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> "There are no treaties in the Abyss—only delays in digestion."
— Elder Cyst-Tongue of the Bone-Shadows
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🌑 After the Clash
The battlefield still smoked.
Flesh refused to rot. Blood steamed in pools that whispered names no one wanted to remember. Between broken totems and the shattered corpses of both the Hornblack and Ash-Eaters, a third silence settled.
A silence not of peace—but suspicion.
Both tribes had pulled back. Nuhrr's wounds left her with half a face and a third of her thoughts. Krall remained entombed in a semi-living cocoon of ossified bile, his mind wandering far from the war he had started.
And then, from the crater they had unknowingly exposed during their battle, something else began to climb out.
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🕷️ The Bone-Shadows Emerge
From the fissure's edge came no warband, no roar of demons. Only footsteps—light, many, and in rhythm.
They were wrapped in skin that was not their own. Their fingers were too long, too deliberate. Their eyes bore no hunger.
They were the Bone-Shadows, and they worshiped something neither tribe had yet understood: memory.
Their emissary, known only as Cyst-Tongue, approached alone.
He bore no weapon—only a sack filled with dried memories and a flute made from the spine of a forgotten beast.
When he played, the blood on the battlefield froze.
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☠️ Words That Could Rot
Cyst-Tongue addressed both tribes beneath the twilight fungus canopy, in the language of bone vibration—a dialect older than any mouth.
> "You bleed for land you cannot hold.
You kill for totems you cannot feed.
And beneath you, the Abyss awakens a hunger you cannot name."
His words were not welcome.
Suku Tanduk Hitam wanted vengeance.
Suku Abu wanted ritual validation.
Neither wanted diplomacy.
So Cyst-Tongue made an offer that neither tribe could ignore:
He laid a tooth on the ground.
Not just any tooth—this was a Pillar Shard, still pulsing with Abyssal logic.
Whoever claimed it would receive a direct mutation from the First Pillar itself.
A shortcut. A sacrifice.
A deal with the inhuman truth.
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⚖️ The Pact Ritual
Both tribes sent forth their remaining champions:
Ikkath, a Hornblack berserker who had sewn Krall's name into his own spine.
Sharune, Nuhrr's blood-sister and the last of the Flame-Eaters. Her left eye had been replaced by a molten parasite.
They were not to fight.
They were to hold the shard, at the same time, and survive its whisper.
So they did.
And the shard spoke.
> "You are not enemies. You are limbs of the same forgotten corpse."
Ikkath bled from his ears.
Sharune coughed up black flame.
But both survived.
When they looked at one another afterward, there was no hate.
Only recognition. And revulsion.
As if looking into a mirror that shouldn't exist.
The Pact was born.
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📜 The Rules of the Pact of the Cracked Pillar:
1. No open war until the next Tier Break.
2. Exchange one warrior per cycle to learn each other's flesh-craft.
3. The Bone-Shadows may extract one memory per war-dead without resistance.
4. Totemic technology is to be shared only via dream-trade.
5. All tribes must send tribute to the crater—the emerging Totem Scar—every third breath of the Pillar.
Any violation would result in total dissolution by ritual fire—a punishment the Bone-Shadows had already demonstrated once, by turning an entire rogue warband into singing glass.
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🩸 Not Unity—But Alignment
The Pact did not create peace.
But it gave shape to the Abyss's chaos.
Now, warriors of Ash-Eater and Hornblack tribes patrolled together along the Scab Ridges. They did not speak. They did not trust.
But they did not kill each other, and that was evolution.
Within moons, new hybrid weapons were formed:
The Split-Tongue Blade: One edge honed by blood ash, the other by blackbone venom.
The Dual-Totem Helm, infused with conflicting dream fragments — wearing it made you a general or a corpse.
And deep below the Totem Scar, something began to shift...
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🌌 What Stirred Below
The crater had become a mouth.
It did not move.
But it breathed.
And from it came heat, insects made of syllables, and one whisper shared only in the minds of the tribe shamans:
> "The Second Pillar opens soon. Be ready to choose your ancestor."
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