Chapter 84: His Voice Below

The song was an anchor in the darkness.

Raziel waited, motionless in bed, until the sounds of the sanatorium died down completely.

There were no guards patrolling the hallways, nor sisters doing rounds.

’They are waiting for me to make a move.’

The thought froze his blood, but it didn’t stop him.

The parasite in his chest was an hourglass leaking its last grains of life. He didn’t have time for prudence.

He slid out of bed.

He turned the doorknob slowly.

CLICK.

Raziel held his breath, listening, and peeked out.

The corridor was bathed in a pale light from the moons entering through the high windows.

He moved stuck to the wall, just another shadow among the others.

The melody was clearer now, a thread of sound guiding him downwards.

He passed by the doors of Lucian and Lara’s rooms.

An instinct screamed at him to wake them up, to get them out of there.

But he had to do this alone.

He found a service door at the end of the wing, hidden behind an image representing the ascension of Saint Sophia.

The stone stairs descended into the darkness, a sour stench accumulated for years came out.

The sanatorium was a lie.

The facade of purity and healing only existed to hide this rotten basement.

He descended with one hand on the damp wall and the other ready to channel the little energy he had left.

The singing became louder, resonating in the tight space.

The basement had shelves with dusty jars, rusty alchemy equipment, and empty cots covered in stained sheets.

Everything looked abandoned, but the feeling of being watched was overwhelming.

The song led him to the end of a dead-end hallway. A wall of wet bricks blocked the way.

’Here.’

Raziel ran his hands over the surface, looking for anything out of place.

He felt an almost imperceptible draft coming out of a joint between two bricks.

He pushed.

Nothing.

He pushed harder, putting the weight of his body into it.

GRIIIND.

The brick sank and a section of the wall slid to the side, revealing an even darker passage.

The stench of despair intensified.

Now he understood, it wasn’t a simple basement.

It was a dungeon.

The hidden hallway was flanked by cells, most were empty, with the iron doors open and rusty.

On the stone walls, he saw nail marks, scratched words that could barely be distinguished.

“HELP”, “FREEDOM”, “WHY”.

It was a prison for people with Gifts that the Church considered dangerous.

A place where “anomalies” disappeared forever.

The song came from the last cell, at the end of the corridor.

The door wasn’t iron bars, but a solid slab of stone reinforced with black metal and covered in seals.

Raziel stopped dead, he recognized the runes.

“Shit,” he whispered to himself.

They weren’t Church seals.

They were much, much older.

Symbols of the Primordial Pantheon, from an era before Zhalyr.

These weren’t designed to keep someone inside, instead they were made to isolate something from the outside world.

Through a small grated peephole, he saw her.

A young woman, probably not much older than him, was chained to the back wall.

She wore a simple white tunic, now gray from dirt.

She had her eyes covered by a linen bandage and her wrists, where the shackles clung to her, were covered in ugly burn marks.

The singing stopped.

The young woman’s head turned slowly towards the door, as if she could see him through the stone and metal.

“You arrived.”

“Do we know each other?”

“I have seen you in my visions, a thousand times.”

Every muscle in Raziel’s body tensed up.

His first reaction was to deny, to act, to put on the mask of the confused novice.

But something in her posture told him that acting here was useless.

“You always come,” she continued, making the chains rattle. “You always find this place, You always try to force the runic lock.”

“And you always die.”

“How do you die?” she asked, tilting her head.

“Ah, yes. Last time, the Mother Superior ripped out your throat with shadows. The time before that, you tried to burn the door and the magic rebound liquefied your organs. There was one time, when you managed to open it…”

She paused, and even though her eyes were blindfolded, Raziel felt like she was looking directly at his soul.

“…that was the worst one, you begged to be killed before it ended.”

Raziel swallowed. Did she remember the loops?

“You are the Oracle,” Raziel stated, his voice losing the childish facade. “You see the discarded timelines.”

The young woman didn’t answer, which was a confirmation in itself.

“If you know all that,” he said, getting closer to the peephole, “why do you help me? Why did you sing to bring me here if the ending is always the same?”

She let out a soft laugh.

“Because the song is the only thing that changes, sometimes it’s a lament, other times a prayer, but you… you are the constant, Raziel Celeste, you are the boy who refuses to stay dead.”

Raziel hit the door with his fist, frustrated.

“I am not a child and I didn’t come here to hear stories of my failures. If you called me, it’s because there is a variable. What is it?”

The Oracle stayed silent for a few seconds. “You are right. This time… something is different.”

Hope stirred in Raziel’s chest. “What is different? Lucian? The exorcist?”

“Not them,” she said with disdain. “The different thing is you.”

A sad smile crossed the Oracle’s lips.

“This time…” she said. “You brought the darkness with you.”

Slowly, she raised a chained hand and pointed directly at him.

Where the Shadow parasite pulsed in silence, devouring his soul.

“It smells like something that doesn’t belong to the story the Goddess wrote,” she whispered. “And that… gives me hope, because only a monster can kill other monsters.”

Before Raziel could ask what the hell that meant or if the parasite was really his salvation, a low hum filled the air.

SHIIING!

The antediluvian seals of the cell lit up with a blinding blue light, projecting dancing symbols all over the hallway.

At the same time, he heard a sound from the entrance of the passage.

THUMP.

THUMP.

THUMP.

It wasn’t one person, it was many.

Heavy and deliberate, approaching without hurry.

Then, a voice resonated from the top of the stairs, stripped of all the fake warmth it had shown before.

The voice of Mother Superior Celestine. “Novice Raziel, you have entered sacred ground without permission.”

A pause loaded with threat. “The penalty for that is that you never leave.”

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