Chereads / Divina Commedia: The Architect of Ain Soph / Chapter 23 - Desecrated Sanctity

Chapter 23 - Desecrated Sanctity

Dawn crept through the manor's shattered windows like watery blood seeping across shattered glass.

A cold, sickly half-light that only served to accentuate the ruin and blight encroaching from every shadowed corner.

One by one, the drained souls stirred into wakefulness, blinking and grimacing as the previous night's horrific memories came seeping back.

Groans and muttered curses rippled through the makeshift communal nest they'd huddled together in for what meager comfort and safety it provided.

Genesis observed it all from where he stood, arms folded over his chest so tightly it was a wonder the cassock didn't simply tear apart at the seams.

His jaw worked slowly from side to side as he ground his teeth in silence, pale eyes studying each member of his dwindling flock with an intensity that should've scorched them down to cinders.

As the last few stragglers dragged themselves upright with bone-cracking stretches and wordless grunts, the priest seemed to inhale a fortifying breath that made his entire frame expand fractionally.

When he spoke, it lashed across the chamber with a whip-crack of righteous authority that snapped every head in his direction.

"Brothers, sisters..." Another pause as he clasped his hands together in a decidedly perfunctory gesture of benediction. "I see the demons had their sport with your rest, tormenting you throughout the night's dark reign."

A few uneasy titters and shifty sideways glances greeted that grim opener.

Genesis merely narrowed his stare to piercing slits, letting the hush reconvene before he continued in a tone that brokered precisely zero dissent.

"But here you all remain, the Lord's favored warriors bruised yet unbroken on the field of battle." One broad sweep of his arm indicated their rumpled, bedraggled state to drive the point home with silent accusation.

"You could've fled, sided with the alluring evil, and abandoned this righteous calling." Genesis began pacing before them in a slow, measured tread, fingers steepled below his chin while he held them all utterly transfixed.

"But you did not. You girded your loins and your souls against the demonic onslaught and weathered it as the faithful should - with backbones of righteousness and iron-shod wills."

Gravitas seemed to radiate off him in smothering waves with each prowling step.

This wasn't a man of God offering cheap platitudes to coddle the fearful - this was a battle-hardened commander steeling his troops to charge into fresh horror.

"Our path grows only steeper from here, my soldiers.

More depraved tests shall be thrown against our convictions with relentless fervor.

But I have borne witness to your unwavering spirit in the face of evil's most grotesque provocations.

So long as you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with me, our righteous fire shall burn brighter than any sacrilege the night can vomit forth to assail us."

By now, Genesis had worked his way to the hall's crumbling hearth, one fist clenched against the soot-stained masonry as though taking grim sustenance from its solid implacability.

The other hand remained extended in their direction like a steadying anchor, his voice growing deeper and more resonant with a conviction that reverberated off the high ceilings.

"The Lord tests us all, this I know beyond any doubt.

Casts us into the scorching crucibles where our faith is smelted to burning clarity until only the pure steel core remains."

That piercing stare settled on them again, flaying them of any last vestiges of false bravado or thinly veiled cowardice.

"So I put this to you plainly here and now, my wretched brethren: Are you bolts of steel forged to drive back the invading darkness, no matter the sacrifices or depravities demanded of you?"

He paused a moment, letting that sobering question hang in the air like a dare, a challenge to their very souls' worthiness.

Then Genesis whipped his hand back, snatching a heavy leather-bound Bible from the folds of his cassock in one fluid motion.

"Because the Word itself makes plain the path for any ardent enough to walk it.

Do you heed its wisdom, no matter how bitter the draught?"

With a deft flick of his wrist, Genesis snapped the ancient tome open to its well-creased center and plucked a single verse from its hallowed pages to recite with all the solemn gravity once reserved for the delivering of iron-wrought death sentences.

"'As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job's perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.'"

Another slap of the Bible's spine against his palm punctuated that recitation with a crisp report. Genesis's smoldering stare seemed to bore directly into their souls from across the chamber's guttering shadows.

"Well? Shall you taste the wages of that promised mercy and blessing? Or spit them back into the void's gaping maw like cringing cowards?"

A tense beat passed, as thick and cloying as the pall of dust motes swirling in the feeble morning light. Then, one by one, spines straightened, shoulders squared, eyes hardened into flinty resolve.

Genesis allowed himself the barest ghost of an approving nod as his flock gradually regained their footing like a pride of lions shaking off deep slumber for the hunt.

With a flourish, he brandished the Bible once more, every word a razor-edged promise.

"Then so be it, you righteous few. Let the clarion call of perseverance be your battle hymn against all who would subjugate our sacred soil to their profane trespasses."

Spinning on his heel, Genesis clutched the tome to his chest with white-knuckle intensity.

As he strode for the exit with crisp, measured purpose, his parting edict lashed their spines into ramrod stiffness.

"So gird your souls and do not falter, my blessed warriors. For only through unflinching resilience against the coming storm will we lay claim to what the Word has promised."

The shadows seemed to peel back from Genesis's implacable form as he neared the exit. Just before crossing the threshold into the manor's decaying bowels, he paused and half-turned, fixing them all with a stare that mingled rapture and terrifying grim determination in equal measure.

"Whether deliverance..." he intoned with sepulchral finality. "...or the complete and utter ruination of all who defy the Lord's ascendant truth."

"Now brothers and sisters, stay put and mind the coop." Genesis's gravelly rumble cut through their murmurs like a dull hatchet. "I'm headed down to make peace with the dead, and pray for them in the basement."

A few uneasy titters and shuffles greeted his pronouncement, but no one dared speak up, let alone bar his path to the shadowed basement stairs.

Genesis leveled them all with one final sweeping glare of condemnation." I expect you to stay nice and put for once.

No more wandering off like lost lambs for the wolves."

With that parting shot delivered and a dismissive flick of his wrist, the priest turned on his heel and started that measured descent into the dank subterranean catacomb-like basement below.

As the all-consuming blackness swallowed him whole, Genesis paused to drag one weathered thumb across his pursed lips.

"I hope they stay safe." His whispered utterance drifted back on a waft of stale air, thick with ancient dust and the musty tang of grave rot.

By the time he reached the bottom, he had a feeling that something was off...

Across the basement's uneven floor sprawled the communal cemetery he'd dug and consecrated in preparation for this spiraling horror's first batch of departed souls.

Plain earth beds with scavenged stone markers as the only indication of the unholy sacrifices claimed by the Joker's depraved machinations.

Only now, to his surprise, those caskets and tombs stood savaged and empty - hastily dug up, the precious cargo within pilfered and despoiled.

Not a single body left to slumber in the fragile peace Genesis had hoped to offer.

His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists so tight he could feel the cassock's fabric groaning in protest.

Whoever the hell responsible for this fresh blasphemy had better start accumulating what few earthly possessions they held dear...

"Because soon enough," Genesis growled through gritted teeth, "I'll be sending them off empty-handed to the afterlife as well."

The candles surrounding his sacrosanct clearing flared wildly, as if whipped by some silent, disembodied wind.

Genesis spun in a slow, narrowed circle, senses attuned to even the faintest hint of unnatural movement in the spectral murk surrounding him.

Nothing, just that endless, whispering susurration filling his ears like an unholy tide.

But then, off to his left, the faintest disturbance - nothing more than a shadow slightly denser than the others merging into being.

Even as his muscles tensed in preparation for attack or defense, the amorphous shape resolved itself into something far worse than any hulking fiend or unholy leviathan.

It was merely Hosea, that same predatory elegance and casual arrogance painting her every measured step and movement through the sepulchral gloom.

"You..." Genesis felt the sibilant syllable slip through his clenched jaw like poison gas. "I should have known this fresh butchery belonged to your hands..."

With a derisive snort, Hosea stepped fully into the circle of candlelight, her ceremonial garb simmering like a coal ripped from the forge's molten heart.

Those crimson lips curled into a cruel approximation of a smile utterly devoid of humor or warmth.

"What's wrong, Genesis?" Dark laughter spilled from her like a lascivious taunt. "Disappointed your new bestie turned out to be not so righteous after all?"

Swaying closer with the lithe, hypnotic grace of a cobra readying to strike, Hosea locked her gaze with his.

Up close, Genesis could all too easily make out the flecks of dried blood stippling the white skin of her throat and collarbones.

"Don't look so stricken, my misguided shepherd," she purred in undisguised delight. "You had your suspicions from the very beginning that not all was as it seemed, did you not?"

Genesis opened his mouth to retort, but Hosea cut him off by languidly tracing one long, elegant finger over her parted lips in a silencing gesture.

"Shhh..." She held that contemptuous pose for a beat too long before dropping the hand to drift across her abdomen in a lewd parody of a lover's caress. "I know that look all too well - the sanctimonious realization dawning in those pious eyes at last."

Jaw clenched to sawing rigidity, Genesis tried to take a measured half-step back, putting some much-needed space between them before he did something regrettable.

But Hosea mirrored his retreat, that crimson gaze never wavering as her wicked smile broadened.

"Yes, that's right...you finally comprehend the depths of my devotion, don't you?" Another low, throaty chuckle, somehow far more chilling than any scream. "I walk the only true path free from your antiquated delusions of righteousness."

One more predatory prowl brought her nearly chest-to-chest with Genesis, so close he could make out every minute detail seared into her flawless features - that constellation of freckles, the subtle curve of her bee-stung lips, even the faint tracery of darkness lurking behind the ruby gleam of her irises.

Like gazing into the shattered remains of a drop-dead gorgeous succubus, one whose seductive charms disguised a whirling vortex capable of annihilating souls on contact.

"I am the Joker, Genesis." She breathed the words like a prayer uttered against his very skin, rancid with unholy rapture. "The favored child and high priestess of the Joy Demon Itself. And you, my poor, blind fool..."

Suddenly, her hand whipped out, fingers tangling in his ginger locks to yank his head back at a brutal angle before he realized what was happening.

That angelic facade twisted into something far more monstrous as she leaned in mere inches from his bared throat, every word dripping with sulfurous finality.

"You're about to become my latest sacrifice to usher in its ecstatic rebirth."

The last thing Genesis saw was that ruby amulet, now glowing like the very heart of a raging furnace, before it swung down and everything dissolved into crackling oblivion.

Some endless eternity later, he regained consciousness just long enough to register the searing agony radiating from the crude sword buried deep in his midsection, pinning him spread-eagle to the flagstone floor.

Every rattling, shallow exhale sent fresh gouts of blood bubbling up from the grievous wound.

Above him, Hosea's face drifted into his darkening field of view, twisted into a disturbing rictus grin from one corner of her mouth all the way across to the other side of her jaw.

The wheezing groan that escaped Genesis then seemed to please her, drawing a dark chuckle that shuddered through her entire frame.

A cold wave of nausea roiled through Genesis's battered form.

As the world crumbled to ash around him, a fluttering whisper caressed Genesis's awareness like the silken brush of death's beckoning wings: "Riddle me this, little lost lambs..."