The city had no name.
Or perhaps it had too many, and they'd devoured each other until only silence remained.
It rose from the ash of an ancient crater, carved from obsidian and bone. No birds. No wind. Just towers made of hollow screams, and streets that remembered every footstep.
They crossed the threshold at dawn.
The light didn't follow them in.
---
"I've read about this place," Tirian murmured. "A forgotten city. Buried, then unearthed, then buried again by the will of the gods."
"Which gods?" Verrun asked.
Tirian hesitated.
"The kind that still listen."
---
Elías walked at the front.
He felt no fear — only a pressure behind his eyes. As if something beneath the stone was breathing in rhythm with his heart.
A heartbeat not his own.
---
They entered a plaza.
Empty.
Except for a single statue.
A woman with six faces, all screaming.
From her chest grew thorns, each piercing another face carved into the ground — thousands of them, crying silently.
"She was the Warden," Leshra said. "Of memory. Of punishment."
"For what crime?" Elías asked.
Leshra looked at him, then away.
"For forgetting."
---
The air shifted.
Then the ground moved.
Slightly.
As if the city had just taken a breath.
---
From below came a sound — not a roar, not a voice.
Chewing.
---
Stone cracked. Pavement trembled. Teeth — thousands of them — emerged from beneath the plaza like a mouth opening through reality.
The statue shattered.
And from the hole crawled the first of them:
The Gnawed.
Once human, now no longer.
Skin torn, faces melted by knowledge. Eyes too wide. Mouths too full — chewing things they could never swallow: bones, scrolls, names.
They did not walk.
They swam through the stone, like maggots through a corpse.
---
"Don't speak!" Tirian shouted. "They eat words!"
Too late.
Verrun cursed.
The Gnawed turned.
One leapt — too fast.
It sank its teeth into Verrun's shadow.
He screamed — not from pain, but from memory.
The thing was consuming his past.
---
Leshra cut it down. Her blade sliced air, not flesh, but the thing split anyway — unraveling into lines of forgotten stories.
More came.
Dozens.
Hundreds.
The city was infested.
---
Elías gripped the Scythe of Death.
The ink in his hand burned.
Not now. Not yet.
He couldn't speak. Couldn't invoke. Could only swing.
And so he did.
Each strike didn't kill — it edited.
The Gnawed lost their limbs.
Then their names.
Then their meaning.
And faded.
---
But for every one that fell, two more climbed from the cracks.
---
Tirian cast a silent glyph.
A seal formed under their feet — light shaped like a cage, forcing the Gnawed to circle instead of attack.
"It won't hold forever!" he signed with his fingers.
---
They ran.
Through archways made of teeth.
Under murals of gods who wept ink.
Down tunnels where footsteps echoed before they were made.
---
Finally — silence.
They reached a chapel.
Or what had once been one.
Now: a maw.
Its walls curved inward like a throat. Pews twisted into ribs. A single altar at the end — pulsing.
On it: a tongue.
Still alive.
Still twitching.
---
"What… is this place?" Elías asked, whispering despite the risk.
Leshra signed: A temple that fed its own god.
---
The tongue moved.
It wasn't dead.
It spoke.
Not in voice.
In memory.
All of them staggered as visions hit:
– A boy thrown into the altar, screaming prayers.
– A woman who carved words into her skin, then was swallowed for lying.
– A king who silenced an entire kingdom, and became a god of whispers.
---
Then: Elías.
He saw himself kneeling.
The tongue before him.
It licked his palm.
And branded a sentence into his soul:
"You were meant to be devoured."
---
He stumbled back.
"No," he muttered. "I'm not… food."
---
The tongue stopped.
It waited.
Like it disagreed.
Like it was waiting for him to change his mind.
---
"Let's leave," Tirian signed.
They turned.
The exit was there — still open.
But not for long.
The teeth were closing.
---
They ran.
Again.
The city behind them shifting — buildings folding, alleys biting down, whispers turning to howls.
They crossed the border.
The sun hit them like a slap.
But it was real.
And the city was behind them now.
Sleeping again.
For a time.
---
That night, no one spoke.
Not even Verrun.
They sat around a fire made of silence.
And Elías wrote nothing in his book.
But the ink still moved.
Writing without him.
---
Question for the reader:What part of you would be the most delicious to a god that eats memory?