1&t=1827
12. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=9iAZo6Qt8OWsrQEB&t=1953
13. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0VKDOlrr50&t=2092s
14. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=Xpe80JainAZU4XYY&t=2223
15. ↑ https://youtu.be/d0VKDOlrr50?si=bIZ7cgq1M2n5\_8TU&t=2368