The bells began before dawn.
Not to summon
to warn.
They rang from iron towers, slow and ruptured,
each toll deep enough to rattle bone.
Not music.
Not prayer.
A countdown.
The sound moved like a wound through the city
low, dragging, endless.
Windows shuttered without hands.
Doors locked themselves.
Fires snuffed out in their hearths as if ashamed to burn.
Dogs howled once, then vanished.
Birds threw themselves from their nests.
Even the trees recoiled, branches curling toward their trunks
as if trying to become small enough not to be seen.
Somewhere, an ox strangled itself in its yoke.
Somewhere else, the milk in a mother's breast soured.
Mothers pressed their children flat to the floor.
Fathers knelt facing the wrong direction —
faces to the earth,
Praying not to be heard.
Praying only to be overlooked.
The bells kept tolling.
Each one slower.
Deeper.
Hungrier.
The city remembered.
It remembered what came after the bells.
Their march echoed before their bodies arrived
a dull, metallic rhythm that rolled through the alleys
like thunder dragged in chains.
Boots hit stone in perfect sync,
the sound bouncing off dead windows,
carving silence in their wake.
Even the wind stopped to listen.
They moved through the city like a machine of limbs and fire
porcelain masks,and black gloves
Each one bore the twisted sun on their chest
a crest etched in brass and soot,
warped into a spiral that pulled the eye inward like a wound.
Their belts clinked with instruments of doctrine:
bladed rods, hooked scripture brands,
thin knives shaped like quills.
Their weapons weren't forged for war
they were made for obedience.
Some carried long poles crowned with small, hanging bells.
The bells jingled softly with every step.
Not for sound.
For count.
For every ten houses: a chime.
For every resistant: a strike.
Each bell tuned to a different pitch
so the high priests could hear disobedience from the altar.
Doors shattered like ribs beneath boot and fire.
Screams disappeared behind walls.
A boy's prayer turned to foam before the first blow.
Fathers were beaten for the crime of standing.
Women silenced before they could beg.
A mother hid her newborn beneath the floorboards.
They found it by scent.
No mercy.
Just classification:
Obedient. Hesitant. Problem.
The obedient were marched.
The hesitant were corrected.
The problems were erased.
The people were not invited to the Square.
They were delivered
like meat to a god with teeth.
And the bells kept ringing.
Lilith watched from above
half-hidden in the ribs of a shattered bell tower,
a shadow folded into stone,
crouched like a memory that refused to die.
Ash clung to her robes.
She had once stood in pulpits.
She had once worn white.
Pale vestments, golden thread.
They called her clean.
But she had never believed.
Not in their god.
Not in their light.
Not in the lie that devotion bought protection.
Now she watched men bleed for a god who never bled for them.
Below her, the city convulsed..
A sacred purge masquerading as ceremony.
Smoke crawled up the spines of buildings,
inked prayers scorched into banners,
blood blooming like ink through parchment.
She did not breathe loud.
She did not move wrong.
The wind did not see her.
The stone did not betray her.
Even her heartbeat was quiet
a discipline forged through winters no god had warmed.
She measured everything:
distance, exits, guard rotation.
The scream patterns.
The delay between strike and silence.
Below, the procession staggered into formation.
A slow procession of bruised bodies and stitched mouths.
They moved like offerings already counted.
Flesh wrapped in grief.
Eyes that begged without lifting.
Children clung to broken relics.
Elders recited verses out of sync,
each one a different plea to the same deaf god.
whether lover or child, Lilith could not tell.
The Square filled.
Forced stillness.
Artificial silence.
The kind of hush that came before execution.
Only the bells kept tolling
slower now.
Softer.
Each one falling like the breath of something colossal and dying.
And still.
Lilith did not blink.
She felt it coming.
Not just the god.
The weight.
The shift in the world that said:
Something has noticed.
Something is turning its gaze.
And she knew what came next.
From memory of the last time she stood beneath the eye of a god
and didn't flinch.
One by one, knees touched stone from instinct.
From something older than belief.
Something closer to fear.
Hands trembled but held.
Spines bowed not in prayer, but to become smaller,
harder to notice.
Mouths moved, but the words were silent.
No one dared speak the god's name aloud.
The air tightened.
Too quiet.
Not peace pressure.
Like the world had sucked in its breath and forgotten how to exhale.
A man coughed.
Three heads turned.
He did not cough again.
The silence wasn't absence.
It was presence.
Thick. Listening. Expectant.
silence that waits to be broken.
that lives in the second before lightning touches the earth.
The kind that makes the soul ache to scream and knows better.
Only the bells kept ringing.
Slower now.
Softer.
Each toll echoing over the stone like the death rattle of something ancient and obscene.
Not dying remembering how to suffer.
And still, no one begged.
They knew it was too late.
The Square filled.
Artificial silence..
The faithful knelt.Not in devotion in terror.
They bowed like condemned men at the gallows,
backs bent, lips stitched shut by fear.
Every breath a prayer to be overlooked.
Lilith did not blink.
She felt it coming.
The shift.
A deep hum began to vibrate beneath the stone.
Not sound pressure.
As if the world had begun to grind its teeth.
And from the shadows within
something began to crawl into the world.
The doors did not open.
They peeled, like ribs pulled apart,
wood and iron groaning like they knew what was coming and hated it.
Heat spilled out first
It rolled down the chapel steps like steam from a slit throat.
Then came the sound.
Wet.
Dragging.
Breathing.
He descended.
Not walking or flying.
Carried.
By chains of fire and flesh,
dragged down like a monarch of rot and ruin,
seated upon a throne of writhing limbs and stitched-together saints.
Their mouths sewn shut.
Their eyes still blinking.
And every time the throne blinked
one of the faithful convulsed.
They didn't scream.
They couldn't.
Blood filled their throats instead.
He was not announced.
The world just noticed him
like prey feels the eyes of something older than hunger.
His mask was carved from sun-bleached bone,
cracked at the crown, fused to the face beneath it.
Not worn grown in.
Behind its slits, there was movement.
Not eyes.
Not light.
Something trying to be both.
His hands dripped gold
but it hissed when it touched stone.
Not divine. Hungry.
The metal moved like it had teeth.
Where it landed, grass died.
Stone cracked.
From his back rose wings .
Words blistered across them like brands:
prayers turned to curses, names turned to screams.
He didn't look at the people.
He looked through them.
And when he spoke, it wasn't from his mouth.
It came from the ground.
The sky.
The blood in every vein.
Quorix.. His presence bent the world.
Windows cracked. Tongues split.
The scent of incense turned to sulfur.
The god rose
but not like a savior.
He dragged upward,
chained to a throne of flame and sinew,
a mountain of twisted saints and severed faiths that howled when they moved.
Each chain groaned with ancient curses,
each link forged from broken vows.
And when He finally spoke
it wasn't language.
It was judgment made sound.
It came from everywhere and nowhere,
a voice that moved through blood before it touched air.
"You rang My bell."
The crowd shrank,
as if the words themselves had hands.
"Do you know what that means?"
A child whimpered and was instantly silenced by her mother's palm.
"I do not come for prayers.
I do not answer songs.
I do not descend for pageants or praise."
"I come when I have been defiled."
The throne twitched behind him. One of the bodies began to sob through sewn lips.
"He was here."
The god's hands opened
golden blood dripped from His fingers,
each drop hissing against the stone like it knew it was unworthy to fall.
"The Shadow Walker.
The defiler.
The thief who lives between heartbeats."
The bells above the city tolled once soft, almost sympathetic.
"He touched what was Mine.
He opened My silence.
He left behind nothing but his stench."
Windows cracked.
Birds fell dead in mid-flight.
"You let him in.
With your weakness.
With your rituals and your empty genuflections."
The god leaned forward just enough to unmake hope.
"You built temples.
You gave Me your children.
But you would not keep My house clean."
Then the mask cracked.
A thin, trembling fracture down the center —
and from it poured light that was not light.
Six bodies caught fire.
No sound.
Only the soft collapse of flesh becoming ash.
"I will not be patient.
I will not be merciful.
I will not be made to search."
A final exhale — deep and seething, like molten lungs dragging breath from stone:
"Bring Me the one who walks in the shadow,
and I will give you your heart's desires—
you will sit beside Me as a god."
The Square erupted.
in something far worse the joy
the ecstasy of terror given purpose.
They cheered like zealots.
They howled like beasts.
Hands bled from clapping.
Voices cracked from screaming.
A child with bandaged eyes screamed, "Glory to Quorix!"
His mother echoed him, even as she collapsed.
This was not loyalty.
This was ritual madness.
And above it all, Lilith watched still, wordless, unmoved.
Then she began to remember
The courtyard was a scar on the earth.
Sunlight did not warm here it burned.
Thirty children stood in a circle of ash and chalk.
All barefoot. All silent.
All holding weapons too large for their hands.
Lilith was among them.
None cried. Not here. Crying had been left behind days ago.
Before them stood ten figures cloaked, veiled, silent.
Ten gods.
Not statues. Not dreams.
The true ones.
Some tall as towers. Others crouched and coiled like serpents in human skin.
Their hoods glowed with runes, scripture stitched in languages that bled through fabric.
None moved. None breathed.
Except one.
Quorix.
Even among divinity, he burned.
His cloak trailed smoke that twisted into angelic shapes before dying.
His crown floated inches above his mask — a ring of melted halos and children's bones.
Only his mask could be seen clearly:
sun-bleached bone carved into a false face of peace.
Lilith stared at it.
Even then…
She knew the face was a lie.
She didn't bow.
She didn't shake.
And when the order came—
when the gods chose who would kill and who would die—
Lilith stepped forward before her name was called.
She didn't hesitate.
She didn't blink.
She made no sound when her blade pierced the other child's skull
And behind her, Quorix laughed.
Only once.
But she remembered it for the rest of her life.
Back in the present—
The god rose again on his throne of fire and flesh, wings dripping scripture turned to rot.
The people below roared.
Animals fled.
The earth felt thinner.
Lilith watched from the tower like an echo returned to haunt its source.
And deep inside her —
beneath skin, beneath scar, beneath everything human —
she felt no warmth at all.
Only the memory of ten shadows.
And the sound of a god laughing