đź“– Written by The Twisted Realms:
A disgraced priestess returns to her city’s abandoned temple after its patron god’s soul is stolen, knowing that only someone already stripped of honor can descend far enough to retrieve it. Beneath the dry temple well she finds the entrance to Irkalla: not a passage, but a vertical throat of black clay ribs breathing dust upward from the dark. Far below, the god’s soul appears for a moment as a caged flame carried away by seven enormous hands, giving her a visible target and a terrible measure of distance. At the first gate, a door of stacked bronze masks turns to watch her with the faces of the improperly buried, while a bull-horned, many-jawed gatekeeper rises from bitumen with clay tablets embedded in its flesh, each tablet naming an oath she has broken. When she steps through, the ceiling above becomes a second earth packed with upside-down graves, pale roots dangling from burial mouths like the hair of the dead. Irkalla is not only below the world; it is the buried truth pressing against it.
The seven gates make the rescue a ritual of loss rather than a heroic descent. As she passes deeper, the priestess encounters a district of the unburied dead trapped behind cracked funerary walls, and her scarce offerings become a moral currency: she can free some of them and weaken her own chances, or rob the abandoned dead to keep moving. The caged soul briefly descends within reach during a subterranean procession, one of the vast hands lowering it through the gloom, and she makes a desperate attempt to seize it before the underworld’s order fully turns on her. That failed closeness reveals that the soul is not being hidden randomly; it is being processed gate by gate, prepared for a role inside Irkalla. A demon magistrate then offers her a cruel bargain: one surrendered piece of herself can be returned early if she reveals which living oath, once broken in the city above, would sever the god’s patronage forever.
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đź“ś Fictional Work Disclaimer:
This story is a work of fiction created for entertainment purposes only. The events, characters, and organizations portrayed are entirely fictional, and any references to historical, mythological, or real‑world entities are not intended to represent reality. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or real‑life events or organizations is purely coincidental.
#fantasy #darkfantasy #creepypasta #horror
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