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His spine straightens slow—too slow—like he’s preparing himself for something his body remembers before his mind does.

Then the smell hits.

Rot.

But not the natural kind that belongs to the woods—the sweet, wet decomposition of leaves, the sour musk of old fungus.

This rot is wrong.

It’s threaded with incense—thick and cloying, a smell that coats the back of my throat like burnt sugar turned to tar. It clings to the air with the weight of ritual. It smells like old altars left to drown in rainwater, candles burned past wicks, hymnbooks swollen with mold until the pages fuse together.

It smells like devotion left to spoil.

“Don’t breathe that in.”

The kind of rot that remembers worship and refuses to die.

Rot saturated with holy ritual.

Malek steps forward and parts the branches, and that’s when I see it.

A Hollowborn is wired upright against a broken trunk, arms stretched wide like some grotesque crucifixion reenacted in the ruins of the forest. Fence wire cinches its limbs back, biting deep into mottled, rotting skin, pulling it taut over ribs that jut like splintered boards. The head lolls at an angle no living neck could hold, mouth frozen mid-prayer—or mid-scream. I can’t tell. I’m not sure I want to.

But the carvings—God. The carvings.

Symbols etched into its chest, stomach, throat—each one deliberate, each one cut with a purpose that radiates from the wounds like heat from a brand. They aren’t random. They aren’t frantic scratches dragged by something dying.

They’re designed.

Devotion markings line the throat in warped mimicry of Gospel scripture—thin, clean cuts that trail like defiled verses written in flesh. Perfectly parallel slices fan down the ribs, creating the illusion of skeletal wings or an emaciated saint carved straight from bone. And spanning the stomach are long, uneven gouges—rows of seven—tally marks like the kind made during ritual marches, counting steps to some holy violence.

This isn’t desecration. This is ritual.

“What—” My voice barely survives the air. “What is this?”

The rot feels sacred here. Heavy. Like speaking too loud might wake something that’s been waiting to hear its name.

Malek kneels beside the Hollowborn, but not with the detachment he usually carries into horror. His whole body tightens—as if something invisible hooks into his spine. His breath stops altogether, chest held still.

He knows these symbols. Intimately.

“Malek,” I try again, stepping closer despite every instinct insisting I shouldn’t. “What do they mean?”

He doesn’t look at me when he answers.

“Incantations.”

The word slithers down my bones like ice water.

“Not magic,” he continues, voice thick, strained in a way that makes my stomach twist. “Scripture commands. The kind the Gospel uses to sanctify obedience.”

My heart stutters—once, twice—then drops, the meaning behind his words crystallizing in dreadful clarity. The Hollowborn isn’t just mutilated. It’s consecrated. An altar of flesh. A sermon bound upright for the world to witness.

“For Hollowborn?” I ask, voice small. “Why would a cult carve scripture into them⁠—”

“For anything bound by their rites,” he says, raw and hoarse. “Anything they’ve ever claimed as theirs.”

And then something in my brain clicks—hard, sharp, wrong.