Chapter 104: Chapter 104: Floor 14: The Village Where Men Vanish II
Finn worked the village the way he worked a floor, one problem at a time.
He went through the lived-in part with the ranger and the water mage, and he did not ask about the Saintess at first, because the moment her name came up the answers turned into the same smooth lines. He asked smaller things instead. Whose house was whose. Who used to work which field. Who had sat in which empty chair.
The houses told their own story before anyone spoke. A table set for two, with food on both plates, while one woman ate alone and the second plate went cold. A pair of work boots by a door, too big for anyone still living there, dust settling on them. A shaving blade on a shelf, dry and untouched for days. One woman with a wedding ring tied to a cord around her wrist instead of worn on her hand.
The pattern came together out of the small answers. The missing were almost all healthy adult men, and the old men and boys had been left to carry what the village could no longer lift. The ranger found it in the ground too, because the cart tracks and field rows and woodpiles had all stopped being kept up across the same short stretch of weeks, as if the labor had drained out a few men at a time rather than all at once.
When Finn finally let the families talk about where the men had gone, the answers circled. More than one wife said her husband had gone up to the shrine for a blessing and come home changed, and then one morning had simply not been there. None of them would say it was the shrine’s fault, and every one of them turned the sentence back into gratitude before it finished, the way the woman at the well had.
Nobody would accuse the shrine. Every road Finn walked led back to it anyway.
James climbed the path to the shrine while Finn worked the houses below, and the building was the only cared-for thing in the whole village.
Where the houses were damp and worn and tired, the shrine was clean, its stone smooth and pale and its steps swept. Red flowers grew in arranged beds along the path to its doors, too vivid against the grey of everything around them. Dark candles stood in iron holders on either side of the entrance, already lit, their flames steady in the windless air. The whole building had the polish of a place where all the village’s remaining effort had been poured, while the people who poured it lived in houses falling apart.
Above the entrance hung a cross.
James stopped when he saw it.
At a glance it read as a holy symbol, the kind of thing a shrine would wear, but the details were wrong in a way that took a second look to catch. The arms did not run straight out, they curved, and the curve suggested wings as much as horns. The lower point came down too long and too sharp, more blade than symbol. Worked into the center, where a plainer faith would have left it bare, was the slim shape of a woman, graceful and deliberate, and the whole thing was too elegant and too inviting to belong to anything that called itself sacred.
Something about the shape pulled at him, a thread of memory he could not place at first and then could. He had seen a thing like this before, in the frozen village on Floor 5, carved into the hidden statue that had been feeding the corruption through the waves. He did not say it out loud. He only let himself register that the shape was familiar, and that the recognition sat cold in his chest.
He moved closer while the mace user kept a wary distance behind him, and the details only got worse the longer he looked. The carvings worked into the door frame were not prayers in any form he recognized but something closer to invitations, shapes that suggested offering and surrender. From inside the shrine, low voices rose in something between singing and prayer, and the words that carried out to him were not about mercy or protection. They were about desire, about giving, about the reward that came to those who gave themselves fully.
The shrine did not feel like a place that asked people to be good. It felt like a place that asked people to give something up, and the holiness was a costume worn over something else.
James and Finn found each other again at the inn as the light started to go, and they put what they had together at a corner table while the three temporary teammates took the next table over.
The inn was warm, with something cooking over a low fire, but the warmth sat on top of the same wrongness as everything else, and the few women near the hearth stopped talking when James came through the door.
"Missing men are almost all healthy adults," Finn said, low and flat. "Labor in this place dried up over weeks, not all at once. And every wife I got talking, once they stopped reciting about the Saintess, told the same story. Husband went up for a blessing, came back wrong, and one morning didn’t come back at all. None of them will say it’s the shrine. All of them walked me to the same door."
"Because it is the shrine," James said, and laid out his side. The symbol that wasn’t holy. The woman worked into the cross. The match to the Floor 5 statue. The carvings that read as invitations and the singing that was about offering rather than protection. "And it’s the cleanest thing in a village that’s falling apart. Everything these people have left, they’ve poured into it."
Finn sat with that for a moment. "So the men aren’t wandering off and dying in the woods. They go up for a blessing, the wives all describe the same change, and then they’re gone."
"That’s not the forest taking whoever it happens to catch," James said.
"That’s selection."
"That’s selection," James agreed. "Someone’s choosing them."
Neither of them said the rest of it, because the rest of it was a woman in white at a shrine that wore the wrong cross, and they would not have to wait long to see her.
She came out of the shrine as the prayer rose again, and the villagers went quiet around her.
The Saintess was dressed in ceremonial white that the villagers clearly read as holy, but the cut of it carried a different message, fitted and draped to draw the eye rather than turn it away, with the curved cross worn openly at her throat. She was beautiful in a way that did not feel accidental, the kind of beauty that worked on a person before they decided whether to let it, and the villagers looked at her with trust and dependence and a quiet, tired hunger for the comfort she offered.
She went to a woman kneeling at the foot of the steps, one whose husband had vanished, and laid a hand against her bowed head. Her voice carried softly across the open ground.
"Your devotion will not go unanswered," she said. "Desire, faith, sacrifice. Each of them is seen. Each of them is rewarded in time."
The woman wept and pressed her forehead to the Saintess’s hand.
James watched all of it without moving.
Finn kept his voice under the prayer. "That her?"
"That’s her."
The Saintess lifted her head.
She turned toward where James and Finn stood at the edge of the gathering, across a distance too far to have heard a word he said, and her gaze settled on James as if she had heard it anyway. There was no fight in it. There was only recognition, one thing finding another and noting where it stood, and James held the look without giving anything back.
She came to them herself, in front of everyone, which made it worse.
"Travelers," she said, warm and unhurried, stopping close enough that the villagers nearby could see her welcoming her guests. "You came a long way to a village with so little left to offer. Or perhaps you were sent. The ones who arrive when they are needed usually are."
"We heard your men were going missing," Finn said. "We came to find out why."
"Men are weak before the things that call to them," she said, and the gentleness never left her voice. "Temptation. Fear. Despair. Not every man who walks out into the world is strong enough to walk back. I pray for each of them."
"Where were the missing ones last seen?" James asked.
Her attention came back to him and stayed there. "Some doors should not be opened before the heart is ready to see what waits behind them. You will understand, when the time is right."
Finn pulled it back to the ground. "We’ll need names. Where each man was last seen, and when. If you want them found, that’s how it’s done."
She smiled at Finn easily and answered none of it, and her eyes drifted back to James between every sentence as if Finn were a formality. Behind them, the temporary teammates stood too still, caught between a woman who would not answer a single question straight and a ring of villagers watching their guests too closely to let them push.
The light was going by the time the Saintess returned to the shrine, and James watched her go.
She climbed the swept steps and passed between the dark candles, and through the open doors he could see her cross the inner floor and lower herself to her knees before something at the far end of the room. Candles and a haze of smoke half-hid it, but the outline came through clearly enough, tall and worked from pale stone, the shape of a woman rendered in the same too-graceful lines as the cross above the door.
He had seen that shape before, behind frozen smoke in a village on Floor 5, with golden light coming down out of the sky behind it.
The Saintess bowed her head before the statue, and the curved cross at her throat caught the candlelight and held it.
James stared at the statue behind the candles and felt his grip tighten.
Floor 14 had not brought them to a village.
It had brought them back to the shadow of Floor 5.
