CODEX
Episode 11 — The Child Whose Prayers Feed the Beast
> …And in the silence, what had been invoked finally decided to work. Not in the mind. But in the real world.
A few months later — Tokyo, Japan.
A light rain was falling on the Arakawa district. The sky was the color of wet bone, and the air was heavier than usual. That morning, Tōsenji Temple was anything but a peaceful sanctuary. It had become an echo chamber for cries that no human throat seemed able to produce.
A twelve-year-old boy, Kaito Yamamura, lay on a futon of blackened salt. The local priests had been powerless to do anything. His voice had changed. His eyes too. He spoke in an ancient language, one that sounded nothing like human. He laughed in the dead of night. He shouted things no one dared to repeat.
The temple then called upon Benjamin Borax, a Western exorcist, specially sent by the occult coalition Magna Ordo Sancta. He was no mere monk. He wore a rosary made of whale bones, a red cloak woven from the hair of sacrificed virgins, and in his pockets: vials containing sealed whispers.
When he entered the exorcism room, the boy immediately fell silent. The air turned icy. And Kaito, or whatever inhabited him, addressed Benjamin with a fixed smile:
"You... You come from where I was drowned. Do you want to remind me? You will remember your true name."
The floor cracked around the futon. An ancient circle, sealed for centuries beneath the temple's wood, slowly revealed itself. The evil was not locked within the boy. It had been brought back with him.
When Benjamin began to pray in Latin, the room lit up with a reddish light. The boy writhed, vomited a hot, black liquid, and then… stopped abruptly.
A black, scaly arm protruded from his mouth. Then a face, eyeless, covered in shifting glyphs.
The demon wouldn't flee.
He wanted to fight.
And in that prayer room, before the helpless eyes of the monks, the demon took human form, naked and abominable, trembling with rage and hatred.
— "I am Hurald-Tha. Born in the dead river. You cannot send me back. For it was you, Benjamin Borax, who let me return."
---
Benjamin didn't flinch. He took out a thin blade, engraved with seven forgotten alphabets. And whispered: "I am the one who lost you. I will be the one who will tear you apart."
And then...
The exorcism became a duel.
---
The rain had stopped. Silence fell.
All around them, the stone statues were slowly melting, as if the very fight were rewriting the material.
Benjamin could no longer see the sky. Hurald-Tha had altered the space. They were locked in a stolen memory—an illusion of a cathedral, built on bones and regrets.
Invisible organs played reversed music.
Light fell downward.
Borax's blade vibrated, reacting to the impossible. It no longer cut the fabric of the world—it rewound it.
When he struck, it wasn't the demon he hit—but the night Hurald-Tha had first been summoned.
A baby's cry echoed.
A cradle burned. And the flames licked the very floor of this false sanctuary.
> Hurald-Tha burst out laughing: "You think you can hurt me? You only remind me of who I am. I am a child's prayer... that has never been answered."
---
He changed.
It was no longer the possessed child, but a faceless beggar, covered in rusty bells.
Then a burned monk.
Then Benjamin's own mother, naked, weeping, and holding a cross in her mouth.
Borax's heart hesitated. For half a second.
Too much.
Hurald-Tha deformed into a monstrous hand made of ancient inks. It stretched out and wrapped itself around Benjamin's throat.
But Borax was not afraid.
He whispered an incantation backward—and the ink screamed.
A flock of crows flew from the blade, piercing the walls of memory.
They pecked at the demon's eyes.
They slashed at the chains of fate.
The world trembled.
A forgotten voice whispered in the stones:
> "You should never have come back here, Benjamin. The dead river doesn't sleep. It recognized you."
A red eye opened in the water, far down at the bottom, and all the birds died at once.
---
When Benjamin opened his eyes again, he was kneeling at the edge of the dead river.
Black blood trickled from his nose.
His blade bled from the void.
The body of the possessed little boy lay on the stones, lifeless... but his shadow still walked, trembling, incandescent.
And behind it, the shape of a child with overlong arms prayed on his knees, in an invisible circle that no one had drawn.
Benjamin, panting, understood.
It wasn't an exorcism. It was a reminder.
The demon didn't want to leave.
It wanted to stay here.
And it was the child's own prayers that fed it.