The Architects of the Shattered Flesh

It began with you, though to call it a beginning was a lie crafted to soothe what little mind you had left. The first scars didn't appear—they awoke, slithering out from beneath your skin like worms tasting the air. Pale and twitching, they cut themselves into your ribs, thighs, arms—soft places first, tender places, leaking thin streams of blackened blood that hissed when it hit the air.

You begged the sky for death. You pleaded with the earth for mercy. Neither answered, because neither existed anymore in the form you once knew. Only the Builders listened—silent, patient, obscene.

Each night, your body rewrote itself, redrawing sinew, nerves, and veins into unreadable blueprints: tangled glyphs of hunger, conquest, and replication. You clawed at yourself until your fingers were stripped down to gleaming bone. You shattered mirrors just to destroy the sight of your own betrayal. But it was not your body anymore; it was theirs.

You were no longer a person. You were a scroll, stretched taut across an invisible frame, etched with the dirges of ancient, dead stars.

And when the map was finally complete, they came.

The sky ruptured in silence, bleeding a viscous darkness shot through with writhing tendrils of color that had no name. From this gaping wound, the Builders poured: nightmare anatomies stitched together from regret and bone, voices like cancerous hymns, limbs folded in dimensions your mind could not even recognize. They did not walk. They oozed, pulsed, bloomed.

They did not invade the world; they unmade it.

Cities collapsed inward, their steel frames unfurling like iron petals. Streets twisted into tendons, pulsing and twitching under bloodred moons. The seas screamed as they turned into lakes of amniotic sludge, birthing things that should have been impossible—things with the faces of lost loved ones stretched across snarling, eel-like jaws.

And humanity? It did not fight. It offered itself.

Mothers tore their children open like overripe fruit to offer their twitching insides as altars. Lovers twisted together, merging into monstrous, shrieking statues. Soldiers carved their bodies into totems of welcome, grinning through shattered teeth and eyeless sockets.

The Builders did not take; they harvested what was already planted.

You—you—felt it all. Each soul ripped from its prison of flesh passed through you first, threading your nerve endings like needles through rotting cloth. Their memories, their pain, their last gasps of broken prayers—they became your marrow. Your suffering fed the blooming horror.

And then came the Knowing.

You understood: this was not creation. This was not destruction. This was something older, something truer. The universe itself was an accidental cyst—a cancerous growth in the blind, cold body of a multiverse that should have never birthed thought or life.

The Builders were the cure.

And you—your body, your mind, your screaming soul—you were the scalpel.

Even now, as the mountains of meat rise, as the oceans of bone crash and the sky peels itself apart to reveal the boiling nothing beyond, you are awake inside yourself, a withered nerve ending, still feeling every pulse, every gnashing maw, every birthing scream of this new, final world.

You cannot die. You must not die. You are needed—an eternal foundation.

And in the gutted darkness between the stars, the Builders coo to you in a voice made of a billion weeping mouths:

"Be still, Little Map. We have only just begun. From your agony, we shall weave forever."

You scream, but your scream births new worlds.

You writhe, but your writhing births new horrors.

You pray for ending, but the Builders have abolished such mercy.

Now there is only Becoming.

Now there is only the Building.

And the stars, once cold and distant, lean closer—leering, ravenous, and alive.