The cabin shouldn't have existed. Not here, in the bowels of Ironhollow's festering underbelly, where the air tasted like rust and the walls wept black bile. But there it was—a crooked wooden shack wedged between collapsing tenements, its windows glowing like jaundiced eyes. Outside, the red fog didn't just *cling*—it *thrashed*, tendrils of vapor coiling around the cabin's frame like parasitic vines, hissing as they scraped against the glass. Inside, the fire spat and crackled, its flames too orange, too *alive*, casting shadows that twitched like skinned rats nailed to the walls.
The smell hit first: cinnamon and woodsmoke, yes, but beneath it—the sweet-rot stench of meat left too long in the sun. At the table, a man hunched over a chipped mug, his mechanical eye whirring as it refocused. The eye was a bastardized thing, its blue lens pried from the skull of an Inquisition automaton, still flecked with dried cerebrospinal fluid. He laughed—a wet, phlegmy sound—and jabbed a grease-blackened finger at the portrait on the wall.
"Haha! I'd sure like to try goblin's egg!"
The painting leered back. Its subject, a man slathered in makeup so thick it cracked like dried mud, had lips that glistened unnaturally, as if painted with fresh blood. When it laughed, the sound was nails on slate. "Careful, Howler," it sneered, the voice oozing from the canvas like pus from a wound. "Goblin eggs hatch in the bowel. You'd shit yourself to death by dawn."
Howler the Regbic—named for the gurgling howls he'd made choking on poison gas decades ago—snorted and wiped his nose on a sleeve crusted with old vomit. His purple ears, sagging like deflated bladders, trembled as he opened his mouth to retort—
"Gentlemen!"
A jittering shape lurched from the shadows. It stood barely four feet tall, limbs knobby and bent like broken broomsticks, its robe stitched from what looked like human hair. The creature's face was a horror of mismatched features: one eye bulged, milky and blind, while the other twitched in its socket like a trapped insect. "S-sorry to interrupt," it stammered, voice splintering into a shrill giggle. "But I must—haha—present our n-new… product."
The room stilled. Even the fire seemed to hold its breath.
Regbic emerged next, his bulk displacing the air like a corpse rising from swamp water. His cloak—stitched from the hides of skinned hounds—slithered over the floorboards as he slammed a fist on the table. Vials rattled; a cockroach scuttled from a loaf of mold-speckled bread. "Enough prattle," he growled, yellowed teeth gleaming. From his cloak, he withdrew a pill.
Not a pill. A *cyst*.
It pulsed faintly, its green luminescence sickly, larval. Veins of black filth spiderwebbed its surface, throbbing in time with the distant *thud-thud-thud* of the Gore Clocktower's pendulum.
"Call it 'Hell's Cabin,'" Regbic rasped, rolling the thing between his fingers. A droplet of oily liquid seeped out, hissing as it hit the table. "Swallow it, and the past comes crawlin' up your throat. Memories the Hue scrubbed clean. Nothin' pretty, mind you—just the rot they buried."
The Alchemist of the Dead Poet leaned in, his mechanical eye clicking as it zoomed. The eye was a relic itself, its brass housing fused to raw, red flesh where the skin had rejected it. "And if it kills you?" he asked, voice flat.
"Then you die *knowing*," purred the portrait. Lady Tokio's painted lips curved, flakes of pigment drifting down like dead skin. "Isn't that sweeter than oblivion?"
A muffled clang echoed from outside—something heavy scraping against the cabin's walls. No one flinched. They were used to the sounds of Ironhollow's hunger.
"This," Regbic hissed, holding the pill aloft, "is how we fight. Not with blades or bullets. We carve the truth outta the city's guts and force it down their throats."
The twelve crow-masked figures seated around the table didn't applaud. They clicked—a chorus of bone against bone, knuckles rapping on wood in grim approval. One mask tilted, its beak smeared with something brown and flaking. "And if the Covenant finds out?"
Regbic's grin split his face like a rotten fruit. "Let 'em. Their 'art' is just piss on a funeral pyre."
The fire popped, spitting embers that landed sizzling on the floor. Somewhere, far below the floorboards, something scratched and whimpered.
---
Beneath Ironhollow's flesh, in the septic veins where sewage mingled with forgotten blood, the Dissonant Covenant convened. Their chapel was a repurposed morgue, its tiles stained the color of old liver. The air hung thick with the reek of formaldehyde and gangrene, so potent it made the eyes water.
Their leader, Veyl, stood atop a dissection table, his bare feet leaving damp prints on the steel. His eyes were twin shards of obsidian, pupils swallowed by the void. Charcoal coated his lips, smeared down his chin like a child's mockery of a beard.
"Brothers! Sisters! Rotlings!" His voice was a serrated hymn. "They call us mad. Good. Madness is the only sane response to this… farce."He gestured to the walls, where Covenant artists had nailed up their masterpieces: stillborn infants preserved in jars, their skin peeled back to reveal delicate bone filigree; a tapestry woven from human hair and rusted wire, depicting the Gore Clocktower devouring the sun.
A cultist near the back—a woman with a jawbone grafted where her ear should be—hissed through filed teeth. "The Cipher took my brother last night. Left him hollow as a gourd."
Veyl crouched, joints cracking like kindling. "And what did you do?"
The woman smiled, tongue probing the hole where her molars had been yanked out. "Fed his skin to the rats. Made a lovely broth from his bones."
"Yes!" Veyl's laugh was a shriek. "Turn their sorrow into spectacle! Let the nobles choke on our art!"
Elsewhere, in a vault hidden beneath the market square's sagging stalls, the Order of the Veiled Scepter plotted in silence. Their chamber was a mockery of nobility: moth-eaten tapestries, chairs upholstered in leprous velvet, a chandelier strung with dead songbirds. High Scepter Caranth drummed his fingers—each nail replaced with a silver claw—on the table.
"The Cipher's Dread Harvest escalates," he said, voice crisp as a scalpel. "They're not just stealing memories now. They're seeding them. Growing new… things in the hollows."
Mistress Evaris, her face a porcelain mask bisected by a crack, tilted her head. "Then we harvest them. Cut the rot out before it spreads."
"And the Shadow Accord?"
A snort. "Rabble. They'll gut themselves on their own ideals."
Aboveground, in the corpse of a gutted factory, Garrick "The Fade" Morrow paced. The floor was littered with broken syringes and rat carcasses, the air reeking of burnt copper. His crew—twenty-odd souls with eyes like lit fusees—watched as he slammed a rusted pipe against the wall.
"They think we're scared?" Spittle flew. "The Cipher sucks memories like marrow. The Covenant wallows in shit. The Order? Ha! They're just grave robbers in fancy rags!"
A teenager with a branded forehead raised a shaking hand. "What if… what if we can't beat 'em?"
Garrick was on him in three strides, gripping the kid's collar. "Then we die loud," he snarled. "So loud the whole fucking city hears!"
---
The meeting chamber stank of betrayal.
Beneath the palace's sagging foundations, in a room wallpapered with flayed skin etched with runes, three figures faced each other. A noblewoman's pearls glinted like maggot eggs in the greasy light. A Covenant defector, his mouth sewn shut with wire, hunched in the corner. A Scepter agent tapped a finger against her thigh—*tap tap tap*—each click the sound of a bone snapping.
"Simpson's back." The noblewoman's voice was velvet wrapped around a blade. "The priest gave him the vial. The *temporal* vial."
The defector gurgled, black spittle leaking through his stitches.
"He'll side with the Accord," the Scepter agent muttered. "They're sentimental. Weak."
"Or he'll burn us all," the noblewoman countered. "The vial isn't just time—it's corruption. The kind that melts reality like tallow."
The door creaked. A messenger stood framed in the doorway, his face a roadmap of scars. "They've seen him," he panted. "Near the Clocktower. His graft… it's *moving*. Like worms under the skin."
The noblewoman stood, her gown rustling like a nest of beetles. "Then we move tonight. Cut his throat. Drink the vial. Let the city choke on the remains."
The defector lurched forward, wire snapping as his lips tore open. "NO!" he screamed, tongue a blackened stub. "He'll end us! You don't know what he—"
The Scepter agent's dagger silenced him, its edge parting his throat with a sigh. Blood pattered onto the floor, sizzling where it met the runes.
"Sharpened enough?" the agent asked, wiping her blade on the corpse's shirt.
The noblewoman smiled. "Oh, yes."
Outside, the Gore Clocktower groaned, its gears grinding bone to dust. Somewhere, Jonathan H. Simpson smiled in the red darkness, the leathery journal cold in his hands.