> "He is not a god of light, nor shadow, nor balance. He is the rupture between them. The mouth that opens when you scream."
— Verse I of the Blood Gospel
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The World After the Fall
The sky didn't crack.
It split like a scab — oozing not light, but grief.
The death of Thornsoul did more than erase a god.
It hollowed the concept of obedience itself.
From the eastern prayer cities of Voresh to the sunken sanctuaries beneath Dunehymn, an unnatural silence settled. Not peace. Not awe.
A silence of severed belief.
Birds forgot to sing.
Temples forgot to chime.
Statues of saints bled from the eyes, and wept worms instead of tears.
In every language, on every tongue, the same whispered word:
> "He killed a god."
And worse:
> "He's not done."
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The Madness Begins
In the holy capital of Delraxis, Grand Cleric Almodine slit his own throat during morning liturgy.
His blood painted the walls of the cathedral — not randomly, but forming a single sentence across stone and stained glass alike:
> "ONE DOWN. ELEVEN TO GO."
His body twitched for 6 minutes after death, mouthing Nero's name.
In the floating libraries of Kether Prime, the Librarians of Light found their tomes rewritten — sacred texts replaced with rib-inked scripture in a language no one taught.
Acolytes who read it tore out their eyes and replaced them with teeth.
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The Cult Awakens
It began in forgotten corners of society.
Not where power lay, but where pain festered.
In plague-ridden basements where healers stopped praying.
In prisons where the condemned called out to Nero, not for forgiveness — but for revenge.
In orphanages where children dreamt of a man with a chest full of tendrils and a smile made from broken hymns.
These weren't converts.
They were inheritances.
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Etcha: The Maw-Saint
Etcha was once a hospice nurse in the gutter city of Velm.
She saw hundreds die praying to gods who never answered.
But one night, while cleaning a dying man's body, the man grabbed her hand and whispered:
> "He's coming. His mouth is open. His teeth are churches."
That night, Etcha dreamt of a garden of pulsing flesh, where every tree bled scripture and the moon had a face that smiled at her.
She woke up with her tongue split and her fingers missing nails — replaced by bone sigils.
She laughed until her throat tore.
And then she wrote the first verse of what would become the new gospel:
> "We were not saved. We were sharpened."
Etcha became the first prophet of Nero.
And her followers called her:
> Maw-Saint. Speaker of the Corpse-Womb.
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Rites of the Cult
The Cult of the God-Eater does not gather in churches.
They meet in slaughterhouses, abandoned graveyards, old vaults, and desecrated chapels.
They do not pray.
They bleed into the soil and whisper into their own wounds.
They do not kneel.
They crawl, heads down, teeth clenched — not in reverence, but in defiance of the sky.
Their rites include:
The Throat Hymn – Screaming Nero's name for 66 seconds until the throat ruptures. Believed to "sharpen" the soul.
The Binding Meal – Eating raw organ meat from "voluntary martyrs" to bond oneself to Nero's will.
Scripture Tattooing – Carving phrases into flesh with blessed bone shards. The most holy words are cut into the tongue or eyes.
The most devoted carry Flesh Relics — scraps of angelic tissue, stolen from battle sites, stitched into their own bodies.
> "We become his choir," they say.
"One scream at a time."
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Nero's Miracles
From the Vault, Nero feels them.
Not like prayers.
More like hunger pangs.
The cult feeds him stories. Offerings. Flesh-ridden chants.
And he responds, not with mercy…
…but with miracles of meat.
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The First Fleshbaptism
A boy, dying from lungrot, is brought to Etcha.
She opens his chest, tears out the blackened organs.
In their place, she sews in a cluster of Seraph lung tissue, still twitching.
The child lives.
Breathes.
And his first breath causes every holy idol within a mile to catch fire.
The boy is renamed: Choir-Born.
He is the first Fleshbaptized.
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The Infection of Faith
Faith becomes disease.
A new condition spreads across religious cities: Faithrot.
Symptoms:
Bleeding from ears when hearing divine music.
Nightmares of being swallowed by a voice.
Uncontrollable desire to desecrate holy objects.
Speaking in tongues that cause spontaneous miscarriages in the devout.
Veritas, the God of Law and Truth, attempts to quarantine belief.
But it's too late.
Belief in Nero is not belief.
It's mutation.
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The Old Gods Panic
In Aetherion, the gods watch with growing dread.
They do not see mortals defecting.
They see the foundations of worship unraveling.
> "They are not converting," says Hollow Mother.
"They are devolving."
Even temples untouched by Nero begin to feel the weight of his myth.
Sermons dissolve mid-speech.
Holy water boils in priests' hands.
Faith turns to friction.
Sky-Father's oracles chant:
> "A god has been born not of starlight or prayer."
"But of trauma."
> "We are not gods anymore."
"We are prey."
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Nero Speaks
Deep in the Vault, Nero sits before a mirror made from angel eyes.
He sees the cult.
The blood altars. The offerings. The newborns carved with his name.
He does not smile.
He does not weep.
He simply places a hand on his own chest…
…and pulls out a piece of his heart.
He shapes it into a glyph of living nerve.
And tosses it through the mirror.
It lands on the Maw-Saint's altar that very night.
It beats.
Etcha collapses in tears.
> "He answered."
> "He is with us."
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