Not all truths are buried in darkness—some lie exposed in the harshest light, waiting for someone brave enough to look.
The morning sun was too clean for a city like this.
It didn't warm—it dissected. Narrow beams knifed through the shattered mosaic windows of the ruined chapel, turning dust motes into halos and shadows into horrors. Once a sanctuary, now a haunt for whispers, the place was no longer holy—just forgotten. But even forgotten things remember.
Asher Blackwood stepped into that fractured sanctum, his boots crunching quietly over the ash-layered tile. He carried no weapon in hand, only a tired silence and a gaze sharp enough to cut open ghosts. The stained glass reflected across his coat in shards of color—violet, blood red, golden-white—bathing him like a martyr stepping into his own trial.
At the center of the room, amidst a collapsed altar and half-melted hymn books, lay a mask.
White porcelain. Cracked. But somehow... whole.
He felt it before he saw it.
A subtle weight in the room. A bending of space, like gravity had grown opinions. The mask didn't just rest on the ground—it anchored it. A heartbeat that didn't beat. A memory pretending to be still.
Asher crouched, studying it without touching.
A presence stirred behind him.
"You know," came a familiar voice from the door, laced in amused cynicism, "for a man who keeps claiming he doesn't believe in ghosts, you sure visit their houses a lot."
Detective Mara Quinn.
She leaned against the rotted doorframe with the casual grace of someone who didn't care if the universe blinked—because she'd blink back harder. Her coat flared with the breeze that followed her, boots clicking as she stepped into the chapel's warped light.
"I'd make a sarcastic comment about your timing," Asher muttered, still watching the mask, "but the city's bleeding again. This time… I think it started here."
Quinn's eyes flicked to the object in question. Her usual smirk faded.
"Where'd you find it?"
"Buried under the choir pit." He finally stood. "As if someone wanted it close to voices that once believed."
Quinn circled it like a wary animal. "That's 7th Circle design. Old demon-craft. Not something you find at a black market stall."
"No," Asher agreed, his eyes narrowing. "This was placed. Recently."
Then the air changed.
The sunlight dimmed—not like clouds, but like memory. The stained glass twisted. Lines bent, colors melted into unfamiliar glyphs—sigils where saints once stood.
And the room blinked.
In that brief instant, Quinn's reflection in the fragmented glass changed—just long enough for the truth to scream: horns, wings, an unholy hunger riding just beneath her skin.
She recoiled. "Did you—"
"I saw it." Asher's voice was taut. "This room… it's layered."
A gust slammed the chapel doors shut.
Every candleless sconce lit with ghostfire. The mask pulsed once—and runes on the floor flared like veins waking up after centuries asleep.
And a whisper not spoken—thought—coiled around them like a breath from something buried deep:
"The mask sees you… and remembers."
The temperature plummeted.
Quinn raised her gun, hands steady but knuckles white. Asher caught her wrist gently and shook his head. "Bullets won't work. This isn't a haunting. It's a tether."
"To what?"
"To someone's past."
She frowned. "Someone's hiding memories in a cursed mask?"
"No," he said, voice hollow. "They're imprisoning them."
He knelt.
He touched the porcelain.
And the world broke.
—
A scream—not from a throat, but from the sky.
Blood flooding the gutters.
A woman's face dissolving into shadow, her voice pleading in reverse—like time wanted to forget her but couldn't.
And above it all: a crimson eclipse. The moon on fire.
Then a face.
Her face.
Lirieth.
Eyes like burning oceans, smile like a guillotine waiting to love you.
"You're late," she whispered.
—
Asher gasped, ripping free of the vision.
Quinn steadied him, her voice slicing through the static.
"What did you see?"
He swallowed. His skin felt wrong. Like it belonged to someone else now.
"I saw the city burning," he rasped. "And I saw her again… Lirieth. Not in a dream. In memory."
He looked down.
The mask cracked in his palm—just a hairline fissure—but from it spilled a flame not of this world.
Blueish-black fire. Silent. Alive.
He dropped it.
The fire didn't burn—it wrote.
On the chapel floor, curling in spirals of script only half-translated in Asher's mind, it formed a single word.
REBIRTH.
[End of Chapter 31]
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Asher stared at the word as the flames flickered and died.
And far above—too high for sunlight to reach—a sound echoed from the ruined chapel's steeple.
A heartbeat.
Not his.
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Chapter 32 – Echoes Beneath the Cathedral
Asher and Quinn descend into the catacombs beneath the ruined chapel, chasing the origin of the mask and the echoes tied to it. But what waits in the dark isn't just memory—it's prophecy. And it's already begun to come true.