Boundless black clouds loomed, pressing down upon the spire of the Sanctuary Cathedral. The great bronze bell swayed slowly in the biting wind. This ancient bell, cast with scenes of saints' martyrdom, had long been corroded. The faces of the twelve apostles were eaten away by acid rain until their expressions blurred into masks of sorrow; only the chains holding the bell still clanked.
Vines crept up the grooves of the Sanctuary's outer walls. As the bell's clapper struck its bronze casing once more, a rotted vine stem snapped, plummeting towards a lower casement window, sealed shut with iron bars. A gust of wind howled past, whipping a fragment of the vine through the bars and against the man's swollen face.
Pain jolted No. 7 awake.
His right cheek throbbed, a fiery ache as if someone had jammed a live coal beneath the bone. He tried to open his eyes, but the left was crusted almost shut with dried blood, leaving only a sliver through which he could survey the cell—a space barely two square meters.
Moonlight slanted through a palm-sized ventilation slit high above, spilling a ghastly white gash of light onto the floor. It illuminated sinister dark stains on the granite walls—the indelible marks of countless predecessors, seeped deep into the stone's crevices, exuding a miasma of decay.
He lay on the floor beneath a surprisingly clean, newish blanket. It carried the faint, familiar scent of the shaving water his church mentor, Silas, always used.
His mind reeled. Pain fractured his thoughts; the night's events had churned them into a daze, making clarity impossible.
"A descendant of the Golden Age, yet half-blind! You have defiled your bloodline!!!"
The Cardinal Sinner's roar still reverberated in his ears. No. 7 reached up, digging a finger vigorously into his ear; he was certain some of the prelate's spittle still clogged it.
"What damn bloodline? And how could I not know about it?"
Descendant of the Golden Age? Half-blind? And… how had the Cardinal found out about the joke he'd shared with No. 3? Had No. 3 actually gone and reported him? He pictured No. 3's guileless face and shook his head. No, the fellow was honest to a fault; there had to be another reason.
No. 7 shifted his stiff neck, trying to find a more comfortable position on the hard floor. A sudden, bitter wave of sorrow washed over him. He tried to review his life, only to find there wasn't much to recall. His memory, after all, spanned a mere three years.
The first person he had encountered since his memory began was Silas. The man's backlit silhouette was like a saint's effigy carved into church stained glass. The forearm muscles bulging from his cuffs were gnarled, pale blue veins standing out starkly beneath his cold, white skin. He didn't just look like stone; he spoke like it too.
"Don't move."
"Breathe deeply."
"What's your name?"
"Don't remember? From now on, you're No. 7."
Back then, No. 7's mind was a blank, muddled canvas; he hadn't understood a word the man said. Yet, from the tone alone, he'd quickly deduced that this Silas was not a man gifted with the art of conversation.
He recalled arriving in this world, his mind equipped only with common sense and languages that felt alien even to him. He knew to find a hole in the ground when nature called, knew the winged things flitting past the window were "birds." Yet his own name, his own home – utterly forgotten.
This profound, alienating, and helpless fear had clung to him for an entire year. Then, by a stroke of both fortune and misfortune, he met No. 3, who, like him, had forgotten everything. Initially, they'd babbled at each other in the few residual, mutually unintelligible languages rattling in their heads. Discovering the mismatch, they resorted to frantic gestures, and soon, an unlikely friendship blossomed.
These recollections eased some of No. 7's tension. He opened his palm. A silver needle slid from his sleeve, hovering above his skin, shimmering with a faint blue luminescence. As his Tidal Force coalesced, the needle quivered, humming with an indescribable power.
He narrowed his eyes, taking aim at a stain on the far wall. In that very instant, the light from the ventilation slit flickered, dimming for a heartbeat.
No. 7 went rigid. He stared, transfixed, at the sliver of moonlight; something had just flitted past the ventilation slit. A cold dread snaked up his spine. He instinctively tried to sit up, but his limbs were like lead.
He couldn't move. It wasn't chains, nor the dull paralysis of drugs, but a far more terrifying betrayal from within his own body. His brain shrieked commands for his muscles to contract, but his nerves, like snapped instrument strings, relayed nothing.
"Hrrk…" He strained to make a sound, but only a choked, death-rattle gasp escaped his throat.
And then he saw it. In a corner untouched by the moonlight, the shadows writhed. At first, he dismissed it as a hallucination, a cruel trick of the pain. But as the darkness thickened, coalescing into a humanoid silhouette, No. 7 felt his blood turn to ice.
It was a stooped old woman. Though No. 7's night vision was poor, he saw her with an unnatural clarity, as if this were not reality, but a dream unfolding.
She wore a decaying, dark robe, its fabric embroidered with crimson sigils that held a dull, scab-like sheen in the faint moonlight. Wisps of sparse white hair trailed to her waist, swaying almost imperceptibly in the silvery gloom as she leaned forward. Her slack skin was mottled with bluish-grey patches, yet her lips were stretched into an unnervingly fixed, upward curve—a ghastly smile.
She made no sound of breath, nor any whisper of footsteps. Only her eyes—terrifyingly bright, a turbid, piercing yellow—stared unblinkingly at No. 7.
No. 7's cry for help died in his throat. He yearned to flee this hellish pit, to unleash his Tidal Force against this uninvited specter. The silver needle clattered uselessly to his palm, the nascent power he had gathered dissipating without a trace. But his body remained inert, his soul trapped within a corpse. He could only watch, helpless, as the figure glided slowly closer.
*Klak… Klak…*
The sound was like something desiccated being dragged from a fissure in hell itself.
The old woman paused at the very edge of the moonlight, her gaze fixed on No. 7's contorted face. On her twig-like fingers, each knuckle was ringed with a rusted bronze band, intricately carved with coiling serpents.
As she raised a hand, a scent wafted towards No. 7—an unholy amalgam of spices and rot. She lowered herself slowly, then her hand descended, covering his eyes.
"What in God's name is happening today?" The thought screamed through his fading consciousness.
In the instant he plunged into absolute darkness, a face flashed before his mind's eye—a gentle, exquisitely delicate face. It was No. 6's face.