The Tharynx Hold's Doom

In TCOSA, a word that is engraved on shattered stone and partially burned scrolls is older than even the Calyra's quills. Doom. Not just a conclusion, but a descent. The world's bones murmured a collapse written in advance.

The remains of Tharynx Hold are home to the most notorious of these records.

Tharynx was formerly a city-fortress cut into the Black Vein Valley's cliffs. It was hailed as a pinnacle of TCOSA's growth, impenetrable, where priests celebrated Gaethara's gift of life and red and silver banners shattered in the wind. However, nothing that does not march, bleed, or breathe can pass through even the most arrogant walls.

The first hint of the Doom was subtle: animals were discovered upside down, with eyes lining their guts like pearls and hooves where heads should have been. Then the dreams began, with each inhabitant reporting the same scene: a voice humming beneath the earth, a hall of unending spirals. Youngsters started sketching the same symbol, a black spiral that twisted inward until it disappeared, on their doorframes.

The priests gave the order to destroy the drawings. The dreams made the warriors laugh. Nothing was recorded by the Calyra.

The Doom, however, had always been penned.

The Hold was silent on the seventeenth night of the Spiral Moon. To something unfamiliar, not to invade or to infect. There were no screams, fires, or struggles reported by scouts dispatched from nearby garrisons. The gates remained in place. The banners continued to wave. However, upon entering, they discovered hollows of men and women positioned like statues: a guard brandishing a spear that never hit, a boy with his jaw ripped open, and a mother permanently mid-lullaby. Their eyes were spirals of black, and their skin was gray.

The heart of Tharnyx itself was located in the middle of the plaza; it was a mass of stone and flesh that had fused together and was pulsing like a gigantic heart, the city's last breath solidified into rubble and meat. Once again, it surged, then fell into dust.

The Doom.

It doesn't yell or become angry. It only makes a claim. Although soldiers mutter that Doom is not limited to a single city, history refers to it as the Doom of Tharynx Hold. Doom is a pattern, a disease, a hunger that waits for the next stronghold to become overconfident, overly noisy, and overly sure of its position in the world.

Tharynx is referred to as an "unfortunate fall" by the Calyra. They write it politely and cleanly, as if the people perished amid the ruins and fire, just like in any other siege. The pulsing heart of flesh, the spiral-eyed statues, and the fact that no moss grows on those remains even now are never mentioned. There are no birds that land there. Even the wind is scared to move.

The soldiers, however, do remember. And every mouth murmurs the same phrase, their voices taut with fear, when the watchtowers become too quiet, when the cattle give birth to twisted calves, and when nightmares spin.

Doom.