A Prompted Story by /u/prompted-writing
The priest's face went pale. "The Blood God commands... no more blood?" He spoke as if he didn't believe his own words, but the message was received loud and clear. He's had enough.
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The messenger was young. Rosh could see confusion warring with fear on the boy-warrior's face as he wrestled with the existential and religious implications. But Rosh knew what this really meant. Rosh was was old enough to remember the time before the Blood God's vessel had arrived. He might be the only one left who could. He'd been so young, it was just fragments now, of a time when the tribes were evenly matched. There had been skirmishes, vendettas, but also trade and sometimes wives. The details came and went from his aging mind, sometimes graspable, sometimes elusive. But one thing stayed constant. A sense of a world unchanging, that these things had been the same since time before memory.
Then came the Blood God.
Then came the weapons and the rage. All who could fight must join, or they were slaughtered. All who could walk were taken the Blood God's vessel, which had descended from the sky. A wall of cold rock, which encircled a space almost as large as Berry Picker's Mountain. In one place, a mouth of rock, from which the Blood God's voice would boom. Which would open to swallow the endless convoys of prisoners, to feed the Blood God's ceaseless hunger.
Rosh's tribe had transformed. They had devoured all who stood before them. Their own women and children, consumed. Fed to the Blood God. Their tribe now reproduced only by recruitment. New soldiers to carry the strange weapons, learning the norms and values of war, to better feed the insatiable maw.
Without the Blood God to feed, what were they? If the Blood God left, what hell would it leave behind? Would its weapons still work, or would it take those too? How could they be anything but holy warriors now?
For a moment, Rosh's memory sharpens and he sees it clearly. They would not stop. All they knew was how to take, and when there was no-one left to take from, they would turn on each other. The lie is broken and it's obvious. Rosh can suddenly see that it's been obvious all along. What he is. What he's been doing. He has just refused to look at it. Yet in that one terrible moment, as he learns the news, Rosh knows it. He knows it, and he knows he can't allow it. Rosh knows he can't allow himself to see that world. He cannot become that thing he would be if he stopped believing. The moment passes and sanity returns.
"The Blood God still hungers." Rosh declares. He knows he cannot be contradicted.