Look, this is your last warning. There is references to torture here, heavy religious overtones used that one might find offensive, and a whole lot of gruesome shit. If that is not your thing, DON'T BE A FUCKTARD. DO NOT READ THIS. It's as easy as that. This story references the Angel Maker episode of Hannibal, Coquilles. It also vaguely references a conversation that Hannibal and Will had about God and religion. If you're a fan of Hannibal and have seen the episode, you'll catch it. I would just like to state that I do not own any of this, Hannibal or Inglorious Basterds. I also do not own the Bible and am using Revelations 6:8 without permission. The biblical quote is from the King James version of the Bible cause it's the one I am most familiar with so don't go correcting my quote just cause you like a different version. While in canon, Hannibal is an atheist and I can see him being one in this AU as well, it has been stated that Will is a Cajun out of New Orleans so odds are that he is French Catholic or was raised French Catholic. Jokes about Catholics and guilt aside for now, I could see Will wanting to do something grand like this. Hannibal would go along with the concept for the artistic aspects of it, and the man does enjoy a challenge and is a sarcastic little shit.

Long story short- I'm a sick fuck and you really shouldn't read this

OoOoO

Their legend started out small, but then even great oaks begin with humble seeds.

It was a story told in the trenches to pass the time, too gruesome to be really be believed, at least at first telling As the war wore on though, those little tales told in the dark as they sat in the stinking mud that was more shit and blood than earth by that point took on some roots, growing into cemetery trees.

The church was their first job done together, their premiere collaboration piece of strange morbid art. It was staged in a small village that had sacrificed all its people and its name on the alter of war. Just another little empty grouping of building at a crossroads made desolate by life's abandonment.

It was a small stone thing, that church. An ancient structure of weathered gray stone, but with the loveliest stained glass windows this side of Paris, it was like finding roses in a briar patch.

A squad of German soldiers had come across this vacant place, chasing after rumors and their ghosts. They decided while they were there to take anything of value or use, because grave robbing came in all different shapes and sizes. The soldiers who found the church, entering it first, ran out screaming. They refused to go back in even under order.

The officer in charge took one look for himself and called it in, keeping the other men away until someone higher up on the command food chain took a peek. In a flurry of communications, the final decision on the matter was to burn the church down to its foundations, but by then, it was far too late. The story had already began to spread, a small sickness exchanged between the grunts under breath, contagious in its telling.

In that ruined little church, every pew was filled, nearly fifty seats in all taken by the devout. With hands folded in prayer and a bible in every lap, the pious audience's eyes were fixed to the front at full attention, not one head tilting to the side with sleep or heavy with boredom. It was the very picture of devotion to one's faith in these trying times, to keeping with the belief that all men are created equally and thus they died equally to, just more horribly than some.

An entire church full of dead German soldiers with their tongues cut out. Meticulously placed as a marker for the bible in their lap, each tongue tasted the words of Revelations.

'…And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him…'

Fishing line like spider webbing kept the bodies still and upright with their hands bound in supplication before them. It kept them tidily in place as their bodies rotted and did untidy things to that place of worship and stained its stone flooring with worse things than just blood.

Instead of a priest, the devout soldier had been given a pair of angels and a crucifixion to find sacred meaning in. Three Gestapo officers preached the good word from where they were fixated in place by more fishing lure.

The two on either side of the crucifixion were made angels, the skin on their backs flayed off and spread out like wings. They had been castrated and blinded as well, the artists keeping to the scripture version of angels. The offending organs could be found in the church's tithing bowl.

For all his countless sins, the highest ranking officer in this house of worship died for all these soldiers' trespasses, taking the wooden Christ's place for him. Nails had been driven through his hands and feet into the wood while fishing line wrapped around his legs and torso kept him from sagging forward and using his own body weight to free himself.

With a crown made of barb wire, the stigmata was completed by a wound placed in his side, the tear in the flesh ragged from the harpoon used upon the medium but not fatal.

From the difference in decomposition, one could tell that this officer had been put up alive and left like that to die in his own good time. It must have taken him days to do so, his dwindling hours spent in the company of corpses, looking into the blank stares on the rotting faces of his silent congregation.

In an empty town, his screams must of echoed, loud and futile, his prayers falling on the dead deaf ears of men and gods who no longer resided in such places.

Even after the church was foully made into a crematorium and left a smoking shell of its former self, the story lived on. It fleshed out with every retelling, becoming a living thing that fed and grew fat on fear, sitting in the minds of men who began to dread the dark ever more than they did so before.

There were small gods walking about out there, powerful things that reveled in death and hungered for their flesh.

'….And power was given unto them over the fourth part of earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death…..'

OoOoO
TBC