Book 1: Gospel: Dead Weight

Book1: Gospel

Chapter 6: Dead Weight

Dark Hollow, Steelwilds, Fourth Age

Book of Roots, Chapter 12, Verse 4

“The body is not a tithe. Love is not a lever. Let no priest wed you in chains, nor bind your limbs to ceremony. For what the Creator joins in silence, let no gospel split or solder.

Granny lumbered through the hallway, the floorboards groaning beneath her like they remembered every soul that ever passed this way.

She slipped out the back door of the inn, the warped frame closing behind her with a wet wooden sigh.

Outside, the night was thick with the smell of loam and old briar.

She followed a path that once, long ago, had led to the Druid Circle—a sacred place of root and stone.

Now it curved instead toward a darker sanctuary: the Dark Hollow Chapel.

The cobblestones beneath her feet had once been set with care—ritual precision, reverent hands—but time, and something deeper, had cracked them.

Her boots thudded heavily, sinking just slightly with every step, as if the ground remembered her weight.

To either side, empty graves gaped open between the mounds of overgrowth.

Not fresh.

Not clean.

Just… waiting.

Walls of hedge and thorn towered around her, swaying in wind that did not touch the air above ,and Granny did not pause.

Not for the graves.

Not for the stones.

Not even when something in her apron moved again.

The door to the chapel swung open without a sound, surrendering beneath the weight of Granny’s massive paw.

Inside was what was left of a carcass religion had decided to leave to rot. Pews, worn smooth by time and indifference, candles flickering in wall sconces like nervous witnesses, stained glass, depicting the rites of Saint Velessa and Egrigio the Engorged—bodies tangled in ecstasy and sacrifice, and at the far end, an altar draped in deep purple velvet, crowned by a gigantic tome bound in cracked hide.

The Greater Church had long since abandoned heavier conversion efforts in Dark Hollow. They blamed it on the locals refusal to accept the new religion of the Gospel of the Creator and the western influence of the Grovelands.

The reality though is the people of Dark Hollow still remembered and practiced the Old Rites and ways of the Circles and Haloes, and the Wildborn still roamed those dark, dank woods. Some things, not even the divinity of Fernweh could have cleansed.

But none of it mattered to her.

Granny did not bow. Did not light a candle.

She plodded forward, as if gravity pulled her to the altar like a lover.

At the front row of pews, she stopped,and began to undress.

First, the apron, then the worn tunic, each layer peeled back like old bark.

What lay beneath was not wholly human.

Her arms, thick and knotted, were covered in coarse hair, her underarms more furred than flesh, her breasts, monstrous in size, swung with weight but no warmth, more like weapons—bludgeons—than anything that had ever nursed a child.

She bent forward—unnaturally so—and as the dress fell away, her legs and hindquarters were revealed: muscle-bound, fur-covered, and equine in posture, more draft horse than matron.

Only one thing remained on her body: a large leather pouch strapped taut across her belly— secured by belts around her waist and between her legs, like a sacred burden too dangerous to remove.

The bundle inside had stopped moving.

Completely still.

Like it was listening.

She spread her legs wide, squatted low—revealing more of her warped anatomy, a terrain of neglect and desecration, of flesh long untended, shaped more by ritual function than human need.

With thick, trembling hands, she pulled open a trap door beneath the altar. It groaned against its hinges like something remembering pain.

Beneath it:

Stone steps, slick with old lichen and older secrets.

The same steps her ancestor-mothers had descended.

The same path she now took—again.

She did not hesitate.

She went down.

And with each step, the sounds rose to meet her: weeping, howls, gasping, the sharp cries of pain, the shuddering echoes of pleasure, and the low hum of ecstasy laced with rage.

It reeked of filth, of blood, of stale sex and failed sacraments.

But to her, it was nothing.

She had come back.

She would try again.

At the bottom, the passage opened into a wide stone chamber.

Cages and pens lined the walls crowded with figures of every kind: humans, gnomes, dwarves, elves… even an orc and a Dragonborn.

None of them spoke anymore.

Some trembled.

Some stared, glass-eyed and open-mouthed.

A few whispered names they’d forgotten the meaning of.

And at the center of the room—beside a blood-streaked stone table that had never known mercy—stood her Master.

Famora.

She turned to greet her servant with a smile as wide as blight across a harvest.

Granny stopped in front of Famora, her massive body heaving with slow, burdened breath.

With hands thick as branches, she reached around herself and undid the clasps that had kept the leather pouch strapped so tightly to her waist.

The buckles snapped open with dull, exhausted clicks.

The pouch flopped downward, and a body—naked, limp, lifeless—tumbled out onto the stone floor.

A male gnome, though the shape of him defied that label in every natural sense. His limbs were long and wrong, spindly and curled like insect legs, his fingers too many, too jointed, as if trying to decide if they were tools or traps. His tongue lolled from a lamprey-like maw, ringed with tiny, eager teeth, and below, where the divine spark of manhood should have rested— was something stretched, warped, and mutated beyond use accompanied by pendulous, swaying growths that suggested a mockery of creation, not a fulfillment of it.

It was, in every way, a monstrosity.

And yet…

There was something achingly human in the curve of the back, the way one small hand still clenched into a fist, like he had died trying to be held.

Famora crouched beside the corpse.

Looked at it.

Traced one clawed finger along its spine with almost maternal grace.

“What lies before me,” she whispered, “is science dreaming of gods…and gods weeping in the dark.”

She looked up into Granny’s beast-warped face, reached out, and cupped her cheek “I’m sorry, love. He didn’t take. Not this time.”

Granny made no sound.

No growl.

No sob.

But her jaw trembled.

Famora leaned in, her lips brushing the beast-woman’s forehead.“Don’t worry. Soon we’ll find the one. The perfect one. And when he survives…You’ll sing again, with the full power of your Wildborn mothers.”

The priestess smiled. “And the Gospel will bleed its final prayer.”

Book of Saint Fernweh , Flesh Codex 7:13

“Let the sacred bear the sacred. Let the faithful unite in flesh, as the Gospel demands. For pain is the dowry, and devotion the consummation.”