Page 77 of The Flesh Remembers
There was no before.
No after.
There was only this.
James, inside her, around her, consuming her.
And Eleanor, no longer Eleanor.
Just his.
Just ruined.
Forever.
Excerpt from the journal of Lord Alastair Blackwood
I write from the ruins of my greatest creation. The supplicants no longer heed me. The subject, once mine, would kill me on sight.
Eleanor fled weeks ago. I let her go, thinking it would solidify my control—a mistake. Without her, he is wilder and unknowable. She vanished in the night, slipping through the cracks I had failed to see.
He broke when he discovered her gone. He smashed his fists into stone, shredded his flesh, yet no blood came. A thing beyond understanding. If only I could reclaim control, dissect him,studyhim.
But something else bleeds into our world. The ritual, its consequences, unravel reality thread by thread. The flowers, their monstrous bloom devouring the faithful, should not exist. And yet they do. More horrors will come. We are being consumed.
I hear voices, too close now. The tunnels beneath the estate remain my secret, meant for hidingothers,never me. Yet here I crouch, a rat in the dark, waiting.
I will not wait forever.
I will take back what was stolen.
An Altar of Flesh
The church's graveyard groaned as if remembering its death. Although the church had been part of the estate for years before it had fallen into disrepair, everything inside it was wrong. The architecture itself had begun to breathe, as if the structure had become a great, hungry beast, waiting for the last offering.
The apparatus, now reborn, pulsed in the centre of the church. It was no longer just a mechanism, cold metal and dead inscriptions, it had changed. It had fused with flesh, writhing, shuddering, alive. Its engraved symbols no longer sat still, but crawled across its surface, shifting, burning, bleeding, reacting to the touch of those who dared to press themselves against it. The carvings that once held meaning had become obscene, not just in depiction, but in how theymoaned, whimpered, and pulsed in reaction to the growing fervour in the room.
At the head of it all, Eleanor stood, her body shaking.
Not with fear.
With readiness.
With acceptance.
With the hunger James had placed inside her.
The abyss had called her, had promised her the unravelling of all things, and she had answered.
Tonight, she would finish what she started.
Tonight, she would give James the final piece of herself.
Tonight, she would become something else.
The air in the church was thick with delirium, heat rolling through the shattered walls like a living, pulsing thing. The last of the faithful had long since shed their inhibitions, and now they shuddered and moaned in fevered ecstasy, their bodies pressed together in a final act of submission to the abyss.
This was no simple orgy.
