Chapter 10 The Eye Opens

Lana didn't remember pulling the trigger.

Only the silence after. Heavy. Not empty charged, like a breath held by something ancient.

Vex's body collapsed into her arms first, weightless, boneless. His eyes were open but saw nothing. The bullet had exited clean through his skull, blood wept in slow streams, soaking his collar and the jagged floor beneath. His lips still twitched as if speaking. Whispering. Praying.

But not to her.

The roots inside him shuddered. Pulled inward. Retracted like veins seeking a heartbeat.

Then came the bloom.

THE BODY BELOW

The cocoon above them split in two. Its outer layer sloughed off like wet skin, sliding down the obsidian walls with a sound like paper tearing under water. What remained inside writhed, something not quite human.

It had Vex's face. But the symmetry was wrong. Too perfect. Too still. As if someone had copied the memory of him but forgotten to include his flaws.

Lana stood frozen, gun trembling in her hands. Smoke drifted from the barrel. Her hands were blistered, coated in soot, blood, and sap. She looked down at him again, at the man she had once kissed under moonlight in Istanbul.

Now just a vessel.

And she had stopped it.

Hadn't she?

The twin in the cocoon opened its eyes.

And smiled.

THE ROOT'S WILL

The pit beneath the shrine widened. Walls of flesh and root pulled apart like muscle during surgery. Vines coiled around the corpse of the original Vex, lifting it like an offering.

Lana heard the roots think.

Not in words, but in pulses. Images. Songs without melody.

The god wasn't rising.

It had already risen.

Shu'kalith had merely been waiting for the vessel to ripen.

And she had ripened many.

Far below the pit, in a vast unseen chamber, Lana sensed other bodies, dozens, maybe hundreds. Some dead. Some dreaming. Each one another iteration. Another attempt. Another Vex.

They weren't growing one body.

They were breeding an army of them.

THE SKY BREAKS

Above ground, chaos bloomed like fungus.

Black Vale burned, not with fire but infestation. Trees burst through concrete. Red mist rolled through the streets like morning fog from hell. Those who had resisted the infection now fell to it, not through contact, but sound.

The song of Shu'kalith. A frequency. A language of god-flesh and memory. It unzipped human minds like rotten fruit. Children wept sap. Elders bled petals.

A scream rose from the town square.

A woman, twenty-five, dropped to her knees, vomiting spores as her skin peeled away, revealing bark.

By the time her husband reached her, she had already rooted into the soil.

BIRTH

The tower rose at dawn.

A mass of pulsing root and vine and wet crimson bark, spiralling into the clouds. At its crown, something being born.

Not Vex. Not Shu'kalith.

A new thing.

A fusion.

It had arms, six of them. A torso that undulated like jellyfish meat. Dozens of faces shifting across its surface, none staying long. Some human. Some insectoid. Some completely alien.

But the eyes were always Vex's.

It opened its chest.

From the cavity spilled light. Red. Gold. Green.

And the world changed shape.

THE ENDING

Lana staggered out of the tunnels. Her right arm hung useless, dislocated at the shoulder. Her ribs cracked. But she climbed. She clawed through the burning mulch that had once been Black Vale's main street.

Behind her, the spire howled.

The earth shook.

She opened her coat.

Inside, the fail-safe.

A device designed to erase buried horrors. Designed by the same minds who built atomic sins in the 1940s and gave them names like Trinity.

It was small.

It would be enough.

As she approached the base of the tower, the infected parted for her. Not out of fear. Out of reverence.

They recognised her.

The midwife.

The one who had delivered the god.

Lana reached the heart.

She placed the device at the base, wedging it into the roots.

The tower moaned.

"You can't kill her," Vex's voice whispered from all around. "She's already in the blood. In the seed. In the breath."

"I know," she said.

She pressed the button.

"I'm not killing her."

She closed her eyes.

"I'm denying her the world."

The sky turned white.