THE CODEX
EPISODE 12 — What Screams Between the Bones
> 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, inanimate... 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 nourished it.
---
> ...And in the silence, what had been invoked finally decided to walk. 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, the Tōsenji Temple was anything but a peaceful sanctuary. It had become an echo chamber for screams 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, which sounded nothing like human. He laughed in the middle of the night. He shouted things that no one dared to repeat.
The temple then called upon Benjamin Borax, a Western exorcist, sent specially 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 drowned. Do you want to remind me? You'll remember your real name."
The floor cracked around the futon. An ancient circle, sealed for centuries beneath the temple's wood, slowly revealed itself. The evil wasn't locked inside 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 dead.
A black, scaly arm emerged from his mouth. Then a face, eyeless, covered in moving 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."
---
He tried to stand. His legs refused. Each movement tore away a part of his memory.
He had forgotten the name of his first master.
Then the taste of fire.
Then how to pray.
The boy's shadow approached, swaying like an inverted flame.
It whispered, mouthless, voiceless:
— "You never wanted to save me. You wanted to be forgiven."
Benjamin stepped back.
A black circle formed around him—made of letters torn from the Codex itself.
They burned in the air, floating like ash.
And in the center… something ancient was forming.
> A formless figure.
A soundless howl.
A name without an alphabet.
He understood then that Hurald-Tha was not alone.
That he was never alone.
He was only a herald.
A finger reaching toward a greater horror.
Beneath the surface of the river, a thousand eyes opened.
The Codex, in the attic, began to bleed.
Not ink. Time.
Benjamin Borax forced a last breath from his parched throat and spoke a word he hadn't used in 14 years.
A word even the angels had forgotten.
The circle shattered. The world with it.
When he came to, he was in a room he didn't recognize.
Walls of salt.
Ceilings of bones.
And before him... an empty throne.
But beneath this throne...
A page.
Written in his own hand.
Or almost.