Elias began leading other kids into the old reclusive room.
It became a place away from the eyes—somewhere quiet, hidden, untouched. A place where they could simply exist. They read old books, played with carved figures, made up stories with no endings. And Elias sat at the head of it all.
For the first time, he was accepted. Not just tolerated. He had formed a small community bound not by rule or ritual, but by something gentler—shared silence, imagination, escape.
But his will, the one that had built it, was fading.
Stolen.
Taken.
He grew sicker by the day. His cough came with blood now. His hair began to thin. Dizziness found him in the mornings and never fully left. Still, he came to school each day as if nothing was wrong. Quiet, steady, slipping beneath it all like he always had.
The trapdoor was gone.
Or maybe… it had never been there.
The book stopped speaking to him. The pull it once held—its glow, its song, its strange affection—had vanished. It was just a book again. Old. Heavy. Silent.
He left it beneath the chessboard in the little hideout. And there it remained.
Eventually, Elias stopped coming to school.
He entrusted the care of the room to one of the older boys. Pressed the key into his hand—if there ever was a key—and made him promise to keep it safe.
The boy agreed.
The others still met there.
They still laughed there.
But something had changed.
One night, the call returned.
Faint. Fragile. Like a whisper adrift in darkness.
But he heard it.
Elias could barely rise from bed. His body trembled. His breath came shallow and wet. But still—he moved.
The spark inside him, dim and thready, pulsed once. Twice.
Then stronger.
It was her voice again. The same voice that had once pulled him from the depths—the woman's voice. Soft, beckoning, ancient.
It called him home.
He dressed slowly, each motion like lifting stone, and slipped from the house unseen. The village slept. The wind did not.
He followed the voice back to the school, stumbling through the wet hush of midnight. The familiar path felt longer now. As if the world itself were stretching to keep him away.
When he reached the hidden room, the steps nearly defeated him. Blood filled his mouth. He fell to his knees, coughing crimson onto stone.
"You're almost there."
The words weren't sound. They were felt.
He forced himself up. Fingers scraping along the wall. Knees shaking. Vision blurred.
The spark within him—what little remained—beat like a heart now.
Not his own.
Something else's.
And it was calling him closer.
A crown of light.
The face of a lion.
The body of a serpent.
God.
Devin'Him called to Elias.
He was the chosen vessel—
Not for worship through scripture, nor reverence through ceremony—
But through sacrifice.
Through knowledge.
Through gnosis.
I want to be born.
Elias moved forward, arm outstretched.
He no longer walked of his own will—
Only pulled, gently, by the thread of fate.
He was not stepping toward death.
He was stepping toward birth.
His own.
Elias.
The voice of the woman returned—
A light without source,
A wisdom that wore no form.
Elias.
He approached the book.
His spark—
Gone.
Elias.
The book opened.
And a flash consumed his vision—
The Architect is blind, and sees only the shape of his shadow.
He fashioned the heavens with crooked hands,
and called them perfect.
The world he made was veiled in mirrors,
and every soul that entered forgot its origin.
But some remember.
And to them is given the seed of escape.
He was an inch from oblivion.
His hand hovered over the page.
Just one motion. Just one knowing.
And then—
A hand gripped his arm.
Firm. Real.
Gaius.
""Child," Gaius said.
Soft. Final.
"Poor soul."
He steps closer, boots silent on the stone.
"Looks like you didn't have what it took after all."
The air thickens. A tremor runs through the ground. The book glows faintly on the pedestal — a heart without a body, still beating.
Gaius doesn't look angry. Only disappointed.
Almost bored.
"A prophet," he says, "not anointed… but consumed. You reached into the mouth of the lion and thought yourself holy for surviving the teeth."
He turns his back.
The light dims.
"Another failure. Another cracked chalice. You mistook the spark for a soul."
He sighs.
"What a shame."
Elias—
Fall.
The world slips.
The floor vanishes.
The light in the book blooms white-hot—
"The Architect is blind."
"He sees only the shadow of his thought."
Elias tumbles through a mirror that no longer reflects.
"He shaped the heavens with crooked hands, and called them perfect."
"The aeons wept, but could not speak."
He falls past altars, past masks that wear faces, past voices that whisper only backwards.
"He made a world of veils."
"And every soul that entered forgot its name."
Elias clutches nothing. His hands bleed from holding what never existed.
"But some remember."
"And to them is given the seed of escape."
"The seed must die."
"The seed must die."
"The seed must die."
The echoes grow louder.
A woman's voice cries out one last time—
"Elias!"
He opens his eyes.
But there is no sky.
The lion's mouth opens.
Not with hunger.
But with invitation.
Elias drops into it like a tear into a cup.
And then—
Silence.
The kind of silence that makes your ears ring.
The kind that feels like someone else's dream closing around your body.
He's no longer falling.
He's suspended.
Held in something vast, like a womb made of smoke and memory.
Around him, shapes flicker.
Not visions.
Not ghosts.
Reflections.
A thousand versions of himself, each fractured—
One smiling with teeth too sharp.
One whispering into an empty shell.
One coughing blood into a chalice carved from bone.
One kneeling.
One burning.
One kneeling while burning.
They speak, but their mouths do not move.
"You searched for the spark."
"But it was never yours."
"You fed it lies and called it love."
"You found the Book."
"And let it write you."
Elias tries to scream but finds his mouth sewn shut—not with thread, but with truth.
The reflections grow sharper. Closer.
One reaches out and touches him.
And suddenly, he remembers everything at once—
His mother's voice humming over boiling broth.
Isabelle's brief, polite smile on a cold morning.
The way David sets his spoon down gently, as if afraid to break the silence.
The candle he lit in the priest's quarters.
The first page he turned.
The moment he forgot to ask:
"Should I be doing this?"
"You are the room now," the reflection says.
"You are the book."
"You are what waits beneath the altar."
"You wanted to be remembered."
"And now… you are."
His body contorts—not in pain, but in translation.
He is being rewritten.
A crack forms down his spine.
Light leaks out.
Or is it ink?
"This is how gods are born."
"This is how they die."
A great rushing sound floods the space—like pages turning in a storm, like wings made of scripture flapping in a vacuum. His body lifts.
And then—
Stillness.
Elias floats in a dark that has no opposite.
No light.
No outside.
No name.
Only one sound remains:
A slow, quiet breath.
Not his.
But remembering him.
The next day, Gaius walks into the courtyard.
Calmly.
Purposefully.
As if nothing unusual had happened at all.
The morning light breaks gently over the chapel roof, dappling the flagstones beneath the fruit trees. A breeze moves the dust. Birds chirp with a kind of mock innocence.
Gaius' hands are folded behind his back. His steps are light. Measured.
He pauses at the edge of the grass.
There—
Barely visible beneath the shade of the wall—
Elias lies sprawled across the earth.
Motionless.
His skin is pale and tight against his bones, like wax stretched over a frame. His hair clings to his forehead in damp strings. His lips are dry. A thin trickle of dried blood threads from the corner of his mouth, curling down his jaw.
One of his hands is still outstretched.
The fingers curl slightly, as if reaching for something that never arrived.
Gaius observes him in silence.
Not sad. Not disturbed.
Just… considering.
He crouches. Brushes a bit of dirt from Elias' cheek with the side of his finger.
"Hm," he murmurs. "Still here."
No one sees Gaius leave.
—
Hours pass.
By the time someone stumbles upon Elias, the sun is high and hot. A group of children chasing a ball goes quiet. One of them screams.
Soon, the courtyard is full of adults.
Alexandra is the first to reach him. She collapses beside his body, scooping him into her arms, her voice breaking in disbelief.
"He's cold—he's cold—"
David is close behind, eyes wide with horror, trying to lift his son's weightless frame, calling for help, calling for medicine, calling for anything.
They bring him to the infirmary. They call the Elder Sisters. They whisper prayers. They boil herbs and crush roots and press salves to his chest. They bleed him. They bless him.
But nothing works.
His body remains unresponsive. Not dead. Not alive.
His chest rises, barely.
His eyes never open.
When they try to move him, he twitches. Once.
And then—
Nothing.
He is not in pain.
But he is not there.
Not entirely.
Some say it's a sickness.
Some say it's a curse.
Some say he wandered too deep into the woods and brought something back with him.
But no one can say what happened.
Only that a boy has vanished.
And something that wears his face now lies in his place.