(As recounted by Aurelio)
The old man's eyes grew distant, as if hearing the echo of distant waves. "There are places in this world that feel wrong. Where the air is too still, and the silence has a weight to it. The Sunken Cathedral was such a place. It was not a sanctuary. It was a tomb for the mind."
He opened Gerald's journal to a page dominated by a sketch of a gaping, dark cave mouth, the rocks above it shaped like a screaming face.
"Gerald, ever the poet, called it 'The Throat of the Abyss.' For once, his flair for the dramatic was justified."
---
— Memory —
The journey south was a silent, grim affair. They moved like ghosts, avoiding roads and villages, living off the land. The camaraderie of the river was a distant memory, replaced by the shared, heavy burden of survival. Benito's head wound festered, and a fever set in, forcing them to move slower, the man's delirious mumblings a constant, grim soundtrack.
When they finally reached the coast, the sight that greeted them was not of a fortress, but of a wound in the earth.
The "Sunken Cathedral" was a fissure in the cliff face, half-submerged by the churning grey sea. The entrance was a natural arch of stone, but the rock had been carved—subtly, horrifyingly—into the visage of a agonized saint, his mouth the cavern's maw. The air around it was cold, and the constant roar of the surf was swallowed into a deep, unnerving silence just beyond the entrance.
"No guards," Riccio whispered, nocking an arrow, his eyes scanning the cliffs.
"They do not need guards," Liam replied, his voice barely audible. His hand rested on the hilt of his sword, his knuckles white. "The place itself is the warden."
Gerald hefted his axe, his face a mask of grim determination. "I like this not. It smells of sorcery and deep water."
"Giovanni's orders stand," Aurelio said, his own dread a cold stone in his gut. His pre-cognitive gift was screaming at him, a constant, low-level panic that made his skin crawl. "Liam, Riccio, with me. Gerald, you stay with Benito here. If we are not back by dawn, or if you hear fighting… get him away from here. That's an order."
Gerald looked as if he wanted to argue, but a moan from Benito decided him. He gave a sharp, reluctant nod.
The three of them slipped into the darkness.
Inside, the silence was absolute. The roar of the ocean vanished, replaced by a damp, dripping quiet that seemed to press in on their eardrums. The cavern was not natural. The walls were smoothed, etched with more of the same strange, spiraling patterns they had seen on the golden serpent rings. A faint, phosphorescent moss provided a sickly green glow, illuminating a downward-sloping tunnel.
They moved with painstaking slowness. The air grew colder, carrying a strange, metallic scent, like old blood and ozone.
Then, they heard it. A sound that froze the blood in their veins.
It was not a scream. It was a chorus of them. Dozens of voices, raised not in pain, but in a monotonous, chanting drone. The words were indistinct, but the rhythm was hypnotic, maddening. It was the sound of souls being systematically erased.
Liam held up a hand, pointing ahead where the tunnel opened into a larger chamber. They crept to the edge and peered over.
The chamber was vast, a natural cathedral whose ceiling was lost in gloom. And in the center, surrounded by robed Cabal acolytes, was a sight that would haunt Aurelio's dreams for decades.
People—perhaps two dozen—sat on the stone floor, their faces slack, their eyes vacant. They were the "hostages." But they were not prisoners in cells. They were being… processed. Before each of them stood a Cabal operative, holding a golden serpent ring before their unblinking eyes. The rings pulsed with a soft, malevolent light, and with each pulse, the captive would twitch, a fragment of memory or emotion seemingly siphoned away, joining the droning chorus.
"Mother of God," Riccio breathed, his face pale. "They are not just holding them. They are… emptying them."
Aurelio's gaze was drawn to the far wall. There, shackled to the stone, were three figures who were different. They were not docile. They strained against their bonds, their bodies taut, their eyes burning with a feral, silver light. Their mouths were open in silent, endless screams.
Echo-Walkers. In the making.
One of them, a woman with matted hair, suddenly shrieked, a psychic blast of pure agony that shattered the monotonous drone. An acolyte calmly approached and pressed his serpent ring to her forehead. The woman convulsed violently, then slumped, her eyes dimming, the silver light fading back to vacant submission.
"They are breaking them," Liam said, his voice thick with a cold, clean fury Aurelio had never heard in him before. "Breaking their will to fill them with… something else."
Aurelio's mind raced, connecting the horrific dots. The intelligence, the "psychic conditioning," the weaponization of Echoes. This was the factory. This was where the Cabal forged its most terrible weapons from the raw material of human souls.
He looked at the scroll in his mind's eye. Destroy if possible.
It was not possible. They were three men against a hive of fanatics and their psychic thralls. But they could not leave.
His eyes met Liam's, then Riccio's. A silent understanding passed between them. They could not save these people. But they could grant them a mercy.
Aurelio pointed to Riccio, then to a cluster of barrels and sacks near the chamber's edge—supplies, perhaps lamp oil. Then he pointed to Liam and himself, and made a cutting motion across his throat, pointing at the two acolytes leading the chanting.
It was a suicide mission. They all knew it.
Riccio nodded, his young face set in a grim mask of acceptance. He melted back into the shadows to find a vantage point.
Aurelio drew his sword. The faint shing of steel was the loudest sound in the chamber.
The chanting stopped.
Every vacant face, every acolyte, turned in unison towards the sound.
And in the sudden, absolute silence, a new voice spoke, smooth as oiled silk, from the shadows above.
"We have been expecting you," said Cardinal Vittorio Moretti. "The Commander's stray dogs have finally come to heel."