The next morning, there were no instructions.
No meal.
No assignment.
Only a ringing bell, low, dull, and thick with salt, that summoned the boy to the central chamber of the Choir. He dressed without thinking. His fingers moved slowly, as though part of him had stayed in that room of sealed jars. As if naming had weight, and he had lost the right to carry his own.
When he entered the cathedral's nave, the cultists were already in position.
Gray robes. Bent heads. Eyes closed or covered.
The shrine's center had been cleared of its usual offerings and cages. In their place sat a long sheet of parchment, wide enough for thirty people to kneel shoulder-to-shoulder, with intricate red ink spiraling from a central node outward like a spider's web. The ink shimmered faintly, not like paint but like movement, as if the lines were breathing.
Ashur stood off to the side, near a tall obelisk of bone. He didn't look at the boy. Just gave the faintest of nods.
"You'll take the fourth circle," said one of the masked figures.
The boy obeyed.
He knelt beside the others. The parchment felt warm. Almost… sticky. The ink pulsed beneath his knees.
A chant began.
Not sung. Not spoken.
Written.
Each member of the circle traced glyphs with their fingertips, forming loops and coils along the red script. As the ritual progressed, the boy realized something strange, the words were changing beneath their hands. Not visibly. Not all at once. But the meaning shifted as they traced.
He followed the motions anyway.
At first, the words were simple. A prayer of forgetting. A vow of silence. A hymn of no-name. He knew the phrases, they were old chants from the outer liturgies. Easy to mimic.
But then something bent.
The glyph beneath his finger twisted sideways.
He blinked.
Now it said something else.
Not a phrase.
A memory.
His memory.
He tried to stop tracing, but his hand continued on its own, like muscle remembering something the mind had not agreed to.
The words now said:
I left her there. I closed the door. She screamed my name and I didn't go back.
He gasped.
The cultist beside him turned, startled. They froze mid-motion. The glyph beneath their hand had changed too.
It now read:
He left her. He closed the door. He screamed.
No.
That wasn't what it had said.
The boy tried to pull back, but his mouth opened.
Words came out.
In a voice too calm to be his.
"She died because I was afraid."
It wasn't a whisper.
It wasn't a shout.
It was spoken.
The chamber froze.
No one looked at him. But one by one, their hands stopped moving.
The ink stopped breathing.
A beat passed.
Then the cultist beside him collapsed.
No sound. Just a slow fall, like a puppet unstrung. Their body struck the parchment silently. Mouth open. Eyes wide.
Not dead.
But not… present.
Ashur rushed forward. Not to the boy, to the parchment. He ran a finger along the red ink, muttering under his breath. Then, sharply, he turned to the remaining cultists.
"End the rite. Now."
No one disobeyed.
The parchment was rolled up, carefully, reverently, and placed inside a long urn sealed with copper wire. The fallen cultist was lifted and carried out by two silent figures.
The boy remained kneeling, his hand trembling.
Ashur finally approached.
"What did you say?"
"I… I don't know," the boy answered. "It wasn't mine."
"It was," Ashur said quietly. "You just didn't want it to be."
The boy looked away.
Ashur sighed. "That was a broken hymn. A damaged rite. Something old, too old. It wasn't meant to be done this way. The Choir's trying to control something that can't be tamed."
"The Truth?"
Ashur shook his head.
"No. Not yet. Just its shadow."
The boy stood slowly, knees stiff.
His spiral mark itched.
But not from pain.
From recognition.
That voice, the one that spoke through him, hadn't been random. It had been close. Familiar.
And it hadn't been done with him yet.
As Ashur led him back to the inner sanctum, the boy glanced once over his shoulder.
The parchment was gone.
The fallen cultist was gone.
But in their place, etched faintly into the floor where he had spoken, was a single spiral.
Not carved.
Not drawn.
Burned.