An Empty room, but of a morsel laying on a casket engraved with symbolic carvings that hold weight heavier than blood. The silence reached deeper than death. Blood of the warrior's remains burn on an incense, blanking the room in red mist; when inhaled by a vessel of the caprine god, believed lead their souls from the grasps of god, the cycle of karma, and Ze-Allah's decision. The bridge of afterlife collapses at the mere breath of their one true god.
Religion... A delusion made from life, merely to hide their fear of death. Praying to a non-existent being they believe is far greater than their comprehension, have they ever seen their god even once? Has anyone proved their existence? Has it ever benefit their meaning, their contribution, their time on life? I don't believe it until they decease under the goat and my knees.
Zoirat's eyes crack out, she thought she was still in the battlefield, the blanketing incense of rotting blood shrouds her location. Believing she had ruptured her eardrums as well from the sheer force of her voice. She lifts her palms, and lays it on her face. The once bruised and shriveled eye sockets are now smooth and flat, stretch marks on her maw-stitched together. Tapping her feet on the floor, instead of piles of corpses squelching on her feet, bile-muck sticking onto her, there were planks of polished wood. A swaying breeze pushes Infront of her, a thin ray of light where oxygen squeezed through. She was no longer in battle, however, she thought that she'd fully healed ever since the battle. Her diaphragm lurched as she attempted to breathe, her alveoli gasped like powder on liquid. Bending and contorting her ribs in every inhalation.
The door slams open, a group of six wardens rushed in, holding staffs infused with tendril carrying a basin of blood. A cloaked silhouette from the flash of sunlight emerges, vial-embellished hood clattering on each other, a conduit of blood on her spherical staff. Red-short hair with white highlights that mark a past from her sanguine studies. A member of the Ribcage Regime, 24 top warriors that mark the foundation of the heart's protection. Isolde Cloiré, 17th Rib of the Vrekat Tribe.
"The Vessel Lives." She whispered, to the ones above.
Each blink contrasts from fragments of her memories to the present procedures carried by Isolde, fighting the urge to observe a rib's powers, the images of her throat crackling into a scream that was the god's put her out of consciousness. In her imagination, the Vrekat tribe were merely a small organization, judging from the gallbladder settlement in where she had grown in. She had underestimated her own nation under her power, stretching pavilions out of oak and stone with the privilege of carvings and architectural pleasure had a strong contrast from her usual average settlement. A hidden nation cultivating under snow.
It had been two months.
Two moons ever since the god was last heard, two moons since the Ein'zhul saw their enemy dragging their own leader across tainted land. A still but pulsating force still resonates as she had been more corpse than alive, her systems filled with everybody but her own blood. Ever since that, they've clamped her jaws shut with an iron maw in with nails.
Now, attendees worked her body back with grueling patience. Each day had her pressed against her own dignity, thawing each nerve cell by cell that had frozen from her waist up. They forced her to walk, even when her joints contorted the opposite way, even when blood vomit across the snow floor. Each night, she gagged at the remedies : goat marrow, curdled lamb blood, and fungal powder that clung on her tastebuds like adhesives. Whenever she wretched, she was given double the servings.
Her palms were strapped and etched to jagged stones carved with sharp hooks to strengthen her grasps of fleshcraft while the wardens stood around her, chanting their sutras of recovery until each connecting and separating fiber blurred her vision and causing her to faint. They weren't rehabilitating her. For weeks, she belonged to them, they were shaping her figuratively and physically as she looses track of her past.
Her hands were once trembling, now contorted fit to shape any clot of blood into a sphere. A fractured and shallow lung exhales a stretched breath of incantations. In secret, she'd always dreamed of working herself to the point of a wretched state but have always had not the bravery to do so, the moment her voice became the god's right hand, the terror carved into her pupils engrave its mark even into her allies memories.
The tribe had persevered against the clash, but barely. Ghorak returned in one piece, split and scarred horns. The Warden of the Heretic's Sutra had a missing left arm and had spikes bound to keep his spine upright. The Peristaltics limped their way through the palace with broken bones, some had the very own totems fused into their flesh.
Ein'zhul had retreated to only gather their strengths, it was murmured that the brigade had erected a bastion of pure ice that rose higher than the mountain itself, with this power, a rule was established where they could only erect these pillars with a meaning of rally and SOS. They were calling reinforcements ashore from neighboring forces.