The House of Yog draws the dead like flies to carrion.
A caravan of meat wagons come creaking across the dusty plains. They hail from faraway lands, ferrying thousands of lost souls to that great place of ruin. The wagons' ancient springs groan with the weight of the dead, trundling across salted flats beneath a lightning-striken sky.
The hospital awaits them high upon a lonely hill. One by one, the meat wagons climb the heights and unload their dead. An endless stream of gurneys pass beneath its moss-eaten portico, upon which are writ the hallowed words:
ALL WHO ARE BORN SICK MUST BE MADE WELL
In the crypt of the house, the triage nurse greets each cadaver with an inquisitive snap of the neck. Her long fingers dance over their jawbones. She scribbles a single sigil onto a pad, and—shhhtt!—tears the sheet loose. Her waxen prescription affixes sinful maladies to the cadavers' 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 riddled with needles and broken teeth.
And here, at last, the cadavers awaken to the house of healing.
The House is crawling with commotion. It is a busy place, a place of restless suffering. Some patients are taken to padded rooms. Some to the head-shrinks. Some to the sleeping chambers, and to the leeching pits, and to the surgeon’s theater. Wherever they go, the doctors are waiting for them. The ghoulish sawbones mutter to themselves as they snip and they cut, as they sniff and they sew, as they lick and they prod those deep, tender wounds.
Healing these broken souls will take centuries. But the doctors are persistent. They are relentless. They have not forgotten the oath of their forefathers, nor the sacred words of their house.
For so it was written as the first law of Hell,
All who are born sick must be made well.
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