[HERETIC’S TESTAMENT: RECOVERED ECHO] SUBJECT: The Carrion Prophet, Patient Zero of the New Faith
You want to know what happens when a mind finally cracks open and lets the Static in? You get the Carrion Prophet. The corporate shrinks have a file on him, of course. They call it “terminal psychosis,” the ramblings of an early victim of the Fall whose writings are studied as a medical curiosity. On the street, we call him patient zero of the new faith.
He was the first to truly listen. Not with his ears — the Static isn’t a sound. It’s a pressure, a psychic dissonance from the Rift, the sound of two incompatible realities grinding against each other. For an unaltered mind, the Whispers are just a sudden wave of vertigo, a spike of paranoia, or the chilling certainty that you are being watched. But the Prophet was chromed. His cybernetics acted as a transducer, translating that unbearable pressure into a sensory glitch: a vivid memory of a place he’d never been, a flash of impossible color, a voice speaking in a language of pure mathematics and pain.
He didn’t just hear the madness; he had a conversation with it. And in that conversation, he found a terrible clarity. He preached that the Rift wasn’t a wound, but a god; that the Amber Blight was its holy word; and that the monstrous transformation of the flesh was not a curse, but a divine ascension .
His madness became a religion. The followers he attracted are now known as The Ascended. They are a Rift Cult who see his path as the only true one. They reject the flesh as a “draft” and chrome as a “cage,” seeking to become something more than human . Their bodies are living canvases for biomechanical art, integrating pieces of Riftspawn chitin alongside their augments and displaying glowing, geometric patterns on their skin as a sign of their devotion . They don’t just listen to the Whispers; they hunt the
Echoes — moments of extreme emotion or violence permanently burned into a location, stains on time that they witness like a holy vision .
The Prophet didn’t write a book. He scratched his revelations onto sheets of scrap metal and left them scattered across the Wastes. These are the “Gutter Gospels,” the sacred texts of the Ascended. They are not a coherent philosophy but a collection of frantic warnings, ecstatic prophecies, and terrifying diagrams of alien geometry. For the Ascended, finding a lost “Gospel” is a holy quest. For a Fixer, it’s a data-shard that can be sold to a cult leader for a small fortune.
His name became a warning on the street. When a Runner’s chrome starts feeding them bad data or their eyes get that distant, haunted look, people say they’re “going full Prophet”. But the most dangerous part of his legend is the ending. He wasn’t found dead. He simply vanished from his final camp, leaving behind only his last gospel. The Ascended believe he didn’t die; they believe he achieved the final transformation he was preaching about. This created the central goal of their faith: to follow his path and attain their own “ascension.” What he became, and whether he can be found, remains the cult’s most guarded and motivating mystery.
[ECHO CORRUPTED. END OF FILE.]
