The salt sang beneath his boots.

Each step crunched through glimmering flats, the sound swallowed by a hush so deep his breath felt like a trespass. The marsh stretched wide, pale and trembling under a bruised violet sky. No sun. No stars. Only the temple, rising like the fossil of a forgotten god’s tongue—split open, stone-hollowed, veins of amber light pulsing within.

He had expected pillars. Incense. Sanctity.

Not this.

The air thrummed, low like a funeral bell muffled by water. It made his molars ache and his cock twitch, as if the land sensed his hunger and answered. He remembered smoke, the night his name burned away, leaving only a thief’s shadow.

They had warned him: the Oracle speaks only when gods ride her, and the gods are jealous. Prophecy demands coin, devotion, or a death wish, they’d said.

He brought none.

Just fingers like lies and a mouth full of stories. Just a dream of his true name, lost to fire, and a hunch that what moved her wasn’t divine but older—wet, willing, alive.

The temple loomed. Its walls pulsed, slow as a sleeping beast dreaming of heat. The archway yawned, unguarded, mouth-shaped.

He stepped through.

Inside, the scent hit him first: iron, ash, salt, and flowers gone to rot. The air was heavy with exhalations, moans that had long since stopped being human. Carvings lined the throat of the corridor—tongues and eyes, twisted in spirals that made his balance tilt if he looked too long. He did not flinch.

He knew how to walk a body like it was a house. He knew how to find the places where voice lived, hidden, waiting to be touched.

The path curved down. Lights flickered—no torches, just bioluminescent organs blooming in niches like fungal lanterns. The silence thickened.

At the heart of the temple, she waited.

He would not announce himself.

He would not kneel.

He let the hush fill him, fingers brushing the stone as the corridor widened. The air warmed, and her chamber opened like the mouth of something ancient, still hungry. A faint pulse of amber light licked the walls.

The Oracle lay still, the amber light tracing her skin.

The gods were quiet tonight.

She lay motionless on the altar, arms spread in offering, though no hands had touched her in three nights. The priests fasted, preparing for the alignment of moons and mouths. They called her the Mouth of Gods, but she had been only a girl when they bound her voice to their will.

She did not miss them.

Her lips tasted of violet root and copper. Her thighs still ached from the last possession, though she hadn’t cried out. She never did, unless they demanded prophecy—and even then, it wasn’t her voice. The gods used her throat like a thief uses a window. No please. No thank you. Just opening.

And after, always the silence.

The silence was the worst part. It crept into her bones, thick as wax. In it, she remembered too much: her own name, long buried. Her mother’s hand, once rough with callouses. The sound of the river behind the house that no longer stood.

She was not supposed to remember. But she did.

She always did.

The chamber pulsed faintly around her. The walls breathed—long, slow exhalations like a beast sleeping beneath the stone. Above her, the stalactites wept slow drops of warm salt onto her stomach. Time passed like a fever dream.

And then—

She felt it.

A ripple.

No priest. No rite. No clattering of sacred chains or the smell of their fear. This presence was different. Looser. Sharper. Like flint in silk. A man, perhaps. Or a lie dressed in skin.

She didn’t open her eyes. Not yet.

She let his footsteps echo through the corridor of her body, each one thrumming along the cords that tied her to this temple. He walked like someone who believed doors existed only to be opened. He walked like someone who had never begged.

A thrill curled at the base of her spine.

The gods stirred.

No, she whispered back.

Not this time.

The veil across her face fluttered as he neared. Not from wind, but from breath. She could taste him now: moss, blood, and something sweet beneath—like a boy who once licked honey from his fingers and never quite forgot the ache.