Chapter 105: Chapter 105: Floor 14: The Saintess And The Succubus Cross
The shrine was quiet except for the low chant and the small sounds of the candle flames, and the villagers near the doors breathed carefully, as if too loud a breath might disturb something holy.
James stood near the entrance with the Succubus Cross above him and the statue at the far end of the room ahead of him. The link to Floor 5 sat in his chest, a recognition he could not put words to yet, while the woman in white knelt before the carved stone and the candle smoke moved between them.
He did not trust any of it. The village trusted her completely, and everything he had seen since the well pointed at her shrine as the center of the missing men, and the gap between those two facts was the whole problem.
The Saintess finished her worship and rose from the statue without hurry.
She turned and faced the room with the same gentle calm she wore everywhere, and there was no embarrassment in her at all, because to the villagers there was nothing to be embarrassed about. A holy woman had knelt before a holy image. They lowered their heads as she rose, and a few of them murmured something that might have been a prayer.
James studied the statue while their heads were down. It was the same shape he had seen behind frozen smoke on Floor 5, but where that one had been crude and half-buried, this one was finished and refined, the wings carved feather by feather, the horns smoothed to fine points, the curved cross worked into the base in clean lines. It was beautiful in the way the cross above the door was beautiful, which was to say it was beautiful and wrong at the same time, and the longer he looked the more certain he became that nothing about it belonged in a place that called itself a shrine.
"The statue troubles you," the Saintess said.
She had come closer without him hearing her, and her voice was soft and welcoming rather than defensive, as if she were offering to help with a burden instead of catching him at something.
James did not accuse her. "Iβve seen something like it before."
"Have you." She looked at the statue with him, her expression untroubled. "Some symbols return to a person when they are ready to understand them. You may not have been ready, the first time."
She said it kindly, and James understood from the way she said it that she had heard more in his answer than he had put into it.
While James stayed near the shrine, Finn worked the village.
He sat with wives and older women in their kitchens and at their doors, and he did not waste their time with comfort they would not believe from a stranger. He asked the plain things instead. Names. Dates. Where each man had last been seen. Whether each one had been to the shrine before he vanished.
The answers came hard at first, because the women were frightened and quick to defend the only thing holding their village together. One said her husband had gone to work and never come home. Another said the forest had taken hers, the way the forest sometimes did. A third told Finn that the Saintess had prayed over her son and that it was wrong to bring suspicion to a woman who had given them so much.
Finn kept his voice even and kept asking questions until the pattern became clear.
More than one woman gave the same answer, from three different houses and three different families. Each said the Saintess had visited the missing men and given them peace before the service.
The wording was too similar to be coincidence. It sounded practiced, repeated, and planted, and none of them seemed to realize it.
The other thing he noticed was who had been taken. The missing were strong, healthy, working-age men. The sick old men were still on their porches. The boys were still hauling wood. Whatever was emptying the village was not taking whoever it could reach. It was choosing.
James turned back to the Succubus Cross while the Saintess moved among the villagers, and he studied it closely.
It was polished and graceful and wrong in every detail once he stopped letting his eye slide over it. The lower point came down too long and tapered like a blade. The upper curve turned in on itself like a pair of horns. The side arms folded the way wings folded against a back, and at the center, worked so subtly that a person could mistake it for ornament, was the slim shape of a woman.
He looked past the surface the way he had learned to look on Floor 5, and he saw the threads.
They were faint, thin lines of something dark running out of the base of the cross and down into the stone of the walls and the floor, spreading out under the shrine the way roots spread under a tree. He could not have said what they carried. It was not quite the death energy he worked with, and it was not quite the dark mana the statue on Floor 5 had pushed into the waves, but it was close enough to both that his necromancer senses caught the edge of it, and it was nothing a holy place should have had running through its bones.
Behind him, the mace user shifted and spoke quietly. "Is it warm in here to you? Itβs freezing outside."
James had felt it too. The shrine held a low warmth that had no source, no fire beyond the thin candle flames, and as he tracked it he noticed the thing that mattered. The warmth thickened whenever one of the village men stepped near the statue, and thinned when they moved away, as if the shrine paid more attention to the men in the room than to anyone else.
It was the first sign that the place did not treat men and women the same.
The Saintess came back to James, and she kept her voice low enough that the villagers could not catch all of it while staying close enough that he could not be openly hostile.
"You carry something behind your eyes," she said. "Most people who come here are looking for comfort. You are looking for something else. The Tower does not choose lightly. I wonder what it saw in you."
James kept his answers short and turned them back where he wanted them. "Where were the missing men last seen?"
"Men vanish when they refuse what their own hearts already want," she said. "What a frightened wife calls disappearance may only be a man finally surrendering to his longing. Devotion is easily mistaken for loss by those who do not understand sacrifice."
James heard the shape of it beneath the softness. It was not comfort or scripture, but a justification.
She stepped closer, and warmth pressed into the air around him, sweet and heavy, urging him to relax his shoulders, lower his guard, and lean toward her voice.
James stayed still.
After weeks with a winged girl who called him father and an egg that drank dark mana, beautiful things inside the Tower no longer made him trusting.
The Saintess noticed, and her smile faltered for a breath before returning, smooth and perfect.
