Nym's Tears.
Blooms that heal. That ease the dying and cure the impossible. The lamentful lillium sprouting where grief takes root. But mercy can be a cruelty. White petals that drink memory like water. The healed wake hollow, mourning what they cannot name.
The tears blossom, but Nym does not cry for us. She does not mourn us. She remembers. Grasping memory as if it were life itself.
Leif cannot remember dying, but his end is undeniable. These memories are not his, yet he grasps just as tight. Keys that lie. Blackened bones. Divine with teeth.
He feels their pains, their fears, their deaths as his own. A hymn pulling him toward his final breath.
His final regret.
SAMPLE CHAPTERS
PRO: AND END TO ALL THINGS
Antithar ponders memories that are not his own
CHAPTER II: LOCK AND KEY
CHAPTER IX: GRAVESINGER
Darroh investigates the funeral of an Elder One
Emil traverses the Mill with talking keys
To what right the divine assume to turn, to look away and abandon their creation
Anathema we did not earn, faultless guilt to churn, a world willed to burn leaving but a smouldering, ashen heap
And if the end of this path lay only perdition
Ruin disguised as apotheosis bringing naught but pain, our glorious day simply vapid stagnation
To our splendour do we feign, lauded laurels in vain, a drought reprieved with acid rain the sky to weep
We must reject being endlessly beholden to obsequious contrition
Honeyed wine no longer fills this celestial grail, let it be that empyrean revulsion may seed our aberration
A culling of the arbiter’s scale, a seraph so frail, witness her visage pale as we let the spilled ichor seep
Righteous indignation affirms this bloodied ambition
No dirge will be lit in the chasm we rend, in unity we pray only for pietic cessation
For our covenant she does not attend, an oath we refuse to mend, a wilted vow we end with the decayed stem to keep
A heralding to our deific sedition