Page 79 of The Flesh Remembers
That she could rescue herself.
But standing beneath James’s towering, shifting, monstrous form, feeling the church tremble beneath her feet, hearing the worshippers dissolve into madness around her, she understood the truth.
There was no escape. There was no salvation. There was only this. And this had all happened before, hadn’t it? And it would happen again, whether in one year or a thousand.
But for now, there was only him.
Only the abyss.
She had been fighting for so long. And now, she was tired. She did not want to fight anymore. She wanted to fall.
"Say the words, Eleanor," James murmured, his voice like velvet and violence, a promise and a sentence.
He reached for her, his fingers no longer fingers but longer, darker, more than human, reaching, pressing, curling around her throat, her waist, and her hips.
She gasped, her vision blurring, her pulse syncing with the pulsing of the apparatus, with the groaning of the living church, with the cries of the faithful as they offered their last moments to the ritual.
Her lips parted.
The final chant rose inside her.
It was not a language she had learned.
It was a language that had always existed inside her.
The words crawled up her throat, spilling from her tongue like a final prayer, a final blasphemy.
The moment the last syllable left her lips, the world shattered.
The apparatus convulsed, swelled, twisted, thenburst, releasing something far worse than death.
The church screamed. Stone and flesh melded, writhing, consuming, swallowing the last of the faithful in a grotesque embrace.
The stained glass shattered. Beyond it, there was no sky, stars, or remnants of the world that had once been. Only a chasm—the endless, watching, ravenous abyss.
James made a sound, was it laughter? A groan? A growl? A scream? It was all of them. It was none of them. It was something that should not exist.
Eleanor dissolved. Not into nothingness. Into him.
Her body was no longer hers. Her voice was no longer hers. Her thoughts ceased to be.
She had given herself. And James had taken everything.
The abyss widened, stretching its jaws.
And together
They stepped inside.
Excerpt from the diary of Dr. Eleanor Ashcroft
I have seen into infinity.
It is vast and incomprehensible, a churning, endless expanse where time unravels and existence is but a flicker in the dark. I stare into it with awe, terror, and devotion. It calls, and I cannot refuse.
I am dissolving. A whisper carried across the abyss, fragile, fleeting, consumed. Unmaking, remaking. I should fear it, but I do not.
Because he is with me.
