Agent Revick (11:00)
I have been called many things in my life, but only one title has ever mattered. Historian of the righteous. It is my duty not to interpret, nor to lead, but simply to record, to preserve. I do not question the shepherd's word. I do not place my own thoughts beside the wisdom of the Scripture. I only listen, watch and write. I was given this duty three years ago. Sometime after the shepherd first found the scripture. At that time, we were fewer in number. But truth will always find those who seek it. When the shepherd first opened the flesh bound pages and spoke the words aloud, all doubt was silenced. We gathered in the old cisterns that night and we listened to the first reading. The words did not echo in the air, but inside of us. Like remembering something you had known only in a past life. The scripture is not for everyone. Even to those of us chosen. Its pages are inert. Symbols without meaning. A maze without solution. Only the shepherd sees its structure clearly. He told us that the scripture was not written. It has always been that it came from no man's mind. That it found its way to him through channels not meant for human understanding. He bore this knowledge with grace, though it weighed on him visibly. Over time, he grew quieter. He smiled less. But he led us. We built the compound by hand. We tore out the wild grass, mixed our own clay and razed walls with the sweat of the unclean. Everything must be earned. We believe that comfort breeds corrosion, that ease leads to rot. The world outside is evidence of that. A place of indulgence, of synthetic morality, of people who refuse to see their own eternal destruction. But we see. The Scripture allows us to see. And what we see cannot be forgiven. There are no illusions among the righteous. We are not seeking paradise. We are not calling down a God to love us. What we are doing is necessary. What we are building is purity. The Scripture has shown us what must be done. The vessel was chosen last spring. I knew him before the selection. He was soft spoken, but strong and faithful. I will not record his former name, as the shepherd instructed us to forget it. He is no longer who he was. He is to become the first of us who will Burn away all doubt. He is to be transformed through fire, not of flame, but of flesh. The scripture says the soul is a knot that must be pulled free, that only pain can unravel it. That through agony the spirit may be reformed. It is not cruelty. It is not punishment. It is love in its rawest form. A terrible, beautiful mercy. Tomorrow, the preparations begin. I will record everything for those who come after, for those who must remember what the world tried to bury. The shepherd did not choose the vessel hastily. The scripture revealed it slowly over many weeks. I remember the day the announcement was made. We gathered in the atrium after the fourth bell, where the sun cast sharp red tinted shadows through the narrow slits of stained glass. The shepherd stepped forward in silence. When he raised his hand, all murmurs ceased. His voice was soft, but carried. The scripture has shown me the vessel. We waited in stillness, one by one. Heads turned as the shepherd's hand extended and pointed. There was no gasp, no outburst, only a breath drawn in held and the slow, deliberate steps of the chosen man as he approached the altar. I will not describe him in detail. I have already begun to forget his name. That is as it should be. From that moment forward, he was no longer brother, no longer friend. He was only the vessel. The preparation began immediately. The shepherd and three of the Elder Righteous led the vessel to the sanctum, a small chamber carved beneath the chapel floor. The rest of us resumed our work in the fields and kitchens. Though a quiet hush settled over the compound, no songs were sung that day. No one laughed. That evening I was summoned. As historian, I am to bear witness. The scripture does not speak of preservation in ink or paper. But I believe my task is one of spiritual clarity. To document is to honor. To describe is to prevent corruption by forgetfulness. If the world outside ever finds what we have done, they must see it not as madness, but as truth in action. When I descended into the sanctum, I found the vessel seated cross legged in the center of a chalk drawn circle. Candles lined the outer ring, their flames still and tall. The shepherd stood to the side, watching, not judging, not commanding, only observing. The vessel was calm, peaceful. His eyes were closed, his lips moving silently, mouthing verses I did not recognize. Over the next few weeks, the rituals intensified. The scripture does not call for cruelty. It calls for purification. Through incisions. The guilt of the flesh is released through starvation. The soul is reminded of need. Through isolation. The mind is made clear of worldly distraction. Each evening I was permitted to sit and record. The man, the one we now called the vessel was not quiet by virtue of Peace. He screamed until his voice gave out, until he could do nothing but weep and tremble and bleed. He begged not for salvation but but for release. The shepherds said this would be the case. The scripture does not speak in metaphor. It is not a thing to be deciphered or interpreted, but a living will etched in forms beyond language, too precise to allow abstraction. What the shepherd reads from its pages, he reads with unwavering certainty. Each symbol made flesh is a command, not a suggestion. And we obey, for to do otherwise would be to undo everything we are. The first glyph was to be carved into the chest. Not a simple marking or branding, but a spiraling structure of curves and bifurcating lines, etched with surgical intent that any deviation would mean spiritual rejection and physical death. The shepherd did not use a blade. The instrument was a sliver of bone, curved and honed until it could part flesh with reverent precision. Its origin was never spoken of, though some among the righteous believed it had been pulled from the body of a living heir of a nation's king. Whether this is true or lore, I do not know. I only record what is whispered among the righteous. The rites were never hurried. The scripture demanded precision, and so the shepherd proceeded with extreme care. Every incision was exact. Some were shallow, meant to map the flesh. Others dug deep into muscle, sometimes through bone. One ritual required the partial removal of a rib to reach the liver, where a glyph had to be carved directly into the organ itself. Each right left him closer to death. His body would shiver violently in the aftermath, teeth chattering, limbs twitching as he was wrapped in ash soaked linens while verses were whispered into his ears. Once the glyph was complete, the vessel was laid flat upon the altar stone and anointed with ash drawn from the coals of burned supplication scrolls. The wound was packed with moss, harvested during the eclipse moon and sealed beneath fabric strips embroidered with psalms and red thread. We waited three days. No rot took hold, no infection. Instead, the skin around the glyph took on a sheen, faint and waxy, and the edges of the wound fused, not closed, but integrated, as if the body itself accepted the glyph as a new organ. The following glyphs required more. One was to be placed over the solar plexus and could only be activated if the vessel had fasted long enough tremors to begin. Another was embedded beneath the ribs, carved through an incision that was later sewn shut, burying the mark where no eye could witness it. Each carving came with its own preparation. In the nights between the Vessel was fed through thin broth, infused with marrow and dried herbs. Always, according to the scriptures, cycles. The process took a year. Not for ceremony but for survival. Every line had to be perfect, every shape. Precise errors meant more pain. Nearly any one of these rites, if done improperly, could kill him, and he had to live, had to endure for the vessel to be filled. He did not grow quiet from reverence. He grew quiet from exhaustion and torn vocal cords. Some days he passed out mid ritual and had to be revived with bitter herbs packed beneath his tongue. Other times he would go limp but still tremble, his eyes fluttering, his fingers curling around. Nothing more than once I thought he had died and it had all been for nothing. But eventually, things started changing. After a particularly horrendous rite in which the shepherd split the flesh along the back and carved a seal on the spine between the shoulder blades, the skin began to discolor with an unnatural pallor, like smoke. It settled beneath the surface. Some of the symbols in his flesh began to almost glow faintly, like the faintest dying flame was shining through, barely visible at certain angles. I attempted to copy them, to write them down, but I couldn't. When I tried, it was like the lines warped. They refused to be put on paper. The shepherd told me not to try again. Pain, he said, is the ink of the soul, and these truths are only for flesh. The final glyph was not carved at all. It was poured, boiling liquid, script made from ground stone, fermented blood, and the dust from a sealed reliquary unearthed during the red flood season. The shepherd recited six verses in words none of us recognized, while the mixture was applied across the chest and allowed to seep through the pores. And then the vessel screamed. It wasn't just pain. It was something else, something deeper, like air being torn from the lungs of the world. The walls of the sanctum cracked, the candles went out, and we were then left in an absolute silence. Since then, the vessel does not rest. His skin radiates warmth. His presence causes the flame to lean toward him even when he does not move and he no longer casts a shadow. Whether he has accepted his role or has been devoured by it, I do not know. The scripture does not speak of consent. It speaks only of completion. And we are nearly there. Soon after, the shepherd called for the final rite to commence, his voice quivering not with fear but with awe. The vessel was brought to the central altar, glyphs smoldering faintly beneath pale, smoky skin, breath exhaling in slow, measured huffs like the bellows of an ancient forge. We gathered around him, each of us carrying the final tokens of blood, ash, bone. These were burned, crushed, and scattered in a circle, as instructed by the scripture. The shepherd knelt beside the vessel and whispered a single word, not in our tongue, but in a language the scripture had revealed only once, and even then, only in a dream. The vessel opened his eyes. The room did not darken, but everything in it seemed to pull away from the light. Candle flames bowed in toward him. Shadows collapsed inward. The air wavered, and he rose. No one spoke. His movement was uncoordinated but deliberate, as though each limb was learning its place in a new order. Bones cracked beneath skin in realignment. As he stood upright, impossibly tall, his vertebrae seemed to rise through his back like a blooming structure, glyphs glowing deep red along his spine. His mouth opened to reveal something. Light, or a suggestion of it, poured from within. But it wasn't illumination. It was exposure. His body had grown long and lean in proportions no longer correct for a man. The torso had stretched to an unnatural length. Ribs warped outward like the framing of a broken cathedral. Patches of skin had been peeled away entirely through the last year of rites, revealing networks of muscle laced with glyphs carved directly into meat and bone. Where joints once turned cleanly, there were now exposed, exposed caps of gristle and reformed bone. His arms hung too long, wrists bending too far, fingers ending in nail like points thickened by callous and heat. The fingers twitched rhythmically, as if anticipating something. What remained of his face was a reminder of suffering. The mouth had split wider than it once was, the lips long since cut away and sealed with rings of charred scar tissue. His nose had caved inward, crushed during one of the rites, and the skin around his eyes had blackened and tightened, cut and cauterized many times over. And yet, beneath all that ruin, the structure of the man he once was remained faintly visible in the symmetry in the shape of his jaw beneath the ruin. It was the familiarity that made him terrifying. The shepherd scrambled back. He looked shaken. Some among the righteous began to cry, maybe in confusion or fear. A few knelt unbidden. Others looked at one another, unsure. We had expected the divine, a savior. What stood before us wasn't those things. What stood before us was something hard to describe. It was malevolence. It was hatred and destruction, a shape molded from pain and fear. What we had considered purification was something far different, and what arose from our work. One of the younger acolytes reached forward. A gesture of reverence, I think, or maybe an instinct to affirm faith. The vessel turned to him and it saw him. He looked through him, past his skin, his sins, his breath. The boy froze. Blood began to well from beneath his nails. His mouth opened to scream, but no sound came out, only a wet rattle as his body began to stiffen and fold. Not violently, not with force, but like paper soaked through and peeled apart. He collapsed inward, weeping fluid from every orifice, his eyes fixed on something none of us could see. The righteous scattered. No command was given, no instructions shouted. It was simply too much. Some fled, some knelt. One began to babble confessions to no one, listing transgressions no one had known. Another struck her own face with a stone until her eye came loose. They were repenting as the newly awakened invoked some deep, alien passage. The scripture had not warned us what the vessel would become, only how it must be prepared. We had assumed purity would be tranquil, holy. But the things standing in the circle now radiated a judgment without mercy, without limits. The shepherd collapsed to his knees, eyes wide, arms trembling as he tried to speak. The vessel turned toward him slowly, head tilting. With inhuman grace, it said, I ran. I cannot lie. I was not brave. I am not pure, and I was not prepared. I heard screams as I climbed the chapel steps, sobs desperate and raw. All around me. The flames no longer flickered. They spun, twisting into cymbals, mid air. I write this now from the upper loft, where the doors have been barred and the candle burns low. I have not slept. I have not moved except to drink rainwater gathered in the cracks of the stained glass. It has been three days. The screams echo from below. The screams of the faithful, the righteous, those who remained behind when I fled. They were not cries of pain so severe you can hear the soul being unmade. They never stopped, not once in the last three days. I cannot face it. I do not wish to be cleansed. I lay in the shadows, trembling, listening as their voices fracture anew, each broken plea painting the chapel in a new layer of horror. Wait. I hear something else. Boots heavier, firmer. Voices shouting commands barked with urgency. I peered through the slats and saw them. Strangers in armor, their faces obscured by mirrored visors, their hands gripped around weapons that deafened in blinding flashes. They moved with purpose. I do not know who they are. Outsiders, certainly. Sentinels of the old world, perhaps guardians of order come too late. They entered the chapel like a storm. Confident, clean. They did not kneel. They did not whisper. I did not see what followed. I could not. But I heard it. The weapons screamed. First, rapid bursts. Then came the tearing of stone, the groaning of the beams the warping of sacred architecture and the screams. Not like those of the righteous. These were clipped, shocked short, one after another, as if the realization of their mistake came too late to warn the others. One of them ran. I saw him through the broken window, helmetless, bleeding. His eyes. I do not know if they were gone or if they simply refused to see. He collapsed near the chapel gate. Silence followed. The smoke rises now from the floorboards below. I hear footsteps again, but not the sharp rhythm of soldiers. These are slow, weighted. The awakened walk still. And I remain here, hidden among the rafters, too hollow to pray, too afraid to move. There is no scripture left for me, no instructions, no absolution. I hear more voices below, shouts, static, more conflict, but they are muffled now. I can hear them getting closer. The floors and walls are beginning to crack. If this is the last thing I write, please know this. We wanted to do only good. Our intentions were pure. Please forgive us.
