The village was not on any map. Aranya had found it by accident, though some part of her suspected the road had bent itself toward her the moment she left the highway. The asphalt gave way to dirt, the trees thickened unnaturally, and soon, the road simply stopped.
The village began.
The people were quiet, their eyes heavy with something that felt older than language. They did not ask her name. They did not question her presence. They simply gestured toward a guest house at the edge of the stone circle—the one they called the throat.
At night, she heard the chanting.
Not loud. Not frenzied. Deliberate.
A rhythm, slow and viscous, like oil sliding down stone. She ventured out, drawn by a pull she could not name. In the centre of the village, carved into the earth, was a circular pit lined with ancient slabs, each inscribed with symbols that hurt her to look at—shapes that seemed to rearrange themselves when she blinked.
The villagers circled the pit, moving counterclockwise, whispering in a language that tasted metallic on her tongue just by hearing it.
She should have run.
But the air smelled of wet iron and fire, and her legs betrayed her.
One of them—a woman with hollow eyes and hands stained dark—took Aranya by the wrist and pressed a stone dagger into her palm. The blade was warm, as if recently fed.
"You came," the woman whispered, not as a welcome, but as a conclusion. "The mouth waits."
They led her to the pit's edge.
Below, something breathed. Slowly. Deeply. The sound of stone grinding against stone. The pit was not empty—it was a throat, and the village was its tongue, its language, its worship.
The woman spoke again, her voice curdled with reverence.
"It is older than the gods you abandoned. It is the shape beneath all shapes. It remembers you."
The dagger pulsed in Aranya's hand, the handle slick now with her own sweat—or was it something else? Her pulse quickened, but the villagers remained still, their bodies slack, their eyes glazed with devotion.
"You must feed it," the woman whispered. "Or you must join it."
Something below shifted.
The walls of the pit moved—stone flexing like muscle. The impossible geometry widened as if unhinging its jaw.
Aranya's hand, as if moved by a will outside her own, sliced across her palm. Blood dripped onto the stone.
The throat groaned.
The villagers swayed, whispering that the mouth remembers, that the flesh is the key, that blood is memory returning to the source.
Her vision blurred. The trees folded inward. The symbols on the stone seared themselves into her skin. Her blood sank into the stone, and the pit began to pulse—as though something beneath had begun to wake.
The air thickened with the copper sting of ancient offerings. Somewhere in the recesses of the pit, Aranya heard bones shifting, rearranging themselves, rebuilding what had long been sealed.
There was no god here.
There was only the mouth.
And as the last of her blood dripped onto the waiting stone, Aranya finally understood.
The village had not found her.It had called her.And it would call the next.
The throat does not forget.It only waits.And it is always—always—hungry.
The stones drank her blood greedily, more than should have seeped from such a shallow cut. The pit groaned, its walls slick with ancient residue—red, black, something older than colour. Aranya staggered back, clutching her hand, but the villagers did not move to help her. They merely watched, slack-jawed, as the throat beneath them widened further.
Something was climbing.
Something that should never climb.
A hand emerged first—long, bony, fingers too many, jointed wrong. It dragged itself upward, nails like obsidian shards screeching against the stone.
"Do not turn away."The woman's voice had changed. It was layered now, as if something else spoke through her, something ancient and intolerably patient.
"You must see what remembers you."
Aranya could not look away.
The creature pulled itself into the half-light, its form both man and not. Horns curled backward like branches burned hollow. Its skin cracked in places, pulsing with something beneath that shimmered like molten marrow. Its mouth—if it was a mouth—stretched too wide, filled with teeth arranged in spirals, as if it had devoured itself in boredom before she arrived.
It stood fully now, towering over the pit, its ribs visible, its throat quivering, as if still tasting the blood she had gifted.
And then it spoke. In her voice.
"You came."
The words weren't echoes. They were memories stolen from her tongue.
"You always come back."
Its eyes were not eyes. They were holes—holes punched through the fabric of existence, windows to something howling beneath the skin of the world. Looking into them was like falling into a well that had no bottom, no walls, no chance of impact.
The villagers dropped to their knees, faces pressed into the mud.
The woman—the priestess, the vessel—stood firm.
"You were born of this place, Aranya. Your mother fed the mouth. Her mother fed the mouth. You were always going to return."
Aranya's throat dried. Her memories clawed at her. Fleeting images of childhood fevers, the smell of copper, her mother's strange, whispered prayers to no god she recognised.
The villagers began to chant again—not words, but wet syllables that stuck to her bones.
The mouth stepped forward.
Its feet did not make a sound.
"You were the debt," it hissed through its spiral teeth. "You are the closing of the circle."
"No," Aranya rasped, stumbling backward. "No, I—I'm not part of this."
But the ground betrayed her. The trees shifted, leaning inwards. The sky itself began to pulse, as if the mouth had grown large enough to chew through reality.
The woman smiled softly, sadly.
"There is no 'out' for you."
Because the throat was not a place. It was inheritance.
It was her blood.
It had always been waiting for her to remember.
"You will not be devoured," the mouth said. "You will become the throat. You will wear the village like a skin."
The villagers rose now, their eyes glazed but reverent. Their teeth sharpened where molars should have been.
They did not worship the mouth.
They fed it.
Aranya's skin pulsed, her veins crawling with something thick, something wrong. She felt the symbols from the stones burning themselves beneath her flesh, stitching her into the structure of this ritual. Her body was no longer her own—it was scaffolding, it was an invitation.
Her mouth opened, and a sound that was not her own crawled out.
The villagers chanted in unison.
The throat does not forget. The throat does not forgive. The throat will be fed. And the throat must be worn.
As the mouth reached forward and pressed its spiralled grin to her forehead, her vision fractured.
She saw futures.She saw herself leading the next stranger into the village.She saw herself, her voice layered, her hands stained.She saw herself—no longer herself—standing at the pit's edge, welcoming the next child who had been called.
There would always be one.There must always be one.
Because the mouth is endless.Because the throat wears many skins.Because blood is a contract no one remembers signing.
And Aranya understood now that she had never escaped the village.
She had never left.
She had only been delivered back.
The throat smiled.
And the next name was already being called.