The Crimson Fruit is a grotesque, gourd-like mass, its swollen body twisted with irregular bobbles and warts. A curling, sinewy stem crowns its bulb, tough as tendon, clinging stubbornly to the branch that bore it. Its skin is a riot of color, rich oranges bleeding into deep, pulsing reds, like overripe flesh on the cusp of bursting. Sized perfectly to fit the human hand, it would be a perfect comestible, if not for it’s awful and apparent nature.
Among its warped surface, something more unsettling lurks, a scatter of human features, impossibly embedded within the Fruit’s flesh. Noses, eyes, mouths, and teeth press against the rind in no discernible order, clustering in grotesque configurations that shift uneasily under scrutiny.
Though it lies still, inert as any fruit, the mind struggles to accept its passivity. A whisper at the edge of hearing, a breath drawn where none should be, the flicker of an eyelid glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye, these subtle intrusions unsettle those who linger too long. It was this murmuring call, faint and insidious, that first ensnared the earliest disciples of the Crimson Cult, drawing them ever deeper into the fruit’s maddening embrace.
