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> "We gave it names. It returned none. We gave it meaning. It chewed it into dust."
— Bone-Shadow Archivist N'haru, before being devoured by his own soul
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🌑 The Unseen Hunger
It began not with a scream, but a sudden silence during a blood rite.
At the Totem Cradle, where two dozen warriors from warring clans gathered to sacrifice cognition for strength, something interrupted the final chant.
The silence was unnatural.
It wasn't absence of sound.
It was devouring.
Each syllable spoken simply did not happen.
And when the last warrior opened their mouth to offer the final word, their jaw fell off, not torn—but forgotten by flesh.
Only one entity stood where the totem stones bled:
A thin, elongated figure with no eyes, no face, no breath.
Only mouths—all across its torso, some speaking, some weeping, some chewing.
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🕷️ What is a Ritual Eater?
It is not a demon.
It is not a god.
It is not even truly alive.
The Ritual Eater is the Abyss's response to repetitive meaning.
To structure.
To memory.
When enough rituals accumulate, and enough spiritual weight condenses in a place, a new entropy is born—one that feeds on the very logic of rites.
It hunts meaning like prey.
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☠️ Physical Description
Tier: 3 (untethered, semi-unstable)
Height: Varies (appears taller in high-density ritual zones)
Skin: Black-flesh layered with shifting runes, each one stealing meaning from nearby objects
Limbs: Often change mid-combat—growing mouths, sigils, or folding into knives made of bone-speech
Notably, it casts no shadow in ritual zones.
Where a Ritual Eater walks, totems cease glowing, and shamans lose their tongues—not physically, but their tongues simply… forget how to speak.
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🔥 First Encounter: The Devouring at Blightspire
The Blightspire Totem Assembly, one of the oldest ritual sites in the First Layer, was overtaken in a single breath.
12 high shamans,
50 ritualists,
7 hybrid scouts
All slain.
Not by blade.
But by having their rites turned against them.
Their chants were consumed.
Their bones rearranged to speak backwards.
The site now recites its own destruction eternally, a low guttural hum heard even from the ash-winds of the outer desert.
The Bone-Shadows tried to cleanse the place.
They failed.
Their spell-structures unwrote themselves on the walls.
The Ritual Eater was still there, somewhere inside, feeding slowly.
It doesn't need to kill.
It erodes.
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⚔️ Abilities & Effects
🕳️ 1. Chant Reversal
Rituals performed in its presence unravel, often undoing their purpose or transforming the user.
A healing chant may instead liquify bones.
A weapon blessing might cause blades to scream and melt.
🩸 2. Mnemonic Consumption
The creature eats memory.
Not just from minds, but from spaces.
Walls forget they were built.
Totems forget their name.
Entire regions lose their history—literally.
🗝️ 3. Sigil Collapse Aura
Any active enchantments or ritual patterns within 300 paces invert, causing explosive misfires, time stutters, or flesh-loop anomalies.
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🔮 Purpose Within the Abyss
The Ritual Eater is a course correction—the Abyss fighting back against stability.
It ensures that no structure remains holy, no ritual remains sacred, and no faction becomes too ordered.
To the Abyss, consistency is infection.
The Ritual Eater is its cure.
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🐚 Reactions Across Factions
🔺 The Bone-Shadows
Declare it a forbidden class of anti-god.
Seek to bind it in a memory coffin and feed it false rituals to track its behavior.
Initial attempts fail catastrophically.
🔺 Forgotten Pact Hybrids
View it as an ascended synthesis of chaos and order.
Try to replicate its existence via forced ritual negation—often killing themselves in the process.
🔺 Purity Cults
Declare it the "Echo of the False Tongue."
Believe its appearance proves the need to return to pre-ritual flesh combat.
Begin large-scale burning of sacred sites to prevent more Eaters from forming.
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📜 The Flesh-Library Incident
An attempt to trap the Ritual Eater in the Flesh-Library of Gro'thul, a bio-cognitive archive of over 7000 dead warriors' memories, went horribly wrong.
The Eater entered.
It spoke no words.
But within one breath, all recorded voices were erased.
The building forgot it was a library.
The minds stored within woke up, fused into a massive, screaming amalgam known now as the Shriek Tome.
To this day, the library's ruin weeps ink.
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🧠 Final Note: Ritual Eater Reproduction?
Though no confirmed reproduction has occurred, recent reports from the 77th Totem Cradle suggest new anomalies:
Small mouth-seeds growing on abandoned altars
Runes appearing in reverse on newborn hybrid skulls
Faint laughter heard after failed rituals
The Ritual Eater may be multiplying.
And if so, the concept of ritual itself may face extinction.
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