Episode 4
1848 Words
SHATTERED FAITH — EPISODE 3: THE VEIN OF TRUTH
The Warrens breathed like a sick animal. Drip of rust-water. Scuttle of pale beetles. The moss-glow in Lyss’s chamber painted their faces in watery green.
Kaelen unrolled a stolen parchment—a sewer architect’s diagram. “Cathedral’s foundation connects to the old river conduit. Here.” His finger tapped a narrow channel labeled Filter Drainage Access. “It’s barred, but the grate is corroded. It empties into the sub-sanctum storeroom.”
Delilah studied the lines. “Guards?”
“Two at the sub-sanctum door during Feast preparations. They rotate every four hours.” He glanced at her. “The Cold-Source boy will be held in the Penitent’s Cell—here, near the geothermal vents. They’ll use the heat to keep his chill contained.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I guarded those cells for a year.” His voice was flat. “I stood there while priests ‘comforted’ prisoners with soft words that made them forget why they were angry.”
Lyss handed Delilah a ragged tunic and trousers. “Wear these. You look too clean.” Her lens whirred. “The nullification… can you control it? Or is it just… touch and reveal?”
Delilah flexed her fingers. “It responds to my will now. I can… press it outward. Or hold it back.” She thought of Kaelen’s hand in hers. She’d held back then—instinctively. Love as a dam.
“Good. Don’t nullify the guards unless you have to. A statue of a guard draws questions. A sleeping guard is just lazy.”
They moved through the Warrens’ arteries. The air grew warmer, wetter. The distant, discordant choir of the Cathedral’s evening practice seeped through the stones—a too-perfect harmony that made Delilah’s teeth ache.
In a low-ceilinged tunnel, Kaelen stopped. Ahead, the rusted grate. Beyond it, faint golden light.
He turned to her. “Once we’re in, there’s no quiet retreat. The Feast is tomorrow. They’ll be on high alert.”
“I know.”
He didn’t move. His grey eyes held hers. “Delilah. If something goes wrong—if they take me—you keep going. You get to the Lie. You touch it.”
“Don’t.”
“I need to say it. This isn’t about saving one boy. It’s about breaking the cage.” He cupped her face, his thumb brushing her cheek. A deliberate, gentle touch. “You are not a curse. You are the only true thing I’ve ever held.”
Her breath caught. She leaned into his hand. No give. No hollow resonance. Only warmth, callouses, certainty. She rose on her toes and kissed him.
It was not a soft kiss. It was a collision of truths—his integrity, her clarity, their shared rebellion. And as their lips met, something shifted.
Not in the world. In them.
A silent vibration passed between their skin, a resonance deeper than nullification. For a heartbeat, the moss-light seemed to brighten. The distant choir’s notes wavered, slipping briefly out of tune.
They broke apart, gasping.
“What was that?” Kaelen whispered.
Delilah stared at their hands, still intertwined. “I think… when truth touches truth… it doesn’t nullify.” She felt it humming in her veins. “It amplifies.”
Lyss’s lens clicked rapidly. “The Cracked’s abilities are solitary. But if two authentics align…” She shook her head. “Later. Move.”
---
The grate gave way with a muffled crack. They slid into a stone corridor smelling of incense and damp. The sub-sanctum storeroom was stacked with ceremonial robes, golden censers, jars of sacred oil.
Voices echoed outside the door. Two guards, complaining about overtime.
Kaelen mouthed, Now.
Delilah pressed her palm to the door. Not to nullify—to feel. She let her awareness seep through the wood, searching for the hollow resonance of falseness in the guards. She found it—a thin, weary emptiness in both. Not evil men. Just men who had long ago stopped believing in anything but their wages.
She focused, not on exposing the void, but on deepening the weariness. Letting the emptiness they already carried swell.
Outside, a yawn. Another. Mumbled agreement to sit for a moment. Then, the sound of sliding bodies against stone. Soft snoring.
Kaelen stared at her. “You put them to sleep?”
“I just… let their own emptiness hold them.”
He pushed the door open. The guards slumped against the wall, dreaming empty dreams.
They moved swift and silent through servant passages. The Cathedral’s interior was a breathtaking blasphemy—vaulted ceilings painted with scenes of blissful surrender, stained glass that turned sunlight into soporific hues. Delilah’s senses screamed. The hollowness here was a thrum, a constant, low-grade drone. The very stones felt like they were whispering, Forget, forget, forget.
The geothermal vents warmed the air as they descended. The Penitent’s Cell was a small niche behind an iron door. A single guard, older, with a face etched by real grief.
Kaelen stiffened. “Elran. He… lost a daughter to the Cracking. They told him she was ‘purified.’”
The guard’s eyes were not hollow. They were full—of pain, memory, and a lingering love that had resisted the Lie’s editing. Delilah felt it, a solid, aching mass in his chest.
She stepped out before Kaelen could stop her.
The guard startled, raising his pike. “Who—?”
“I’m here for the Cold-Source boy,” Delilah said softly.
“You’re the Thorne girl.” His eyes widened. “The Void.”
“Does your daughter still visit you in dreams, Elran?”
He flinched as if struck. “Don’t.”
“Does she sing the rhyme your wife taught her? ‘Ash and ember, remember, remember…’”
His pike trembled. “How do you know that?”
“Because the Lie hasn’t eaten everything. Not yet.” She took another step. “They told you she was purified. But you still feel her, don’t you? In the empty space at the table. In the too-quiet dawn.”
A tear traced the crease in his cheek. “They said remembering hurts the kingdom.”
“Maybe the kingdom deserves to hurt.”
He stood, shaking, for a long moment. Then he stepped aside. “The lock’s key is on the hook. Don’t… don’t make me watch.”
They unlocked the door. Inside, the Cold-Source boy sat chained to a warm pipe, shivering violently. Frost feathered the stones around him. His eyes were glazed with terror.
“We’re getting you out,” Kaelen said, working the manacles.
The boy stared at Delilah. “You’re the Truthsayer. I felt you coming. The cold… it pulled toward you. Like you’re a warmer truth.”
As Kaelen freed him, Delilah felt a sudden, violent tug in her chest. Not emotion. Something physical, metaphysical. A connection snapping taut.
She gasped, stumbling.
“What is it?” Kaelen caught her.
“Silas.” Her hand pressed over her heart. “He’s… using the void. He’s pulling on the piece of him still in me. The piece I nullified.”
---
Far away, in his study, Silas knelt before a mirror. His carved, nullified arm was now entirely grey, the runes pulsing with slow, hungry darkness. He had cut his other palm and let the blood drip onto the dead flesh. The blood did not bead. It was absorbed, swallowed into the void.
He spoke to the absence. “Daughter. I feel you. In the city of lies. Come home. Or I will carve the truth out of the world until nothing is left but what I allow.”
The void in his arm stretched, a filament of infinite nothingness, reaching across the miles toward the pulse of her presence.
---
In the cell, Delilah swayed, cold spreading from within. “He’s coming.”
Kaelen hauled the Cold-Source boy up. “We move. Now.”
They retraced their steps, but the Cathedral was stirring—a sudden increase in chanting, the clash of armored feet. An alarm had been raised.
As they reached the sub-sanctum, the main doors burst open. Not guards.
Inquisitors. Six of them. And at their front, Caius—Mirror-Bite. His mask reflected Delilah not as a void, but as a screaming, radiant crack in reality.
“The Thorne Void,” he intoned. “And the deserter. How fitting you die together.”
Delilah stepped forward, placing herself between him and Kaelen. “Your faith is a hollow thing, Caius. Let me show you.”
He lunged, talons outstretched.
But before Delilah could raise her hand, a wave of cold blasted past her. The Cold-Source boy had thrust out his palms, all his fear and pain unleashed. Frost exploded across the floor, crawling up the Inquisitors’ legs, freezing their armor to their skin.
Caius snarled, shattering the ice with a twist of his blessed gauntlet. But it bought seconds.
“Go!” the boy yelled, his nose bleeding from the effort. “I’ll hold them!”
Kaelen pulled Delilah toward the grate. She looked back, saw the boy surrounded, saw Caius raise a silver dagger aimed at the boy’s heart.
No.
She tore free of Kaelen’s grip, turned, and slammed her palm onto the Cathedral’s marble floor.
Not nullification.
Amplification.
She focused on the Cold-Source boy’s pain, his truth, his loyalty. She took the cold and made it real. The temperature plummeted. The very air crystallized. Caius’s dagger froze, then shattered. The Inquisitors cried out, their masks frosting over.
The boy stared at her, awestruck.
“Run with us!” she screamed.
He didn’t hesitate. They crashed back through the grate, into the Warrens’ dark safety, as behind them the Cathedral’s perfect, lying warmth fractured into sudden, honest winter.
---
Lyss listened, her lens unmoving. “You revealed a new power. And your father is now a compass pointing right at you.”
Delilah leaned against Kaelen, exhausted, the afterglow of amplification still buzzing in her bones. “We have until dawn. Until the Feast.”
Kaelen looked at the Cold-Source boy, who slept finally, no longer shivering. “We hurt them today. But tomorrow, they’ll have the Lie at its strongest. And Silas will be here.”
Delilah touched her chest, where the void-tether ached. “Then we don’t wait for dawn.” She looked up, her eyes clear, fierce. “We go to the Lie tonight. While they’re still reeling.”
“The defenses will be extreme,” Lyss said.
“I know.” Delilah took Kaelen’s hand. The resonance between them hummed, warm and solid. “But now we know—truth isn’t just a weapon. It’s a bridge. And I think… if we cross it together, we can reach the heart of the Lie before it reaches us.”
Outside, in the false night of the Spires, a new sound echoed—not a horn, but a deep, silent absence, swallowing the distant choir note by note.
Silas had arrived.
- Writer
