I should feel cleaner standing before a church.
I don't.
Maybe because I'm not here to pray.
Maybe because I've only ever known God from a distance, shouted through incantations and screamed into test tubes.
The thurible sways in Henrietta's hand, crimson smoke curling toward the cellar doors—not pulled by gravity, but something deeper.
Something hungry.
Henrietta slows as we approach.
"A mágos hiding under a church," she mutters. "Ironic. Or desperate."
She grabs the rust-bitten handles, corroded iron staining her gloves.
"Mágos workshops are supposed to be sanctified spaces," she says, voice edged like a knife.
"Half forge, half delusion. Tailored to their own little truths."
She opens the doors. Darkness.
"That's why they're picky. Foreign traditions throw off the whole thing. Churches, temples, real sacred ground—they don't mix. It's like trying to purify water in oil. A mágos building one under a church isn't just stupid, it's arrogant. Velladine is either desperate, or thinks he's above interference."
Her hand flicks and her prayer ignites.
The air tastes of struck matches and forgotten names. Light doesn't bloom—it peels.
A pale flame uncoils midair, whispering red. It drips warmth but chills the skin.
The fire floats beside her like a thought she hasn't yet decided to think.
She begins her descent and I follow. The decrepit stairs howl with each step, swallowed by the dark.
The air grows colder, more concept than temperature.
Dust floats like memories stripped of names, and the thurible's smoke slithers ahead, tracing a path through shadowed stone and warped silence.
The trail ends.
Not at a corridor. Not at an altar.
A wall.
Just that.
Blank.
Unremarkable.
Stone, old and ugly as any tomb.
Henrietta narrows her eyes, already assessing.
"The thurible is leading us true, but it's not revealing the entrance. That's not normal."
She runs her gloved hand along the stone—measured, methodical.
"No seams. No false brick. Nothing physical. He's using high-level mageía that's neither spiritual nor physical. More refined than expected."
A pause. Then, her tone sharpens:
"The thurible's smoke should part illusions and disrupt memory wards. This? It's something else. He's not just hiding the door…he's making it unreal to anyone but him."
Just then, the wall trembles. No sound, no shift, just a ripple in the corner of the world.
Like heat off asphalt, but cold. Wrong.
A door. Wooden. Ancient.
It doesn't appear—it insists.
Its surface hums with a sound too low to hear but too heavy to ignore, like someone pressing a violin string without bowing it.
"Henrietta…I see something."
I step forward.
"Noelia, wai—"
But her warning is too late.
My hand is already on the doorknob.
I shouldn't exist.
That's my first thought.
No metaphor. No pain. No image.
Just…absence.
The moment my fingers close, I am unwritten.
My breath dies. My shape dies.
My memory doesn't just vanish—it folds inward. Unthought. Unchosen.
The world doesn't scream.
It sighs.
And in that sigh, I become…
Not.
No body to feel pain.
No time to measure loss.
Just static emptiness, held in place by a truth the world forgot how to say.
Then…it starts again.
Not with a heartbeat.
With a name.
Mine.
Not because I remembered it.
Because the World did.
My hand reforms first, fingers that haven't yet finished existing curled around the doorknob.
Then bone.
Then flesh.
Memories reconstruct like stained glass reassembled.
I scream, but it's not a sound.
It's meaning, clawing up my throat.
The first thing I feel is guilt.
The second is heat.
The third is breath that shouldn't be mine anymore.
Henrietta stares, frozen.
Reaching for something. Me. Anything.
But it's too late.
I'm already back.
Fully formed.
Fully wrong.
Not because anything is incorrect, but because nothing is.
I don't just feel wrong inside my body, I feel like I'm trespassing in it. Like it remembers being gone more fondly than being here.
She steps forward, voice tight.
"Noelia…"
I don't answer.
I don't think I can.
My soul's still catching up. Like it hesitated before deciding I deserved to return.
And even now, part of me wishes it hadn't.
Henrietta exhales shakily, her gloved hand touching my cheek as if to check I'm real.
"Are you stable?" Her voice is flat, professional—but there's a crack beneath it. A tremor of something human.
I swallow, or try to. My throat still feels like it belongs to someone else.
"I'm fine." The words scrape out raw. "Just…deal with the barrier."
As she watches me, irritation flickers in her eyes, covering something deeper.
For a moment, she looks like she wants to tell me off. Instead, her shoulders sag.
"Stubborn girl," she mutters, almost too low to hear.
She steps closer to where I saw the door, her gaze sharp with calculation.
"Velladine's using an anti-truth Magic Seal on the door. Not an illusion or memory ward. He's overwritten the local ontology, made it so the door can't exist for anyone else. That's advanced mageía, but manegeable."
She pulls a thin vellum scroll from her duffle bag, unrolling it with precise reverence. The parchment is inscribed with lines of worship so ancient they blur in and out of sight, refusing to be trapped in a single world. Each word looks less like ink and more like truth folded into letters, radiating a silent psalm that makes the skin ache to hear.
I try to focus on the script, but my vision swims. Every symbol feels like it's writing itself into me. Reminding me I'm still here, still bound to meaning, still forced to keep existing no matter how wrong I feel.
Henrietta presses the scroll flat against the stone.
"Stay back," she warns softly, then begins to pray.
Her words aren't words. They're echoes spoken underwater. Each tone tastes of myrrh and old blood, flickering across my skin like the wings of unseen angels brushing past.
The scripture writhes, pulsing with a dim, mournful glow. Light bleeds from between her fingers in sighs, as if the scroll exhaled its last breath.
For a moment, everything feels too still.
Then—
The scroll ignites in silence.
Not burning, but unraveling.
Its scripture tears away like prayer ripped from a believer's tongue, each shred pulling at the air with a soundless scream that resonates deep in my teeth.
The wall shudders.
What was once stone flickers, glitches, then folds inward, revealing the door I had seen—no longer a private delusion but undeniable truth carved into the dark.
Henrietta lowers her hand, the last scraps of vellum drifts down.
"One-use only," she mutters. Her tone is detached, but her shoulders remain tense.
The door yawns open before us with a shiver of displaced air.
Beyond it, the mage's workshop stretches into a narrow corridor with rusted Gothic sconces. Bare stone walls are scored with sigils and magic diagrams—some blackened with ash, others scrawled in blood-dark ink.
We step forward.
The space bends subtly as we move—never quite an illusion, but enough to feel wrong, like walking through someone else's half-remembered dream.
The corridor splits into rooms, each branching chamber filled with tools, notes, and strange instruments of copper, glass, and bone.
One wall is lined with empty picture frames in a perfect grid.
Henrietta stops before the only picture frame with a photo. It hangs unevenly; inside, a photograph shows young men and women posed before an ancient castle rising with quiet majesty. Slender gothic spires crown its towers. A fairytale elegance despite its scale, like a mythical palace built to impress kings.
The people wear formal attire: dark tailored suits, embroidered coats, and high-necked dresses. Each garment whispers understated wealth and inherited power.
At the bottom, the caption reads: Götterdämmerung Castle, Berlin 1994.
Henrietta scoffs, short and sharp.
"Twilight of the Gods. Pretentious as ever."
She glances at me, eyes narrowed, then back to the photo.
"The Church rightfully calls it Babylon. The Noble Society's grand fortress. Half university, half throne room. They think it's the seat of enlightenment. But it's just another tower of sin."
We continue deeper as the labyrinth's air grows colder.
The deeper we go, the more real he feels. As if I'm walking into his mind—or out of mine.
A faint cry echoes down the hall.
Henrietta's hands tighten around her sidearms. We follow the sound around a final bend into a wide operating room.
Steel tables line the walls, covered in dark-stained tools and unidentifiable scraps of flesh. In the center lies a man in Church vestments, bound by leather straps—our missing agent. His chest is split open, ribs pulled aside; heart and lungs an abomination of rot and mutation. Dead eyes stare at nothing.
On a table beside him is a girl no older than twelve. Her arms are half-changed—skin stretched tight over bulging muscle beneath. Her breathing is ragged. Shallow.
I step forward, slow and careful, close enough to see the tremor in her chest with each shallow breath.
Her eyes flutter open, unfocused at first. Then widen, pupils flickering like candle flames as they find me.
She inhales, trembling.
"You…you smell…like me. Are you…like me?" she whispers.
My throat closes. My knees give slightly. My trembling hands hover just above her ruined skin.
"Yes," I whisper back. "Yes. And I…I'll save you."
I say it because she needs to hear it. Because if I don't, there's nothing left of me but the part that deserved what was done to her.
Henrietta approaches silently and stands beside me. Without a word, she rummages into her duffle bag and withdraws a small wooden carving of a reindeer, worn smooth by age.
"Here," she murmurs, pressing it into the girl's trembling hand.
The girl clutches it weakly. Tears leak from her eyes as the light leaves them.
Henrietta brushes a lock of hair from the girl's brow.
"The kids at the orphanage call me Mrs. Claus," she says softly. "Guess I've still got the habit."
I stare at her. At the crack in her voice when she says 'kids'. At the way her shoulders slump in quiet grief.
"Why?" I rasp. My voice barely more than a sound. "Why do you care so much?"
She doesn't look at me as she replies.
"Because love isn't earned, Noelia. It's given. And if you wait until you think you deserve it… you'll die waiting."
Something twists inside me. A pain I don't have words for.
A pain that tastes like betrayal, though I know she's telling the truth.
Before I can reply, the room trembles with a low seismic hum.
A voice molts the air.
"So, the intruders who butchered my greatest work have invaded my workshop."
The voice warps with zeal. Quivering, ecstatic, unraveling at the edges.
"I wondered…what let you return from erasure, little sin-girl. Your flesh—oh, such glorious wrongness—will perfect my mageía, advance cosmic truth beyond even that stagnant Castle's enlightenment! They will accept me again. They will savor my splintered brilliance! They will have to. They will have to taste me whole!"
The floor beneath me softens, liquefying like quicksand.
Henrietta lunges forward, hand outstretched.
"Noelia!"
But it's too late.
The floor gives way entirely, swallowing me into silent, freezing dark.
Within a blink, the floor seals above me; solid once more, leaving no opening for Henrietta to follow.