「 ✦ Eliheid S. B. Heiligh ✦ 」
I stood in the white room again.
Unnaturally white. Not pure, but corrupted. Like the pallor of disease masquerading as cleanliness. A white that doesn't reflect light but devours it. No windows. No doors. No ceiling I could see, no floor I could trust. Just white stretching in all directions, a canvas painted with nothing, waiting for something terrible to manifest upon it.
It didn't feel sacred. It felt wrong—sterile in the way a fresh grave might be—prepared for corruption, anticipating decay.
Hollow.
Empty.
Cold beyond measure.
They surrounded me—the priests in their black robes. Thirteen of them, moving in perfect circles, never acknowledging my presence, never looking away from that wall—that damned, cursed wall I had feared since childhood. The wall my father warned would one day reveal to me "the truth that breaks kings."
They chanted. Softly at first. Words twisted and malformed, our supposed holy tongue perverted into sounds that scraped against my eardrums like rusted nails. Holy tongue, they called it. The language of creation. But there was nothing creative in these sounds.
My mouth felt as though I'd been chewing ashes. My hands shook uncontrollably, royal dignity be damned.
Pope Ishtar raised a withered hand, pale as bone. "Look there, Your Majesty."
I turned to the wall he indicated. Just white. Nothing to distinguish it. My heart hammered against my ribs anyway, threatening to burst through flesh.
Then... it began to ripple.
Not like water disturbed by wind. Like flesh disturbed by parasites moving beneath it. It was disturbingly gross as hell. Like something was breathing—no, feeding—behind that thin membrane of a damned wall. The wall bulged and receded, pulsed and contracted.
I stepped back, my heel catching on my ceremonial robes.
"Stay," commanded the Pope. "Witness what your bloodline is bound to know."
The ripples intensified, stretched the white surface taut, then split it apart like rotting skin peeling from muscle. And behind the wall—behind the wall wasn't darkness. It wasn't shadow.
It was nothing.
Not emptiness as we understand it. Not void as philosophers describe it. This was active nothing. Nothing that hungered. Nothing that consumed. Nothing that wanted.
Do you understand the horror of that? Not absence—but absence with appetite.
The Pope's voice came as if from underwater. "Do you see it?"
I wanted to deny it. To reject what my eyes perceived. To preserve some fragment of the world I thought I knew.
But I saw it anyway.
There was a presence in the nothing.
It wasn't mist or shadow. It wasn't light or substance. It was like concepts given false form—like deception made manifest. It shifted constantly, never settling on a single shape, yet always maintaining a terrible symmetry that hurt my eyes to follow.
And it had eyes. No. Not eyes.
"I see it," I whispered.
My throat cracked with each syllable. My lips split, blood trickling down my chin. It fell to the white floor where it didn't stain but sizzled. Then it turned toward me. The thing in the nothing.
The pretender.
The priests' chanting grew more frantic, more desperate. No longer summoning—constraining. No longer worshipful—fearful. My skull felt too small for my brain. Pressure built behind my eyes until I feared they might burst from their sockets.
The entity twisted. Contorted itself through impossible angles. Assumed shapes that defied understanding. Like it was trying to appear as something worthy of worship while its true nature leaked through the disguise.
And then it opened its mouth.
I expected some cosmic horror. Some revelation of ultimate, universal truth.
Instead, inside its maw was... me.
But not just me. Versions of me. Possibilities where I ruled as a god-king. Where I led armies that swept across the continent. Where I stood atop mountains of corpses, wearing a crown fashioned from the teeth of dead children.
I saw myself as I could be—if I surrendered to what this thing offered.
Power. Dominion. Divinity.
All false. All hollow. All bait for a trap millennia in the making.
I tried to turn away.
I couldn't.
It reached toward me with a promise. A temptation shaped precisely to my deepest desires. It touched not my body but my ambition.
And I understood.
This wasn't a god. Not truly. This was something wearing the idea of godhood like ill-fitting clothing. This was Ehit, a parasite. A being that had positioned itself between humanity and true enlightenment, feeding on faith, growing fat on worship, using devotion as chains.
It must have been there for thousands of years, behind the veil. Not upholding creation—but feeding on it. Not blessing humanity—but farming us. My nose began to bleed. Then my ears. My eyes. Blood that tasted wrong—metallic and sweet and ancient.
I collapsed to one knee, crown tilting precariously.
Still it watched.
Still it hungered.
"Now you understand," the Pope said, his voice distant through the blood rushing in my ears. "This is what we serve. This is what we fear. This is what we keep appeased."
"This... this is Ehit?" I managed through bloody lips. "The Founding God? The Divine Creator?"
The Pope's lips twisted in what might have been a smile, might have been a grimace. "Creator? No. Conqueror, yes. There is a difference between making a world and claiming one."
The entity continued to shift and change, each form more seductive than the last. King. Warrior. Father. Sage. Whatever would most appeal to my sense of self.
"We've been worshipping... this?" My voice emerged as barely a whisper. "This... deception?"
"For generations," confirmed the Pope. "As have all the peoples of Tortus. Different names. Different rituals. Same entity. Same hunger."
"Why show me?" Blood dripped from my chin onto my royal vestments. "Why reveal the lie?"
The Pope gestured to the priests, who had formed a tighter circle, their chanting more controlled now. "Because someone must know. Someone must remember what truly lurks behind our faith. Someone must maintain the balance between worship and resistance."
"Balance?" I spat blood. "You serve a false god willingly?"
"We serve Ehit with all our hearts," the Pope hissed, suddenly fierce.
I could see it in the nothing beyond the tear—worlds consumed. Civilizations hollowed out from within. Ehit's true form—vast, insectile, ancient—moving between our world's fabric like a spider between webs.
"Without the Church," the Pope continued, "without the rituals, without the façade of worship, he would not be content with influence. He would seek dominion."
Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the wall sealed itself. White again. Unblemished. As if the horror had never been revealed.
Except it had.
I could still feel it. Still there. Behind the thin skin. Watching. Waiting. I could feel its attention like oil on my skin, like worms beneath my fingernails. Not inside me—but surrounding me.
"Blessed be the Founding God Ehit," the priests recited, their voices hollow with the knowledge of the lie they perpetuated. "For letting us cleanse our souls. Blessed be the Church, for a world reborn."
Empty words. Necessary fiction.
My knees gave out entirely. I collapsed to the floor, hands trembling against the cold white stone. My ancestral crown—generations of Heiligh kings, all complicit in this deception—slipped from my head and clattered to the ground.
No one moved to retrieve it.
"Your father wept for three days after his revelation," the Pope said, his voice gentler now. "Your grandfather refused to speak for a month. We all find our ways to accommodate the truth."
"Truth?" I laughed, the sound bordering on hysteria. "Is this what we call it?"
The old priest knelt beside me with difficulty. "What did Ehit offer you? What vision did he tempt you with?"
I closed my eyes, but the images remained—myself as conqueror, as tyrant, as living god.
"Empire," I whispered. "Dominion over all Tortus. Immortality."
The Pope nodded slowly. "And now you understand the Church's true purpose."
I struggled to sit upright, dignity reasserting itself through horror. "And my role in this charade?"
"Balance," the Pope replied. "The throne must know the truth while appearing to honor the fiction."
"How?" My voice cracked on the word.
The old priest reached for my fallen crown, lifted it with ceremonial reverence, and placed it back upon my head.
"By remembering what you saw behind the wall. By understanding that Ehit is more than god."
I rose unsteadily to my feet. "And if I refuse? If I tell the people the truth about their beloved god?"
"Then Ehit would twist your words. Turn truth into madness. Transform revelation into heresy. And when the people turned against you—as they inevitably would—he would select a more compliant vessel for his influence."
I looked around the white room—at the priests with their terrible knowledge, at the wall that hid a twisted predator.
"This is monstrous," I whispered.
"This is purpose and hope and faith," the Pope corrected.
As if on cue, a door appeared in the white wall—a way back to my palace, to my throne, to the kingdom I now knew rested on foundations of lies.
"And my father?" I asked. "Did he bear this knowledge well?"
The Pope's eyes darkened. "He found comfort in wine. In excess. In distraction with women. Each sovereign finds their method of endurance."
"And what is mine to be?" I straightened my spine, adjusted my crown.
"That," said the Pope, "is for you to discover."
I moved toward the door on legs that threatened to betray me with each step. My hand closed around the bronze amulet, its edges sharp against my palm.
As I reached the threshold, I glanced back once more at the white wall. For just an instant, I saw it ripple again. The thirteen priests intoned as one, "Blessed be the knowing king. Cursed be the false divinity."
I stepped through the door, back into the world I thought I knew—now forever changed by the knowledge of what lurked behind its fragile walls.