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The first sensation to leave me was the cold.
Not warmth — cold.
As if my body no longer belonged to the physics of this place, as though sensation itself had been repossessed.
My blood slowed. I could feel it — not in the usual dull throb of the pulse, but in the agonizing, sluggish drag of each cell through veins that were becoming something else. The wound in my side was deep, I remembered that much; the gash had been the church's welcome toll for my trespass. Yet the pain was fading now, not through mercy, but through replacement — the agony was being overwritten by something older, something designed for a different host entirely.
It whispered then.
Not aloud. Not in the air.
In the marrow.
> "…unfinished…"
"…not whole…"
"…give me the rest…"
Every syllable crawled like a centipede up my spine, laying eggs in each nerve. The words were not in any language I knew, but my mind was already translating them — not into sense, but into hunger.
The vaulted roof above swam in and out of vision, its ribs stretching into the impossible, bending into a dome that might have held not heaven, but a blacker ocean than space itself. Shadows swayed along the beams, their motion unmoored from the flicker of the guttering candles.
I coughed. My hands came away wet and dark. The stain spread across the warped floorboards in lazy rivers, pooling toward the altar as though even my blood wanted to be closer to it.
That was when my fingers struck it.
A disc. Cold. Smooth. Heavy in the palm despite its size.
The coin.
Not Roman, not Greek, not Sumerian — though my mind scrambled to assign it such names for comfort. The relief etched into its surface writhed in my vision; my eyes insisted it was a head in profile, while my mind screamed that no head could possess that many eyes and yet be blind. The mouth on the coin was not open, but I swore I could hear breath through it.
The whisper swelled.
> "…finish me…"
"…call me… all of me…"
My vision began to fold inward. The church dissolved — wood to smoke, stone to shadow, air to memory. And in that last fraction of consciousness before the black swallowed me, the world tilted — not just space, but time itself bending like a page turned too fast.
And then I was elsewhere.
I was before.
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