Chapter 33
The candle kept drawing in the ember, swallowing the heat of an air long buried in history. The flame born from the defeat of the Cursed One, when sanctity was seized and the world was rewritten into the ledger of satanic ownership, merged into the wick's light.
Its glow did not waver, yet it voiced a pain impossible for mortal ears to hear. Ophistu held it firmly, grasping it with both hands as a knight would grip a sword long before bowing to some ancient rite.
The candle was still set, positioned precisely before the navel, a symbolic center of strength and will.
For a moment, he lifted it.
Not hurried, not theatrical.
Only a motion that contained decision. No cry was carved into the air, no roar struck the silence. Yet the void filled with a voiceless summons, a longing that transcended language, a will fossilized in suffering and delayed far too often.
And in that moment, the cosmos understood. Whatever bore witness knew well that a prayer burned with Aroksash and lit with the flame from the fall of the Pure One was never counted among ordinary petitions.
It was judgment.
It was declaration.
And then—boom.
The blast did not merely shatter space, it erased direction. It arrived without prelude, without warning, as though all of existence had reached its final line, the climax of a cause never told.
Light and dust mingled, not swirling, but erupting outward, spilling to all edges until the notion of a boundary itself became illusion. Time was caught within the breath of that surge, compressed, like lungs that had held their breath far too long.
Yet it was not the visual chaos that struck hardest. It was the truth that Ophistu, the one known for an unerring gaze, the one who had never failed to find meaning, could not see.
Not blind, not closed.
Stopped.
The eyes, long able to pierce what is and what is not, to discern that which is more real than reality itself, now met a wall.
The inner lens, accustomed to tracing hidden recurrences behind the veil, to reading the world's structure like an open page, now found nothing. No edge to grasp.
In the storm, Ophistu stood. Not afraid, but fixed in place, for even he—the one who had walked through every possibility that opposed possibility itself—could not measure, could not verify, the anomaly that now cloaked creation.
It was not that the anomaly was too deep. It was that this one had crossed the threshold, outstripped the meaning of the word "anomaly" entirely.
And it kept exceeding it.
No mystery, no deception. Only a collapse of meaning, unreachable by thought or feeling.
'A whisper rings, born to the left side. For a breath I turn—and nothing.
Then that shadow again. Its age unaltered. Only the neck now differs, sprouting more than once in a brief moment.
They grow like starving roots. This is no illusion, no beauty from some dream.
It is the will of something that desires only the loss of control.
We act, of course, attempting the banishment as the sacred scripts instruct. Yet why is there stone in my limbs? And who—who grips my shoulders now?'
Hufffffh.
'Women, from three directions. Until now they choose silence, standing still while reciting their verse.
The beauty of their forms is undeniable. Too lovely to have been made by demons. Yet too silent, too solemn to be called holy.'
When the candle, still held in Ophistu's grasp, was lowered, placed gently toward the space behind his back, seeking to cover the unseen side left vacant for so long, his body remained poised, facing forward.
The movement bore no sign of haste, nor was it accompanied by tremor. Only a single, smooth pull, as though obeying a law older than motion itself. While the light of the candle's wick no longer shone forward, its radiance now gathered, illuminating solely the shadow of one's own back, casting light upon a blind spot that perhaps had been left in darkness for far too long.
In that stillness, a voice emerged.
Not an explosion, nor a sacred echo that shook the air. But a whisper, almost faint, yet too clear to be ignored.
It slipped in from the left side, right at the edge of Ophistu's mortal hearing, like someone pressing their lips against the threshold of the ear and releasing a single word that could never be repeated.
This sound was no language, nor was it a cry. It was like a fragment of breath, one once swallowed by suffering, now forced back out in a form unrecognizable.
Instinctively, Ophistu's head turned to the left. His gaze swept over the frozen space. No suspicion could yet be carved there, not at first. But as time seemed to stretch its veil thin, in the following minute, in a field no longer bound to the logic of direction, the presence returned.
A small shadowed figure, clearly no older than thirteen, stood in silence. No hand raised in greeting, no gesture offered as comfort.
Ophistu's head inclined, following the child's gaze. What drew his attention was not curiosity, but that his mortal body seemed summoned, compelled merely to witness.
And in the next instant, the shadow was no longer bound to simplicity. For now, its neck had begun to branch, forming three stems, each supporting a head. Even now, the length of those necks mirrored the growth of roots, not wild roots, but those already in the season of harvest. Shoots with no intent of seeking light again, but instead devouring, consuming only their own shadow.
The branches moved slowly, almost imperceptibly, yet enough to imply that time itself was no longer linear around the small form. In that sight, unexplainable by any sequence of logic, Ophistu stood still, not out of fear, but because all forms of perception had lost their use.
All that remained was a silent admission, a mute stance toward something older than reason, yet newer than death.
Ophistu drew a breath, deep and steady, to fortify his resolve to reject, to drive away whatever encircled him.
His left hand began to rise, shaping into a sacred position, while his right clutched a talisman, none other than the exorcist's prayer, long kept for the direst of moments.
Within, he called out, chanting the holy mantra inherited from the first voices of the angels, hoping the light of faith might banish the entity, this figure who danced between the boundaries of darkness and the unseen.
From the knowledge he had held since before creation, anything resembling a shadow of branching limbs, especially one appearing in the form of a child with three heads, was no creation ever blessed.
Instead of fading, the sensation of a grip began to spread, encircling Ophistu's body.
Cold, slow, yet absolute, it seeped in from right, left, and behind. Not a warm touch, but an invisible pressure, as though the world itself conspired to block his advance, to force him into submission before something he could not name.
Ophistu's instinct refused stillness. He turned first to the right, then to the left, finally casting his gaze over his shoulder.
In every direction, what he saw was no release, rather, each revealed a new truth, yet one so eerily alike that denial was impossible.
There, stood three women. Not mere women, but pure entities, their beauty rivaling that of heavenly maidens. White wings unfurled faintly from their backs, glowing softly yet without warmth. Their gazes were closed, their eyes unseen, yet holding an intensity like a hidden torch behind the lids.
To be continued…