Chapter 31 – Prayers Sold Beneath False Light
The night sky hung like a wound refusing to heal.
Thin mist drifted beneath the trembling glow of yellow lamps, swaying from old wires, flickering like a soul unsure whether to live or die. Beneath them, humans walked, clutching hopes—hopes that were never truly theirs.
A night market. Not a place to buy necessities. But a place to sell fear.
Among the rows of worn-out games and the too-sweet scent of cotton candy unfit for this world, a small stall stood. Dangling from it were talismans with false eyes, red threads, and prayer papers written in a language heaven itself refused to read.
Enver stood not far away. His body tall, his face like a night unwilling to dawn. People passed by him, yet not one brushed against his body—as if he belonged to another dimension.
His eyes fixed on one point: the prayer stall.
The vendor sat cross-legged. His name was Ardel.
A man in his fifties, his face weary, his smile forced, his eyes constantly shifting, as if hiding something behind his eyelids.
"Prayers, sir? For a child's safety? For business fortune? For a love that never returns?"
His voice slithered—sweet, piercing.
He sold prayers like candy—sweet at first, bitter at the end. Yet the true danger was not the bitterness, but the sweetness that made people forget it was false.
Enver did not answer. He raised a card from beneath his cloak. A translucent card, bearing the image of a black eye weeping blood. The symbol of sin—not of error, but of deliberate deception.
Ardel froze. His breath grew heavy. His hands, used to selling lies, began to tremble.
"Dear God… you… you're not from here, are you?"
From beneath the stall, a thick mist began to creep. Cold. Alive. Speaking without voice. Livox.
An astral being born of false prayers. It had taken shape from every hope silently destroyed.
The mist whispered. And within those whispers were faces.
Faces of children once begging for healing. Faces of old women who sold their homes for "prayers of protection." Faces Ardel himself had long forgotten.
"He comes to erase me, Ardel," Livox's voice echoed, "But I was born of you. You are my factory."
The mist swirled, rushing toward Enver. From within it, Livox took form—half mist, half human. Its face resembled Ardel's daughter—dead ten years ago from an illness no prayer ever cured.
"It wasn't me who killed her, it wasn't me… it wasn't me…" Ardel screamed.
Livox grinned. Its fog surged forward.
But Enver did not flinch. He raised his left hand and pulled time into himself. Golden light radiated from the ground, forming a ritual circle that banished illusion. Every false face burned. Every memory built from lies melted like wax.
"Livox," Enver said calmly, "you were born not from suffering, but from deception. From the lies nurtured because truth was too painful to bear."
The creature roared. Its face dissolved. It turned into smoky hands trying to seize Enver's heart.
Enver drew a needle from his left chest. Not a weapon, but a pen.
He wrote one word in the air with his own blood:
"Purificazione."
The sky collapsed around the circle. False prayers at the stall exploded into ash.
Livox screamed, then was sucked into Enver's card. The card cracked, then shattered into fragments of glass that fell silently to the ground.
When silence returned, only Ardel's trembling breath remained.
He sat hunched, his fingers shaking, clutching the last talisman he had made. It cracked, useless, devoid of light.
"They… they believed," Ardel whispered. "But only because I wanted someone to think I mattered."
Enver looked at him. His face remained silent. But from that silence, a single sentence emerged:
"Truth will not promise you comfort. But it will free you from regret."
He walked closer. Not forcing, not condemning, only placing a blank card before Ardel. The card bore no glow. No symbol. Only white. An invitation, not a punishment.
"Prayers are not for sale," Enver spoke softly. "But if you still wish to speak to the sky… then speak honestly."
And then he left. Vanished without sound.
The night market lived on. People kept buying toys and sweets. Yet in one corner, an empty stall swayed in the wind, and an old man wept among false eyes that no longer saw anything.
A new card slipped into Enver's cloak.
Within it, a symbol slowly formed: a false eye opening, shedding clear water—not blood.
A sign that someone, someday, would choose to see.
"One by one, they will awaken. Not because they were saved—but because they were forced to face a mirror without veil. That mirror is truth."
---