>>6187551Idly shaking blood from your hand, you peer around the pillar to see your father striding through the chamber. He opens his revolver and dumps out the spent cartridges, casually loading fresh cartridges into the gun. Whenever he passes a fallen body he gives it a sharp kick, as if making sure that they’re all really dead.
“Care to tell me what that was all about?” you demand, gesturing all around you. The chamber is a slaughterhouse, blood and shredded viscera splattered all across the ancient stone. Just the smell of it is making you dizzy, nauseous, and you can hear… you’d swear you can hear the flapping of wings.
“What do you mean?” he replies casually, as if he had been taking a stroll through the woods rather than gunning down hapless cultists. A low groan interrupts your response, and you glance around to see the man you stabbed. Not quite dead yet, he has dragged himself partways towards the white stone slab he had been worshipping. Your father doesn’t hesitate, swiftly marching across and planting a heavy boot on the wounded cultist’s back. You grimace as he raises the revolver, but you don’t allow yourself the luxury of looking away as he pulls the trigger, blowing the wounded man’s head into so many bloody fragments.
Without a second thought, your father walks around the spreading pool of blood and starts to examine the white stone. Nodding with a grim satisfaction, he gestures for you to approach. You move carefully, lifting the hem of your long skirt to keep it from being befouled. Mounted to the stone pillar is a slab of older stone, carved to depict some kind of city set against a swirling vortex of stars.
“I need you to take a look at this. Study it closely,” your father orders, “It will provide guidance.”
Giving him a fleeting sneer, you look closely at the white stone slab. You don’t see anything particularly special about it at first, aside from the fantastical image it displays, but the longer you stare at it…
The longer you stare at it, the more it seems to move. The stars seem to twist and writhe, churning like a whirlpool that threatens to pull you in and swallow you whole. In the distant back of your mind, a shrill voice of panic starts to wonder if you’d be able to look away, even if you wanted to. That voice is soon drowned out by other voices, and again the flapping of wings. Louder and louder, until-
-
“Until what?” you ask, leaning forwards as Gratia’s tale reaches a pause.
She hesitates for a second, then shrugs. “I don’t know. Father told me that I fainted, although I gather that I gave him some kind of prophecy before I lost consciousness,” she answers, “He never told me what I said, no matter how many times I asked. That was one secret that he took to his grave.”
“But…” she adds as an afterthought, “I don’t think it was what he wanted to hear.”
[2]
