The air hung thick and cloying, a damp blanket woven with the scent of mildew and something else… something metallic, like old blood. Dust motes, disturbed by my hesitant steps, danced in the sickly yellow glow of my flickering torch, painting grotesque shadows on
the catacomb walls. Above, the oblivious city of Dhalgren breathed its shallow, dying breaths. They walked, they talked, they bought and sold, utterly unaware of the vast, weeping god beneath their feet.
They called it the Lachrymation. Not a name whispered in polite circles, not a deity carved into any temple frieze. No, the Lachrymation dwelt in the darkness, a god of forgotten corners and festering wounds. And I… I was one of the called.
They think there are only a few gods. Foolish. The pantheon is a teeming menagerie, a chaotic carnival of the divine, and most of them prefer the shadows. They thrive on the forgotten, the unloved, the things that crawl in the spaces between sanity. And some, like the Lachrymation, relish it.
The catacombs twisted and turned, a labyrinth of bone-white stone slick with unseen moisture. The air grew colder, the metallic tang stronger. I could hear it now, a low, guttural sob that resonated not in my ears, but in my very bones. The Lachrymation was close.
It wasn't the petty griefs that drew me here. Not the sting of a lover’s betrayal or the ache of a lost parent. Those were surface scratches. The Lachrymation craved the deep wounds, the soul-rending traumas that burrowed into the marrow and festered there. The kind of pain that hollowed you out from the inside, leaving you a brittle husk. That was the feast the Lachrymation hungered for.
And I… I carried such a feast within me.
The chamber opened before me, vast and echoing. In the center, it sat. Not on a throne, but slumped against the far wall, a colossal figure wreathed in shadows. Its face, if it could be called that, was a ruin of weeping sores and scar tissue. From these wounds, tears of molten gold flowed, burning channels into the stone floor. The air crackled with a strange energy, a mixture of agony and… ecstasy.
The Lachrymation. God of Pain. God of Despair. God of the Broken.
And I stepped forward into its abode, it reached out to me to take my pain. And in that terrible union, I found a twisted kind of solace. My body lightened by its feeding even as the pain from the burns from its holy molten tears burned into my flesh. Finally I smiled up into its face as it consumed me and freed my soul. I could not longer feel the burning tear that disfigured me and in one last gasp just for that fleeting moment I was healed and free of my torments. Before the blackness of death took me.
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