The sight of the ugly little flower embossed on the cover stops me cold. A ripple runs through my shadows, a strange pulse, there and gone before I can process it.
That sickly yellowed bloom shrivels at the edges, rotting from paper to pigment. The scent hits me next. Sticky, sweet, and festering, like citrus left to decay in the sun.
My stomach churns, but I force myself to pick it up.
The Culling Ledger.
It sounds cold. Clinical. Almost bureaucratic—like a catalog of monsters.
But it’s not.
It’s a kill list. A manifesto. A methodical plan to erase us.
A tidy little blueprint for genocide, bound in underborne skin and written in erevald blood.
The book doesn’t just document creatures; it classifies them. Each entry ranks a being’s threat to humanity, the best way to kill them, and which parts of their bodies are most useful to the cult’s twisted rituals.
Through research and some forceful persuasion, I uncovered something worse. The Disciples don’t just rely on zealots.
They cultivate killers, hunters drawn from the Kindled and Lustrate, trained to eliminate anything not born of man.
The Lustrate are the newly anointed, the ones still being broken down and reshaped in the Disciples’ fire.
The Kindled are those who have survived the process, fanatics proven through blood and devotion.
When a hunter slaughters a creature, they must bring proof to one of the Albedo, the gilded priests who oversee the rituals of death.
The Albedo determines whether a kill is worthy, but only the Dawn, the guiding light of the Disciples, makes the final judgement. She alone bestows the highest honors, elevating the most devoted hunters to near-sainthood, granting them access to secrets, tools, and magic designed for one purpose: extermination.
Even touching this book makes my skin crawl, but I kept it for a reason. And now, something pulls gently at the back of my mind. It’s a whisper of recognition, a thread leading straight to Aurora.
The Disciples didn’t get everything right, and the book has glaring omissions—like me. But they were meticulous. They recorded every creature they encountered or believed existed, many of them now extinct because of the Disciples.
Take unicorns. Peaceful, beautiful, curious creatures who couldn’t resist the very thing that would destroy them: humans. Their trusting nature is why they’re woven into fairytales and folklore with unnerving accuracy.
And yet, the Disciples hunted them into extinction, carving their horns from their skulls to steal the potent magic inside. A ritual overseen by the Aurifex, the cult’s divine craftsmen of horror.
They called unicorns monsters. But I see the truth now.
The cult covets the very thing that sets the underborne and erevald apart from humans.
They fear them. But want to become them.
Human hypocrisy knows no bounds.
As I continue my search, I notice several other creatures that are now extinct thanks to the Disciples.
Something ugly and unwelcome knots behind my ribs.
Oh hell, is that empathy?
That’s new. I don’t give a shit about the underborne, and my feelings toward the erevald border on outright hatred. Even so, I never went out of my way to kill them. But the Disciples did. Over and over again.
As I idly flip through the disgusting little book, something unexpected grabs my attention. The notes in the margins warp, edges bleeding together.
No. No, it can’t be this.
It’s a fucking myth. Even in our world.
