The Madman's Guide to Miracles

The agony tore through my chest as the needle bit into the bone, but my mind detached, suspended in white noise.

I don’t know how long it went on. After a while, the hours just blurred together. All I could feel was the cold iron, the wet stone beneath me, and Aldren’s voice going on and on. They kept cutting into me, doing things I couldn’t even understand, forcing my body to take more than it could handle. Every breath felt like glass scraping down my throat.

Honestly, I just wanted to die. I wanted my heart to stop, anything to make this room disappear. I prayed for anything that would knock me out, but my body wouldn’t let me. No matter what they did, I stayed awake through all of it.

When the pain finally receded into a dull, throbbing numbness, the blue light in the room had shifted.

The small basement chamber was gone. They had dragged my slate table into the grand subterranean vault directly beneath the cathedral.

The air reeked of burnt lavender, copper, and something that had been left to rot for far too long. Hundreds of candles lined the stone walls, their flickering light barely reaching the crowd standing in the darkness.

Hundreds of them.

The Church’s followers stood in silent, rigid rows behind the table. Monks in gray linen, knights in rusted armor, and corrupted husks with gray, cracked skin, all staring at me with hollow, unblinking eyes.

Then, the chanting began.

It wasn’t a loud roar. It was a low, rhythmic murmur, hundreds of voices whispering the exact same syllables in unison, sliding over each other

"The vessel opens," they whispered into the dark. "The flesh yields. The root finds soil."

The sound vibrated through the stone floor, humming straight into my bare back.

So this was it. That bastard’s heart. The one Aurelia warned me about. I should have listened.

And the heart mentioned in the diary... what the hell is it doing here? I thought it was supposed to be in the cave.

The shadows crept over my boots and up my legs. I wasn’t just dying. They were turning me into a vessel. If that thing took over my body, would there even be anything left of me?

Then I thought of Nia, still sitting in that chair upstairs with the iron chain around her seat. My chest tightened. Was she still terrified, waiting for me to come back for her? I didn’t care what happened to me anymore. I just wanted her to get out.

Beside him sat a heavy, square chest carved from dark, fossilized wood. Its surface was bound in thick iron bands that groaned under immense internal pressure.

"The vessel opens," the crowd hissed again, their voices rising like dry leaves scraping across stone. "The flesh yields."

Aldren reached down and unlatched the iron lock.

The heavy lid fell back with a dull thud.

The chanting stopped. The room went silent. I could hear my own breathing and the drops of sweat hitting the slate.

Aldren reached into the dark interior of the chest with both hands.

When he lifted it out, my stomach dropped into a cold, bottomless pit.

It was a heart.

It was nearly the size of a human torso, dark, rubbery, and covered in thick, jagged veins that pulsed with a dull, sickening crimson light. It looked like it had been torn from a beast centuries ago, yet it was alive.

Thump.

The sound wasn’t coming from the heart. I could feel it through the stone table, in my chest, even in my teeth.

Thump.

Please, I prayed to whatever silent god was listening, my teeth grinding together so hard my jaw throbbed. Just let my heart burst. Just kill me now.

"For centuries," Aldren whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying, quiet awe. He held the massive, wet thing directly above my exposed chest, his pale hands stained dark with its fluid. "It waited. It starved. It searched for a shell that would not shatter under its weight."

He looked down at me, his eyes completely vacant, devoid of any human pity or warmth.

"You are blessed, little beast," he murmured. "You get to carry a god."

I tried to pull away, but the iron clamps dug deeper into my bleeding wrists, holding me down.

"W-Wait... please! P-Please, I don’t want this! S-Somebody... please, just stop!"

If something capable of slaughtering gods and burying them took over my body... then I don’t stand a chance. There was no way I was making it out of here alive.

I guess this is it.

I’m sorry, Nia, I thought, as the last of my breath was squeezed out of me. I couldn’t do it.

The crimson veins snapped taut around my spine. The heavy heartbeat roared in my ears, drowning out Aldren, the cultists, and my own pulse.

"Yield," he commanded softly.

And Yield I did.

He pressed the heavy, beating heart directly into the fresh, gaping wound in my sternum.

The moment the dark, wet mass touched my open flesh, it didn’t rest on top of me. It sank.

The veins burst from the heart and sank into my chest. They wrapped around my ribs, tore into my lungs, then dug straight into my Soul Core.

My eyes rolled back. My spine arched so hard against the slate the iron straps groaned.

The world went black.

***

Suddenly, I was somewhere else. Somewhere I had never been.

The first memory was dark and wet.

Cold stone pressed against my cheek. My body felt too heavy, covered in thick plates of bone and black iron. Heavy golden chains dug into my wrists, keeping me pinned to a slate floor slick with dark blood.

Above me stood a figure wrapped in sharp, blinding light. Seraphiel, the Numen of Knowledge. Beside him stood Ignar, a towering Numen with a crown of white-hot plasma for a head, and Nyxis, a figure draped in shadow whose presence seemed to make the light around her bleed away.

"It has no Soul Core," Nyxis whispered, her voice soft as silk against dry bone. "It isn’t even in the Elder Litany."

"Why waste the chains on it?" she asked.

Seraphiel tugged on one of the chains, forcing my head up. "Because it listens."

"That’s all?"

"That’s enough."

Ignar chuckled, the sound like grinding stone. "A mindless hammer. Perfect for dirty work."

I had no name. No thoughts of my own. There were only the chains around my wrists, the hunger gnawing at my gut, and the smell of blood.

The vision jerked, plunging me into darkness.

Millions of tons of celestial rock had collapsed during a divine war, burying an entire sector beneath the earth. I was pinned under a fallen pillar, my left side crushed, my flesh slowly rotting away in the dark.

Fifty feet away, chained to a broken arch, sat a woman. Her light was faint, barely more than a dying candle in that massive underground tomb.

We didn’t speak for years. I was a broken war machine waiting to decay, and she was a minor Numen the Empyrean Court had abandoned to die.

Then the stone shifted, crushing what was left of my ribs. A low, wet grunt escaped my throat.

She spoke after a long silence.

"Still alive?"

I couldn’t answer.

A dry laugh came from the darkness.

"Yeah... me too."

I still couldn’t answer. My throat was packed with dried grit.

"They aren’t digging us out," she said softly, leaning her head against the dirt. "They’ve already forgotten this place exists. We’re just trash to them."

Decades passed in that tomb. My body was failing. My flesh had begun turning to sludge, starving for Ether.

One night, I heard the sound of tearing flesh followed by a choked gasp.

She crawled through the dirt toward me, dragging herself forward on broken arms. Her chest was wide open, pale glowing fluid dripping into the dust. In her hands, she held her own Soul Core, a jagged, pulsing heart of pure divine Ether.

"Take it," she rasped, blood running down her chin. "If we die like this... we die as their tools. Together... you can live."

She knew exactly what it would cost her.

She still gave it to me.

"No..." I managed to grunt, my voice rough as grinding stone.

"Shut up and take it!" she snapped. Tears cut through the grime on her face. "Don’t let them win! PLEASE!"

She shoved the glowing core into my hollow, decaying chest.

The pain was unbearable. Her Ether flooded into me, burning through every vein it touched. My body convulsed as something deep inside my chest began to change.

I didn’t understand what was happening.

I only knew that, for the first time, there was something inside me that hadn’t been there before.

Her.

I wasn’t just a weapon anymore. She had given me a soul, something the gods had decided an Elder Beast could never possess. In that dying darkness, I became something they had sworn could never exist.

The memory shattered into burning gold and falling thunder.

We had dug our way out, but the Empyrean Court was already waiting above the burning forest. Shimmering Archons hovered in the sky, flanked by the great Numina themselves.

Ignar stepped forward first, his fiery presence charring the clouds around him.

"Look at it," he sneered. "A slave beast daring to touch divine Ether. A monster pretending to hold a soul."

"IT IS A TABOO!" Seraphiel’s voice boomed across the sky, ringing with absolute authority. "AN ELDER BEAST CANNOT BECOME A GOD! THE ELDER LITANY FORBIDS IT!"

Nyxis drifted down, her shadowy cloak swallowing the sunlight around her.

"How grotesque," she murmured. "A stolen soul in a mongrel vessel. Cleanse it."

Seraphiel raised his hand.

The ancient golden chains buried in my soul suddenly pulled tight.

"Weapon!" Seraphiel commanded.

His Authority crashed into my mind like a wave.

"KILL HER! Cleanse the divine Ether you stole from her corpse!"

My body seized.

The command carved itself into my soul. The chains binding me forced my arms to move against my will. My massive, bone-plated gauntlet slowly rose, pointing straight at her chest.

I panicked.

"No... no, no, NO!" I begged, my voice cracking as tears of blood leaked from my slitted eyes. I fought against my own muscles, trying to force them back. "Seraphiel, PLEASE! Master, please don’t make me do this! TAKE MY LIFE INSTEAD! PLEASE!"

"It doesn’t even realize it’s begging," Ignar laughed from above. "Fascinating."

"Execute her," Seraphiel repeated.

I tried to break my own arms. I tried to throw myself against the ground hard enough to shatter my spine.

"PLEASE!" I screamed, dropping to my knees as my body fought itself. "I’LL BE YOUR WEAPON AGAIN! I’LL BE YOUR SLAVE FOREVER! JUST LET HER LIVE! PLEASE, SERAPHIEL, I BEG YOU!"

She looked at me with those pale, frightened eyes.

The chains burned around my head, and I could do nothing but kneel there in the dirt, shaking and crying.

"It’s okay," she whispered.

She stepped closer instead of running.

"It’s not you."

"RUN!" I screamed. My voice broke into a ragged sob as my arm pulled back against my will. "PLEASE, RUN AWAY FROM ME! I CAN’T STOP IT! RUN!"

"I gave you my soul so you could be real," she said, her voice trembling as she reached up toward my face. "Don’t let them take it back."

My arm moved.

My hand drove forward.

The sound was wet and sickening.

My claws tore straight through her chest.

"Good beast," Seraphiel said from above, his voice cold and satisfied. "Now return to your knees."

Her blood poured over my hands, warm and bright. She collapsed against my chest, coughing dark fluid over my armor.

And in that exact second, as her life faded completely... the last of her divine Ether snapped into place inside my heart.

The slave chains in my mind shattered like brittle glass.

Sentience hit me like a physical blow.

For the first time, I understood what I had done.

Hunger was gone. So was the command.

There was only horror.

Her blood was still warm on my hands. I remembered her giving me her soul. I remembered her begging me to live. And now she was dead because of these hands.

I loved her.

And I had killed her.

Killed

And I had killed her.

Killed

Her blood was still warm on my hands.

"What..." I whispered.

My voice wasn’t grinding stone anymore. It was mine. It was human.

"What did I do?"

I fell to my knees, cradling her ruined body against my chest. I sobbed until my ribs cracked.

"Look at that," Ignar mocked, leaning down from the sky, his heat drying her blood against my skin. "The beast gained a mind just in time to watch her die. How poetic."

"CLEANSE IT!" Seraphiel ordered. His voice carried a sudden edge of disgust. "KILL IT BEFORE IT ACCLIMATES!"

"NO!"

The roar tore out of my throat with enough force to crack the earth beneath my feet.

For the first time, I wasn’t fighting because I was ordered to.

I fought because there was nothing left but hatred.

I tore through the Archons with my bare hands. When Ignar’s spear of white fire came for me, I caught it. It burned straight through my flesh, but I held on and drove it back into his eye.

I survived.

I ran when I had to. I fought when I could. Those I couldn’t beat, I fled from. Those I could kill, I killed.

I kept going until there was nothing left of me but hatred.

I turned the forest into a graveyard.

Golden blood ran between the roots as I hunted them down one by one. I tore through every Archon I could find, screaming her name into the burning sky until my throat split and my voice gave out.

Even then, I kept screaming.

I wanted the heavens to remember her name.

If the gods had erased her from their history, then I’d carve it into their corpses myself.

Every god that came down to stop me died. I dragged their massive, bleeding corpses into the mountains and built a graveyard from their remains.

Then I sat among the rot and screamed into the silence.

The vision skipped through centuries of silence.

I saw myself standing at the edge of the world, where the Outer Sea stretched into a lightless void.

"Where did you go?" I wept into the darkness, falling to my knees on the cold rock. "Please... I’m real now... please come back to me..."

Then the void moved.

A shape rose from the blackness, vast, ancient, and utterly wrong. It had no face. Only a towering mass of shifting, antler-like spires that seemed to tear the sky apart simply by existing.

It looked down at me.

Its gaze touched me, and something inside my head began to give way.

The laws of reality around my body started to unravel. My flesh cracked. My newly born soul began to dissolve into static.

Terror seized me.

I crawled backward, dragging myself away from it. I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. The longer I stared, the less of myself I could feel.

I don’t remember much after that.

I only remember wanting to go somewhere familiar.

Somewhere I could forget what I’d seen.

The next time they came, there were no Archons.

The Numina came themselves.

I stood in the center of a shattered, burning valley, surrounded by the corpses of lesser gods I had butchered. My armor was melted, my flesh hanging in ragged strips, my Soul Core bleeding her stolen Ether into the dirt.

Then the temperature plummeted.

The air froze so violently that the stone beneath my feet shattered like glass.

Thalassa, the Numen of Tides, descended in a towering cascade of black water and crushing pressure. Beside her stood Morvain, the Numen of Death, draped in silent burial shrouds that smelled of ancient soil and absolute stillness.

Even Aurelion, the Numen of Dawn, hovered above us. He wasn’t looking at me with hatred.

He looked sad.

"Enough, Vaelgor," Aurelion said, his voice warm and mournful, like a dying sunrise. "You were born a tool, but you have suffered enough. Rest now."

"I DON’T WANT REST!" I shrieked, blood spraying from my ruined throat onto the ice. "I WANT HER BACK! BRING HER BACK OR I’LL TEAR THE HEAVENS TO ASH!"

"She is beyond the river, beast," Morvain whispered. His voice was barely louder than the rustle of grave dirt. "The natural order cannot be undone for grief."

"We do not do this out of cruelty," Thalassa said softly, her watery form tightening around me like a vice. "You carry an anomaly. An Elder Beast holding a soul threatens the balance of existence itself. The Concordat cannot permit it."

They attacked with the cold, effortless certainty of beings who had never needed to question themselves.

Thalassa bound my legs in crushing pressure, splintering my bone-plated armor. I drove my claws into her fluid body, but my strikes passed through her like water.

Morvain reached out a pale, gaunt hand.

The very concept of decay settled inside my lungs.

My strength drained away. My muscles failed. I collapsed onto my knees.

I thrashed. I bit. I tore at my own skin, screaming her name into the frozen dirt.

Then the sky split open.

Seraphiel descended.

Something about him felt different this time. The light around him was heavier, almost impossible to look at. It felt like he knew things no living mind was supposed to know.

"You fight with emotion, Vaelgor," Seraphiel said.

His voice wasn’t loud, but it echoed directly inside my mind, overriding my thoughts.

"Emotion is a flaw of finite beings. Allow me to grant you understanding."

He raised his right hand.

With his index fingers and thumb, he formed a sharp, glowing triangle over his left eye.

Inside that frame, his eye burned with infinite golden geometry.

"Observe," he whispered.

THUM-THUM.

Something poured into my mind.

Everything.

Stars being born. Worlds dying. Things without names. Things without shapes. Answers that created more questions the moment I understood them.

My mind couldn’t contain it.

My nervous system burned out. Blood poured from my eyes, nose, and ears as the sheer weight of it crushed down on my soul.

I couldn’t move.

I couldn’t scream.

I was trapped inside my own head, drowning in knowledge I was never meant to possess.

Seraphiel drifted down through the air, completely calm.

He reached toward my helpless body and pressed his fingers against my sternum.

With one precise movement, he drove his hand through my ribs and seized the divine heart she had given me.

"The Litany is absolute," Seraphiel murmured.

His voice was almost gentle as he tore the heart from my chest and bound it in glowing golden runes.

"A beast cannot hold a soul. Your existence ends here."

He drove a massive spike of conceptual iron through my open chest, pinning my soul directly into the bedrock of the world.

"SEAL HIM!" Seraphiel commanded.

Then he turned his back on me.

"Bury the heart where the sun cannot reach. Let the dirt forget his name."

The earth tore open. Mountains shifted, collapsing over my body like a massive stone tomb. I felt the darkness closing in, crushing my lungs, smothering my voice, pinning me in the lightless depth of the earth for eternity.

"No..." I sobbed internally, unable to even open my mouth as the last ray of sunlight vanished. "Please... don’t leave me alone... please..."

Then the memory dissolved into nothingness.

***

The memory dissolved into nothingness.

Aseren snapped back to reality with a violent, bloody gasp, his back arching off the slate table so hard the iron shackles sheared against the stone.

Air burned his throat like fire. The vault reeked of iron, copper, and ancient rot.

Saint Aldren stood right over him. His robes were stained black with fluid, his hands covered in blood, and his eyes completely unblinking.

"Father..." a monk whimpered from the dark corner, stumbling backward over his own robes. "Father, look at his chest! What did you put in him?!"

"Shut your mouth!" Aldren snapped, his voice shaking. He leaned in close, staring down at Aseren with a terrifying, breathless grin. "It worked. The meat didn’t burst."

Aseren couldn’t move his legs. He couldn’t scream. His entire torso felt like it was being ripped apart from the inside.

On his chest, where Aldren had shoved the blackened, antler-marked organ, the flesh was turning purple. Dark, swollen veins were crawling up his neck like black roots.

Then his chest heaved.

THUMP.

His human heart kicked against his left ribs, weak and frantic.

BA-BAM.

A second later, deep in his chest, the god’s heart slammed against his right ribs with the weight of a falling anvil.

They weren’t beating together. They were fighting.

THUMP-BAM. THUMP-BAM.

The beats picked up speed, completely out of sync, hammering against his ribcage like two desperate animals trying to break out of a cage. The wet, heavy thudding echoed off the stone walls, making a hollow, metallic ringing sound—like heavy bells striking deep underground.

CLANG-THUMP. CLANG-THUMP.

"Ah—GAAAH!" Aseren choked, dark blood spurting from his nose and spilling down his chin.

Every time his human heart beat, a wave of cold terror hit his brain. Every time the god’s heart slammed down, an ancient, suffocating grief threatened to snap his mind in half.

THUMP-CLANG! THUMP-CLANG! THUMP-CLANG!

The pulse turned frantic. The air in the vault grew so thick it was hard to breathe. The candles around the room flickered, turned a sickly red, and died.

"FATHER, PLEASE!" a monk screamed, clutching his head as blood started leaking from his ears. "THE SOUND! IT’S CRACKING THE FLOOR! IT’S IN MY HEAD!"

The monks scrambled over each other, clawing at the heavy iron door in pure panic, trying to pull it open. "LET US OUT! GET US OUT OF HERE!"

Aldren didn’t move. He just stared down at Aseren’s chest, his own hands trembling as the stone table beneath them began to split.

But he had to continue the assimilation. He had to finish the ritual.

So he retrieved the ritualist’s knife and slowly approached Aseren.

THUMP-CLANG-THUMP-CLANG-THUMP-CLANG!

The double-beat went wild, pounding so fast and loud it felt like his chest was about to explode. Aseren’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, bloody tears running into his hair as his soul tore down the middle.

A voice echoed through his skull.

"This body is mine."

Aseren’s body suddenly convulsed.

His fingers clawed against the stone as his entire frame began to shake violently. Blood spilled from the corners of his mouth, then burst from his lips as he tried to force the words out.

"No..."

His voice came from his own throat, raw and desperate.

"It’s mine."

His body trembled harder, blood dripping from his chin as he fought against something buried deep within his own soul.

For a moment, the two voices overlapped.

One calm.

The other terrified.

Both fighting for the same body.

"This body is mine."

Aseren’s eyes widened.

"NO. IT’S MINE!"

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