Miracleborn Saga

SILENCE.

Roze floated in it—not in water, not in air—just… nothing. It pressed against her like damp cloth stretched over her face, yet she wasn't choking. She should've been, right?

Was she breathing?

The darkness was absolute. No sky. No ground. No edges. Just black. It didn't shimmer or swirl. It was thick. The kind of dark that felt like it had weight, like it could bruise you. Somewhere, her fingers twitched—maybe.

She couldn't tell if her eyes were open. Maybe she didn't have eyes anymore. Maybe she was thought, suspended. Awareness like a thread fraying, snagging, asking:

"Should I wake up?"

The question was jagged. Not a full sentence. Just an instinct.

No.

Because she remembered things… or the fragments of them. White lights. Metal beds. Her mouth dry and stuffed with gauze. Needles. A tube in her throat. And then nothing.

"If I wake up, what will I be?"

....

Back in reality,

Wet, sucking mud squelched under heavy, mismatched feet.

Jeff stumbled through the tangled carcass of an abandoned industrial zone—rusted steel ribs of half-fallen towers, broken-glass puddles, wind chimes made of bent rebar and bird bones. The sun had gone, if it had ever risen at all.

He held a homemade cattle prod in one hand, modified to keep its charge longer, and in the other, a rusting chain looped three times around the neck of… her.

The thing behind him slouched forward, impossibly tall. Its meat was stacked like a sculpture made in a fever. Roze had been just one person—he swore she had. But now, now she was three.

Three torsos fused vertically, shoulders fused to hips, hips to jaws. The bottom one dragged its feet—thick, bloated, genderless stumps. The middle torso writhed with a belly that pulsed like it had something trapped inside it, occasionally clawing to get out. And the top—the top was what remained of her.

Her face wasn't just distorted—it was wrong. The bone seemed to have forgotten how to be a face. Her eye sockets stretched too far apart, nose sunken like wet clay, a jaw that opened wide, wider, unhinging slightly whenever she breathed too hard, emitting soft gurgling moans. Her left eye still looked like her. Brown iris. Lashes clotted with pink crust.

From her back, long limbs had sprouted—arms, maybe four, of varying sizes, ending in hands that didn't match. One was a child's, another swollen and liver-spotted. One finger twitched randomly like it had its own agenda.

Jeff glanced back once. Her head lolled.

"Don't look," he mumbled, more to himself than to her.

The prod buzzed faintly in warning.

He didn't know if she understood, but when she tried to move too fast, he zapped her. Not out of cruelty. He had no choice. When she got too close, her third mouth—low on the side of her hip, filled with human teeth—would gnash.

He kept moving.

Past a collapsed water tower. Through a drainage ditch overgrown with weeds thick as snakes. All around, buildings had slumped like dying beasts. Roaches clung to shadows. Something watched from the rafters.

Where he took her—he didn't even know what to call it. An old pump station? A storage yard? There was nothing left but decay. That was the point.

No one would find her here.

He opened the rusted gate with a squeal. The monster—Roze—stumbled forward. One of her knees bent backward like a goat's. The bottom face let out a burbling groan, slapping its tongue against slack gums.

She didn't fight the chain. Not today. Maybe she didn't know she could.

Jeff didn't speak to her as he guided her down the ramp into the darkness.

INSIDE HER MIND,

"Wake up," a voice said—not hers. Not Jeff's. A memory?

But another voice, deeper, full of static and dripping from a long ceiling, whispered:

" You already did."

Her chest felt full of teeth.

Something laughed through her ears.

The sky hung low with the weight of smoke and snow. Wind whistled through crumbled abbey walls and splintered carts, whispering laments of the forsaken. Chickens long pecked to death. Earth slick with ash. The cobbled path to the old Vanguard station was choked with frost-laced briar.

Mary and Jeff had already vanished behind the iron-barred door, dragging chains and desperation behind them.

Allen and Henry stood alone now beneath the crooked steeple of a collapsed barn, where pews had once been piled for kindling. An old weather-worn shrine of Saint Balthasar lay face down in mud, its halo cracked.

"She's not Roze anymore," Allen muttered, stepping forward as thunder groaned low in the east.

Henry squinted at the fog-shrouded form staggering toward them—three stories high of groaning, human ruin. Flesh like churned mud. Parts stitched by hands that had no right to sew. A single eye gleamed in the wrong place, blinkless, wide.

"You speak like a man emptied of feeling," Henry said quietly. "Like someone who sold his mercy to keep warm."

Allen chambered a shot. "I killed the ones who raised me. All of them. Sat with their bones until spring. Tell me—what's one woman to me?"

Henry didn't flinch. "Roze was kind to you. And you know it."

Allen's eyes narrowed. "She was kind to everyone. That's how kindness works. Like wind—it touches whatever's in the way. That don't make it sacred."

The creature wailed, a layered, wrong-souled cry. It scraped one arm—a ropey tendril of mismatched limbs—against a half-standing wagon, toppling it.

The ground trembled. The beast charged.

Allen raised his musket. "Shoot if you're gonna."

Henry hesitated.

The first volley hit the creature square in the midsection—thick blood and something else sprayed out, sizzling where it struck the snow.

And still, it came on.

The wind screamed over the stones as the creature barreled forward, and Henry's wide-brimmed Vanguard hat was torn from his head—spinning into the darkness like a dying bird. His black cloak snapped behind him, soaked with snowmelt.

Allen stood firm, golden hair wild, catching the firelight from the broken lantern at his feet. The musket roared, the shot blasting into the beast's rib-like side. It staggered—but didn't fall.

"Now!" Allen shouted, kicking a rope loop from beneath the mud.

A crude trap sprung—spiked boards slammed shut like a jaw, triggered by the monster's own weight. It screamed, toppling briefly, a tower of writhing limbs crashing down.

Henry didn't wait.

He ran, boots splashing through sludge, sword drawn. The thing twitched and hissed—but Henry looked it in the eyes.

And the world cracked.

Inside.

A shell. Hollow. Crusted with slime.

Child Roze sat curled within, arms around her knees. Hair in tangles. Rags soaked in something dark. She shivered, eyes red, lips moving silently.

"I want to die," she whispered.

Henry's breath caught. He tried to reach her but everything around him collapsed.

Back in reality—

The monster surged upward with a deafening shriek, one arm slamming toward Henry's skull.

But Henry's eyes flashed with white light—his "Feather" trait igniting. He bent backward, body flickering with ghostlike speed, dodging by a whisper.

The claw sliced air.

Henry landed, breath sharp, blade ready. His Prophecy trait wasn't strong enough to insight that monster.

The beast turned.

The ground began to shake again.

The creature towered before them—a cathedral of flesh and wrongness.

Its torsos writhed against each other, fighting for dominance. Hands without arms clawed at its own skin, stitched faces mouthed silent sobs. A mouth on its thigh split open and screamed.

Allen stumbled, coughing blood. His shoulder was dislocated, his coat soaked through with black rot. One eye swollen shut. But he still had one explosive charge—a flask of brimstone pitch, wrapped tight in flint-struck fuse.

Beside him, Henry rose slowly.

His cloak was torn, blood slicked his boots, but his eyes shone bright with something ancient and fatal. In his hand, he held the last of the seven white feathers, fragile symbols of The Watcher's dwindling miracles.

He dropped to one knee and spoke the forgotten tongue.

The feathers spun into the air.

They shimmered like falling ash—then twisted into a single shape:

a sword as long as a man's spine, gleaming white with feathered edges, humming with raw grace.

"Forgive me," Henry whispered—to no one in particular.

The creature lunged.

Allen threw the flask.

It burst against the monster's chest—a shrieking bloom of fire—flesh boiled, faces melted into each other. It stumbled. Parts of it sloughed off. The stench turned the air solid.

Henry ran—sliced through the beast's knee-joint. Gore sprayed his jaw.

A fist slammed into him, sent him skidding across the ice. Blood poured from his nose.

"Not yet," he growled. He ripped two more feathers from inside his coat.

He slammed them into the frost.

The ground lifted him.

He soared, wind in his ears, sword in hand, coat flaring like angel's wings.

And then—

He saw her.

In the warped side of the monster's head—Roze's eye. Soft. Wet. A single glimmer of something that remembered.

Her voice came to him like breath on glass.

"Thank you… you all, for giving my life a value…"

Henry's jaw clenched. His blade came down.

One stroke.

The head severed.

No scream. Just stillness.

The head liquefied in the snow—a pool of silver light—and turned to vapor.

Moments later, the body collapsed, sagged in on itself, and dissolved into mist.

All that remained was steam, and silence.

The Snow had turned Ash.

....

The wind moved slow through the swamp-touched trees, stirring only the mist. Beyond the shattered bridge and the field of broken carts, the world had gone quiet, save for the trudging shuffle of boots in the muck, the wheeze of wheelbarrows, and the soft murmurs of the living.

Henry and Allen led them—twenty-two civilians, two goats, and a baby whose crying had finally become rhythmic enough to sound almost like singing.

No one mentioned what they'd seen.

No one said her name.

Allen, walking with his musket slung carelessly over one shoulder, had been smiling for the first time in years. Not the sly smirk he used to deflect. A real, open-lipped, sun-cracked smile.

He bent low beside a group of kids clustered around a cart, half-asleep.

"You lot awake?" he asked.

One girl blinked, rubbing her eyes. "We're resting."

"Good," Allen said. "Because I need a crew. I'm forming the Order of the Biscuit Knights."

A small boy squinted. "What's that?"

Henry, walking just ahead, didn't stop but raised his voice over his shoulder:

"It's a rogue military group who fights evil using nothing but stale bread and sarcasm."

Allen nodded solemnly. "We're very elite. We've slain two marmalade demons and a tea witch just this morning."

Laughter rippled through the group. Even the old man with frostbitten fingers coughed a dry chuckle.

One child held up a crust of bread. "Do I qualify?"

"Promotion to captain," Allen declared, placing a hand over his heart. "Effective immediately."

Henry allowed himself a brief, sideways glance back. The corner of his mouth quirked upward.

A woman walking beside him—a widow whose husband had turned and been shot without ceremony—looked at him quietly.

"Do you... ever mourn?"

Henry's smile faded slightly. His gaze turned to the woods.

"We all do," he said. "But not always where it shows."

Allen caught up, eyes scanning the sky.

"How far, you think?"

"Another two hours," Henry replied. "If the road's clear."

Allen whistled low. "Better hurry. That tea witch might return."

Henry finally laughed—a low, tired sound that felt human again.

Behind them, no one asked who Roze was.

Not the little girl with the bread. Not the boy who clung to Allen's coat. Not the woman with the trembling hands.

They didn't ask, because no one had said her name.

And because when Allen smiled, and Henry told dry jokes, and the road ahead looked like it might not end in fire—

It was easier to pretend there never had been a person named Roze.

But in every silence, her memory walked just one step behind.