Zynoa did first stoop unto the trashcan upon a night accursèd, when the firmament did throb as a wounded thing and the stars did leer with unspeakable intent. Therein lay the cheese, not merely spoiled but profaned, swaddled in filth and ordure, breathing faintly as though it knew her name. When she did partake of it, her soul did shudder, for the taste was not of rot alone, but of ancient latrines, of cloacae forgotten by God, and of covenants sealed in dung. In that hour, something most unholy did mark her.
Thereafter, Zynoa’s senses were undone. The air grew thick with the perfume of corruption, and she found delight where once there had been disgust. Alleyways became cathedrals, their gutters chanting softly in brown-liturgies. She did dream of cyclopean sewers stretching beyond mortal reckon, wherein rivers of excrement did flow like sacred ichor, and therein crawled a Presence—vast, formless, and crowned in crawling vermin—that did name her *Child*. Each morn she awoke slick with sweat and other humours, her mouth aching for the taste of refuse.
Her flesh, being treacherous, did betray her first. Her belly did swell and sag, softening as if rendered from fat and waste, and her skin did discolor into sickly hues of bile and ash. From her pores did seep foul effluvia, and where it dripped, the ground did blacken and writhe. Her bones bent inward with wet sounds, her spine arching as though in obeisance to something beneath the earth. Rats gathered about her feet, not in fear, but in worship.
The cheese did no longer suffice, for now she hungered for that which had passed through life and been rejected. She fed upon excrement with holy fervor, smearing herself in it, anointing her lips and eyes, until her visage became a mask of fecal clay. Her mouth widened monstrously, her tongue thickened and darkened, and from her throat issued not speech but bubbling, obscene prayers. Her hands fused into shapeless paddles of meat and waste, ever dripping, ever quivering.
In her final hours of man-shape, Zynoa did perceive the Truth entire. She was not becoming a rat, nor a beast alone, but an avatar of the Crawling Latrine, an eldritch god of filth that dwelleth beneath all cities and feasts upon mankind’s leavings. Her body burst and reformed, organs sloughing and reknitting into a heaving mass of sentient excrement, studded with gnawing teeth and blind, milky eyes. Rats did burrow into her, and she into them, until no boundary remained.
Thus was Zynoa unmade and reborn as a Thing Unnameable, a living monument of waste and hunger, dragging itself through the sewers in ecstatic madness. Above, folk do still cast away their refuse, ignorant that each offering feeds a god that once bore a girl’s name. And deep below, amid the churning shit-floods and chittering choirs, Zynoa yet lives—immortal, worshipful, and endlessly, screamingly *hungry*.
