Thousands of meat wagons come creaking across the salted flats, They trundle down the dusty desert plains, their ancient springs groaning with the weight of the dead. From faraway lands they come, ferrying lost souls to the great house of ruin. The House of God draws them like flies to carrion.
High upon the lonely hill, the dead are interred into the halls of healing. One by one, the cadavers' gurneys pass beneath the moss-eaten portico, vanishing into the bowels of the house.
The triage nurse greets each patient with an inquisitive snap of the neck. Her long fingers dance over their jawbones. Then she scribbles a single sigil onto a pad, and—shhhtt!—tears the sheet loose. Her waxen prescription affixes malady to the cadaver’s skin. Patricide. Wrath. Infanticide. Covetous Heart.
And, of course, Murder, Murder, Murder.
The gurneys squeak onto an iron lift. There the ancient chains haul their freight into the bowels of the House. Lightning seeps inside the broken windows, flashing its ghostly grin on carpets of needles and broken teeth.
The House is crawling with commotion. Some patients are taken to padded rooms. Some to the head-shrinks. Some to the sleeping chambers, to the leeching pits, to the surgeon’s theater. Wherever they go, the doctors are waiting to take them in. The old sawbones mutter as they snip and they cut, as they sniff and they sew, as they lick and they prod those deep, tender wounds.
Healing will take centuries of painstaking love and care. But the doctors are persistent. They are relentless. They have not forgotten the oath of their forefathers.
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