They reached the Wound at dusk.
It wasn't marked on any map—not that maps meant much here. The land shifted, trenches collapsed and reformed like breathing ribs, and the sky above never held the same shape twice. But everyone knew when they were close to the Wound. The air got heavier, the wind sang backwards, and the candles wept wax that burned cold.
Aaron followed the others as they approached the crater—a chasm in the earth nearly a mile wide, blackened at the edges, riddled with shattered relics and melted banners. This was where, they claimed, an angel of the God-Head had fallen, screaming, its wings torn out mid-flight.
It had hit the earth so hard that time bent around the impact site.
And now the Trench Pilgrims had come to pay tribute. To leave behind relics. And maybe... to leave behind him.
They set up camp on the ridge overlooking the Wound. Instead of tents, they erected cathedral flakboards—makeshift sanctuaries hammered together from scrap and stained-glass riot shields. Everything hummed faintly. The Wound did that to things. To people.
Aaron sat beside a relic fire, watching blue flames flicker as wax dripped from a suspended skull. The skull whispered faint prayers every few minutes, and no one seemed concerned.
He clutched his coat tighter. It was still damp with blood.
"Saint Graves," he thought, bitterly.
I was painting minis and arguing about lore twelve hours ago. Now I'm a war hero because I knew Swine had bad ears.
A familiar voice stirred the air.
"Prophet."
He looked up. Sister Trenaxa.
But she wasn't alone.
With her came a figure swathed in iron-threaded vestments, wearing a crown of candles and a mask shaped like a saint's screaming face. Tall, still, wrapped in layers of embroidered cloth and ritual scars. Two servitors flanked him—faceless, twitching, each holding reliquary cases that hissed steam.
Trenaxa knelt. "Archivist Hierophant Dacien. He led the last seven Processions of the Wound."
Aaron blinked. He rose, awkwardly. "Uh… hi."
The Hierophant regarded him. "You are the Flame-Born."
Aaron scratched the back of his head. "Sure. Let's go with that."
"You led the faithful. You rang a bell tuned to D-flat."
Aaron hesitated. "Yeah. I remembered it from… uh, ancient scripture?"
The Hierophant leaned in. "There is no scripture on the cochlear sensitivity of the Swine."
Aaron opened his mouth. Closed it. A beat of silence.
Trenaxa didn't blink.
"Then…" the Hierophant said slowly, "it was revelation."
He turned to the others.
"Saint Graves is a vessel of lost knowledge. A living archive. Perhaps even one of the Unwritten Apocrypha."
Servitors dropped to one knee. A priest nearby crossed himself with burning fingers.
Aaron's heart pounded. "Wait, wait, hang on. I'm just—"
"You must speak."
"What?"
The Hierophant extended a gauntlet. "The Wound listens. It devours lies and echoes truth. You will descend into it and offer your first passage."
Aaron paled. "You want me to go into that?"
"It must know you. It must drink your words."
"Can't I just write something and throw it in?"
"Prophecy does not permit proxies."
They prepared him like a bride for a funeral.
Ropes of bone were wrapped around his arms. A waxed tabard of white dripped steadily against his boots. A half-mask—half iron, half parchment, was tied across his face. Trenaxa daubed his forehead with black oil from a cracked vial.
"Don't speak unless the Wound demands it," she whispered. "Don't remember anything that isn't true."
"What does that mean?"
"It means your memory shapes reality here."
Aaron stared at her. "That's not how things work."
She handed him a relic torch.
He turned toward the lip of the Wound. Wind curled up from below, hot and cold at once, like a breath from a dying mouth.
He descended.
The sides of the Wound were slick and steep, carved like ribs into the land. Bones jutted like rebar from the rock. Echoes bounced off stone shaped by no mortal geology. As Aaron climbed lower, his vision pulsed, throbbed—like a headache had metastasized into reality.
He stopped halfway down and blinked.
A statue of himself stood embedded in the mud.
No. Not a statue. A miniature. Resin. Base-coated in chaos black, arms not yet glued on. A sticky white dot marked where a purity seal should've been.
Then another.
And another.
They weren't statues, they were versions of him. Some carried paintbrushes. Others wore forum usernames on their breastplates. One, horrifyingly, wore a hoodie that said "INQUISITION-APPROVED LOREPOSTER".
Aaron staggered.
"This is ridiculous."
"This is Trench Crusade," a voice answered.
When he reached the bottom, the ground was smooth and glistening. A mirror of mud, too perfect. Too still. He saw himself in it. Then he saw thousands of himself.
"Speak," the Wound whispered, though no mouth spoke it.
"Speak your scripture, Prophet of Paint and Fire."
He took a breath.
And then he told it everything.
He spoke of St. Methodius Alpha, of the black-market relic trades and the Order of the Wax-Tongued Martyrs, who screamed sermons with molten candles lodged in their throats.
He recalled the Cavalcade of the Tenth Plague and their tradition of riding diseased beasts that exploded into clouds of insects when slain.
He mentioned the iron scriptoriums of the House of Wisdom, which bound living men into books and read their pain as prophecy.
He quoted from a forum post written by a guy called "@CanonCannon42," which theorized the Hollow Men were what happened when trench soldiers forgot their own names and kept fighting.
"Their ranks replenish not by birth, but by erasure."
He whispered old memes.
"Swine can't read, they smell the word of God."
"Every Trench Crusade faction is just Catholicism on bath salts."
"Wermacht4 didn't draw it, so it's not real—except when it is."
He laughed through tears.
"The Cult of the Black Grail canonically drinks heretic blood for vision quests. There's a sketch of it. I saved it. It had like seven reposts before it got deleted for being 'too visceral.'"
He remembered a meme theory that the Flame-Wardens of the Burning God used flamethrowers not to purge, but to baptize.
And he remembered arguing online that the Trench Ghosts weren't literal ghosts, they were "collective guilt given form."
"I thought this was just... an aesthetic."
"I thought this was just a fan setting."
"I thought I was just a guy who painted figurines."
His voice cracked.
The Wound listened.
The mud bubbled. The mirror shimmered. A choir began humming—a sound like bone flutes being played through gas masks.
A single word surfaced in waxed script.
"True."
Aaron fell to his knees.
Not from exhaustion, but from the crushing realization that everything he'd ever painted, posted, mocked, or theorized… was real now.
Not metaphorically.
Not symbolically.
Canonically.
And it was his fault.
When he emerged from the Wound, his eyes were wide. His hands glowed faintly with residual wax. Everyone stared. No one breathed.
"Congratulations," intoned Hierophant Dacien.
"You have entered the Wound and returned with scripture."
Aaron's mouth moved on its own.
"The memes were real," he whispered.