Story 1189: The Skin Oracle

They came to her when they had nowhere else to go.

Not the wise. Not the good. Only the desperate. Those who had lost time, faces, or their names to the tide of something older than grief.

She was called The Skin Oracle, though that wasn’t her name. No one remembered her name, not even her. But she remembered others. That was her curse.

She lived at the edge of the scorched city of Briarhymn, in a crumbling chapel wrapped in chains and stitched hides. No doors. No windows. Only a slit carved through flesh and wood, pulsing like a wound.

You entered by being swallowed.

And if you asked the right question, she answered—by pulling your future from your own skin.

Jasper Crane, the grave whisperer, came in search of her.

He carried a bag of teeth and the scent of grave soil in his coat. His dreams had been hollow for weeks—something was feeding through them into the waking world. Something below the cemetery.