The Keeper’s Bloom

In a world slowly being devoured by a sentient decay known as the Blooming Rot, the boundary between prophecy and infection is dissolving. Eshur is a blind cartographer who maps not the land as it is—but as it once was. With a set of ancient sensory lenses and a memory honed sharper than steel, he walks a dying world where reality rewrites itself, cities collapse into fungus-choked bones, and rusted machines whisper riddles from forgotten gods. But when he finds a map scrawled on a child's skeleton, inked in prophetic symbols no sane mind should comprehend, Eshur is thrust into a journey he cannot escape. Guided by a masked, backward-speaking child who may be more oracle than human, Eshur and a band of haunted pilgrims—among them a crucified monk, an infected soldier who has survived death, and a dreaming cartographer from another time—traverse the remnants of fractured civilizations. Each step deeper into the Rot peels back the illusion of choice and reveals a world shaped by belief, haunted by prophecy, and bent under the weight of its own ruin. As the Oracle's riddles warp the future, and the Bloom pulses with chaotic intent, Eshur begins to question what it means to map truth in a world where truth itself is unstable. Are they following a path foretold, or carving it with every breath? Pilgrims of the Blooming Rot is a surreal, rust-soaked journey through fungal wastelands, prophetic machines, and decaying mythologies. For readers of Jeff VanderMeer, Mervyn Peake, and China Miéville, this is a novel where every prophecy is a seed—and every seed might bloom into something monstrous, sacred, or new.