Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I. Lamebrains Revenant, The Living Mistake

"If I lose a limb, I’ll just call it character development.”

Elsewhere, a corpse sat bolt upright in a puddle and immediately swatted the crow off his head.

He patted his limbs. Counted his fingers. Something was missing — definitely a toe. Maybe a kidney.

“Oh no,” he groaned, “not again.”

He was, unfortunately, alive again.

These days, he goes by Lamebrains Revenant — A name he gave himself on the spot.

He didn’t ask to be undead.

He just kind of... forgot to stay dead.

Some say it was a curse. Others blame an unfinished ritual. Lame thinks he just had a really weird luck — and also possibly died a virgin, which might have screwed up the paperwork in the afterlife.

Now he wandered around with half-dead limbs, a cheerful — almost stupid attitude, and a nail so large stabbed on his head. He didn’t take it out. He kind of liked the look. Sometimes, birds like to perch on it.

He wasn’t scary. He wasn’t wise.

He once tripped over his own spine and thanked the ground.

But there was something about him that refused to decay properly. Staple gun in hand, limbs barely held together, with the attention span of a confused puppy and the smell of yesterday’s grave. He meant no harm. He liked flowers. He liked soup. He liked being pat. Being sheltered.

Unfortunately, he also tended to freak people out.

He wasn’t trying to haunt anyone.

He just didn’t know where else to go.

II. Canine Maneater - The False Seraph

“To devour is to understand.”

“To be devoured is to transcend.”

In the chapel made of marrow and glass, Canine Maneater sat in silence.

Wings — tattered things of bone and velvet, arched above his throne like a crown of ruin. The cult knelt before him in solemn hunger, their mouths stitched in reverence, their eyes turned inward.

He did not speak often.

He didn’t need to.

To the faithful, his presence was scripture. A living psalm of rot and holiness. The Unholy Angel, the Mouth of Transcendence, the Blasphemous Prophet — He wore each title like a skin he hadn’t shed yet.

He gave them feasts of memory.

He burned sinners into incense.

He kissed the skulls of those who begged to be eaten.

And yet—

He was bored.

Not with the cult, or the rituals, or the ecstasy of shared consumption. But with sameness. With the way everything around him was digestible. Predictable. Eventual rot.

He longed for something that would not break under his teeth. Something new. Something that could make him feel alive once again.

III. Paths Entangle

The sky split open in a minor miracle. Thunder cracked without clouds, and bones rattled from the underground.

Canine felt it like a ripple in the dark. A soul that sang the wrong note. 

Something rotten.

Something wrong enough to be sacred.

And Lame — wandering through forest and fog, trailing loose skin and dead leaves — felt it too. A pull. Like a weird spiritual GPS dragging him toward the creepiest cathedral he’d ever seen.

“Maybe they have snacks,” he whispered hopefully.

Their meeting was written in rot and error.

A fallen angel in a bone throne.

An undead who wouldn’t stay dead.

Not enemies. Not friends. Not yet.

Just two things the world didn’t know what to do with—

drifting toward each other, slow and inevitable,

like rot toward fruit,

like teeth toward skin,

like deity toward apology.

Chapter Text

The doors groaned open like the throat of a dead daemon. Canine Maneater turned his head.

He had felt the ripple first — not through flesh, but through rot, as though something had entered the room that refused to decompose properly.

The congregation fell silent. Bones stopped clattering. Shadows held their breath.

Then, from the lightless hall beyond, comes a voice.

“HI! Uh… are you guys like, doing a celebration buffet—??”

The cult gasped.

And there he was.

An undead. A corpse. A cartoon mistake of resurrection.

His garment was damp and riddled with bite marks, one of his arms was dragging slightly behind him, and most prominently — a huge, rusted nail stuck straight into his skull like a party hat worn wrong.

The Prophet observes.

Lame grinned. “Hope I’m not interrupting dinner! It just smelled real fancy here. Like… pot roast and incense?”

No one moved. A single candle guttered.

Then, Canine stepped down from the altar, silent as plague. The congregation bowed their heads.

“You’ve arrived,” he said.

“Neat,” the undead said, eyes wide. “I do that a lot. Just randomly spawned somewhere.”

“What are you?” Canine asked.

“Oh?? I’m Lame!!” he chirped. “Or, uh. Lamebrains Revenant if you’re feeling poetic. I'm kinda undead, I think? Or half-dead? Jury's out.”

He paused.

“Oh, also, this is kinda embarrassing, but… I think my ear fell off in the hallway. If you find it, no rush. I just kinda need it.”

Canine Maneater did not cast him out.

He did not condemn him.

Instead, he said:

“Come. Break flesh with us.”

Lame clapped. “Oh hell yeah, I love food!”

The table was set with frightening care — carved ribs stacked like sacrament, candles burning down to stubs in skulls, and goblets that shimmered too dark to be wine.

Lame marveled at it all. “You guys know how to set a vibe. Kinda like Halloween and a Pinterest board had a baby.”

A dish was placed before him.

The meat looked… familiar. The kind of familiar that gnaws at your memory and leaves teeth marks.

He took a bite.

“Chewy!” he said brightly. “Tastes like… I dunno. Anxiety?”

Canine watched, motionless, his not-quite-eyes behind his rotten wings studying every stupid, radiant inch of the undead with a staple gun holstered to his hip and skin stitched in zig-zags.

“You do not fear what you consume,” he murmured.

“Buddy, I once ate a roach thinking it was a date,” Lame replied. “I’ve moved beyond fear.”

“You are… not digestible.”

Lame paused, then wiggled his fingers. “Yeah, I get that a lot. I kinda stink.”

Canine leaned in.

“You cannot be broken down. You are whole despite your ruin.”

Lame squinted. “Was that… flirting? Or a diagnosis?”

The cult began whispering fervently around them. One drew a sketch of Lame with radiant light pouring from the nail that is stuck in his head.

Canine reached across the table. His hand hovered over Lame’s cheek, not touching — just trembling.

“You are sacred,” he said.

“Aw,” Lame beamed. “Your flirting is kinda intense, huh?”

Lame looked around, finally catching the strange stares. The muttering. The weeping. The fact that the meat had tattoos, and teeth.

“Wait. What is this place?” he asked.

The Prophet smiled with something depraved

behind his lips.

“A sanctuary.”

“Oh cool. I love sanctuaries. They have the best snacks.”

Chapter Text

The cult called it a miracle.

Lame called it “Tuesday.”

He had woken up in the cathedral’s under crypt — on a velvet slab, next to a bowl of incense and what might’ve been a femur — and immediately stapled his right leg back on, while humming a song he heard from an advertisement.

Above him, the congregation had already begun gathering. Whispering. Bowing. Worshipping.

Lame stumbled into the great hall, dragging a foot and a loose eyeball in his hand.

“Morning!” he called. “Sorry if I smell like soil. Y’all got any breakfast? Like cereal or…?”

The entire room knelt.

Lame blinked. “Oh. Cool. Uh… good morning to you, too…?”

One of the acolytes, face stitched shut and still managing to sob with joy, offered him a goblet. Inside floated a pearled eyeball and something fibrous.

Lame politely declined and instead pulled out a bag of broken chocolate cookies from his hoodie.

“I brought snacks!” he offered, shaking crumbs onto the altar.

The cult gasped. One fainted.

Canine emerged from the shadows at the far end of the hall, silent and slow, like mold growing backwards.

He studied Lame.

The undead stood there with an entire wing bone stuck to his garment, smiling like he had no idea that his existence violated the natural order of rot, death, and digestion — or he actually knows, he just doesn't really care about it.

It all started with a joke.

Lame, idly kicking a skull down the aisle, said to no one in particular:

“Hey, if I ever become a prophet, I want my sermons to come with jazz hands.”

The cult — already halfway to worship — immediately began stitching gloves onto their ceremonial robes.

Later, when he sneezed and a chunk of… whatever flew out from his body, three cultists wept and called it a sign of sacred release.

When he tripped over an armrest and landed face-first in a sacrificial bowl, someone screamed that he was “anointing the altar with divine clumsiness.”

Canine watched all of it unfold.

He should have stopped it.

Should have clarified.

Should have named the undead a heretic.

But instead…

Instead, he handed Lame a cloak — stitched from preserved skin, embroidered with holy glyphs — and said softly:

“They see you as the proof.”

Lame looked up, cookie crumbs on his lip. “Proof of what?”

Canine did not answer.

Because he didn’t know.

Because he didn’t care.

Because when he looked at Lame, bright-eyed and dumb and broken in every way, something unfamiliar inside him ached.

Not hunger.

Not faith.

Something far worse.

Something tender.

Later that night, Lame sat atop the altar steps, kicking his legs.

Canine sat beside him, his wings half-open, draped in silk and shadow.

“Why do you keep staring at me like that?” Lame asked.

Canine didn’t blink. “You are not decaying properly.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s just how I am. You should’ve seen me last week — my spine came out like spaghetti.”

“Do you not question it?”

Lame shrugged. “I used to. Then I figured maybe it’s just part of being… me. Kinda like how some folks collect pretty rocks. I just fall apart weirdly.”

Canine tilted his head.

“Would you let me try to… understand you?”

Lame blinked. “Like emotionally? Or surgically?”

“Spiritually,” Canine replied. “And maybe a little anatomically.”

Lame laughed. “Sure! As long as you don’t yank anything too important.” He paused, then added, 

“I think my heart’s stapled to my pancreas, by the way. Just in case you go looking.”

Canine didn’t smile.

But his gaze lingered. Long. Quiet. Observing.

Like he was memorizing Lame’s laugh.

Like he was afraid of forgetting.

Chapter Text

The cathedral was alive.

Not metaphorically — alive.

Bones polished. Flesh banners realigned. Choir of moaning skulls returned slightly.

Tonight was the Ritual of the Forsaken Mouth, a deeply sacred rite involving incantations, symbolic consumption, and absolutely no jokes, snacks, or bodily dismemberment. 

An event held once every blood moon, where the congregation consumed the fermented essence of forgotten souls. A rite of communion. A ceremony of divine hunger. An evening that required absolute precision, reverence—

—and of course, no Lame.

But here he was.

Standing proudly with his staple gun holstered and the ceremonial robe haphazardly stapled to his actual skin, which, to be fair, was peeling off in sheets anyway.

“You will carry the Bowl of Devouring,” said Canine, his voice echoing like an organ played underwater.

Lame saluted. With the bowl. Upside down.

“Got it, Boss Pastor, Sir!!”

The cult’s eyes twitched collectively.

Canine gestured to a shimmering pool of thick, blood red stew that bubbles and glows ominously on the altar. 

“It smells like soup,” Lame whispered, peering into it.

Canine inhales placidly. 

“This offering is fermented over seven moon cycles and must not be spilled,” he continued, gesturing with a bony hand to the artifact in question, “it is sacred. It is sentient.”

“Mm... Like yogurt with emotions,” Lame whispered, nodding seriously.

“Please don't tell me you ate the offeri—”

“Too late. Already bonded with it spiritually.”

The procession began.

Canine stood tall in the center of the altar, draped in layers of silken skin, thorns, and black feathers. His head tilted down in prayer, hands raised like a conductor before an orchestra of reverent decay.

Behind him, the cult gathered, faces shrouded in hooded bone garment. Their chanting was soft and rhythmic — wet syllables, guttural vowels, nothing human.

Lame entered last.

His footsteps were irregular, partially because one of his legs was held together by three rusted staples and sheer hope.

Still, he carried the bowl.

Proudly. Carefully.

Until, unfortunately, he didn’t.

A misstep.

A jolt.

His foot snagged on a loosened ribbon from his own robe — some kind of decorative intestine knot. His stapled leg bent backward like a sad folding chair.

In the half-second it took for gravity to remember him, Lame’s expression shifted through five stages of cartoonish realization.

The Bowl of Devouring flew from his arms.

It sailed like a comet.

The stew — a glowing, bubbling crimson mix of ichor and blood — sparkled midair.

First, it hit the wooden rafters.

Then the ceiling.

Then—

SPLOOSH.

A single drop struck the anxious Oracle’s ceremonial hood with a soft, wet plop.

Then the rest came down like confetti at a very cursed birthday party.

One cultist shrieked. Another fainted.

A third opened their mouth and caught a full spoonful, eyes rolling back in bliss. 

Veritable chaos.

Lame lay sprawled like a scarecrow run over by a wagon, his limbs splat in every direction.

The bowl landed upside down on his head.

“Oh, beans…” he mumbled.

Every eye in the room turned to Canine.

The air was thick with tension. Even the cathedral itself seemed to pause, the humming in its bones ceasing for a moment.

The Prophet closed his eyes.

He inhaled.

And exhaled.

Then, he looked at Lame.

The boy was trying to scoop spilled stew back into the bowl using his hands. Two fingers fell off in the process. He did not seem to notice.

Canine stepped forward slowly.

“He is…” he said, voice low and measured, “improvising the rite.”

Lame froze, then grinned from under the bowl. “Yup! Spirit and soup — joined in harmony! A spiritual… consommé — !!”

Someone in the choir wept softly.

Canine shook his head with a patient sigh, then offered a weary, genuine smile.

“You make ruin feel like revelation, Lamebrains.”

Later, they sat on the cathedral steps together.

Lame had a towel draped over his shoulders and a foot in his lap, trying to staple it back to his ankle. Canine was crouched beside him, carefully threading a needle to reattach two lost fingers.

“I ruined everything again,” Lame said in guilt, while silently observing Canine’s precise handiwork.

“You didn’t,” Canine replied gently.

“I spilled seven months of cursed stew on the poor Oracle.”

“He was overdue for a baptism.”

“I think I baptized half the choir too.”

“And now they know the taste of penance.”

Lame gave a little laugh. It cracked slightly.

Canine paused his stitching, then added:

“From broken rites, new beliefs can grow. The Deities do not demand perfection. Only passion.”

“You’re really good at the talking thing,” Lame murmured. “You ever thought about being, like, a preacher or something?”

Canine just looked at him.

Then reached up and gently straightened the nail in Lame’s skull.

“Go wash your hands, Prophet of Chaos.”

Lame beamed.

Gave a two-thumbs-up with his freshly sewn fingers.

Then walked into the nearest wall.

Chapter Text

He used to have a name.

A voice he once knew — soft, warm — calling him from somewhere just beyond reach.

He could almost remember it, like a fading song caught on the edge of his mind — melting into silence.

But that was before.

Before the sickness settled in like poison, before the world grew cold and cruel.

The room was white and too bright — an unbearable cage of sterile light and harsh shadows.

The smell of bleach was sharp in his nostrils, stinging and endless.

His skin, pale and taut, stretched over ribs trembling with a fear he barely understood.

Other kids were silent. Tired. Too tired to scream anymore. Their names weren’t even spoken — only their functions.

They never called him by name.

Only by numbers, by what he was worth.

A broken ledger entry on a list of lives to be measured, to be taken.

He lay on a cot, alone but for the cold hum of machines counting down his fading moments.

Hands — gloved, detached — prodded and pulled at him like a thing stripped of its soul.

He was no longer a person.

Only a body, a commodity to be used or thrown away.

Lame had a number. He couldn’t remember it now.

He remembered asking once, “Do we get to go outside someday?”

The staff member — a smooth-smiling man with gloves always on — just said,

“Only if your organs stay worth harvesting.”

He wanted to scream.

But his throat was a desert, dry and mute.

He wanted to fight.

But his limbs felt like lead — chains dragging him further into the dark.

In the haze of pain and cold, a whisper echoed — a name, maybe, or just a sound.

Soft.

Faint.

Calling him back to something warm, something he had lost.

His eyelids fluttered as he clung to that fragile thread of memory — an ember in the suffocating dark.

He tried to reach for it, but it slipped away like smoke through trembling fingers.

Then the pain struck. Sharp and merciless — hammering into his skull, splitting light from dark.

He tasted iron and rot.

His vision fractured into shards.

In those last moments, his lips parted and barely moved, whispering a question to the emptiness,

“Who am I — when even my own name is gone?”

He woke with a ragged breath — chest tight, skin clammy. The nightmare still clung to him like a shadow that wouldn’t fade.

He reached for his staple gun out of habit and reattached his loose skin in two clicks.

- Click.

— Clack.

Then silence.

Soft morning light spilled through stained glass, casting fractured colors across the cold stone floor. The chapel was quiet, but not empty.

He thought of the number again.

He thought of how no one ever cried for him when he died.

Because he’d already disappeared long before then.

His fingers curled around the bone feather in his hoodie pocket. A feather that Canine gave to him.

He didn't cry. Couldn't, probably. His tear ducts had long since shriveled.

But his shoulders curled in like a dying leaf.

Canine found him like that.

Sitting curled on the pew, surrounded by nothing but the smell of dried meat and candle wax, eyes empty but wide.

The Prophet said nothing at first.

Then he sat beside him, close enough that Lame could feel the warmth radiating from his lean frame.

He observes behind his feathers, heavy with a thousand untold stories, holding Lame’s gaze — steady, patient, and quietly tender.

Without a word, Canine reached out, brushing a damp lock of hair from Lame’s forehead with a gentle fingertip.

The touch was light, intimate — a silent promise.

“I think I was born just to be wasted,” Lame said suddenly. His voice was vulnerable, like someone saying it for the first time. “They didn’t even let me be a person. Just a bunch of organs on layaway.” He said as he hugs his own knees.

“Did... did it ever end? The pain?” His voice was hoarse, fragile.

Canine’s lips twitched, the faintest hint of a smile breaking through the shadows.

“Not yet, it only changes shape.” He said softly, voice low enough to be almost a whisper.

“But you’re not alone anymore.”

Their eyes held — his, tired and still half-lost; Canine’s, deep as grave-soil and warm as candlelight. 

“You came back unspoiled,” Canine murmured, as though reading scripture from his wounds.

“They took everything but that. And somehow, it made you holy.”

Lame let out a dry, humorless puff of air. “You keep sayin’ that like it’s a blessing.”

Canine reached into the pocket of his long coat and pulled something out.

Not another relic. Not scripture.

Just… a plain mirror, round, cracked at the edges.

He handed it to Lame.

“Look.”

Lame held it shakily, glancing at his reflection — lopsided jaw, wobbly staples, empty gaze and the stupid nail right in the middle of his skull.

“…I look dumb.”

“You look divine in your refusal to belong.”

Canine’s voice was unwavering, tender in a way that felt like prophecy.

“You returned not as vengeance. Not as wrath. You came back as a joke. And in doing so, mocked the entire system that tried to erase you.”

Lame’s lip quivered slightly. He looked like he wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, which is hard with a half-dead face.

“…I didn’t mean to be funny.”

Canine tilted his head, eyes half-lidded.

“Exactly.”

Later, when the others had gone to sleep, Lame sat alone in the cathedral kitchen and drew on a napkin with a stub of red chalk.

It was a doodle of Canine — big wings, floaty robes, surrounded by sparkles and soup.

He left it at the altar with a single dried eyeball as an offering.

Canine found it hours later.

He said nothing, only tracing the crude lines of the drawing with one long, clawed finger, then folding it carefully and slipping it into the pages of his black scripture book.

That night, Canine sat by Lame’s side again.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t preach. Just… sat with him, while Lame stared at the ceiling with empty but no longer alone eyes.

Before the slumber took him, Lame whispered.

“…Think they’d still want my organs now?”

Canine looked down at him, voice low.

“No. You’ve made yourself whole in a way they never could.”

Lame smiled a little.

Then drifted off, the bone feather clutched in his hand, the nail in his head shining faintly in candlelight like some broken halo.

Canine did not sleep. He only watched.

And for the first time, the silence felt less like an empty room, and more like waiting for a prayer to be answered.

Chapter Text

Lame had been “living” in the cathedral for… a while now. Days? Weeks? He wasn’t really sure. Time felt bendy when your internal clock had mostly decomposed.

Still, he had settled into a kind of routine. Wake up. Staple loose limbs. Accidentally cause minor spiritual upheaval. Nap in a sunbeam like a happy cat trying to warm itself…

It wasn’t a bad afterlife.

But tonight, as he sat brushing his teeth with the wrong end of a bone comb (yes, again), he had a sudden, horrible realization.

“…Oh. Oh no. I don’t even know his name.”

The comb clattered into the sink. He stared at his own reflection — lopsided grin, one eye half-hanging out, a stupidly majestic nail still impaled in his head like a divine cocktail skewer.

“I’ve been calling him ‘Boss Pastor Guy’ this whole time,” he whispered, horrified. “I never even asked.”

A beat of silence.

Then,

“This is so lame…” He said while covering his own face in awkward regret.

The realization weighed on him all day like a guilty spleen.

He tried to distract himself — played fetch with a severed arm he found in the offering pit, helped a cultist bedazzle their robe with teeth, attempted to make soup and instead, made a crime.

But the guilt wouldn’t go away.

He didn’t even know the Prophet’s name.

The guy had been nothing but weirdly gentle and mysterious and smelled like grave incense and cemetery flowers — and Lame hadn’t even asked.

So, as always, he wandered into the garden. Not intentionally. His “sense of direction” could best be described as “emotionally driven chaos.”

And of course, he found Canine there — sitting beneath one of the upside-down trees, wings half-folded, eyes distant.

He looked like a statue carved out of night and mourning.

Lame flopped down beside him with all the grace of a dropped laundry basket.

“Hey,” he said, trying not to fidget.

Canine looked at him. Patient. Still.

“I, uh…” Lame scratched the back of his neck, where a crow had a taste of it. “I realized something really dumb today.”

A pinion lifted. Canine's own way to show his curiosity.

“I don’t know your name,” Lame blurted. “I never asked. I’ve been calling you Sir Boss Pastor and Prophet Wings Face in my head and — I’m sorry!!”

He bowed dramatically, forehead almost hitting the dirt. “I’m a jerk. A whole undead jerkburger.”

Canine was quiet for a moment. Then,

“…Canine.”

Lame’s head lifted. “Canine?”

“Canine Maneater.”

Lame tasted the name like it might explode. “That’s a fire name, man.”

Canine tilted his head in slight confusion.

Lame nodded solemnly. “Sounds like a sick game username, ya know??”

Canine blinked. Slowly. He has questions about the dictionary that Lame used, but he decided not to talk about it. 

Lame rubbed the back of his neck, again. “Anyway. I wanna remember it. I wanna use it. Not just because you’re the spooky cult leader man, but because… y’know. You’ve been here.”

Lame hesitated.

Then added, soft and meek:

“...Even when I woke up crying.”

Canine remembered.

It was three nights ago.

The cathedral had gone quiet. The kind of stillness that only happens when every ghost is asleep and the walls are holding their breath.

Canine had been passing through the eastern wing when he heard the sound — soft, hoarse, broken.

He followed it, slow and careful, until he found Lame curled on a cot like a pile of wet laundry, mumbling into his own sleeves.

“No more numbers… no more cuts… I don’t wanna go back…”

His shoulders shook.

His voice cracked.

But his eyes stayed closed.

Canine had sat beside him. Said nothing. Just placed a hand on his shoulder — light, grounding. And when Lame finally jolted awake with a gasp and a yelp of “DON'T—!!”, he hadn’t run.

He’d stared at the hand on his shoulder. Then at Canine. Then, without a word, he’d leaned over and tucked his face against the Prophet’s side.

And muttered, “...Thanks. You smell like a very nice coffin.”

Canine hadn’t moved until he was sure the undead had fallen asleep again.

Now, in the garden, Lame looked up at him with something quiet in his eyes.

“You didn’t have to stay,” he said. “But you did. And I wanna remember your name because… I think I’d forget how to breathe without it.”

Canine didn’t answer right away.

Then he reached out and carefully straightened the nail in Lame’s head.

“That,” he said gently, “is the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard.”

Lame grinned.

“I tried.”

They sat together a while longer, watching the garden pulse with strange life, listening to the soft rustle of upside-down trees and the occasional sound of a flower sneezing.

Eventually, Lame pulled something from his hoodie pocket.

It was a piece of broken chalk.

He leaned over and, with great effort, scrawled on the nearest stone:

“CANINE WAS HERE.”

Then underneath it,

“—And so was Lame. We shared snacks and traumas.”

Canine sighed.

But it didn't stop him.

That night, Lame dreamed again.

But it was different.

The room was still bright, still white, still full of the cold hum of machines — but this time, when the gloved hands reached for him, he slapped them away with a staple gun and screamed, “BACK OFF, I’M PROPERTY OF CANINE MANEATER.”

The hands recoiled.

He woke up breathless and laughing.

And when he rolled over in his cot, there was a feather resting on his pillow. Long. Bone-white. Etched faintly with a name:

Canine.

Lame held it to his chest and whispered,

“Coolest fucking name I’ve ever learned.”

Chapter Text

There was a quiet kind of danger in getting comfortable.

The cathedral was still made of bones. The cult still wept when Lame sneezed. And Canine still moved like a sermon written in silence.

But somehow, Lame had started to feel… safe.

Which meant he started doing what he did best.

Making things weird.

It began with the cloak.

Once upon a time, the sacred robe of the Herald was considered untouchable — stitched from preserved human skin, anointed in sacred oils, marked with glyphs that supposedly whispered when the wind blew.

Lame added cat ears. Badly.

They flopped unevenly to one side, made from torn fabric and some hair he swore was ethically sourced from the sleepless Oracle’s pillow.

An acolyte fainted on sight.

“I think it’s cute,” Lame said, spinning dramatically. “Gives me a vibe. Like Saint of the Stray Cats.”

Canine, who had arrived mid-twirl, raised a single pinion. One of his feathers fell while doing so.

The rest of his face didn’t move. Didn’t have to.

“You are… desecrating holy vestments,” he said flatly.

“I’m accessorizing,” Lame corrected. “It’s fashionably blasphemous.” He posed.

Canine blinked.

And then — very softly — sighed. “I will allow it.”

The cult took that as divine approval.

The next morning, three of them showed up with ears sewn into their hoods. One added a tail made of vertebrae. Lame high-fived all of them.

What about the name?

The name came later.

It was late. Very late. The cathedral had gone to sleep, or at least, fallen into the eerie, humming quiet it always did when the rituals ceased and the statues stopped twitching.

Canine sat at the foot of the altar, his wings draped low and still. He was sharpening one of the ceremonial blades, its edge glowing faintly with a memory only he knew how to read.

Lame wandered in with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a cape and two socks that didn’t match. One was probably stolen from a corpse he randomly found.

“Hey,” Lame mumbled, flopping onto the steps nearby. “You busy?”

Canine looked up. “I am preserving tradition.”

Lame nodded. “Cool. I’m preserving crumbs in my hoodie. Wanna hear a dumb thing?”

Canine resumed his sharpening. “...I expect nothing less.”

Lame hesitated. Then, with the sort of casual boldness that came from sleep deprivation and affection,

“…I’m gonna start calling you Nine.”

Canine paused mid-stroke.

“Nine…?"

“Yup. Like short for Canine. Which, by the way, is a very intimidating title. Sounds like you bite people who lie during confessions.”

“I have,” Canine said evenly.

Lame blinked. “Oh... Huh.” The undead realized something and chuckled before continuing his sentence. 

“Well… anyway. Nine. You like it?”

Canine was quiet for a beat too long.

“It is… tolerable.”

Lame beamed.

“Better than Prophet Wings Face, huh?”

Canine gave him a look that might’ve been offended if he were in a different universe.

“You called me that?”

“Only in my head,” Lame replied brightly. “You were very spooky at first.”

“I am still spooky.”

“Now you’re my spooky.”

The words hung there. Casual. Weightless. But something in them made the air shift.

Canine said nothing.

Just reached over and pulled Lame’s blanket tighter around his shoulders.

The next morning, someone carved “999” into the pulpit in a bone script.

The cult was divided. Half were confused. The other half immediately adapted the new title into their chants.

Canine said nothing.

But when Lame passed by during breakfast, he murmured, “Good morning, Nine.”

And Canine… looked pleased.

The sky cracked a little later. No one was sure if it was because of Lame or not.

Days passed.

Lame started calling Canine Maneater by “Nine” with increasing boldness and increasingly dumb reasons.

“Nine, do you want half my sandwich? It’s technically just dried meat I found behind a wall, but it smells holy.”

“Nine, do you think I could borrow your wings to fly down from the cathedral attic?”

“Nine, if I ever get canonized, can you make sure my halo is extra bendy?”

Every time, Canine would stare at him with that unreadable face.

And every time, he’d answer.

Laconically. Patiently. Like someone slowly being worn down by love and chaos in equal measure.

One evening, Lame fell asleep on the altar again.

He was supposed to be writing a “sermon.” Instead, he had doodled a smiling Canine in the margins and titled it “Chicken Wings.”

He snored softly.

Canine found him there, slumped over an open book and wrapped in his fluffy blasphemous cloak, a small drool puddle forming on page twelve of the sacred rites.

Instead of waking him, Canine gathered him up carefully — limb by mismatched limb — and carried him to the warmest pew in the cathedral.

He placed the cloak over him. Straightened the nail in his skull. Brushed a loose scrap of paper off his cheek.

Then, for reasons even he didn’t fully understand, he leaned close and whispered,

“Sleep well, Lamebrains.”

Lame didn’t stir.

But his mouth twitched into a soft smile.

The next morning, Lame woke up with a new sense of invincibility.

He strutted into the dining hall, arms full of stolen flowers and enthusiasm.

“Good morning, Nine!!” He sang, throwing petals into the air like a chaotic wedding priest.

Canine, seated at the head of the table, looked up slowly.

“You smell like grave plumerias.”

“Thanks! It’s my new scent. Eau de Enthusiastic Rot.”

The cult collectively sighed.

One of them whispered, “He’s glowing again.”

Another whispered back, “He’s in love.”

The third just said, “He’s DOOMED.”

And Canine, watching him dance through the hall, scattering petals, laughing with his arms full of things that shouldn’t grow in a dead place—

He didn’t deny it.

Not even once.

Chapter Text

It started, as many sacred disasters in the cathedral did, with Lame being very bored.

Canine was reading again.

The cult had retired for the evening to whatever rituals, corners, or candlelit journals they curled up with after dusk. The cathedral was quiet — hallowed and still, like the belly of something ancient sleeping.

Lame was lying upside-down on a pew, arms dangling off the edge, feet wiggling in the air. A half-eaten cookie balanced precariously on his nose.

He was thinking.

That was always the beginning of trouble.

Eventually, he kicked his legs and called out, “Hey, Nine?”

Canine didn’t look up. “Yes?”

“…Did you ever notice that ‘Maneater’ kinda sounds like ‘Manatee’?”

There was a pause.

A long, heavy pause.

Canine turned one page in his book. Then he looked at Lame like he had just confessed to replacing holy relics with snack cakes.

“…What—??"

Lame grinned. “You know. Canine Maneater. Tweak it a little and it turns to Canine Manatee. Which is, like, a super chill underwater prophet.”

He flopped dramatically. “Blub blub. Holiest sea cow in the unholy sea~”

Canine blinked. “You are aware that Maneater refers to the sacred ritual of consuming the flesh of sinners to achieve transcendence.”

“Yup!” Lame said cheerfully. “And now I’m imagining you doing it while floating. With little flippers. And maybe a sash that says ‘Chomp with Grace.’”

He made flipper hands.

“Blub blub, repent or get gently bumped.”

The Prophet slowly closed his scripture.

“…You are calling me a blasphemous manatee.”

“A holy one,” Lame corrected, now drawing circles in the dust with his finger. “You’d be like — The Benevolent Bubbleboo of Bone Tide. I’m just saying, it sounds powerful.”

Canine stared.

Then blinked once. Twice.

And sighed. “Only you may call me that.”

Lame whooped. “Heck yeah!”

It didn’t stay private.

The next morning, during breakfast, Lame casually chirped, “Pass the bone butter, Manatee!”

Canine didn’t flinch.

But the cult did.

One acolyte gasped so hard they inhaled a prayer bead and chokes.

Another dropped their goblet, clutching their heart. “The Prophet… has accepted a soft title.”

A third burst into sudden tears. “He hath shed his sharpness… for the floaty affection…”

Within the hour, a new hymn had begun forming.

“Oh Sanctified Sea Cow, Drifting Through the Bubble Crimson Ichor Deep...”

Someone embroidered a manta tail onto their robes.

Canine banned that one immediately.

Later that night, Lame found him in the garden again.

The trees were pulsing faintly, casting sickly moonlight through upside-down branches. The roots hummed beneath their feet, like something ancient trying to listen.

Canine paced with slow, deliberate steps.

Lame approached, quieter than usual.

“You mad…?” he asked softly.

Canine paused.

“No,” he said, turning to him. “Just confused. I have been feared. Revered. Worshipped in silence and blood.”

He looked at Lame.

“And yet somehow, you make me laugh by calling me a sea mammal.”

Lame gave him a lopsided grin. “Guess I just see past the wings and the prophet eyes. Maybe that’s my gift. Emotional sonar.”

Canine went silent.

Then he made a sound.

Not quite a laugh — but close. A dry, exasperated huff that sounded suspiciously fond.

“You are a ridiculous creature,” he muttered.

“I’m your ridiculous creature,” Lame replied, beaming.

Canine didn’t deny it.

Later on, Lame doodled a sketch on the back of a ritual script.

It was a manatee with tiny bone wings, a glowing halo, and a sash that said ‘Blub of Judgment.’

He left it on the altar.

Canine found it hours later.

He didn’t burn it.

He folded it neatly and tucked it into the pages of his scripture.

Right beside a flower Lame once gave him, dry and squashed, but whole.

Chapter Text

He was not always rotten.

He was not always worship.

Before he became The Prophet, before he became Canine, before the faithful whispered his name like a prayer half-swallowed in blood—

He had wings.

Six of them.

Spiraling from behind his head like a crown of grief and grandeur.

Wings that once shimmered with light. Wings that sang hymns when they moved.

Now, they hissed.

Now, they are deliquesced.

They used to call him a Seraph.

A messenger. A vessel. A holy conduit between the sacred and the starving.

He had worn his wings like a blessing then.

Two to fly.

Two to shield.

Two to veil his face.

But the shield broke first.

Then the flight fell.

And when the veiling wings opened again, there was nothing left behind them but a face full of hunger and a name he no longer answered to.

“██████ █████”

That had been his human name. The name of a priest who cried when the gods didn’t answer.

He had made the mistake of asking them to look.

They did.

And what stared back was not mercy.

The ascension came during the last plague.

He had prayed for salvation, standing barefoot in a ruined church as the bones of children were swept into sacks.

He had screamed to the heavens. Offered his voice. His body. His everything.

And something — divine, eldritch, unknowable — had whispered.

"Open wide."

His back split first. Bones creaked. Blood trickles.

Not in pain, but in purpose.

Wings bloomed — six of them, impossibly vast, feathered in ivory that wept as they grew.

He did not fly.

He fell upward.

The plague ended.

Because nothing dared out-suffer him.

He awoke with his mouth full of scripture and the taste of marrow behind his teeth.

His halo had cracked sideways.

His eyes no longer blinked. They observe.

And his wings — his once-beautiful, seraphic crown — had blackened at the edges, as if the light had burned too long.

Now, they hovered in eternal orbit around his head — some feathered, some skeletal and thorned, all watching.

He spoke and people wept.

Not because they believed.

But because they understood.

Canine never claimed to be divine.

He simply accepted the silence that came after the deities left him behind.

The faithful came anyway.

The cult began around his throne.

They kissed his shadow. Drank from the bones he touched. Called him The Mouth of Transcendence — The False Seraph.

False.

But still holy.

Holy in the way that rot is holy.

Holy in the way that death is honest.

Now, centuries later — maybe more, maybe less — he sat beneath the ribs of the cathedral he had built with silence and sinew.

The stained glass cast pale halos across the floor.

His wings folded low around his head, blocking the light. Cradling his skull like a shroud.

And yet…

That undead.

The one who called him Nine.

The one who spilled soup on sacred rites and laughed like he didn’t know angels could bleed—

That undead had changed something.

He’d called him a manatee. Mocked the sacred with joy.

Canine had not killed him.

Had not cursed him.

Had not even looked away.

Because deep beneath the wings, where the flesh had long turned to sermon and ash—

Canine remembered what it was to feel warm.

He stood in the garden now.

The earth beneath his feet pulsed gently, the root system dreaming of blood.

His six wings fanned open, wide and terrible, circling his head like the orbit of broken halos.

Above, the moon cracked like a blink from a blind deity.

He knelt beside the finger that Lame had planted — a single ridiculous relic of life in a place that had long since stopped pretending.

He did not touch it.

Just watched.

And when the roots curled slightly toward the warmth of it, when the soil hummed softly beneath his knees—

He whispered, voice low, guttural, sacred:

“Let something grow that does not worship pain.”

And for the first time in centuries,

the wings around his head closed in,

not in rage or reverence—

But in prayer.

Chapter Text

It was strange how quickly the outside stopped feeling hostile.

The trees still leaned the wrong way. The air still smelled faintly of iron and unspoken names. But Lame had stopped noticing.

Maybe it was because Canine was beside him.

Maybe it was because, for once, nothing was on fire.

“Hey,” Lame said, arms spread out, “it’s like the sky’s trying to cry, but forgot how halfway through.”

Canine said nothing. But one of his wings twitched like it agreed.

They wandered past thorn-thick woods and streams that whispered in languages best left untranslated. At one point, Lame found a stick shaped like a lopsided heart and named it “Regret.”

He carried it for half a mile.

“I’m bringing it home,” he declared. “It can be our emotional support twig.”

Canine simply nodded.

Lame smiled to himself. It was easy to be brave out here. To joke. To forget the cathedral walls and the whisper-prayers and the cultist who stitched jazz hands into their robes in his honor.

Out here, it was just the two of them.

Prophet and mistake.

Seraph and rotten.

Nine and Lame.

They reached the edge of a clearing where the light bled through in beams. A long-abandoned chapel leaned against a hill, half-swallowed by vines.

Lame wandered toward it.

It looked familiar in the wrong kind of way.

Like a song he hated but still knew the lyrics to.

Inside, the pews were dust and the altar was cracked down the middle. Shelves had long since collapsed. Mice had made a home in the pages of forgotten prayer books.

And yet…

In the center of the altar sat something clean.

Untouched by dust or time.

A metal tray.

Rectangular. Sharp edges. A faint chemical smell rising from its surface.

Lame froze.

Canine felt it immediately.

One of his wings swept out instinctively, half-wrapping around Lame’s back.

The tray wasn’t large. Just big enough for a child’s chest.

Lame didn’t move. He stared.

And then he whispered in trembles, hollow.

“I know that.”

The memories didn’t creep in.

They rushed.

He was back on the table.

Back in that cold white room where the lights buzzed and the walls hummed and everyone wore gloves.

He could smell the bleach. Hear the beeping.

He remembered the tray. The straps.

The way they didn’t call him by name. Just by a number on the clipboard.

“666 — vitals holding.” 

“666 — prepare for spinal core test.”

“666 — nonresponsive to painkillers. Proceed anyway.”

He remembered the click of the scalpel case.

The cold silence when he asked if he could go home.

He remembered staring at the ceiling and thinking, if I make a joke, maybe they’ll think I’m still a person.

So he did.

And they didn’t.

The flash ended.

But Lame was still trembling.

He backed away from the tray like it was going to open its metal jaws and swallow him whole.

Canine was already beside him, wings raised, his voice protective.

“That doesn’t belong here.”

“No,” Lame shudders. “It doesn’t.”

“It’s a scar. Left to fester.”

“No,” Lame said again, louder this time, teeth gritted. “It’s bait.”

Canine stilled.

Lame’s eyes were wide, wild and scared. “It’s too clean. Too preserved. They put it here. Someone put it here. For me to find.”

The Prophet turned to him, voice shifting into command.

“Then we burn it.”

Lame hesitated.

Then gave a jerky nod.

Canine’s six wings unfurled in full arcane splendor. A low hum filled the chapel. The tray began to warp — edges bending, sizzling, melting into sludge as The Prophet whispered scripture in a tongue not meant for mouths.

It hissed.

Screamed, almost.

And was gone.

The silence that followed was sharp.

Lame sat down on a pew that gave a dramatic creak.

He looked at his hands.

They were shaking.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “I didn’t mean to freak out. I was just…”

He swallowed air out of habit. “I didn’t want to remember.”

Canine knelt before him.

“You are not what they made,” he said. “You are not what they numbered. You are the result of their failure.”

Lame let out a breath. Then, shakily, a laugh.

“Is that… supposed to be comforting?”

“Yes.”

Lame smiled. A real one. Small, but whole.

“…Thanks, Nine.”

The Prophet didn’t answer.

But his wings lowered gently, forming a slow halo around Lame’s slumped frame.

Lame leaned forward, forehead resting against the Prophet’s.

And for the first time in days, he whispered, so soft it nearly broke.

“Hold me.”

Canine did.

Without ritual. Without robes.

Just six broken wings, folding in around the boy with a staple gun and a name stitched from trauma.

Together, in the forgotten ruin of a chapel the gods no longer watched.

Chapter Text

They didn’t go back right away.

The cathedral could wait.

Let it rot a little without them.

Let the cult murmur and wonder where their prophet and their walking sermon wandered off to.

Out here, in the thick of nowhere—where the sky hung too low and the birds spoke in riddles—the world didn’t care who they were.

Not a mistake.

Not a prophet.

Not Experiment 666.

Not a False Seraph.

Just Lame.

And just Nine.

They found a place where the moss grew in soft curls and the trees opened up enough to see the bruised sky.

Lame collapsed onto his back with a puff of grave-dust and leaf litter. “This,” he announced, “is officially my new favorite patch of not-haunted grass.”

Canine stood over him like a monument, wings half-folded. One of them twitched, still wary.

Lame cracked one eye open. “You gonna sit, or you just gonna stare at me like I’m misbehaving in church?”

Canine slowly lowered himself beside him, stiff at first, like the ground might bite him.

Lame reached over and poked him in the side. “Relax. You’re not gonna get struck by lightning for taking a break.”

“I’ve been struck before,” Canine said mildly.

“...Well, if you’re gonna flex, at least do it lying down.”

The Prophet sighed — but he laid back.

Wings splayed out around him like broken halos. Six of them, silent and still. Framing his head. Watching the sky.

Lame rolled onto his side, resting his chin on his hand. “Hey, Nine?”

“Hm?” Canine hummed in response.

“You ever wonder what you’d be like if nothing bad had ever happened to you?”

Canine was quiet for a while.

Then, “...No.”

Lame blinked. “Really?”

“I only exist because bad things happened.”

“…Oh,” Lame said softly. “Yeah… Me too, huh.”

A breeze picked up, ruffling Canine’s feathers and Lame’s uneven hair.

Then Lame said, “But like. I think you’d still be cool. Even without the wings and all the scary titles. I bet you’d be the kind of guy who reads poetry out loud and gets flustered when someone compliments your voice.”

Canine stared at the sky.

Then said, “You think I get flustered?”

“I know you do,” Lame grinned. “You do this little thing where your wings twitch and you pretend it’s a breeze.”

His wings twitched right after. Canine didn’t deny it.

Instead, he asked, “And what about you? What would you be, if not this?”

Lame considered.

“Honestly?” he said, squinting at a passing moth. “Probably someone really annoying. Like a barista who draws dumb little doodles on your coffee cup and talks too loud about ghost documentaries.”

Canine turned to look at him. “That is not far off from what you already are.”

“I know,” Lame grinned. “I just would’ve had better shoes… and probably some proper limbs.”

The silence stretched, but it was kind.

They listened to the wind. The sound of trees breathing. The soft crackle of leaves.

Lame scooted a little closer.

Their shoulders bumped.

Canine didn’t move away.

Lame let out a sigh. Deep and heavy.

“You ever get tired of being looked at like a god?”

“Yes.” Canine nodded lightly.

“Ever want someone to just look at you and go, ‘hey, that guy probably has his own diary and secretly likes flowers’...?”

Canine glanced at him.

“I do own a diary,” Canine paused.

“I also do like flowers,” he admitted.

Lame grinned and softly touched his pinky to Canine’s. A tiny contact. Simple.

“I look at you like that,” he said.

Canine veiled his eyes with his wings.

And for the first time in ages, it wasn’t to block out the world.

It was to feel it.

Later, they lay side by side on the moss, wings and limbs tangled up like roots in the soil.

Lame talked about nothing. About the time he mistook a ghost for a coat rack. About how he once tried to kiss a frog because it “had a vibe.” About how badly he wanted to teach Canine how to skip stones without cracking the pond.

Canine listened.

Sometimes he hummed.

Once, he chuckled.

A small, breathless sound. Like the ghost of a song he used to know.

And when night finally settled over them — when the stars peeked through the cloud-smudged sky and the wind grew colder—

Canine let Lame curl into his side, head resting beneath the wings that once shielded the divine.

No one watched them.

No one prayed.

No one whispered sacred titles.

Just the sky above them.

And a shared silence—

private, imperfect,

and free.

Chapter Text

The Prophet was gone.

The Not-Quite-Dead-One was also gone.

No wings. No sermons. No sacred staring contests. No “to devour is to understand.”

The cult responded with immediate spiritual panic.

This was, of course, a spiritual crisis.

So naturally, the cult did what any faith-driven, god-fearing congregation would do in his absence.

They threw a party.

It started innocently.

Just a few acolytes in the dining hall with crispy (human) skin snacks, humming “Our Lord Has Probably Not Been Eaten by a Wendigo.”

Housemaid Llorona set up a punch bowl. It was technically just alcohol, blood and lavender.

Everyone agreed it tasted “surprisingly fresh.”

“We deserve this,” muttered one cultist with a content sigh.

“It’s like… a reward for being devout. Self-care. Prophetless enrichment.”

“It’s not heresy if it’s themed.”

They set up tiny offerings of pig blood cookies and jelly eyeballs.

Someone found a sax.

Everything spiraled instantly.

The hall was temporarily repurposed into a snack altar. They decorated the chapel with colorful intestines and… a questionable disco ball.

Archivist Allekino wore the ceremonial robe backwards and declared themselves as The Prophet of Theatrics.

Another hosted “Sacred Soup Pong.” The balls were eyeballs. No one won. The eyeballs splat.

The choir tried to compose a hymn called “He Who Leaves, Leaves Room For Us To Be Fools.” It had three verses and a saxophone solo.

Someone knocked over the reliquary and apologized to the corpse inside.

“This is good,” whispered one robed cultist, adjusting the ceremonial glowing crown made out of poor fireflies on their hood. “He’s letting us self-govern. Like sacred enrichment.”

“He's definitely watching us from the shadows,” another nodded sagely. “Silently judging. Learning.”

“We’re absolutely being graded on this.”

“I give us a B-minus. We haven’t accidentally summoned anything… yet.”

They all turned to look at the corner.

The corner burbled ominously.

“…Don’t look at it,” someone whispered. “It feeds on attention.”

At one point, Housemaid Llorona asked.

“What do you think they’re doing right now?”

The room fell very still.

Then, all at once,

“Fishing.”

“Cuddling.”

“Do you think they kiss with tongue or telepathy?”

The housemaid shriek-laughed into a velvet pillow. “Do you think he purrs when he's happy??”

“Which one??”

“BOTH.”

The cultists giggle in between the gossip.

“Where do you think they are?” asked Llorona, somewhere between punch bowl refills.

“Probably doing sins.”

“I bet they’re holding hands.”

“I bet they’re frolicking.”

“I bet Lame fell into a pond and The Prophet just stared at him with a faint hidden smile.”

A sigh rippled through the room.

“I want what they have.”

“You mean rot-based codependency and shared trauma?”

“Yes.”

They took turns impersonating Canine.

One cultist stood solemnly in the center of the room, wings made of mop handles strapped to their back, and intoned,

“To devour is to understand. To be devoured is to— Wait, where is the soup spoon-??”

Another mimicked Lame by taping snack wrappers to their limbs and walking into a door on purpose.

“HI! I fell in a grave again! Did we have soup?!”

The cultists cheered. They passed around one of Lame’s lost socks like a sacred curio and dared each other to smell it.

Oracle Lemuel fainted.

They shoved him into the reliquary.

The party ended the way all sacred disasters do.

Butcher Cleaver got drunk and unconsciously swinging her knife everywhere,

a half-eaten communion cookie in someone’s hood,

and three cultists whispering “manatee” into the bones like it was a secret password to heaven.

They passed out in robes, in piles, across pews and relics and one ancient altar.

Someone was gently cradling the saxophone.

Peace returned to the cathedral. For about four hours.

The next morning, the doors creaked open.

Canine stepped inside first, expression unreadable, wings half-furled like tired crowns.

Lame followed, still damp from falling in a bush, carrying a pinecone he claimed was “symbolically significant.”

They froze.

The cathedral looked like a post-apocalyptic slumber party.

Crumpled cultists everywhere.

Glittery intestines on sacred murals.

The poor Oracle snoring in the reliquary.

The weird curio shrine had somehow multiplied.

Lame looked around.

Then slowly—

Softly—

Started clapping.

Canine turned. “...What are you doing?”

Lame kept clapping. “A standing ovation.”

“For what.”

“Them,” Lame whispered, eyes shining. “Look at them, Nine. They did a terrible job!!”

He gestured to the chaos like a proud uncle. 

“It’s beautiful.”

Canine blinked. Then, with the faintest regretful sigh a man ever heard,

“…They did, at least, maintain the candles.”

After a little while, housemaid Llorona stirred from her sleep.

She peered up blearily at the pair.

Then screamed, “THEY’RE BACK!!”

Half the cult jumped up in disarray, bumping into each other, trying to realign bones and look reverent.

Someone yelled, “FORM THE BLUB STAR!!” and they all collapsed into a glittery, chanting pile.

Lame clapped harder. Canine sighed louder.

And the doors to the cathedral closed behind them like the curtain on a deeply confused stage play.