The upside-down crescent moon swam in my vision. I traced its shape in the dust on the floor, my finger leaving a clean, dark line against the grey grime. Nothing happened. No sudden flood of memory, no divine whisper. Just the same hollow ache in my skull.
"Staring won't make it talk back," Croft rasped from his perch on a fractured angel's wing. He was preening a primary feather, his head twisted at an impossible angle.
"It's the only thing that feels like anything," I said, the words tasting like dust. The symbol was a hook, set deep in the empty sea of my mind. I could feel a tension, a nagging pull, but the line was slack. "What does it mean?"
"It means," he said, dropping the feather and hopping down to the floor with a soft thud, "that you're looking in the wrong place." He strutted over to the base of the nearest pillar, where the flaking red paint formed words I couldn't read. "The map isn't on the floor. It's on the walls. The story of the war."
"War?" The word felt heavy, dangerous.
"The war that killed this world. The one that made you necessary." He pecked at a specific word. "This word. It says 'Fate.' And this one," he hopped a few inches, "says 'Betrayal.' They're everywhere. This whole place is a monument to it."
I pushed myself up, my joints stiff. The sheer scale of the church was still overwhelming. It wasn't just a building; it was a corpse. I walked to the pillar, looking at the jagged script. "I can't read it."
"You don't need to read it. You need to feel it." Croft looked at me, his black eyes depthless. "What does this place make you feel? Anger? Fear? Sadness?"
I let my gaze travel up the pillar, to the murals of blurred, fighting figures. "Nothing," I admitted. And that was the worst of it. The emptiness inside me was so vast it swallowed everything. "It's just… stone."
A sharp crack echoed through the nave. We both froze. It came from the direction of the main doors—a sound of something heavy and dry snapping underfoot. Not the wind. Something was out there. In the dead city.
Croft was a sudden weight on my shoulder, his claws gentle but firm. "Don't move," he breathed into my ear, his voice barely audible.
We listened. Silence. Then, a slow, dragging sound. Like something heavy being pulled over rubble. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, unfamiliar rhythm. Fear. This, at least, was a feeling I understood.
The dragging stopped. A minute passed. Then another. The silence was worse than the sound.
"We can't stay here," I whispered. The church, which had felt like a shelter, now felt like a trap. Its doors were too large, its echoes too revealing.
"The symbol," Croft insisted, his grip tightening. "It's the key. You felt the pull. Focus."
I looked back at the floor, at the inverted moon. The dragging sound started again, closer this time. It was just beyond the main doors. Panic fizzed in my veins. Focus. I forced my breathing to slow, closing my eyes against the immediate threat. I thought of the warmth, that faint spark under my finger.
What are you? I asked it, not with words, but with the raw need clawing up from my gut. Show me.
A pressure built behind my eyes. Not a memory, but an impression. A landscape of blasted rock under a purple sky. A figure in black armor, standing before a gate of light, a scythe in his hand. My hand? The image was gone as fast as it came, leaving a searing pain in its wake. But it left something else: a direction. A compass needle in my mind, swinging firmly toward the shattered eastern wall of the church.
"East," I gasped, opening my eyes. "We have to go east."
The dragging sound was right outside the door now. A shadow fell across the threshold—long, distorted, and wrong.
"Then we go," Croft said. "Now."
We moved away from the doors, keeping to the deeper shadows of the pillars. The eastern wall had collapsed into a slope of rubble, leading out into the open. As we scrambled over the broken stones, I risked a glance back.
The thing in the doorway was a silhouette against the grey light. It was man-shaped, but its limbs were too long, its head lolling at a sickening angle. It wasn't walking. It was being dragged, puppet-like, by some unseen force. It let out a wet, guttural sigh that had no business coming from a human throat.
I didn't need to be told twice. I turned and ran, Croft clinging to my shoulder, his wings beating the air for balance. We fled the church, leaving the sighing thing behind, and plunged into the canyons of a dead city, the phantom compass in my head pointing the way into the ruins of Eden.