Yellow Jacket

Across Hemera, during the dreaded Black Red Nights, three nights in which the Broken walk the world without fear of the day, the most dangerous nights for those in the fringes and the unprotected ruins, like Mara once was, shrines begin to appear like a creeping infection. They are not sanctioned, not recognized, not permitted by any authority, yet they bloom in silence along roadsides, in ruined temples, and even inside abandoned homes. Each shrine is marked by crude symbols: strips of faded red silk tied to poles, rust-stained nails hammered into stone, or simple wooden effigies draped in cloth. Blood is always present. Offerings range from a finger prick smeared across cloth, to a vial of blood trembling in the dark, to entire bowls filled and left to clot. The belief is simple: if you give blood freely, the Red Widow will not take it herself.

The shrines are torn down as quickly as they appear, but they return just as fast. No decree or law has been able to stop them, because the people who build them are desperate. They have seen what happens to those who scorn the ritual. Farmers tell of neighbors who mocked the shrines only to vanish, their houses left blood-smeared and gutted. Wanderers speak of companions found with their throats bitten open, their bodies bent into positions no human could ever fold into. Entire caravans have been discovered emptied of life, wagons still creaking in the wind, shrines raised in their place from the corpses left behind. The Red Widow does not need shrines, but the world cannot stop building them, as though compelled by fear itself.

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Some regions have their own variations. In the Branthorn bogs, offerings are left in jars that sink slowly into the mire, swallowed as though the swamp itself accepts the bargain. In the frozen north, blood is poured onto the ice where it freezes into scarlet veins that glow faintly under moonlight. In coastal villages, sailors leave strips of crimson cloth knotted to the bones of fish, casting them into the sea to drift with the tides. Everywhere the shrines appear, they share one truth: the Red Widow's presence is remembered, and appeasement is offered.

The shrines carry more than just superstition. Travelers claim the air around them feels heavy, pressing against the lungs, and that insects swarm more thickly near the offerings. Dogs refuse to pass them, howling until dragged away. Children sometimes fall silent in their presence, staring blankly at the red-stained tokens as if listening to some voice no one else can hear. Whether these are tricks of fear or genuine signs, no one can say for certain. But the timing of their appearance, always during the Black Red Nights, suggests something more than human belief at work.

No one agrees on what The Red Widow truly is. Some call her the first Aberrant, others the first Broken. Some whisper she is both, a horror born in the Collapse that never truly died. Whatever the truth, the shrines remain. They are not acts of devotion, but of survival. They are warnings painted in blood, bargains whispered into silence, and desperate hands reaching for any chance to avoid being claimed. The Widow does not ask for shrines, but the world keeps building them anyway, as if instinct itself demands the offering.