The resonant hum faded, leaving Tsongen alone with the grotesque reality of Namra’s severed limbs, still twitching on the gravel. He turned without a word, the echo of the Orolang’s command ringing in his mind. The Sunken Mire, beneath the Whispering Weep of Elder Jigmed. That was the next destination, but a different dread pulled at him, a colder, more immediate fear than the phantom beast. Chenzom. The descent was swifter than the climb, but the razor-ash seemed to have thickened in his absence, a gritty, grey fog that clung to every surface. The air stung his eyes and scraped his windpipe with each pull. He ran, the bone-tools clattering faintly against his thigh, the urgency now a physical ache in his chest. His delay, his cruel indulgence, had cost him. He knew it with a certainty that settled like lead in his gut. He burst into the loom-shack, the dim light struggling against the ash-thickened air. Chenzom lay on her pallet, not merely coughing, but gasping, her small body wracked with shuddering spasms. Her skin, once soft and warm, had begun to crack. Fine, grey lines, like dry riverbeds on parched earth, webbed across her cheeks and the backs of her hands. A faint, almost iridescent sheen of ash-scales dusted her eyelashes. She was turning. Slowly, irrevocably, she was turning to dust. “Chenzom?” His voice was a rasp, a fragile thing in the sudden, cavernous silence of the hut. She opened her eyes, clouded and distant, and offered a weak, rattling cough. A single, jagged fragment of razor-ash, no larger than a grain of rice, flecked with crimson, caught on her lower lip. Tsongen wanted to sweep her into his arms, to beg forgiveness, but his hands felt useless, contaminated by the recent butchery. He had to go. He had to keep moving. He had to stitch the monster back together, or lose his sister entirely. He forced himself to turn away, Chenzom's brittle skin etched into his vision. The Orolang had spoken of lungs in the Sunken Mire, but the water-seller, Khadrok, had built his dwelling on the middle terraces directly over those cisterns, guarding illegally hoarded barrels. He had sold runoff tainted with mineral silt to the lower villagers for exorbitant prices, even as their windpipes seized in the dry air. Khadrok’s jars had overflowed while the bottom tiers cracked and sickened. Tsongen climbed the winding paths, the air thinning around him. The air grew thinner, cleaner, the higher he climbed, but the wind carried the stench of something foul—a sickly sweet, metallic odour, like an abattoir left to rot in the sun. It grew stronger as he neared the stone dwelling, a squat, windowless shelter carved into the rock face and ringed with bulging, water-stained barrels. The door hung ajar, revealing a tableau of grotesque suffering. The trader, a mountain of bulk even in health, was slumped against a stack of casks, his face a mottled, purpling blue. His eyes bulged, wide with terror, and his thick neck was distended, stretching the coarse fabric of his tunic. A wet, gurgling scrape tore from his windpipe with each failing heave. The air in the room was heavy with the putrid, sweet smell. It was a smell Tsongen knew, a smell that spoke of living tissue, but twisted, malignant. As Tsongen stepped closer, he saw the source of Khadrok’s agony. From the man's distended mouth, a pulsing, raw slab of meat protruded, glistening with viscous fluids. It seemed to be forcing its way out, a living, growing tumor of flesh that had devoured the space within his chest and now sought release. Each heave from his ribs caused the mass to expand further, like an alien organ attempting to birth itself from his gullet. The trader's gaze fixed on Tsongen, pleading. A thin whimper escaped the gurgling obstruction. Tsongen felt the familiar, cold flicker of satisfaction. This was the seller who had peddled tainted runoff, whose hoards had starved the gutters where Chenzom played. The hoarder of mountain water was drowning under the expansion of his own cursed flesh. Tsongen watched him, for longer than strictly necessary. The last resistance drained from the man's pupils, replaced by glazed glassiness. His skin had turned a deep, bruised violet, his lips black. The pulsating mass in his gullet swelled with each passing second, mocking every struggle to draw air. Tsongen savored the sight, the grim, bitter joy a brief, dark warmth in his cold chest. Chenzom’s brittle face surfaced in his thoughts, snapping the hesitation. He withdrew a long bone-bodkin from his pouch, its tip dull against the grey gloom. The dying man's pupils tracked the carved point. Tsongen showed no haste to grant relief, keeping his stroke cold and deliberate. This was not an act of mercy, but an extraction. He leaned over the trader, ignoring the wet whimpers and the spasms of a body strangled by its own graft. Tsongen drove the carved stylus into the base of the pulsing mass, dragging it along the edge. The flesh proved fibrous and resistant, yet the tool, steered by an unnatural pull in his fingers, sliced through without tearing. A gush of dark, viscous fluid erupted, coating Tsongen’s hands, smelling of copper and decay. The body went rigid, then sagged, the final hiss escaping as a wet whistle through the parted tissue. Tsongen plunged his fingers into the widened neck-cavity, seeking the stolen organs. The meat was still growing, even in death, a writhing, pulsing mass that clung to the inside of the man’s chest cavity. It took effort, a brutal, messy tearing, but he finally wrested the organs free. They were not lungs as he knew them, but two bulbous, glistening sacks of dark, mottled flesh, still expanding and contracting with a slow, independent rhythm, like alien hearts. He dropped the reeking, immortal lungs into a leather pouch, securing them quickly. The cellar air settled flat and bitter once the putrefaction left the corpse. Tsongen turned to leave, the stench clinging to his clothes, to his skin. As he stepped outside, a low rumble vibrated through the shale. The ground beneath his feet shifted, a deep, guttural sound echoing from the mountain peaks above. He looked up. The dome of razor-ash, previously a still, ominous presence, was now swirling, churning. A massive, grey wall of particulate matter, finer than sand, sharper than glass, detached itself from the upper slopes. It roared down the terraces, a silent, annihilating tide. The avalanche roared downward, pulverizing the stone paths beneath a sliding wall of glass. It sealed the winding paths with a suffocating, impenetrable drift. Tsongen stood stranded on the middle terrace, the grey drift sealing the descent between him and his sister, whose lungs continued their dry crumble.

The Meat that Breathes