Chapter 1: The Gospel of Blood

Chapter 1: The Gospel of Blood

The first thing to breach the syrupy fog in Kenneth’s mind was the smell. It was a vile trinity, a scent he’d known his entire life but had never experienced with such suffocating clarity. First, the cloying, almost sickening sweetness of rosewater, so thick it felt like it was coating his tongue. Beneath that, the acrid tang of holy incense, its smoke a phantom clawing at his throat. And finally, the smell that cut through them both: the coppery, metallic warmth of fresh blood.

His eyelids were leaden weights. He forced them open, the dim light of the shack lancing into his skull. The rough-hewn wooden walls, stained dark with generations of grime and ritual, seemed to press in on him. This was the heart of Shearwater, the sanctum sanctorum where the Rosewater Gospel was born and renewed. His home. Their church.

A low, wet dripping sound drew his gaze. It was slow, rhythmic, obscene in the silence. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, his limbs feeling disconnected, his head swimming in the dregs of a drugged stupor. The earthen floor was cold and damp beneath his palms.

And then he saw them.

His father, Abel Thorne, the Prophet of the Devouring Truth, lay sprawled before the altar—a glorified butchering block carved with spiraling thorns. The Prophet’s imposing frame, a vessel for the divine word that could make grown men weep in terror or ecstasy, was now just… meat. His chest, once a barrel of righteous fury, was a ruin of blood-soaked linen. His piercing eyes, the ones that held the village in rapturous thrall, were wide and vacant, staring at the shack’s smoky ceiling with a look of profound surprise.

Standing over him, silhouetted against the flickering tallow lamps, was Samantha.

His sister.

She was perfectly still, a statue of terrible calm. In her hand, she held not one of the ritual knives, but a simple, brutal thing: a flint arrowhead, its edges sharp and dark with their father’s life. The blood dripped from its point, spattering onto the floorboards with that same, sickening rhythm.

“Sam?” Kenneth’s voice was a ragged whisper, a stranger’s voice in his own throat. The drug was a thick blanket, but the ice of adrenaline was beginning to pierce through it. “What have you done?”

Samantha’s head turned, her movements unnervingly fluid. There was no panic in her eyes, no grief. Just a chilling, resolute emptiness that he had only ever seen in the eyes of lambs brought to the Shearing.

“What needed to be done,” she said, her voice low and steady. It didn't carry the tremor of a murderer, but the conviction of a surgeon who had just excised a tumor.

The world tilted. This was blasphemy. This was the ultimate sin. To strike down the Prophet was to strike down God itself. The scriptures, the sacred texts he had spent his life interpreting, screamed in his mind. The vessel is holy. The voice is Truth. To harm the flesh is to poison the soul of all.

“He is the Prophet!” Kenneth rasped, staggering to his feet. The room swayed violently. “Samantha, you’ve damned us all!”

He lunged, not to attack her, but to get to his father, to undo the impossible. Maybe he wasn’t dead. Maybe a prayer, a ritual, the last dregs of the sacred rosewater could…

Samantha moved with a speed that defied her frail appearance. She didn’t raise the arrowhead to him. Instead, she blocked his path with her body, her pale face inches from his.

“He wasn’t a prophet, Kenneth,” she hissed, and the venom in her words was more shocking than the murder. “He was a man. A cruel, sick man who used a story to beat his wife and terrify his children into obedience.”

Kenneth recoiled as if slapped. “No! The visions… the Devouring Truth… it chose him. It chose our bloodline!” His hands, forever stained with the ink of the scriptures he copied and the herbs of the rosewater he brewed, trembled at his sides. He was the heir to this holy duty. His entire existence was predicated on this truth.

“The visions?” Samantha let out a short, bitter laugh that held no humour. “You mean the madness? The sickness in our blood that he twisted into a gospel? The one that drove Mother to her knees, thanking him for the ‘blessings’ of his fists?”

The mention of their mother struck a discordant chord deep within him. He remembered her, a pale wraith with haunted eyes, her body withering under the weight of the Prophet’s ‘divine discipline’. He had been taught it was a test of her faith. A holy trial.

“He was purifying her soul,” Kenneth recited, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. “The scriptures say…”

“I don’t give a damn what the scriptures say!” Samantha’s voice rose, cracking with a fury that finally broke through her icy composure. “He wrote them, Kenneth! Or he twisted what his father wrote, and what his father wrote before him. It’s a chain of lies forged in a madhouse. There is no god in this room. There is no Devouring Truth. There was only him.” She gestured with the bloody arrowhead at the body on the floor. “And now he’s gone.”

Kenneth’s mind fractured. On one side was twenty-two years of unshakable faith, of ritual and scripture, of his father’s charismatic, booming voice declaring the will of a terrifying god. On the other was his sister’s calm, cold certainty, and the undeniable reality of his father’s cooling corpse. The two realities could not coexist. One had to be a lie. And if his faith was a lie, then his entire life was a meaningless horror.

He stared at the blood, at the dead prophet, at his sister the heretic, and felt a terror far deeper and more profound than any the Devouring Truth had ever inspired in him. It was the terror of absolute emptiness.

And in that sudden, terrifying silence of a world without God, a new sound began.

BOOM.

The heavy oak door of the shack shuddered in its frame.

Kenneth and Samantha froze, their gazes locking.

BOOM. BOOM.

It was a fist. A heavy, insistent pounding. Then a voice, raw with zealous fervor, roared from the other side.

“Prophet! The sickness takes little Elara! The signs are upon her! We need the Gospel! We demand a Shearing!”

More voices joined in, a rising chorus of panicked, desperate faith. They were out there. The flock. The true believers. They were waiting for their shepherd.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM!

The pounding grew more frantic, the wood groaning under the assault. The entire shack seemed to tremble with their hungry faith.

“A new prophecy!” the voice screamed, ragged and demanding. “Give us the word of the Truth, Prophet! We are your flock, and we are hungry!”

Samantha looked from the door back to Kenneth, her chilling calm returning. A grim, terrible understanding dawned in her eyes. The Prophet was dead. But the hunger for a prophet was alive and well, and it was beating down their door.