Cor Mortuum
A dead god is still dying. Someone has to be there.
The premise
You did not fall into the rift.
You walked in.
Something vast died out here, long before anyone was listening. It is still dying — slowly, the way stars die, in a wound that has not finished closing.
You are a pilgrim in old armour, carrying something you have never explained to anyone. Inside the rift you find a body the size of a cathedral system: ribbed corridors, ritual geometry, chambers that were once thoughts. Its physics never healed. Gravity here remembers where things used to be. Light carries weight. Silence has pressure.
What remains of the being's mind wanders its own corpse in fragments, still enacting the laws that killed it. They are not guarding anything. They simply have not been told it is over.
You are not here to escape. You are here to perform last rites — and the only way to do that is to learn, force by force, the language a dying god speaks.
A run, in five movements
Every descent is a rite.
The maze reassembles each time you enter. The shape of the passage does not.
The threshold. Nothing hunts you yet. The game will not rush you here.
The outer rings are almost welcoming. You are being introduced to the dead.
Something turns toward you. The walls begin to keep time with what you carry.
The architecture stops pretending to be architecture. You go in anyway.
No boss. A heart, barely beating, that has been waiting for a witness.
Its pull remembers where I was, not where I am.Field observation — outer rings
The forces
Four laws, wearing bodies.
You do not out-damage them. You learn what they are still trying to do, and you let them finish it somewhere harmless — or somewhere useful.
It is not chasing you. It is holding on. Debris orbits a torso that bends the light around it, and every move you make adds mass to the room.
It charges on your panic. Move badly and you feed it. When it releases, the maze itself is thrown open and everything you had planned is scattered.
A slow rotation that draws lethal lanes across the floor. Its light has weight — stand in it too long and you carry the difference into the next chamber.
It removes force rather than applying it. In its dead zones nothing behaves. In a place built entirely of pressure, silence is the worst thing that can happen to you.
What you carry
The reliquary does not level up.
It responds.
There is no shop, no skill tree, no currency. There is one object at your chest, warm, humming faintly at a pitch you stopped noticing a long time ago.
Each time you help a fragment of the being end properly, the reliquary takes on a trace of what was released. Nothing announces it. Some players will not notice for several runs that the hum has changed — and then will wonder how long it has been changing.
One sustained pitch. Ten seconds. Once per chamber.
Two voices at once. You become the whole harmony, alone.
It holds a tone it has heard. Puzzles begin to span rooms.
It can silence. The first mercy you are able to give directly.
It sings without being asked. It is remembering something.
Death is not failure. It is how the universe teaches you its laws.Design principle — Cor Mortuum
Stay close
We will write rarely.
No marketing cadence. Occasional notes from development — a chamber, a force, a piece of the autopsy — sent when there is genuinely something to show.