Chiara’s words, sharp and final, hung in the air, the scent of dust and old paper clinging to them like an accusation. Renzo met her gaze, the usual lightheartedness in his eyes dimming, replaced by a complex, almost ancient sorrow. He understood her fear, even the possessiveness that tightened her mouth. It was the same instinct that made him push others away, a quiet desperation to protect a fragile, new existence he hadn’t known he craved. The mortuary, usually a place of quiet processing, felt suddenly small, suffocating under the weight of her demand. “Chiara,” he started, his voice softer than usual, “I’m not trying to impress anyone. This isn’t a game.” He reached out, his hand hovering, then falling away. “I just… I feel it. This locket.” He pulled the tarnished silver disk from his pocket, the one the Matriarch had given him. It pulsed with a faint warmth against his palm, a barely perceptible thrum that no one else could sense. “It calls to something, something familiar.” Her jaw worked, her lips pressed into a thin line. “Familiarity is how they trap you, Renzo. This world is a tangle of old snares. Leave it be.” She turned, walking to the room’s single window, her silhouette framed by the grimy glass. “It’s my lineage’s burden. Always has been. The Damphyr hunts the aberrant, the parasites that tear at the fabric of existence. The quiet one is the worst among them.” Her shoulders stayed locked square, straight as an iron rod. He watched her, a knot forming in his chest. She was magnificent in her conviction, a fierce, unwavering light against the encroaching shadow. But he couldn’t stand by. Not when his own fragmented memories resonated with the very threat she faced. Not when the Matriarch’s warning, ‘You have more than one soul,’ echoed in his mind, tying him directly to the creature. He needed answers, and the medallion, warm and insistent, was the only lead he had. Renzo spent the better part of the night in the mortuary’s embalming room, the pendant gripped in his palm. The air here was thick with residual grief, the phantom echoes of lives cut short. He didn’t try to absorb it directly, not tonight. Instead, he channeled his focus, pouring his nascent spiritual energy into the talisman, trying to amplify its subtle call. The metal grew warmer, the thrum a little stronger, tugging him towards the older districts of the city. By dawn, he knew where he had to go. An abandoned cathedral, tucked away in a neglected corner of the Vecchio Quartiere, the Old Quarter. Its spires, once soaring, now crumbled, scarred by time and neglect. It was a place where faith had once burned brightly, a beacon of human belief, now reduced to embers. The perfect hunting ground for something that consumed memory and essence. He arrived under a sky bruised purple and grey, the air heavy with the promise of rain. The cathedral’s grand doors hung ajar, groaning on rusted hinges. Inside, the vast nave was a mausoleum of broken dreams. Dust motes danced in the slivers of light piercing the stained-glass windows, depicting forgotten saints with vacant, chipped faces. Pews lay overturned, prayer books scattered like forgotten leaves, their pages brittle with age. The metal vibrated steadily now, a quiet pulse against his skin, leading him deeper, past the ruined altar, towards a side chapel. There, amidst the rubble of a collapsed confessional booth, a figure moved. A woman, her form slender, her movements precise. She wore simple, dark clothing, but her posture held an almost regal stillness, even as she sifted through a pile of fallen masonry. As she turned, her eyes, the colour of jade, met his. Recognition, stark and sudden, flashed between them. “Renzo?” Her voice came low, raspy as if unused. She looked older than him, perhaps in her late thirties, but a weary wisdom etched around her eyes spoke of far more than just years. “You remember.” He felt a surge of something akin to joy, a fierce, protective instinct he hadn't known he possessed. Another cultivator, a sliver of his old life. “Alessia,” he breathed, the name surfacing from a world he still couldn’t fully grasp. “You survived.” He took a step forward, a genuine smile, unburdened by his usual feigned ditzy charm, spreading across his face. Before he could take another, a shadow detached itself from the deeper gloom near the chapel’s collapsed ceiling. It wasn't merely a lack of light; it was a hungry darkness, a void that drank the ambient illumination, making the very air around it feel colder, thinner. It coalesced, shifting and reforming, an impossible geometry of despair. Murmurs rose in the dark, a chorus of forgotten names, of desperate pleas, of fractured memories. Her face hardened, her green eyes narrowing. “No,” she hissed, pulling a shard of ornate, glowing glass from her belt. “It tracked me.” She shoved Renzo back with surprising force. “Run, Zenthos! It’s after *you*!” The dark presence surged, expanding, taking on a vaguely humanoid shape, taller than any man, its form flickering like a dying flame. It had no discernible features, only a swirling maelstrom where a face should be, yet Renzo felt an unnerving, intimate connection to it. As it solidified, brief, flickering images appeared within its depths – a scholar bent over yellowed scrolls, a warrior wielding a glowing blade, a serene figure meditating beneath a celestial tree. Remnants of power, shards of memory. Then, for a terrifying instant, his own face shimmered within the chaotic vortex, a younger, sterner version of himself, overlaid with an alien malevolence. His stomach dropped. A cold dread seeped into his bones, far deeper than any fear he had known. The muttering sharpened, coalescing into a single, resonant voice that tore through his mind, a voice that was undeniably his own, yet corrupted. *“An echo. A fragmented will. This form… it is weak.”* Alessia screamed, a sound of fury and pain, and threw the glowing glass shard. It struck the shadowy form, not piercing it, but causing a momentary disruption, a ripple through its shifting mass. “It’s *him*, Renzo!” she yelled, her voice strained. “That horror… it’s what’s left of Zenthos! Your own belief in your legendary power, twisted by this city's faith, given form! It consumes other souls to remember what it was, what *you* were!” The revelation struck Renzo like a physical blow. The monster consuming cultivators and timeless supernaturals… was *him*. A perversion of his own past, a dark mirror reflecting the power he had once wielded, now turned against him. The shadow creature roared, a soundless scream that vibrated in Renzo’s very bones, and lashed out with a tendril of darkness. Alessia intercepted it, a shimmering barrier of pale light erupting from her hands. It held for a moment, then fractured under the entity’s relentless assault. She stumbled, a gasp tearing from her lips. “It tries to reclaim its other half!” she cried, her body starting to glow with an intense, pale-blue light, like moonlight caught in ice. Her eyes locked with Renzo’s, a profound sadness mingling with a fierce determination. “I cannot let it. Not yet. Live, Zenthos. Remember.” With a final, desperate surge of power, she unleashed a brilliant, blinding pulse of energy. It ripped through the chapel, tearing at the fabric of the shadows. The creature shrieked, a cacophony of stolen voices, recoiling as if struck by a physical force. The connection, the invisible tether Renzo had felt to the apparition, snapped. Alessia’s body, now almost translucent, dissolved into a shower of pale motes, her essence dissipating into the broken flagstones of the cathedral. The shade, weakened and furious, its form still flickering, turned its full, malevolent attention on Renzo. The swirling darkness where its face should be seemed to focus, condensing into an imitation of his own features, twisted into a snarl of pure rage. The drone, now a singular, chilling tone, echoed his own, yet was devoid of any warmth, any humanity. It was the voice of a predator, of a thing that sought only to consume. “You are an imperfect copy. You will be unmade.”

Cathedral of Forgotten Saints