They told us it was a myth. A local folktale. A leftover whisper from the Old Country, brought over by sailors and lunatics and buried like a tooth beneath the floorboards of polite society.
But myths don't sing.
Myths don't answer.
And what waits beneath the earth is not a tale. It is a mouth—and I have heard it speak.
My name is Father Ruel. I tend to the faithful in the wet dark beneath the hills of Greymoor. We are not many. But we are enough. And we are heard.
---
I was not always a believer. Like many, I came to the Mouth with brokenness in my hands. I was a drunk, a failure, a childless husband with a rotting house and a wife who left in silence one wet November.
Greymoor offered quiet. I bought a shack. I chopped wood. I tried to forget myself.
And then one night, I found the cave.
It called me.
Not with words, not then—but with a hum, low and wet, like breath pulled through a throat too wide. The trees bent toward it. My dog whimpered when we neared.
But I stepped inside.
And the air changed.
The world went soft around the edges. Not dark—just wrong. The rock pulsed underfoot like slow flesh. The walls sweated, not water, but memory—I tasted things I had never done, saw the shape of guilt in motion.
Then, at the very bottom, I saw it.
A mouth.
Unblinking. Toothless. Breathing.
It did not speak.
It thirsted.
---
The first offering was instinct. A cut on my palm, held above the cracked stone lip. My blood steamed as it fell. The air shivered.
I felt it inside me. Not possession—recognition.
It saw me. Knew me. My lies. My regrets. My hungers.
And it smiled, though it had no face.
I woke the next morning with a word etched into my mind: Y'haelth.
That was its name. Or the closest my mind could hold without splitting.
---
I am not the first. The cult of the Mouth has bled through time like veins under skin. Before the village, before the Romans, before language. The mouth is old. Older than thought. Older than choice.
I began to study. Alone, at first. Old texts. Mistranslations. Temple graffiti unearthed in Mesopotamia showing circles of people kneeling before open mouths. In one, a priest lifts a still-beating heart into the air, and the stars themselves are dripping.
But I wasn't alone for long.
They came to me.
Wanderers. Disgraced scholars. Grieving mothers. Broken people drawn to the hum like insects to meat.
The Mouth calls the forgotten. The unmade.
We called ourselves The Circle of the Last Breath.
And we built something holy.
---
We widened the cave. Not with tools—stone falls away when you hum the chant of inhalation. We lit no fire, for the Mouth hates light. It sees through shapes. It drinks motion. It does not love, but it craves the echo of love.
Our rituals were simple.
One breath before speaking.
One drop of blood in the mouth at dawn.
One prayer whispered to the dark beneath the floor every night.
The rewards came swiftly.
A woman who had been blind since birth saw again—for a day, and she described things she could not have known. Cities that float. Worms with glass wings. Towers that bleed salt.
A man healed from cancer overnight, but now speaks only in reversed speech, and we must record him and play him backwards to understand.
The Mouth gives.
But it takes first.
---
There are sacrifices.
Once a year, on the day the stars form the shape of a weeping mouth, we open the pit.
One of us is chosen.
It is always someone who volunteers.
The descent is quiet.
We tie them with velvet cords. We whisper the names of lost things. We lower them slowly.
And the Mouth… accepts.
They vanish without a sound. No scream. No blood.
Only a soft exhalation.
And for a moment, we all feel it—its joy. Its hunger. Its memory of being worshipped by planets.
---
I have served for sixteen years. I've watched the town change. Greymoor grows sicker each year, though none know why. The soil grows black. The trees twist. Children hum songs they've never heard.
But we are strong.
And the Mouth is growing.
It speaks to me now.
Not in words—its true voice would pulp my skull—but in feelings, in patterns. I've begun writing things I don't remember starting. Glyphs. Blueprints. Mouth-shapes.
I see the time approaching.
The Mouth will open.
Not just here—but everywhere. Beneath every city. Under every ocean. It has always been here, asleep.
But it dreams louder now.
And it wants to breathe.
---
Some among us faltered.
Brother Elias tried to burn the shrine.
He raved about nightmares, about teeth in his stomach, about waking up with mud in his lungs.
He begged me to stop.
But I could see it in him. The mark. The dream. He had been touched. He wasn't afraid for himself—he feared the clarity. He saw what the Mouth was showing him, and could not return to the smallness of human grief.
I wept when we lowered him into the pit.
The Mouth exhaled for twelve minutes that night. The wind knocked trees down a mile away.
And I dreamed of the first city swallowed whole by it—a place with no sky, where people sang without mouths, and built towers from their own memories.
It was beautiful.
---
They will come for us soon.
We feel them—outsiders. Digging. Sniffing. The government. The scholars. Those who smell the rot behind our doors.
Let them.
Let them kneel. Let them scream.
The Mouth is ready.
It does not need defenders anymore. It needs witnesses.
We, the faithful, will be consumed willingly.
Not as meat. Not as martyrs.
As keys.
We are opening the way.
---
Tonight is the Last Breath.
I am the final offering.
There is no fear in me. I have seen the sky inside its throat. I have heard my own voice echo through dimensions. I have tasted time dripping from its teeth.
My body is ready.
I lie on the velvet slab. My brothers and sisters chant in the true tongue. The cords are soft around my limbs.
I feel the Mouth below me.
Open.
Smiling.
It breathes in.
And I go to it.
---
When I am gone, when the earth cracks open like a mouth gasping its first full breath, you will understand:
The gods never left.
They were buried beneath our feet.
And one of them… is hungry.
End
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I was really hungry while writing this. How odd.