No cars. No voices. Not even the stray sound of footsteps from a drunk stumbling home.

Only the wind.

It swept through the alleyways like a whispering thing, threading through broken shutters and rattling ancient street lamps that flickered in protest. The city felt wrong.

Not asleep.

Hollowed.

Gabriel adjusted his coat, rolling the ache from his shoulders as he moved. His ribs still burned, but he ignored it. He had walked through worse.

Then, as he turned a corner

A sound.

Low. Distant.

A chant.

Faint at first, no louder than the whisper of leaves shifting in the wind.

Latin.

"Libera nos a malo."

Gabriel slowed his steps. The chant was coming from nowhere and everywhere.

"Deliver us from evil."

It repeated. Soft. Unnatural.

There was no direction to it. No source.

The city around him felt thinner now, like a veil stretched too tight.

Gabriel exhaled, steadying his pulse.

Then, the chanting stopped.

And the streetlights flickered out.

All of them.

The world plunged into darkness.

For a moment, Gabriel stood still, listening.

Then, one by one, the lights sputtered back to life.

And the city was normal again.

Or at least, as normal as it could be at this hour.

Gabriel clenched his jaw and kept walking.

5 A.M. – The Archivist’s Vault

By the time Gabriel reached the outskirts of Traverse, the night had begun to break.

It started with the birds.

A single trill in the distance, then another, rising with the dawn.

The black sky softened into deep blues and purples, heaven’s light bleeding through the cracks in the horizon.

The street lamps, which had once flickered violently in the night, now dimmed beneath the coming day, their fire reduced to dying embers.

The world was waking.

But Gabriel knew that did not mean it was safe.

Santa Caterina stood ahead,a monastery long abandoned to the records of time.

Or so the world believed.

Gabriel walked past the cracked stone angels lining the courtyard, their faces worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain.

And beneath the shadow of the largest grave marker, he found it.

The engraving, nearly erased by time:

Sanctus Tenebris.

Holy Darkness

He pressed his palm against the stone.

With a groan, the ground shifted.

The entrance yawned open beneath his feet,.a stairway leading into darkness.

Gabriel exhaled and stepped inside.

The secrets waited below.

And they were waiting for him.

The Descent into the Forbidden

As Gabriel pressed his palm against the weathered engraving, Sanctus Tenebris, the stone beneath him groaned, reluctantly yielding to reveal a gaping maw of darkness. A serpentine staircase spiraled downward, its steps slick with the patina of centuries, beckoning him into the abyss.

Each step he took echoed in the confined space, a hollow sound swallowed by the oppressive silence. The air grew colder, laden with the scent of damp earth and the metallic tang of decay. The walls, slick with moisture, seemed to pulse with a life of their own, their surfaces marred by the crawling tendrils of ivy that had long since turned a sickly yellow.

The faint glow of his lantern cast elongated shadows, transforming the narrow passage into a gallery of grotesque silhouettes. The atmosphere was thick, almost tangible, pressing against his skin like the breath of some unseen watcher.

As he descended deeper, the weight of the world above seemed to press down, the air growing thin and stale, carrying with it the faint whisper of voices long silenced. The temperature dropped further, each exhale forming ephemeral clouds that dissipated into the surrounding gloom.

At the base of the staircase, the passageway opened into a cavernous chamber, its vastness swallowed by darkness. The feeble light barely penetrated the inky black, revealing only glimpses of towering shelves laden with tomes bound in cracked leather and scrolls tied with fraying ribbons. Cobwebs hung like tattered curtains, their silken threads shimmering in the lantern's glow.

The Archivist

Seated at an ancient wooden desk, its surface scarred by the passage of time, was the Archivist. His form was hunched, draped in robes the color of midnight, blending seamlessly with the surrounding gloom. The hood of his garment concealed his features, casting his face into shadow, save for the glint of his eyes cold, calculating, and ancient.

His hands, pale and skeletal, moved with deliberate slowness, fingers stained with ink and age. Before him lay a massive tome, its pages yellowed and edges crumbling, filled with writings that seemed to crawl across the parchment like living things.

The Archivist's presence exuded an unsettling stillness, as if he were a fixture of the chamber itself, an embodiment of the forgotten and the forbidden. The air around him seemed to hum with a latent energy, a silent chant that resonated with the very stones of the vault.

Without looking up, his voice emerged from the shadows, a rasping whisper that cut through the silence. "You should not have come here."

A Vault of Forgotten Sins

The chamber breathed.

Not in the way a living thing does, but in the way old cathedrals remember their prayers, their stone walls still carrying the whispers of long-dead priests.

Gabriel stood at the threshold, his presence an intrusion upon something ancient and unseen.

The air was dense, thick with the scent of aged parchment, smoldering wax, and the faintest trace of something metallic like rusted iron left too long in the rain.

Shadows flickered across the walls, their elongated fingers stretching unnaturally from the dim lanterns mounted in iron sconces.

The shelves,towering, labyrinthine structures carved from obsidian-black wood,loomed like sentinels. Each was overstuffed with tomes so old their bindings were cracked like dried riverbeds. Some were locked shut with rusted chains. Others bled ink from between their pages, staining the dust-laden stone floors.

And yet, despite the staggering weight of knowledge housed in this place, it was silent.

Not the silence of emptiness.

The silence of something listening.

Gabriel moved forward.

The Archivist did not rise from his seat.

He simply turned a fragile page, the whisper of parchment against bone-dry fingers sounding deafening in the hush.

"You should not have come here."

His voice was brittle, paper-thin, yet heavy with unspoken things.

Gabriel exhaled slowly.

"That’s starting to sound like a warning."

"It is." The Archivist’s ink-stained fingers traced a line of text on the ancient tome before him. His nails were cracked, ridged with time, his skin the color of weathered parchment.

Gabriel’s eyes flicked to the desk.

Scattered across its surface were old Vatican records, bound in red thread.

Some bore the insignia of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum the List of Forbidden Texts.

Gabriel recognized one of them immediately.

Because it had his name on it.

The Vatican’s Burial of a Man Still Alive

Gabriel reached for the nearest file. His fingers brushed the brittle paper, its surface warped from age and ink stains.

The cover bore the Vatican’s official sigil, though it was faded, like the document itself had been hidden away long before its time.

He flipped it open.

And there, written in precise Latin script,

GABRIEL CROSS – MARKED FOR DELETION.

The words settled into his chest like cold iron.

He skimmed further. The date of the report, ten years ago.

The day after the failed exorcism.

Gabriel clenched his jaw.

"They buried me like I was already dead."

The Archivist did not correct him.

Instead, he reached for a different document, sliding it across the table.

This one bore the same date.

But beneath the records of the exorcism, scrawled in hurried handwriting, there was an addendum.

THE ENTITY REMAINS.

Gabriel’s breath slowed.

He reread the words, his mind reeling, unraveling.

"No," he murmured. "That’s not possible."

The Archivist finally looked up.

His eyes, clouded, cataract-stained,pierced through the veil of dust and time.

"You did not exorcise it, Gabriel."

A pause.

"You freed it."

The words hit like a hammer.

Gabriel’s pulse thundered in his ears.

The Vatican had erased him. Not because he had failed.

Because he had succeeded at something far worse.

The lanterns flickered.

A whisper slithered through the chamber, curling beneath the shelves.

Gabriel’s fingers twitched toward the relic beneath his coat.

The Archivist exhaled, slow and measured.

"It has been looking for you ever since."

And somewhere beyond the vault

Something laughed.

Not a sound made by breath and lungs.

It was a vibration in the air, a ripple in reality itself. Low, guttural, unraveling through the silence like distant thunder rolling through hollow bones.

Gabriel went still.

The vault’s oppressive stillness had deepened, not an absence of sound, but the kind of silence that swallowed everything whole.

And then, the texts responded.

The bookshelves trembled, dust slithering from their spines as the ancient tomes quivered, their pages rustling without wind.

Something was waking.

Something was aware.

Gabriel’s breath came slow, controlled, even as his fingers tightened around the relic beneath his coat. His instincts screamed at him to leave, but his resolve held.

The answers were here.

Buried in pages older than the Vatican itself.

And he would unearth them, no matter the cost.

He turned back to the book in his hands.

The Demon That Sentences the Damned

The name burned against the aged parchment. Malphas.

Gabriel’s eyes traced the ink, his breath hitching as he read.

"Malphas does not take the innocent."

"He comes for those who should have died."

A sickening weight coiled in his chest.

This wasn’t just a demon.

It wasn’t a mindless entity to be banished, nor a restless spirit clinging to the edges of existence.

Malphas was a force of correction.

A being that did not simply possess, it rewrote reality itself.

A judge. An executioner of fates denied.

Gabriel was never meant to survive his first exorcism.

The Vatican had tried to erase him, not to cover up a failure, but because his survival had been a mistake. A fracture in the natural order.

And Malphas had come to correct it.

His grip on the book tightened.

There were other records here.

He needed more.

The Vatican’s Forbidden History

Gabriel set the book down, his eyes darting across the shelves. His fingers brushed against leather bindings, some crumbling under his touch, their ink long since faded into obscurity.

Then, he found it.

A tome bound in blackened human skin.

Its cover bore no title, only a seal branded into the flesh.

An inverted cross.

Gabriel swallowed hard, then pried the book open.

The pages were filled with accounts written in trembling hands, ink smudged by the weight of desperation.

Records of exorcists who had stood before Malphas.

And lost.

His eyes darted through the text, absorbing each line with the hunger of a dying man clinging to his last hope.

"We thought we could banish it."

"It is not a demon. It is a Sentence."

"When the Church failed, they did not fight it. They hid it."

The Vatican had known.

For centuries, they had hidden this truth, allowing exorcists to walk blindly into death.

They had rewritten history.

Burned records.

Erased names.

Because Malphas did not lose.

It simply waited.

Gabriel flipped another page

And stilled.

Because staring back at him from the aged parchment

Was his own name.

Gabriel Cross.

Written long before he had ever been born.

His pulse roared in his ears.

"No."

But the evidence was there.

His life had always been borrowed time.

The Whisper in the Vault

The candlelight flickered violently.

Shadows pulsed, stretching unnaturally, as if something was rising beneath the stone.

A slow, deliberate breath exhaled from the darkness behind him.

Hot against the back of his neck.

Gabriel did not move.

His muscles locked, his heartbeat a steady drum of defiance.

Then, a voice.

Low. Ancient.

"You were never meant to live, Gabriel."

A hand cold, clawed, and real, clamped onto his shoulder.

And the vault plunged into blackness.

The Path Beyond the Vatican

The silence after the phone call was thick, unmoving.

Gabriel set the receiver down slowly, his mind turning over every word, every revelation. He was never meant to live. Malphas was never exorcised.

The Vatican had erased him, but they had done nothing to stop it.

Because they couldn’t.

Gabriel exhaled sharply, turning to the Archivist. The old man watched him with the quiet patience of someone who had already foreseen how this would end.

"You knew," Gabriel said.

"I knew."

"And you still let me come here?"

The Archivist’s withered hands hovered over the ancient texts.

"You were already marked, Gabriel. There was nothing I could do to stop it."

Gabriel studied him for a long moment. The old man looked fragile, fading like ink left in the sun too long. A guardian of secrets long buried, waiting for someone like him to come and claim them.

He had.

And now, he would use them.

"Then my path is clear," Gabriel murmured.

He turned, walking toward the iron door. It groaned as it opened, the passage ahead stretching into dim torchlight.

The Archivist’s voice followed him.

"The Church will never fight this war for you, Gabriel."

Gabriel paused at the threshold. The shadows of the vault clung to him, unwilling to let him go.

"I don’t need them."

A flicker of something passed through the old man’s eyes.

Gabriel stepped forward, leaving the darkness behind.