Sink and Submit to the Ninth Wave
OUR LADY
of the
UNFADING BLOOD
"I always counted the waves. The ninth was the largest. I trusted it more than people."
Sink and Submit to the Ninth Wave
"I always counted the waves. The ninth was the largest. I trusted it more than people."
Teaching hospital sponsored by the Eastern Catholic Diocese. Treats 23,000 inpatients annually. Built on History, Healing the Future.
Built over the excavated remains of a 150-foot deity. A fingerbone that weeps oil. A cathedral of rot.
Marina Acuario returns to Our Lady of the Unfading Blood Hospital to find a lobby that reflects an Art Deco mausoleum. The scent of mugwort and benzoin masks the yeasty smell of human dirt and something else: Sweet. Minerally. Almost floral. Like raw meat.
Beneath the 20th-floor, a sub-basement hides a tooth as large as a monolith. The staff, now priests in surgical scrubs, prepare for Pleroma—a biological immortality that erases the soul.
As the Ninth Wave rises to swallow the world, Marina must decide: sink and submit to the Mother, or burn her way out of the deep water.
"I just want to go get some sushi."
The Estranged Daughter. Carrying guilt for Shayanna and a green claw clip with broken teeth. She wades into the deep water unwillingly, only to find her reflection changing in the Mother’s orb.
"You don't belong here, Bookwater."
First-Year ER Resident. Smelling of energy drinks and exhaustion. A "target" for ministration, he must navigate the oscillating states of the hospital before his black veins consume him.
"Take the Blood, or it will take you."
The Matriarch. Reborn from the cancer through Blood Resin. She hovers in the Chapel, a vessel for the Mother, inviting her children to leave the shallows and enter the deep.
"No one dies at this hospital."
Hospital Administrator. Polished, predatory, and entirely inhuman. He manages the transition between the mundane world and the theological truths of the Unfading Blood.
"I lose unimportant things."
The Sub-Basement Facility Manager. Three eyes in a triangle, organs visible behind a glassy ribcage. He guards the foundations where Navison cannot reach.
“Hospitals are exchanges of identity and energy all at the same time. Souls are being sent down via birth and up through death.
— David Navison
"What they want is every person to go on as a slave. They’re trying to get a whole breed of automatons."
"The world outside can’t save you. Drown with me in the Deepwater Temples."