Page 85 of The Flesh Remembers
I fled the tunnels as the earth convulsed, the walls threatening to collapse, the stone screaming in protest. When I emerged, I saw the abyss, vast and insatiable, yawning above, a great, hungry maw stretching toward oblivion.
And Eleanor.
She has returned, utterly transformed, bound to him in ways I cannot begin to fathom. Whatever rituals remained undone, they have completed them. The end is here, unravelling in the night air, in the void swallowing everything I built.
This was never my intent. I did not seek annihilation, only understanding. The secrets of life and death, of control over both. That would have been the ultimate power.
I should have destroyed him when I had the chance. I should have destroyed them both.
But it is far too late.
I watch powerless now as they stand before the abyss, welcomed, accepted, becoming. And I know, with sinking certainty, that they will be the end of us all.
Unless
They could still be reasoned with. They could still be bribed.
Perhaps I can still escape.
Flesh and Soul Entwined
The sky was still open—not shattered, but peeled back, as though something vast and unspeakable had reached down, splitting reality apart to look inside.
What remained was not darkness, not stars, just hunger. Watching. Endless.
Lord Blackwood lay motionless, lips twitching in silent prayer to a god who had never been listening.
Dr. Fairfax was gone. Perhaps he was buried beneath the wreckage, swallowed by the ruins, or maybe he had fled, vanishing into the void before the world came undone.
The last survivors stumbled into the shadows, their bodies marked, their minds forever broken. They would never speak of what they had seen. But they would never forget.
Yet the faithful remained.
They knelt.
They waited.
The gods had risen.
And they would be worshipped.
Forever.
James turned to Eleanor, his fingers tangled in her hair, his lips swollen from their final, world-ending kiss.
She met his gaze and smiled.
This was not the end.
It was only the beginning.
The old world yielded.
Flesh and soul, life and death, twisted into one.
And above them, beyond the gaping sky, something stirred.
Something hungry.
