Quoted By:
A cautionary tale:
>It had been an area for exercise away from prying eyes and well supervised, where the physical ailments and frailty were not so obvious. It was stiflingly hot. It was ferociously humid. Blue and white tiles lined the outside of a drained pit. And in that pit was a burrow. A tunnel. A boring-hole. Around it were the corpses of more than two dozen humans. The ones who could not walk. Every skull was opened, the jellied contents haphazardly removed. Wet bone glistened in the half-light of a flickering lumen.
>Every face wore a smile.
>Every body bore growths, fruiting, ripe, ready to burst.
>One lived. Perhaps … life was too generous a term. It had a functioning nervous system.
>One had been left for us, by HER.
>One was the trigger.
>She could have been the twin of the girl in the courtyard, if not for the grossly inflated abdomen. Her hair was bone white. Her eyes were membranous sockets. Her smile was divine and serene. Her skull was open and overflowed like a bloody goblet. She rose out of the shuddering mass of fleshy growths like a cyst.
>“Do not be sad,” she says with the voice of the Devourer. “This is a message of hope.”
>“You are not your bodies,” she says in the voice of chitinous hordes.
>“Cast off these hollow shells,” she says in the voice of endless hunger.
>“Join the Great Journey, honey”
