Mort focused on receiving the polluted faith Renata funneled into his body. He guided the prickling stream into his limbs, forcing it to nourish them back toward divine strength. It had been so long since his body had felt this powerful—truly powerful. He groaned at the sensation, alien and familiar all at once, a cruel reminder of what he once was.

  Ever since leaving Itzcamazotz, he had never again tasted such excess. That absolute freedom. The ability to crush anything beneath his palm without effort or consequence. Even with the swarm empowering him, Mort had never filled his divinity to its limits the way corruption once had.

  Within himself, he sensed motes of faith in countless colors. Even inside his body, they resisted him, refusing to submit to a divinity whose concept did not align with their own. Only corruption rushed toward him without restraint, swarming eagerly, clawing at his essence in its hunger to infect.

  At first, the coarse faith raked through his veins, tearing open channels that allowed whatever corruption lurked within the stream to slip inside. The tangled ideas and emotions that made up the polluted faith gouged paths through his flesh, bursting from his pores in defiance. It would not bend to Mort’s conceptual divinity. It would not obey.

  Xochiquetzal fought desperately to purge the corruption as it invaded his body, but Renata had allowed too much in, too quickly. The torrent surging through Mort’s veins could no longer be stopped by will alone. Only unity could stabilize him—and the three of them were divided by fear, guilt, and strain.

  Still, Xochiquetzal persisted. She stirred Mort’s vitality, urging him to love himself, to protect her, to protect Renata. She weaponized his affection, turning divine love into a bulwark against the corruption that tried again and again to take root.

  His heart—alongside Renata—continued to draw in polluted faith. There was no other option. The same faith that wounded him was also the only thing that could restore him, once refined by Xochiquetzal’s hand.

  Mort existed in a constant state of damage and recovery, balancing incompatible energies locked in endless war within him. His gem throbbed violently. With every rejected strand of faith that tore free from his being, a microfracture spread across its surface.

  Renata strained to control the flow. She fought the torrent with everything she had, anchoring the divine flower deeper into the void. She seized what faith she could from the rushing stream, feeding it into the structure beneath her feet. The flower—Mort’s hope made manifest—grew larger, its petals glowing with a chaotic rainbow of color.

  It was meant to act as a filter.

  It was failing.

  The pressure mounted, forcing Renata to cry out as the stream intensified. She pushed harder, her small form trembling as faith battered her from every direction. Still she endured, forcing the flower to grow roots where none should exist.

  She used all her strength to build Mort a foundation—a shrine capable of guiding the flow, of halting it if only for a moment. But the void around her was vast, nearly infinite, and anchoring anything within it was far harder than she had imagined.

  Even with all her creativity, Renata could not invent curses foul enough to describe the endless darkness yawning beneath her feet.

  Mort could hear the priest’s anxious calls, the man’s voice strained and oddly hoarse. He registered the sound only faintly, unable to discern the cause. His focus was stretched thin, fragmented by the collision of emotions and thoughts tearing through his being.

  Through blurred vision, he sensed that nothing outward had yet gone wrong. That was enough. Mort closed his eyes again, surrendering every remaining scrap of attention to maintaining equilibrium. He let divinity in his hair fall free as he wrestled with the forces inside him, severing connected faith to every strand that could otherwise be used elsewhere.

  He went further still—cutting away divinity bound to his godly form. The divine raiment Xochiquetzal had crafted from layered blossoms unraveled, petals shedding one by one until only his worn, mortal clothing remained beneath.

  Mort felt no attachment to such adornments. To him, they were excess. But within his mind, Xochiquetzal bristled. She scowled at the loss, at the exposure. She had labored for days to weave that garment from scraps of faith and borrowed beauty, and now it fell away so easily. Still, she swallowed the sting and struck corruption with renewed ferocity, pouring her will into the fight.

  At last, when Renata had expanded the divine shrine enough to withstand the torrent, the flow faltered.

  The flower—now an immense bloom—drove its roots deep into the fabric of Mort’s world. They stretched through the void, sealing the microfractures spidering across the gem. Its vast petals glowed with prismatic light, etched in distorted, half-formed language. From them burst spontaneous miracles—uncontrolled, radiant, and chaotic—filling the once-dead void with movement and color.

  Renata collapsed at the flower’s center, huffing in a way only figurative breath could convey. With a small, stubborn humph, she curled in on herself. The subtle motions of the shrine—the slow creep of roots, the gentle shimmer of petals—brought her an unexpected comfort. Even the errant miracles detonating into distant, sparkling explosions only enhanced the scene in her eyes. It was beautiful.

  Xochiquetzal did not relent. She continued her battle against the corruption lingering within Mort, flooding him with vitality, affection, and something teasingly irreverent. Her words became movement. Her presence unfolded into art.

  She danced through his mind, showing him a world of expression no mortal lifetime could have prepared him for. Motion became meaning. Meaning became form.

  She cradled him as an infant, dancing as he laughed and reached for her. She spun with him as a sibling, briefly wearing Renata’s shape as they stumbled through shared steps, clumsy and bright. Then she pressed closer, her movements fierce and demanding, each leap and turn carrying them into unseen realms.

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  By the time Mort awoke, his body was drenched in sweat. His sense of self felt rearranged, shifted loose within his skull. Memories overlapped and tangled.

  And his hair was gone.

  “Young man, wake up! Don’t die on us when you haven’t healed my son yet! Young man!”

  The older man’s shout dragged Mort back from the haze. His awareness returned in fragments—sound first, then weight, then the dull ache of a body that felt newly assembled. Reason followed slowly behind his senses, as if reluctant to catch up.

  His eyes were open, yet the world refused to settle into meaning. Two figures hovered before him, their faces twisted between anger and fear. Mort couldn’t tell why they looked that way, only that their attention was fixed squarely on him.

  A cool breeze brushed against his scalp. That, at least, made sense. Everything else felt distant, unimportant—including the worn clothes clinging to his body. None of it struck him as strange.

  He drew a shaky breath and tried to speak, to reassure them. Nothing came out but a dry, rasping wheeze that burned his throat.

  Parched beyond reason, Mort attempted to rise and reach for the small waterskin at his hip. The motion proved harder than expected. His legs trembled violently, as if they belonged to someone else. He would have collapsed if the priest hadn’t stepped forward, catching him by the arm and guiding him back down.

  The priest helped him drink. Cool water spilled over his lips and down his throat, and Mort drank greedily until the world sharpened at its edges. Seeing his color return, both men finally relaxed. They drank as well, easing their own hoarse throats.

  The scare had earned Mort a severe scolding. Leaning against one another, the men muttered doubts—wondering aloud whether the young stranger was truly capable of healing anyone at all.

  For a moment, they even entertained the idea that this had been an elaborate deception.

  That thought lingered as they watched Mort closely. His hair continued to fall away in fine strands, and the elegant, divinely wrought garments he had worn before were nowhere to be found. In their place were simple clothes, patched and mended countless times—unremarkable, almost pitiful.

  Mort took his time reorienting himself, allowing his mind to settle into its new shape. One carefully molded by Xochiquetzal through immense effort. Faith now flowed gently into him, guided jointly by the goddess and Renata, no longer tearing at his veins.

  As faith overflowed and was refined into divinity, Xochiquetzal began the painstaking work of weaving him a new divine raiment. Renata, meanwhile, remained curled within the gem, resting at the heart of the flower shrine.

  For her, at least, this was now a good place to be.

  Mort was bursting with barely contained force. His veins stood rigid beneath his skin as blood surged through them, his heart and gem beating in perfect unison—twin drums pumping life into every corner of his body. Divinity once lost had returned tenfold, still climbing, still refusing to settle.

  He wanted to growl. To strike. To unleash everything at once.

  Xochiquetzal, mercifully, stayed his hand, soothing the violent edge of his awakening before it could spill into something undignified. Corruption that dared surge toward him was annihilated on contact—shredded against roots, burned away by radiant petals, or obliterated outright by the dozens of chaotic miracles detonating throughout his inner world.

  The refined faith now flowing into Mort’s domain began to gather and condense. It clumped into small islands adrift in the void, or twisted itself into strange, malformed creatures that wandered the darkness. Long-limbed, many-eyed, and tentacled, they drifted aimlessly—yet never strayed too close to the great flower at the world’s center.

  Mort exhaled slowly, contentment washing through him. This was a true cycle of power—earned, renewed, and his alone. The hollow strength corruption once offered paled beside this. What filled him now was vast, deliberate, and obedient to his will.

  He turned his attention back to the two elders before him and smiled—calm, steady, and unafraid. Rising to his feet, Mort stepped forward as a changed man. The fears that once shackled him no longer held sway. Itzcamazotz would not dictate his future.

  That shadow looming over him would be broken down and used as fertilizer for his bloom.

  Mort reached out, channeling divinity steeped in love, and tore into the writhing corruption lodged within the man’s Tonalli. The pink radiance burned like sacred flame on contact, slicing cleanly through the blackened mass now fully visible to his sight.

  Severed from its source of faith, the creature reacted instantly. It lunged toward Mort, splitting itself apart mid-motion. Barbed, spectral appendages coiled around the man’s soul as the thing fought desperately to remain anchored. Its circular maw gaped wide, unleashing a shriek that rattled the air. Hundreds of corruption-soaked fangs churned within the grotesque opening.

  Phantasmal limbs lashed outward, striking with savage desperation. The creature fought with terrifying ferocity, interposing its divided form between Mort and the soul it clung to—doing everything in its miserable power to avoid forcible removal.

  This cursed thing, born of pure corruption, had been passed down through divine contact. The toad god Mort had glimpsed earlier was no god at all, but a breeding ground—an unwitting incubator for Itzcamazotz’s influence. Through it, parasites were seeded into worshippers who never realized they were being consumed.

  Mort wanted to shout the truth. To tear away the lie and expose it to everyone watching.

  But who would believe a stranger who blasphemed their god?

  So instead, Mort focused on speed. On precision. On destruction.

  If he was fast enough, he could excise every one of these repugnant creatures before suspicion reached their master. But Itzcamazotz would notice eventually. Every parasite removed was another fracture in his vision of a cursed reality.