Why the Flock is in the Ossuary

The Flock of the Open Grave

Brother Alms was never supposed to lead a cult. He was a Pharasmin grave-warden in the village of Hollowmourn, two miles from the ossuary hill, responsible for maintaining the outer crypts where poor families buried their dead. Three years ago, a summer plague took his wife, Elara, and both his daughters. He buried them in the ossuary's eastern terrace, in the cheap ground reserved for common soldiers and refugees. He prayed over their bones every Saintsday.

Then the dreams began.

The Veilbreaker—or one of its masked emissaries—spoke to Alms in the language of grief. It showed him visions of Elara standing in gray light, not suffering, not judged, simply free. It told him that Pharasma's spiral was a chain, that judgment was a prison, and that the creature stirring beneath the ossuary was proof: a soul that had broken its shackles and become something greater. It called the Soul-Hunger a saint of liberation.

Alms did not need much convincing. He gathered other grieving families from Hollowmourn and the surrounding farms—parents who had lost children, widows who had lost husbands. They came to the ossuary because that is where their dead were buried, and because the Veilbreaker promised them that if they widened the tear, every soul in the mass grave would rise not as undead, but as free spirits, unshackled from the Lady of Graves.

What they are actually doing is feeding the Hunger. They bring offerings—candles, prayers, and, when the Hunger grows desperate, live animals and kidnapped travelers—to the edge of the rift. The Soul-Hunger consumes the life force, strengthening the tear. The cultists believe the "soul-flames" they see vanishing into the dark are ascensions. They are not. They are annihilations.

Alms's tragedy: He is not evil. He is exhausted. If confronted with proof that the Hunger destroys souls rather than freeing them—particularly if shown Selene's true nature as a corrupted servant of Pharasma rather than a liberated martyr—his faith in the Veilbreaker will shatter. The question is whether the party can reach him before he sacrifices anyone else.