18 — The Ancient Primordial Demoness

In an instant, such a name made my heart pounded so fast.

Then slow.

Like being summoned by Death.

Death. Death. Death. Death. Death.

Each letter lined up so neatly in front of me, as if the name weren't unfamiliar to my ears.

No—not just unfamiliar. Something like this was real. The kind of thing that could make me die possessed, mad without direction. Vanishing without a trace. Followed by every phrase of dialogue that sounded simple, yet always haunted.

"Papa! Mama! I already finished going to the toilet by myself!"

Where did that sentence even come from?

I don't know. All I knew was that it was carved clearly in my head, followed by splatters of blood. A bag found under a church pew.

I saw it. The bag. Small, brown leather with a brass clasp. The kind a child would carry to Sunday service, filled with crayons and a folded picture of a sheep. It was lying on its side beneath the third pew from the back, and one of its straps was broken. The clasp was still closed.

That was the strange part. The clasp was still closed.

A bag that had been set down carefully would sit a certain way. A bag that had been dropped would sit another way. This bag sat in neither way. It sat as if someone had placed it there and then stopped existing.

There was blood on the pew above it. Not much. Just a few drops. Just enough to look like spilled juice until you looked closer.

I remembered the sound. That was the strange thing—I remembered the sound before I remembered anything else. Not a scream. Not a struggle. Just the sound of a hymn being sung, and then the sound of the hymn stopping. The silence that followed was not empty. It was full. Full of something that had no name and no shape and no face, and it pressed down on the whole church like a hand.

I remembered the light, too. The way it came through the stained glass windows and fell across the floor in colored squares. Red, blue, gold. The child had been sitting in one of those squares. The gold one. She had been swinging her legs. She had been happy.

That was the part that hurt the most. Not the blood. Not the bag. The fact that she had been happy.

No trace. No sound. No shape.

The memory flickered. I couldn't tell if I was seeing it from my own eyes or from someone else's. The church was cold. The candles were lit. Someone was singing a hymn in a voice that cracked on the high notes. The wood of the pews smelled of old wax and older prayers. A child was sitting in the front row, swinging her legs, wearing a dress that was too small for her because she had grown faster than her parents had expected.

Then the singing stopped.

Then the child looked up.

And then—

I remembered a book.

That was the strange thing. In the middle of all of it—the blood, the bag, the silence—what surfaced was a book.

It had been in my father's study. High on the shelf, above the volumes he actually used, above the ledgers and the letters and the records. A slim black spine with no title on it. I had asked him once what it was, and he had said it was a history of heresies. I had asked what a heresy was, and he had said it was a belief that the Church had decided was wrong.

I had asked if that meant the belief was actually wrong, and he had laughed and said that was exactly the kind of question that got people burned.

I hadn't understood him then.

I was starting to understand him now.

The book had a chapter on the Abyss. Most of it was dry—lists of names, dates, battles, treaties. The kind of thing that made your eyes slide off the page. But there was one section I had read over and over, because it was the only part that sounded like a story.

It was about a priestess.

There was no name given. Just yet another famous, blasphemous title of hers. The Ancient Demon Priestess. The one that no one dared to use it just because it screams contradictions.

I mean, a priestess who also is a demon? Who would have thought?

She had been a human once. A scholar, a theologian, a woman of the cloth. The book said she had been one of the most gifted priestesses the Lutetia Church had ever produced. Fluent in a dozen dead languages. Capable of reciting entire scriptures from memory. Beloved by her students, respected by her superiors, and—according to one of the footnotes—"possessed of a mind that the Church could not decide whether to celebrate or fear."

And then, one day, she had walked into the Abyss.

Not fallen. Not dragged. Not corrupted.

Walked.

The book was very clear about that. She had not been seduced by a demon. She had not been tricked. She had not been punished. She had simply decided that the Church's answers were not good enough, and she had gone to find better ones in the place where the Church said there were none.

The Three-Day Abyssal Procession.

I had read that phrase three times the first time I encountered it. It sounded like something out of a fairytale. A ritual, the book said, in which a mortal was taken apart and put back together as something else. A reverse baptism. Instead of being welcomed into the divine, the candidate was welcomed into the Abyss.

The priestess had endured it.

The book said the Demon King himself had been surprised.

When it was over, she was still a priestess. That was the part I hadn't understood. The book kept insisting on it. She kept the robes. She kept the prayers. She kept the scripture. She kept the theology. She had not renounced holiness. She had renounced humanity's claim to it.

The book called her a monster. The book also called her "the most honest theologian the Abyss had ever produced."

I had asked my father what that meant. He had said it meant she was dangerous. I had asked why. 

He had said: "Because she doesn't lie."

That was all I remembered of the conversation. That, and the way he had closed the book and put it back on the shelf, and the way his hand had stayed on the spine for a moment longer than it needed to.

I hadn't thought about that book in years.

I was thinking about it now.

And now—here, in this room, with Celine's eyes on me and Myra's mouth sealed shut and Lily's hands still gripping my shoulders—the two things were starting to overlap. The book. The church. The bag under the pew. The title Celine had spoken. The title I had read in my father's study when I was too young to understand what I was reading.

They didn't fit together. Not yet. But they were close. Close enough that I could feel the shape of something underneath them, something I wasn't ready to see.

"Clara?"

The voice approached just like that—

"Clara! Snap out of it!"

Someone shook my shoulders.

Then I turned.

Lily. Again. Waking me up from a nightmare despite the bitter reality. Her hands were on my shoulders, her fingers digging in harder than she probably meant. Her face was pale. Her eyes were wide. She had been calling my name for a while, I realized. Her throat sounded raw from it.

How long had I been gone? A few minutes, maybe. Long enough that the candles in the council room had burned down a little. Long enough that the tea in Lily's cup had gone cold.

Myra, who was usually calm, looked furious.

Her ears were flat against her skull. Her tail bristled. Her small hands were balled into fists at her sides. She was staring at Celine with an expression I had never seen on her before—not anger, not fear, but something closer to hatred. Pure, uncomplicated, animal hatred.

I had seen Myra angry before. Annoyed. Irritated. Impatient. I had seen her stamp her foot and cross her arms and refuse to speak to me for an entire afternoon because I had forgotten to bring her the strawberry cake she had asked for.

But not like this.

"Professor Celine! What did you—"

Her words were cut off by magic. A clean, precise spell, applied without ceremony. Celine didn't even lift a finger. She simply looked at Myra, and Myra's voice stopped.

"Calm down, Mireille." Celine said.

Myra's fists were still clenched. Her whole body was trembling. But she couldn't speak, and she couldn't move, and so she just stood there. Shaking. Watching Celine with those eyes.

I had never seen Myra hate anyone before. Not like that. Not with that kind of intensity. It made me realize, distantly, that Celine must have done something to earn it. Something specific. Something that had nothing to do with the budget, or the name she had just spoken.

Something about my parents.

The thought arrived and then left before I could catch it. But it was there. It had been there all along, buried somewhere I hadn't wanted to look.

In an instant, the atmosphere went silent again, before one of us continued the conversation.

"Are you feeling better, Clara?"

Celine's voice was calm. Almost gentle. As if she hadn't just spoken a name that had knocked me out of my own mind, as if she hadn't just silenced my fox spirit with a flick of her will. She sat there with her legs crossed, her chin propped on her hand, watching me with those eyes that always seemed to know everything.

At first I stammered. But eventually I started to get used to it, and somehow it felt like I shouldn't have been that surprised.

Because this wasn't the first time I had heard the name.

I had heard it before. Years ago. In a different room, in a different city, in the weeks after my parents were buried. Someone had said it in passing—a priest, maybe, or a healer, or one of the adults who had come to the house to sort through what was left of my family's things. They had said it quietly, as if they didn't want me to hear.

But I had heard.

I had heard it, and then I had forgotten it, because forgetting was the only thing that kept me functioning. The room had been my aunt's parlour—my foster mother's parlour, technically, though I hadn't called her that yet. The walls were green. The chairs were stiff. There was a clock on the mantelpiece that ticked too loudly, and I had counted the ticks, over and over, because counting was easier than listening to the adults talk about what had happened to my family.

They had used words I didn't understand.

Words like "extraction." Words like "arrangement." Words like "the Demoness."

And once—quietly, from someone who thought I wasn't listening—the Ancient Demon Priestess.

I hadn't known what it meant then. I had assumed it was a story. A ghost story, the kind adults told to frighten children into obedience. I had assumed the word was a fairy tale, and I had forgotten it the way you forget a fairy tale—not really, not completely, but enough that it stops being real.

But it was real.

Ren had visited the infirmary three days ago. He had asked his questions. He had taken his notes. He had left. I had told myself it was nothing. I had told myself he was just doing his job.

But now, sitting in this room with Celine's eyes on me, I wondered if Ren had known.

I wondered if he had been waiting for me to say the name first.

I wondered if he had been waiting for me to remember.

He had looked at me strangely, I remembered. The way you look at a locked door—curious, patient, waiting for someone to produce the key. I had assumed he was thinking about memory magic. I had assumed he was thinking about Myra.

I had not assumed he was thinking about me.

I hadn't remembered. Not until now.

And now Celine had said it, the memory simply had to come back.