Memoria Coalesce's Arc

Chapter 4 of 2

Memoria stood before the stitched bone door. The ritualist waited inside. She had followed his blood to this room, but she had nothing to fight him with. If she opened the door, he could split her open again with a word. She pressed her hand to her ribs and felt the child hold still, waiting. "We can't just walk in," Ellie said. She stared at the door with her black, weeping eyes. "He made me this way. He made all of us. He only needs to look at you." A new voice cut in from the dark hall behind them. "Then don't let him look first." A small hooded figure stepped forward. Broken horns rose from his hood. A long black scratch ran down his pale face. He carried a coil of iron thread and a pouch of salt, and he moved without fear. This was Lucian, a spirit hunter. Memoria had never met him, but she knew the look of someone who killed things like the ritualist for a living. "Who are you," Theyla said. Blood dripped from her hollow eyes. Her voice held a knife's edge. "Lucian. I trap spirits." He knelt and poured salt in a wide ring before the door. "He's a spirit now. Not a man. I've bound worse." He threaded iron through the salt in a tight circle. "Three things. Salt. Iron. His name carved on something he touched. All three, or nothing." Memoria remembered the walls. "His victims' names are cut into the bone out front," she said. "But not his." Lucian looked at her ribs. "He touched you. He touched all of you." He drew a horn shard and a small blade from his robe. "Say the room where he worked last. The freshest name. That's his mark on the world." Ellie whispered the wet name she had read on the wall. Lucian scratched it into the shard, then pressed the shard against the door where the ritualist's hand had left a smear of red. The door groaned. It swung inward on its own. The ritualist stood among blue flame faces that grinned and flickered on the walls. He lifted a hand toward Memoria. Her ribs cracked. The child screamed inside her. "Stay," Memoria gasped. "I'm wrapped around you. I won't let go." The crack held. She did not split. Lucian threw the last of the salt. The ring closed. Iron thread snapped tight around the ritualist's feet. He pulled, and could not move. His mouth opened but no word came out. The salt drank it. Theyla walked into the ring and looked at him bound and silent. "Now you can't do anything," she said. He was caught. He could not split anyone again. But bound was not dead, and he still held the ritual that stitched their names into stolen bodies. To free the missing, they needed the words to undo it. And only he knew them.