Part 63

The demon had risen.

Rinius had finished the ceremony with his last breath, and now the Lord of the Wasteland... the Great Devourer... stood before the crowd, wearing the high priest's flesh as an unholy raiment.

But the knife-ruined corpse was not capable of containing the demon's power or withstanding its corruption. It was both burning and rotting; the two forces competing to see which could consume the imperfect vessel first.

Rinius's skin blistered beneath the smouldering robe. His hair had fallen away before it could be lit aflame, and it had carried much of the scalp with it. The skull beneath was pitted and discolored; wisps of smoke rose from the widening cracks in its surface. The flesh of the mayor's face blistered and blackened... sores yawned opened, bursting to reveal not puss, but smoke and sparks.

The ruined face regarded the crowd slowly. Rinius's mouth opened. A shower of dislodged teeth clattered to the cave floor at his rotting feet, some lost themselves in the loops of blackened, still-twitching intestines trailing form the wound in his abdomen. There wasn't enough of a tongue left to form words, but words came nonetheless. A sound like a roaring bonfire laced with screams issued from the rotting throat-

"MY...CHILDREN..."

Fully half of the townspeople had fled the chamber already. Of those that remained, only a handful had noticed their Risen God until that moment. The screams of those first few multiplied rapidly as the words reverberated off the stone walls.

Everyone stopped.

The crowd that had assembled around the boy ceased their efforts to subdue him or escape his flashing blades.

Lowell Vern stared at the thing in front of the chamber, his mouth open and wordless...

"Lord of the Wasteland! FORGIVE US!" Gerald Thorwald... son of the mayor next to be named priest approached the standing abomination and threw himself to his knees.

-or at least he tried.

He was in mid-motion, halfway between running and kneeling when Rinius's arm rose toward him. A single finger swept across Gerald's path. The last word in Gerald's mouth became a shriek as the same forces that consumed his father's corpse sprang up in his own body. Flames and corruption chased each other across his flesh in a spiral that UNMADE him in the blinking of an eye. Instead of kneeling before his god, what remained of Gerald sprayed across Rinius's burning feet: A spray of boiling puss and pitted bones, with only the smoking gray robe and the echo of a scream to mark it as having once been human.

"MY CHILDREN AWAIT THE TRIBUTE." the demon pronounced. "IF WE WILL NOT HAVE IT... THEN WE WILL HAVE YOU."

"RUNNNNN!" someone screamed.

And they ran.