Edmund Harrow's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Edmund walked toward town with the locket still hanging in his mind. The sheriff would listen, but words wouldn't be enough. He needed proof that the cult leader hadn't just invented a con. He needed to show that the temple itself was older than the fraud, that something darker had been here first. He circled back through the marsh instead of following the road. The temple sat on a raised patch of dry ground, but behind it the water spread out in shallow pools. Edmund had focused on the floorboards and the transmitter during his first visits. He'd never walked the perimeter. Fifty yards past the back wall, he found what remained of a stone marker rising from the mud. The obelisk stood taller than him, cracked down the middle and covered in moss. He scraped away the green growth with his pocket knife. Symbols carved deep into the stone appeared beneath — not letters, but interlocking patterns that repeated down each face. At the base, someone had chiseled words in English: offerings made here 1847. The temple was seventy years older than the cult leader. Someone else had built this place to appease something, long before the charlatan arrived. Edmund pushed through the cattails toward the temple's foundation. The back wall had collapsed inward, exposing the interior from a different angle. Inside, half-buried in mud and broken boards, sat a stone box. He climbed through the gap and crouched beside it. The sarcophagus was smaller than a coffin, its lid carved with the same symbols from the obelisk. Water had pooled inside when the lid cracked. He could see bones floating beneath the surface — small ones, arranged in a circle. Around the outer edge of the box, more words: feed the water its due. Edmund's hands went cold. This wasn't a temple for grief. It was a place built to give something what it wanted. The cult leader had found it empty and repurposed it, but the original builders had meant it for something else entirely. He photographed the obelisk and the sarcophagus with the camera he'd borrowed from the boarding house. Inside the temple, beneath years of rot and moss, he found the lectern the original builders had used. Its pages were swollen and illegible, but the gilt letters on the backing board were still visible: Levold. A family name, maybe, or the name of whatever they'd been trying to please. Edmund gathered his evidence and walked back to town. The cult leader was a fraud, but he'd chosen his stage carefully. The temple had always been a place where desperate people came to bargain with death. The charlatan had just changed the terms. Now Edmund had proof the lie went deeper than one man's greed — and that made it harder to explain, but impossible to ignore.