Why Not Me?

I could be her.

Feb 14, 2026

Content notes: Folk horror, ~2.3k words. Contains ritualistic suicide/self-sacrifice and animal sacrifice (deer), rot.
This story was written as part of the “Seven Holy Paths to Hell”, a Valentine’s Day horror-erotica anthology themed after the Seven Deadly Sins.

You are on the path of Envy.

Dusk fell on the cusp of lunar rebirth, initiating the cyclic ritual as Sisters in pale robes gathered fireside. I leaned close to the woman beside me, the scent of orange blossom on her skin momentarily overwhelming the aggressive notes of ash and wet vegetation that filled the evening air. A compliment or sweet nothing half-formed in my throat, only to be hushed as soon as she saw the movement of my lips.

Still, she reached down and squeezed my hand as a condolence. I pouted silently to myself— we’d heard these opening words ad nauseum and still Teresa would accept no distraction. The High Priestess stood in front of the bonfire and cleared her throat before repeating the familiar story, the holy legend of rot and renewal.

“During the Bell-Men’s War the land was laid to waste and the forest starved; they stripped the bushes bare and hunted until everything became bloodless. They left the land broken and burned.

Years later, on a night much like this, new life approached the dead valley. The echo of the forest’s cries still persisted, rattling a mountainside camp where the Sisters of Siléne had paused their travels. They mistook the haunting reverberations for wind.

Only one of these Sisters truly understood the sound of hunger, and what it would take to satiate it.

The novice priestess walked calmly into the heart of the forest with two of her Sisters to bear witness. In the darkness of the lunar metamorphosis she laid herself bare and offered herself to feed the earth, piece by piece.

The land consumed her, rot washed over her in waves as a heated mist rose into the cool night air from the drenched soil. The forest devoured her until she was nothing but bone.

And when the moon was reborn, so was the land. The trees sprouted green and the valley flowered and thrived, it swallowed the ruin of the strangers’ war and produced renewed life. From the bone bloomed the Sower, the immortal spirit and voice of the forest.

The newborn Sisters of the Sower settled themselves permanently within the valley, following in the path of this nascent Goddess.

As we feed from the forest, so too shall we feed the forest. All rot leads to renewal.”

“We feed the forest,” the entire congregation responded, kneeling in unison to press a palm to the earth.

Generations had passed since the first Sisters abandoned their moon worship in reverence to the land, yet the old cycles still held weight in our rituals. The new moon was a sacred time.

We embarked into the forest in a cloud of bodies and trailing fabric, the offering carried at the end of the train between six Sisters. Teresa walked ahead, head bowed piously, her robes snug against the volume of her beauty. My eyes caught on the sway of her hips where the fabric clung to her curves, the lanterns further ahead lined her form in a bronze glow.

I wanted to reach out to her, to run my hand along her lower back where the fabric pooled in waves. If I closed my eyes I could recall our time together earlier in the day, fingers pressed into the soft swells of her flesh. But now my hands were occupied with the shared weight of the sedated deer intended to feed to the forest. A predestined corpse filled with blessed blood.

It would be frowned upon to voice my wandering thoughts on the nature of this divinity, worthiness, and worship. Yet still, I couldn’t help but return to the fear that we might simply be satiating a beast that hungered truly for us. I knew the hunger for human flesh, in a sense. It was intoxicating.

I kept these morbid ponderings to myself, moving forward diligently as my bare feet sank into damp moss and earth with each weighted step. Teresa believed the Sower was divinely ordained, and so I remained a devout priestess alongside her. I read all the texts, every retelling of the creation, every holy message received. I knew Teresa’s god inside and out, and so I knew her soul.

Teresa was my own personal goddess, worshipped in ways like no other. In moments beneath fabric and heated skin and wet mouths— my theology revolved around becoming all that she needed, fulfilling her in every sense. In a way, all my piety was committed in her honor, as worship to her. Every movement was a question that begged her, am I worthy yet?

The forest air was chill when we reached the Sowers clearing, our feet dirt-stained and numb from the journey. The only sound was the shuffle of burdened footsteps as we hauled the sacrifice to the oblong stump that sat surrounded by the bones of prior offerings. The Sower herself knelt nearby, a statuesque figure hidden beneath the hood of her own robes. She raised one green-hued hand, palm facing the altar; the offering was acceptable.

Our High Priestess whispered a single word of blessing before splitting the deer’s throat with her blade.

I caught sight of Teresa through the fog that rose from the birth of the corpse, her eyes half lidded as she gazed at the immortal priestess. The Sower pressed her palms to the ground where the earth drank of the offering, pressing her fingers into the inky muck. We Sisters knelt in the cold, wet grass and witnessed.

Rot overtook the deer before our eyes, liquifying into a fluid mass that slid away from the bones and followed its blood into the earth. I saw Teresa’s eyes filled with the shimmer of reverent tears as she watched the Sower’s hands slosh obscenely in the filth.

The entire scene set off an unpleasant pang in my chest. I tried to ignore the feeling and it slithered away, somewhere deeper in my core. It sat like a small weight behind my ribs.

Teresa was ecstatic after the ritual. She told me she felt touched by the Sower as her lips teased along my neck and her hands roamed aimlessly across my skin. The combination of worship and wine had turned her words loose, she slurred between ideas of mortal and immortal devotion.

Her body still met mine, arching with the curl of my fingers and clenching at the graze of my teeth, but I couldn’t help but question how much of her mind was there with me— how much of her heart was mine? How much of her soul?

The unusual emotion coiled in my chest grew a little heavier as these thoughts settled in. Teresa was my soulmate, we needed to belong to each other to complete each other, didn’t we?

I was met with a whine-like groan when I paused my efforts and stared up at her. She peered down at me with a mixture of yearning and confusion.

“You taste like worship. Are you devoted to me?” I let the heat of my breath fall against the deep pink of her skin that still shone with the memory of my tongue, I felt her thighs tense where my hands still held them in place.

I heard her whisper a confirmation, but she was clearly distracted. My fingers pressed harder into her skin and halted her impatient attempt to arch upward.

“Be patient.” I kissed her inner thigh and received a small whine in reply. “You love me, me alone? Am I all that you desire?”

Teresa nodded quickly, her expression a cross between want and honesty.

“And your immortal soul? Is it mine?”

The line I crossed was tangible as the tension dissolved beneath my fingertips and Teresa’s brow furrowed. Her flesh went cold on me before her voice did, all the heady delight suddenly vanished.

“Livia… Why would you ask that? Our souls belong to the Sower, we give them to her just as we will give our flesh to the forest.”

I let my hands fall as she pulled her legs in and lowered her skirts. The weight in my chest scaled over, hardened and sharpened.

“What if I wanted to give my soul to you? You wouldn’t have it?” My fingers curled defensively in my lap, pulling at each other as though it could distract from the roiling sensation in my gut.

“You’d waste your soul on me? You have my heart in this life, is that not enough? Is it not enough that we’ll live alongside each other eternally as part of the Sower?” Teresa sounded on the verge of tears.

I shook my head, bit back the response that burned acid-like in my throat. The conversation drifted into conflicted silence until Teresa slipped away to pray.

No, it wasn’t enough at all.

The tension of that night diluted with time and space, but the quiet in-between days left more time for the wound to fester. She’d spurned me. She considered giving our souls to each other a waste.

How could it be that I wasn’t as worthy of her as the Sower? How could it be too much to ask that she love me back the way that I loved her?

It wasn’t fair. The Sower was just some woman that killed herself in the forest— anyone could do that! All the Sisters were buried there now to feed the land, were they lesser than her? Or did they make Her even more?

Why Her at all? Why not anyone else? Why not me?

Why not me?

The Sower resided in the forest, resting in her clearing among the graves of each Sister who chose to lend their rot after meeting their natural ends elsewhere. Blood had not been spilled with malice within the valley since it was reborn.

It was impossible to keep from chewing a tear in my lip as I trekked into the forest alone. Teresa had forgotten our disagreement by now, but I hadn’t. I knew the solution. She need not divide heart and soul, nor choose between her love and her god.

The new moon was a few days away yet, the Sower would be fatigued as she awaited the next offering. Coiled tightly around my ribs now, the wicked thing within me seethed. Weak. How could anyone be devoted to a deity so feeble, so helpless?

The Sower couldn’t return Teresa’s devotion. Only I could do that.

I found the Sower in her clearing, her large robed form sat leaning back against a tree. In the faint light from the sliver of moon she was almost mistakable as part of the foliage, shades of green blended into leaf and shadow.

The ceremonial knife felt heavy in my hand as I approached. A hiss of injustice escaped my throat.

“Why you?” I pointed the knife toward her and spat the words with venom, “What makes you so holy?”

A soft hum came from beneath the veil of robes, a considering sound.

“I fed the forest. I made the needed sacrifice.” The Sower’s voice was a deep sigh that rustled the plants and brought forth the smell of fresh dew.

“We all do that— anyone can do that!” The knife swayed through the air as I spoke, punctuating my frustration.

“The forest didn’t ask for anyone else.”

“Maybe it should! Maybe someone should offer!”

We were close now, close enough that I could cut the veil that hid her if I tried.

“It doesn’t want you.”

The clearing went entirely silent, even the breeze stilled.

“You’re lying,” I thrust the blade a fraction closer but the Sower didn’t flinch. I took a step back, a deep breath, the vicious weight curled around my bones was making it hard to breathe. “You’re a liar.”

It was hard to think over the hiss of my blood boiling in my ears. How dare she. Liar. Weak.

“I could be you,” the words were saccharine acid against my tongue, wickedly sweet. Painfully delicious.

The Sower stayed silent, she offered no denial. But she stood and reached out a hand toward me, her palm cool against the feverish anger beneath my skin. The touch… it was everything, it pressed into my flesh the holy imprint of what I could be, of how I could make Teresa feel if it was just—

“I could be you—” I stumbled back another step, making space between myself and the overstayed goddess. “I could be you!”

The first thrust of the knife hit a rib, but the fraction of release was palpable. I couldn’t help but laugh as I pulled the blade free from my chest and lined it up for another try. Both hands this time. It hurt to tear myself open, but I knew it would be necessary.

The weight inside me had evolved, my own divinity uncomfortably gestating within me until now. I would set it free, give it life. I heard it whispering the future, Livia Most Holy.

“Why not me?!” The words gurgled around the blood pooling in the back of my throat, drowning me from within as I pleaded directly to the forest, begging for my justice.

The Sower bore witness, her hand pressed to her chest as though she was gasping for each breath alongside me. Soon the searing pain of each penetration was followed by the feather-light kiss of rot.

She was wrong— the forest would take me.

I grinned as my knees hit the dirt, enveloped in the sickening scent of earthly decay as I began to fall away from my bones. The Sower approached, knelt before me as my softest parts sloughed free, pressed her fingers into the earth soaked with my final offering.

“Your flesh is willing,” her fingers squelched through the mess of me, a strangely pleasant invasion, “but your spirit is weak.”

In my last moments the ecstasy of ascension was torn away, replaced with a cold darkness that drew me in bit by bit. The wicked weight inside me slid free of the cage, dragging that intangible tainted piece of me lower and lower.

Why not me?