“Et clamabunt ad me, sed ego non exaudiam…“And they shall cry unto me, but I will not hear them…”  Proverbs 1:28, Codex Inferni

The door shut behind Gareth with a reluctant groan wood swollen by centuries of silence. The air inside the house felt thicker now. As if the walls themselves had begun to breathe, exhaling centuries of decay, dust, and secrets too long buried. The scent was a complex stench mildew and rotting velvet, overlaid with the unmistakable metallic whisper of dried blood.

His boots sank slightly into the faded rugs lining the corridor. They were moth eaten, but beneath the fraying threads, he glimpsed patterns circles, stars, lines curved in unnatural geometries. Sigils. Not just decorative flourishes, but wards. Binding seals.

The chandelier overhead a crooked iron fixture resembling an inverted crown of thorns creaked faintly in the stillness. Candle stubs, long unlit, hung like stalactites. Shadows clung to the corners, thick and unmoving, and Gareth had the distinct sense that they were watching.

He stepped into the great hall.

Here, the silence changed.

The walls were lined with ancient tapestries, their threads rotted to threadbare whispers of what once had been scenes of judgment and flame. Faded figures with elongated faces held scrolls aloft, while winged beings neither angel nor man watched from darkened skies.

In the center of the room, etched into the cold stone floor, was a circular seal. Burnt into the rock. Not drawn, not carved burnt. It was formed of three rings, one nested within the other, and covered in Enochian script. Gareth knelt beside it, the faint pulse of power rising beneath his fingertips.

His eyes narrowed.

He whispered, half in thought, half in memory. “Othiel… Vadriel… Amersiel…”

The names trembled on his tongue. Names not found in any biblical canon, yet scrawled in blood-black ink on the pages of the Clavicula Obscura.

The book trembled inside his coat.

Without thinking, Gareth drew it out. Its leather binding was darker now, moist. As if it fed on the room’s ancient energies. The symbols on the cover shimmered faintly, as though inked in mercury.

He turned the first page.

The writing had changed.

What once were sketches of protective seals had shifted, transforming into detailed instructions etched lines guiding him to the center of the circle before him. There was a phrase scrawled in Latin:

“Recludam quae clausa sunt. Nam malum suum iam dormit.” “I shall unseal what was sealed. For its evil only sleeps.”

Gareth stood and stepped into the center of the circle.

The temperature dropped.

A sudden wind, though no windows were open, tore through the hall. Candles sputtered to life no flame, just the scent of burning wax. And the whispers began.

It was not a sound he heard with ears. It was beneath the skin, between the ribs, behind the eyes.

“Et ecce, filius perditionis venit… portae Inferni patent ei…” “And behold, the son of perdition comes… the gates of Hell open to him…”

Gareth staggered back, but the circle held him.

Then the wall.

The one to the north, layered in thick stones unlike the rest of the house, began to sweat. Black fluid oozed between the cracks like tears. The sigils on its surface   previously dormant began to shine in pulsing red.

Something was behind that wall.

Something sealed.

And now, it knew he was here.

Gareth, his breath shallow, reached out and touched the stone. The moment his fingers met the damp sigils, a jolt of ice shot through his spine and a memory not his own pierced his mind:

A monastery. Screams. A circle of priests bleeding from their eyes. A woman suspended in midair, her skin covered in ash and scripture. And behind them all, something vast, robed in flame, wearing a crown of bone.

He stumbled back.

The Clavicula Obscura fell from his hands and landed open on the floor.

And the ink began to move.

 

“They shall see the face of the forgotten one, and tremble at the whisper of His name…” Fragment from The Black Hymnal, Hollow End Edition

The ink moved.

Not in rivers, but like a thing alive slithering across the open page of the Clavicula Obscura. It pulsed, coiling and rearranging itself into new shapes. As Gareth stared, the lines reformed into a diagram a ritual gate. Three interlocking circles with five crescents… a seal he recognized from a marginal note in the Sefer HaRazim The Book of Mysteries. An invocation not for summoning, but for waking.

A drop of cold sweat rolled from Gareth’s brow to the stone floor. It sizzled where it landed.

The house responded.

From the northern wall came a low groan, like wood tortured by centuries of winter. The sigils there began to warp glowing first red, then fading to black as ash spilled down in thin rivulets. The air stank of sulfur and burnt roses. Gareth reached toward the book, trembling now, and read aloud from the shifting page.

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"Shem ha-mephorash... Zazel… Belial… Marbas… I call thee not as enemy, but as knower. Open the Veil between!"

The wind died.

Then silence.

Then a voice.

Not heard but felt. Like a needle behind the eye. “You are not the first to trespass. But you may yet be the last…”

Gareth’s heart pounded. Behind the northern wall, something cracked. A jagged line, bleeding black ichor, split down the center. A moment later, the stones collapsed inward, revealing a hollow passage steep steps descending into the guts of the house, into the stone bones of the land itself.

He hesitated.

The Clavicula hummed in his hand, warm now. Too warm.

He stepped forward.

The air in the stairwell was colder than death. Each step downward was a step out of time centuries coiling around him like vines. The walls bore clawed markings, ancient text scorched in strange dialects. Bits of Latin. Aramaic. Fragments from the Book of Tobit and the Pseudepigrapha. Words only the damned would know.

Below, the passage opened into a subterranean chamber. Arched ceilings. Iron sconces burned with no fire. And on the far side of the room stood a pedestal, upon which sat… a mask.

Bone-white. Long. Eyeless.

Etched across the crown of it were words Gareth had never seen in full only hinted in whispers from mad monks and burned scrolls: "Coram inferis lumen exstinguitur." Before the damned, the light extinguishes.

Gareth approached, and the mask pulsed with life. As his fingers brushed its surface, the chamber screamed.

A howling wind, but no source.

The mask moved, and so did the walls revealing murals beneath murals, hidden from time. Painted in blood and gold: men and women in twisted rites, consumed by flame, pierced by stars, whispering to something vast with black wings.

Then

The vision returned.

The monastery. The suspended woman. The entity behind the veil. This time, Gareth saw its face a thing of ten thousand eyes, crowned in antlers and fire, speaking in seven voices at once. And as the vision shattered, a name seared itself into his memory:

“Varaq’el.” One of the Grigori. The fallen. The watchers.

The mask snapped shut.

The book burst into flame and then, as quickly, turned to ash in his hand.

And now he wasn’t alone.

Behind him, at the top of the stairwell, something watched. A figure wrapped in tattered priest’s robes. Its face a melted psalm. A whisper clung to the air like smoke.

“You have broken the seal, Gareth Valen. And now… Hollow End remembers.”

 

The chapel stood like a forgotten tooth among bones, nestled at the edge of Hollow End’s northern ridge where the fog curled thickest, where graves wept moss and the trees whispered like old women praying through broken teeth.

Gareth walked the winding path alone, his boots sinking into the damp, spongy earth. The evening sky was a cracked chalice of blood and charcoal; the sun had bled out behind the hills, and in its place rose an amber twilight. A single blackbird screamed overhead and was swallowed by the trees. The wind, cold and uncertain, threaded through his coat as though trying to feel his ribs.

The chapel’s wooden doors were shut, but not locked. When he pressed against them, they moaned open with the sound of age timber resisting memory. Within, a thin veil of incense still hung in the air like ghost-breath. Rows of cracked pews leaned like drunks. Light spilled through the stained glass in twisted shapes Michael defeating Lucifer, Abraham with the knife, a woman burning beneath seven stars.

At the altar, Father Merek knelt alone. He had aged since Gareth last saw him his face hollowed, beard wild and streaked with ash. He was whispering a prayer in Latin, the words clinging to the stale air like cobwebs:

"Fiat voluntas tua, in terra sicut in caelo… Ne nos inducas in tentationem…"

"Father," Gareth’s voice broke the spell. “You knew what this place was.”

Merek did not rise. “We all know. We just never spoke of it.”

"You hid the truth. About the house. About the Clavicula Obscura."

The priest exhaled, slow and shallow, as though releasing a sin he’d carried in his lungs too long. “That book should’ve been burned a hundred years ago. But men like you grieving, desperate always find the buried key.”

Gareth stepped forward. “What was bound here?”

Merek finally turned to face him. His eyes were bloodshot and fearful. “Not what. Who.”

Behind them, the candles flickered violently and died.

The door shut by itself.

The air shifted. Heavy. Dense. Cold. It was not the cold of nature, but the chill of presence. Then a sound like dry leaves being ground underfoot followed by the scent of scorched honey and blood.

She was there.

The Ash-Mother.

She did not walk in; she was. Materializing from soot and shadow, from forgotten hymns and the sigh of the dying. Her body was swathed in tattered black lace, stitched from moth wings and charcoal. Her hair hung like weeping vines, and her eyes were burnt-out stars holes in time.

“Your hands,” she whispered, “are stained with the ink of the dead.”

Gareth’s breath hitched.

She floated near the altar, the wood beneath her blackening like fire had passed over it centuries ago. “You have opened a hinge not meant to turn. The Clavicula was a lock and you have made it a door.”

Merek bowed his head. “Mother, we did what we could. The wards… the sigils…”

“They decay,” she hissed, voice doubling with echoes from realms unclean. “And the seals are breaking. The pact you all forgot has not forgotten you.”

Outside, the bell of the chapel rang once. But no one had pulled it.

In the distance, the wind howled a long, hollow scream that twisted through the hills like a child calling from a well.

The Ash-Mother drifted closer to Gareth. “You seek her. Your wife.”

Gareth’s throat dried. “She didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

“No,” the Ash-Mother agreed, almost gently. “But the price was taken. The balance is now broken.”

The chapel began to hum, low and wrong. Symbols along the walls once hidden glowed faintly beneath the plaster, seeping through like old wounds reopening: Enochian marks, Solomonic rings, sigils of St. Cyprian, the Scourge of the Legion, and a burned-in whisper: “Libera nos a malo.”

Merek stood, finally. His voice trembled. “We must gather the villagers. The rites must be performed anew.”

“Then do so,” the Ash-Mother whispered. “But know this: the night remembers.”

And she was gone.

No door opened. No wind followed. Just absence.

Silence settled like dust.

And then…

The chanting began.

Outside.

Low. Male voices. Droning.

“Adonai, Elohim, Tzabaoth…”

Gareth and Merek stepped out of the chapel to see the villagers hooded, solemn, gathered in a circle in the clearing, candles in their hands, ash smeared on their faces. At the center was a stone too smooth to be natural, etched with ancient symbols.

Ash-mother had not just warned them. She had awakened them.

The village of Hollow End lay under a shroud of unease.  Whispers of ancient evils stirred in the shadows, and the air grew thick with foreboding. 

 

Gareth stood at the threshold of the chapel, its once welcoming facade now twisted by the encroaching darkness.  Inside, Father Merek knelt before the altar, his prayers a desperate plea against the rising tide of malevolence. 

 

"Father Merek," Gareth's voice echoed through the hollow chamber, "the seals are broken. The Clavicula Obscura has awakened something ancient." 

 

The priest turned, his eyes hollow with dread. "You have meddled with forces beyond comprehension. The village stands on the brink." 

 

A sudden gust extinguished the candles, plunging the chapel into darkness. From the shadows emerged the Ash-Mother, her presence commanding and ethereal. 

 

"The time has come," she intoned, her voice resonating with the weight of ages. "The pact must be honored, or all shall be lost." 

 

Outside, the villagers gathered, drawn by an unseen force. The sky roiled with ominous clouds, and the earth trembled beneath their feet.  The ancient rites, long forgotten, would be invoked once more to confront the encroaching darkness.