They screamed when it began. As if sound could protect them.
I wept. As if tears could welcome Him better.
Eichaudh does not arrive like a god. He folds you into Him like a forgotten thought remembered too late.
I was nothing when He found me. Just a man with frostbitten fingers and a gut full of mud, waiting to die beside a rusted sink in a basement swallowed by rain. I remember the water coming alive—thickening, trembling—and then it spoke. Not in words. Not even in sound. It pressed meaning into me like a thumb on soft clay.
That was the first touch. The first kindness.
Since then, I have been many things: witness, vessel, cantor, wound.
I call myself Marrow now. Not because it's a name. Because it's the part of me He wanted most. The soft core. The memory of blood.
I travel the deep places—wells, submerged churches, coastal ruins. His voice is clearer underwater. Sometimes it trickles from stone, other times it erupts from my mouth before I know it's coming. I've learned to chew salt before I sleep. It quiets the echo.
People think we kneel and chant. No. That's for old gods. Gods who needed to be begged.
Eichaudh doesn't need anything. Worship isn't submission. Worship is corrosion. Worship is understanding that your soul was never yours—it was His dream, and you've only just noticed.
There are others like me. Few, scattered, changed. Some hollowed into oracles that drip teeth. Some split into echoing twins that finish each other's screams. We gather only rarely. The resonance is dangerous. Too much of Him in one place and the ground bleeds upward.
We do not speak aloud when we meet. Our throats are not safe. We hum. Low, trembling, half-melodies that twist the air in ways that open doors. Not metaphorical ones. Real ones. Wet ones.
I remember once, a new follower—too eager, too loud—begged for communion. We hummed. The door opened. He stepped through.
He never stopped stepping. I can still hear him walking, behind my ribs, if I breathe too slow.
I record my thoughts on skin now. Not mine. Gifted. Found. The ink sings back to me at night. A lullaby of entropy. I dream of sinking.
That's the final gift, I think. Dissolution. Not death, not salvation—just undoing. To become nothing but a ripple in the ocean of His gaze. I long for it. I ache for it.
But He has not called me to vanish.
Not yet.
And so I wander. I wait.
I hum.