Vera Nightwhisper's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The ledger told me the face feeds, but not who it fed on. Names filled its pages. If I could find those people, maybe I could free them. And if I freed them, maybe the face would lose its grip on me too. So I asked you to walk with me again, this time to the old cathedral. A town keeps its dead in a church. We crossed under the wraiths in our cloth disguises. The cathedral rose ahead, its spires broken, its walls sagging. Purple light bled through its cracked windows. We climbed the steps and pushed through the door. Inside, dust covered everything. I searched the fallen shelves near the altar. My fingers found a book of records, its pages listing the town's dead. Beside each name someone had scratched two words: "face taken." The same names from the library ledger. These were the faces the crimson gaze had stolen. On the altar sat a candle. Its wax was dark, its flame steady and soft. The book called it blessed. I did not understand why my hands reached for it, only that they did. I lifted it, and the flame did not flicker in the cold air. "We take this," I said. "I don't know what it does. But nothing here is left by accident." We stepped back into the street. A wraith drifted toward us, hooded and slow. My hands went cold out of habit. Then I raised the candle without thinking. The light touched the wraith. Its hood fell open. For one breath I saw a face inside the empty dark. A woman's face, thin and frightened. Then it was gone, and the hood hung empty again. But I had seen it. I whispered a name from the record book, and the wraith stopped moving. It knew its own name. I understood then. The wraiths were not guards. They were the stolen. Every faceless shape drifting through Sleepymire had once been a person the gaze had emptied. I turned the light toward the far wall. A twisted shape stood there, half wood, half body, branches growing from its shoulders. It did not move. The candle showed a face buried deep in the bark, mouth open, eyes shut. Some of the taken had not stayed wraiths at all. They had rooted into the ground and become almost-trees. I lowered the candle. My chest ached. "They're all still here," I said. "All of them, inside these shapes. The gaze didn't kill them. It hollowed them and left them to drift." You looked at me, waiting. "I wanted to free them," I said. "But look at them. The one turned to wood can't even speak. I don't know how to give a face back." I held the candle tight. "Now I know who they are. That's worse. Because now I can't pretend the gaze only took me. And I still don't know how to undo any of it."