Palms Baptized in Sanguine.

CW/TW: Cannibalism, Gore, Death, Psychological Horror, Religious Themes.

Beneath the arched ribs of my rotting timber sanctuary, I watched the iron beast stumble into the mire of my courtyard. Gratia tibi, Domine. I whispered to the hollow air, for the Great Hunger had been answered. I waited as the sun bled out and the shadows grew long and cold, until the clock struck the hour of the dead.

I emerged draped in the heavy velvet of midnight, my visage hidden behind the porcelain pale of a weeping woman—a mask pierced by a rusted blade at the brow. With the silence of a shroud, I unsealed the vessel and discovered my tithe: a pair of lovers and two men, all surrendered to a heavy, doomed slumber.

I drew these four souls into my reliquary of dust. My marrow ached with a famine that only the quick can soothe. Within those ancient walls, I bound their limbs with the iron certainty of the grave.

The woman, flickering between consciousness and the abyss, I laid upon the altar of my dining board. She writhed against the hempen cords, a frantic bird in a stone cage. I offered her only the stillness of my masked grin. Her soul shrieked into the indifferent dark, where no echo returns. Fly, I breathed within the chapel of my mind, fly until your heart bursts with the futility of it.

From the vaulted rafters, I lowered the Engine of Sightlessness. With a mechanical sigh, it plucked the light from her head. I watched the twin spheres submerge into the preservative brine, listening to the melodic cadence of her agony — mors, mors, the shadows seemed to chant. She was a debt that must be paid in full.

As her spirit grew faint, I swung the heavy steel—a pendulum of jagged mercy. The bone parted with a crisp, hollow snap. Her screams were a requiem that turned my lips upward. I carved until the soul was unmoored from the flesh. As the life-tide spilled across the wood, I gathered the warm, crimson libation into basins. My hands were baptized in the very essence I had craved since the noon-day sun.

I bore the remnants to the hearth to be transfigured. Piece by piece, the earthly coil was unmade. I harvested the viscera—the heart, the brain, the intricate clockwork of the body—and entombed them in glass vials of silent amber. My gallery of ghosts grows ever larger. Here, amidst the scent of iron and the damp of the earth, my joy rages in the dark.