Unsleeping Patron - Prayers to a Painted Ghost

With a dull, wet thunk, the iron wedge bit deep into the pine log.Silas didn’t use a mallet. He pressed his bare right palm against the top of the wedge, driving three pounds of Mind-Light pressure through his palm into the iron. The green wood split clean down the grain, the two halves falling onto the shale floor with a dry clatter that startled a brown sparrow off the thatch eaves.Ru sat on a low three-legged stool near the hearth, her small, dirt-caked fingers plaiting dry hemp line. She was nine, her grey linen dress three sizes too large, the sleeves rolled twice and pinned with copper wire.”Uncle Silas,” she said, without looking up from the hemp knot. “Mrs. Chang said there’s fresh barley flour at the storehouse. She said if you bring two armfuls of split pine, she’ll trade a bowl.”Silas picked up another log, setting it upright on the chopping block. “Mrs. Chang can wait until dusk.”He had lived in Pastoral Village #4 for three weeks under the name of an illiterate carpenter from the eastern terraces. It was a quiet settlement of three hundred souls, tucked into a shallow limestone hollow four miles outside New Sanctum’s central wall. The houses were rough timber, the fields tilled with slate spades, and the air smelled of wood smoke and damp river silt.Except for the smell of roses.It drifted on the breeze every morning at sunrise a sweet, cloying odor of boiling sugar and crushed rose hips that didn’t belong in a shale hollow where the only wild vegetation was grey moss and thorny hawthorn.Silas wiped his brow with his sleeve, his amber eyes drifting toward the stone hut at the end of the village lane.Farmer Chang walked past the fence. He carried two wooden buckets on a pine yoke, his stride slow, measured, and silent. He didn’t wear a cap. His thick grey hair was parted straight down the center, and poking through the scalp near the crown was a pale, pink stem no longer than a fingernail, capped with a tight, unopened bud.Chang didn’t look at Silas. His eyes were wide, glassy, staring straight ahead at the slate path as if he were walking through knee-deep water.Silas dropped his split wood onto the pile. “Ru. Stay by the hearth.”The girl looked up, her small thumb catching in the hemp loop. “Are you going to the shrine?””Stay inside,” Silas repeated, his voice flat, carrying a cold, quiet weight that made her lower her chin and nod.He walked down the narrow gravel lane. The village was unnaturally quiet for mid-afternoon. Three women sat on a low stone wall near the well, their hands resting limp in their aprons. None of them were talking. Their faces held the same turnip-white smoothness Silas had seen on Old Lin in Greenhouse 14, and from the crowns of two of their skulls, small pink petals were already beginning to unfold in the pale sunlight.The stone hut at the end of the lane had once been a grain bin. Its timber door stood wide open, and inside, three tallow lamps burned on a flat slate slab, throwing greasy yellow light over a five-foot silk scroll hung against the back wall.The scroll was an oil painting.It depicted a woman floating through stylized, indigo clouds. She wore sweeping robes of crimson silk, her long black hair braided with pearls, her arms cradling a basket of golden peaches. Her face was painted with delicate, meticulous detail arched brows, soft crimson lips, and wide, compassionate black eyes that seemed to look down at the floor with gentle, divine grace.Lady Fey Flying to Heaven.It had been painted three years ago by Zhou, a former art student from Beijing who had died of lung-rot in Brierhold. Before he died, Zhou had painted six copies of the traditional Earth goddess from memory, selling them to village elders for sacks of dried tubers.Four villagers were kneeling on the slate floor before the scroll.They didn’t speak in chants. They muttered a quiet, repetitive refrain under their breath, their palms pressed flat against the stone floor, their foreheads touching the dirt. Every time they bowed, the pale pink blossoms sprouting from their hair shivered, dripping tiny, clear drops of sweet nectar onto the slate.O Lady Fey, protect the crop. O Lady Fey, keep the Miasma from the door.Silas stood in the doorframe, his bare soles resting on the cold threshold.He didn’t draw a knife. He closed his eyes, extending a hairline thread of Stage 9 Peak Mind-Light through his forehead, projecting his perception into the air above the silk scroll.He didn’t see a divine light descending from the heavens.Above the portrait of the beautiful, crimson-robed goddess, the air was curdled.Driven by the focused, emotional faith of the four kneeling villagers, the ambient spiritual energy in the hut didn’t connect to a distant throne. There was no “Lady Fey” in the cosmic void. Instead, the unanchored stream of human prayer the desperate, blind hope projected toward a fictional image created on Earth was pooling directly above the scroll.The energy had no master. It had no order.It was coalescing into a mindless, writhing parasite. A chaotic, lump-like mass of dark-pink plant fibers suspended in the air, sprouting hundreds of fine, hair-like roots that reached downward like invisible threads, plugging directly into the crowns of the four kneeling believers’ skulls.With every prayer they uttered, the parasite drank a fraction of their soul essence. In return, it flushed their veins with plant sap, numbing their pain, smoothing their skin, and growing its fleshy pink blossoms out through their bone.It was toxic faith.Silas opened his eyes, a cold, heavy realization settling over his spine like a slab of wet iron.In the Miasma Wastes, faith was not a passive emotion; it was a physical force, a weight that anchored reality. When humans prayed to a real, existing Relic like the Slate of Eleven Names their collective belief fed the Aegis, expanding the golden dome and driving back the fog. But when they prayed to an imaginary, fictional deity invented in Earth folklore, their unanchored spiritual energy had nowhere to go.It decayed. It rotted in the air, creating a parasitic, Eldritch entity out of their own collective delusion, which then turned around and devoured the very people who created it.The villagers weren’t dying of a virus. They were being eaten by their own unanchored prayers.Silas took a step into the hut.His boots made a quiet, sharp crunch against the gravel floor, cutting through the low, repetitive muttering of the four believers.