TOPIC: Horror on the Orient Express - All Rotations

no - i'm good to start. i just wasn't sure after tony said we had a night off

Epilogue: That which was Father Mika

The supernatural vacuum did not leave a mess. When the portal closed, it took the sound with it, snapping shut like a heavy iron door. In the pitch-black silence of Makryat’s ruined study, the survivors breathed in air that tasted of ozone, burnt hair, and absolute nothingness.

Father Helmut Michael Dhole was gone. Not merely dead, but utterly gone. Mind, body and unknown to the investigators perhaps even his soul.

When the selective gravity of the Skinless One’s abyss laid claim to the room, it didn't just drag Father Mika’s corpse across the floorboards; it unspooled him. The force had seized the old priest by the heels, his rigid, stone-cold form tilting into the vortex like a timber falling into a well. The white hair that had defined his final, terror-stricken moment trailed behind him like a streak of dying starlight before the dark swallowed it whole.

He left nothing behind. No blood from a ruptured heart, no scrap of his priestly vestments, not even a speck of dust from his boots. The void was tidy, seeming to want to clean up after the whole anarchic destouction visited upon the study, and the people (beings) within...

For a man who had spent his life tethered to the holy, the structured, and the divine, Mika’s physical end was entirely profane. He was catalogued by an ancient, uncaring god as mere detritus, collateral waste, dirt and ashes to be swept into the same cosmic dustpan. MIka's faith declared 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' but probably never considered joinging Makryat’s shredded flesh and the shattered pieces of the Sedefkar Simulacrum somewhere in the deep, unmappable outer dark. The remains of Father Mika now drift in a fathomless void.

There is no grave to dig. There is no body for a Christian burial. The collapse of his mind under the weight of cosmic madness was instantly followed by the erasure of his mortal shell. Mika is simply no more.

In the quiet darkness of the street below, as the adrenaline fades and the reality of survival sets in, the realization will hit the others: they aren't just mourning a comrade. They are acknowledging the absence of a man who was utterly deleted from the world.

[No epilogue for me unless I get to role for degree of decomposition and ability to get up everyone's nose!]