A massive hand breaks through the shattered window, grabbing the wall. The arm is slim and tight, full of muscle and bleeding crimson. The arm has no skin, showing every vein and bulging artery. Three more arms emerge from the fog, latching onto the wall like the first, its rough hands clenching onto the wood.
The arms pull their main body from the leaking fog. It drags itself through the window—a devilish combination of a spider and a human—four legs land inside, arriving before the torso. All the limbs lack any sort of skin, with blood leaking through their fibers. A face with a nose, or lips. Its eyes are not locked in its sockets, simply hanging, only tethered by thin strands of flesh.
The Somata snarls, the drooping eyes snapping towards me, slowly swinging. The torso escapes from the fog, revealing guts and organs, beating and moving, wriggling around, switching places with other entrails. Every limb is grafted into the torso, blood leaking from the hastily made stitches. The Somata has a face, a face of the damned.
The Inquisitor doesn't even glance at the Somata. He keeps his gaze on me, waiting. "Boy," he says. "Answer me, where is your mother?"
I don't reply; my attention is locked onto the hellish Somata. The dread from before is holding my neck, slowly squeezing as realization finally hits me. The moon has risen. And as the Matriarch said, her children will come for me. They will hunt me.
I feel a slight prickling sensation in the skin around my neck. It's not pain, but irritation, coming from the struggling dread. My breath becomes heavy as my eyes shift for anything to use as a weapon. I grab the silver knife, wrapping my fingers, and bring it up toward—
The Inquisitor's hand snaps to my wrist, constricting my movement. He presses some vein, causing me to lose feeling in my hand, dropping the knife onto the floorboards. "You don't need that," he says. But my eyes snap to Somata, only halfway through the room, moving towards me.
I look at the Inquisitor, and his eyes are calm. There's no pressure or the same sense of dread that's consuming me in him. "Answer me, boy. Ignore the beast behind me, and answer my question."
He can see the Somata. He knows it's there?
The Inquisitor grasps my face, forcing me to gaze into his irises. Then, I understand his words and answer him truthfully. "My mother is dead," I tell him.
The Inquisitor slowly lowers his head in disappointment, slowly shaking. He turns toward the Somata, and the golden-white aura brightens for two moments before disappearing altogether.
The Somata is a yard away from the Inquisitor and me, combersumly moving toward us. It suddenly stops as the wood in the room begins to creak. It listens as if it's wondering what the Inquisitor is doing, like I am.
On the floor beside the knife I dropped, light suddenly appears. It forms a symbol: the sigil of a triangle over an eye within a circle, wreathed by two crossed swords. Another appears an inch from the first. The two symbols begin to ooze a radiant light, rising from the floorboards, the symbols rising with it.
They float at eye level, the light still pouring. The symbols begin to whirl around one another, making revolution after revolution, as the space between them slowly disappears, and the two crash into each other, coalescing into one ball of light, two colors mixed—one white and one gold. The gold part shines as the white part dims, and the two parts separate into two streams, each creating different spheres of gold and white. The Inquisitor shifts his hand under the spheres, lifting them.
"You never needed that crude knife," the words leave the Inquisitor in a bush tone. He turns around, watching the howling Somata move uncoordinatedly toward us.
The Inquisitor slaps his two hands together, smushing the orbs as he bows his head and prays: "Interceder, hear my words, mark them as you tell the Saints. May this creature of darkness be washed by my faith. I pray for this corrupted soul, whose body was mashed and turned into something unholy, and free him from this torment."
The Somata is a few feet away from the Inquisitor. After his prayer, the Inquisitor lifts his head and begins to move his hands as light grows brilliantly through his fingers. He moves his hand forward, fingertips to palm, and pinches the two spheres, placing them between the two middle fingers while letting the light escape.
The light coverages into one. The Inquisitor pulls on the light, stretching it back to his shoulder, where it transforms into an arrow. The Inquisitor's stance generates a golden-white aura only in the area where the arrow is held, and it's a… the Inquisitor's aura forms into a bow—finally, the bow snaps, and the arrow of light fires.
The sudden flash eclipses the world, and the arrow pierces through the demented face of the Somata, unaware of what occurred, its gaze still upon me.
It halts in its course as the stitches at its limbs begin to unravel. Soon the limbs drop from the torso, turning into… dust? They turn into dust before hitting the ground.
The Inquisitor strolls next to the dust-transforming Somata, cupping its chin solemnly.
"Poor soul," he says. "May you travel safely through the Veil."
After his words, light pours from the Somata's torso as the rest of it turns into dust. What stands in its place are three translucent children—all young boys who never saw past ten winters.
They smile, waving the Inquisitor goodbye. Then, they wave to me before disappearing.
Thunder roars through the air, breaching the room as the lightning flashes by.
"What…? What was that?" I ask.
The Inquisitor turns around and smiles. "It's the duty of an Inquisitor, no matter the rank, to free a lamb of the Saints from internal damnation."
The sense of dread that choked me is gone. I'm free of that irritable sensation.
He strides towards me, laying a hand on my shoulder. "Your mother is dead, you say?"
I nod yes.
"How rare," the Inquisitor responds. "A Seer telling the truth. Truthfully, a rare occurrence."
He pats my shoulder twice before gently lifting me from my chair. "Never did I think I'd live to see the day to see a Seer. I believed that your kind was all gone. But now, you're here in the flesh. Truly, a miracle from the venerable Saints."
I shake my head; I have so many questions about what I saw and what the Inquisitor is saying. "What do you mean?"
"What I mean, young Cole, is that here, no Somata shall touch. I swear it on the Saints. No beast or creature of the night shall bring you harm. Not even another Inquisitor or one of those genocidal Duantless could ever touch you as long as I am here. You are safe with me."
Dauntless? Is he talking about Ikaris? "Dauntless?" I repeat.
"Oh, your kind must have another name for those things. I always wondered what you called them. You must know of them. They're the purgers of Seers."