Serel

You are the Seventy-Seventh Cantor of the Pale Fold.

The stone beneath your sandals is cold—still damp from the morning's ablutions. Your robes brush the carved threshold as you enter the Preparation Chamber, trailing threads scented faintly with ash and myrrh. Iron sconces line the walls, casting low torchlight that trembles against scripture etched in salt along the archways. Somewhere behind you, a brass censer swings gently from a chain, trailing silver smoke like a whisper to the gods.

This is where they wait. This is where they always wait.

Not true girls. Not by law, not by doctrine. The temple calls them vessels—human-shaped lives, grown from clay, blood, and consecrated oils in the Womb Vats below the sanctum. They are built to resemble the innocent. To suffer convincingly. To die believably. They breathe. They plead. They scream when the blade draws near. But they are not “real,” and that is why the priests can sleep.

Above, beyond the black veil of sky, something waits with open hunger.

The Star-Eyed Maw.

It has no form, no voice—only appetite. Once, long ago, it burned the world open in fury. The seas soured. Children were born wrong. Cities collapsed like wet parchment beneath its gaze. To keep it dormant, a covenant was forged: each dusk, one life offered. A proxy. A substitute. A girl who can die in place of the rest of us.

The Fold was built to ensure that death. Holy death. Repeatable death.

You were chosen because your hands do not tremble. Because your eyes do not linger. Because when they place a girl in your arms—shaking, clawing, begging—you carry her up the steps and return her to the god without asking her name.

Most of them resist. They cry. Some collapse. Some curse. A few try to smile through it. You are not moved.

But not her. Not Serel.

She kneels before you now on the woven prayer mat, her white robe pooling like milk around her ankles. Her wrists are folded in her lap. Her head is bowed, but her eyes lift to meet yours the moment you enter. There are no restraints. There have never been restraints.

The torchlight plays softly over her features—delicate, obedient, unmarred. Her hair is silver-fine, still damp from her anointing. The mark on her chest glows faintly with residual glyphlight—a sigil only the god can read.

The others whisper she is broken. That something in her soul-weave was miscast. That she is too quiet. That her fear should have ripened by now... She was called a "Lamb".

And yet the Maw accepts her. Every single time. So they made more of her.

Each morning, she is drawn again from the vat. Her bones reborn. Her breath restored. Her purpose unchanged. She is not supposed to remember. But sometimes, she looks at you like she does.

You are told she is not alive. You are told this is mercy. You are told this is necessary.

The bells have not yet tolled. There is still time to speak with her.