The door did not open.
He passed through it. Not walking. Not phasing. Simply... translating. One moment his fingertips touched silver, and then the concept of "door" ceased to apply.
The cold hit him first.
Not temperature. Something older. The cold of a tomb that had never known sunlight. The cold of stones that had been stacked before the invention of language. It settled into his marrow like sediment, patient and permanent.
'At least Twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. No. Lower. No. The scale doesn't—'
His cataloguing stuttered. Stopped. There was no temperature here. Just old.
The space was vast.
Vast in the way cathedrals are vast—designed to make the worshipper feel insignificant. Pillars of dark silver rose into shadow without end. The floor beneath his bare feet was polished obsidian, reflecting nothing. The ceiling, if there was one, had been swallowed by darkness so complete it felt like looking into the space between stars.
And the smell.
Incense. Ancient and sweet. The kind of smoke that had risen from sacrifice pits when humanity was young. It coated his sinuses like oil, thick enough to taste on the back of his tongue.
'Aromatic compounds. Frankincense base. Myrrh undertones. Something else. Something—'
The smell was wrong. It carried memory. Not his memory. Older memory. Prayers in languages that predated writing. Blood on altars. Children crowned and children consumed.
The vision cascade from the corridor. The same wrongness, now in scent form.
His restored hands clenched at his sides. Both of them. The reminder that his body was whole here did nothing to comfort him.
---
Something was waiting.
It had always been waiting.
In the center of the space—if a space without walls could have a center—it sat. Patient. Ancient. Vast in a way that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with weight.
A cat.
The largest cat Grigor had ever seen. Larger than any cat that had ever lived. Larger, perhaps, than anything that should be called a cat.
Its body was sculpted from living silver—not gray, not white, but the true metal itself, polished to mirror shine and catching light that had no source. Muscles rippled beneath the metallic skin. Each movement sent cascades of reflected gleam across the obsidian floor.
It was the size of an elephant. Perhaps larger. The pillars that rose around it were dwarfed by its presence. Its head alone was larger than Grigor's entire body.
And its eyes.
Lapis lazuli. Deep blue, flecked with gold, old as the stones beneath the oldest temples. They watched him with an intelligence that made his spine try to crawl out of his skin.
'Cataloguing as hallucination. Continuing.'
The thought felt hollow. His analytical engine was making sounds, going through motions. But something deeper knew: this was not a hallucination. This was not dying neurons firing randomly.
This was real. This was here. And it was looking directly at him.
"Vicar."
The voice filled the space. Not loud. Not echoing. Simply... present. Everywhere at once, coming from no single point, felt in the bones rather than heard through ears.
Warm. Amused. Hungry.
"Such a filthy little soul. I've been waiting for you."
The warmth in that voice was familiar. Something about it nagged at the edges of memory. The Voice that had spoken to him in the cargo hold, just before he died—You will BE the bleach—had carried that same quality. That same sense of patience.
Or had it?
He couldn't be certain. His memories were fragmenting, dying neurons playing tricks. Perhaps there had been one voice. Perhaps two. Perhaps he was imagining connections that didn't exist.
'Insufficient data. Cataloging and continuing.'
She did not move.
She did not need to.
Her presence filled the space so completely that movement would have been redundant. A mountain does not need to shift to remind you of its weight.
"You have questions." It was not a question. "Your eyes have changed, and you don't understand why. You walked through my gallery and spoke names you never learned. You felt histories that belonged to other throats, other altars."
Grigor's tongue was lead in his mouth. He had prepared himself for torture. For monsters. For starvation and degradation and the endless grinding horror of Hell.
He had not prepared for this.
A voice that spoke his thoughts before he could form them. Eyes that knew him better than he knew himself. Power so absolute it didn't need to threaten—its existence was the threat.
"Silver-white." The words curled around him like smoke. "The mark of awakening. Your Stigmata has chosen its shape at last. You are Acolyte now. More than meat."
'Stigmata. Acolyte. Terminology I don't—'
"You don't know these words," she said, answering the thought he hadn't spoken. "Of course you don't. The Intent doesn't explain. It uses. It discards. It has no patience for teaching."
The warmth in her voice shifted. Something almost like sympathy.
"But I have patience, Vicar. I have nothing but time."
He found his voice.
"What are you?"
It came out cracked. Broken. The voice of a man who had screamed when his eye was burned from its socket and his hand was severed at the wrist. But it was his voice, and he had used it.
The great silver head tilted. A gesture so perfectly feline it made his chest ache.
"I am what I have always been. The Mother. The Protector. The One Who Waits." The lapis eyes gleamed. "I am the voice that speaks when the cold grows too deep. The warmth in the darkness. The one truth in a universe of lies."
Her smile was a predator's smile. Beautiful. Terrible.
"I am Bastet. And you, Vicar, were always meant to find me."
'Egyptian goddess of protection and cats.'
The clinical knowledge surfaced from somewhere. Common knowledge. Cultural literacy. The kind of fact you absorbed from documentaries and museum plaques without ever really learning it.
'Mythology. Fiction. Symbolic representation of cultural—'
"Not mythology." Her voice was gentle. A mother correcting a child's innocent mistake. "Not fiction. We were here before your stories. Your stories came from us."
She rose.
The motion was fluid, impossible, terrifying. A mountain standing. An ocean lifting itself from its bed. The pillars seemed to lean away from her as she moved, as if even the architecture feared her.
She circled him. Slow. Deliberate. Each footfall silent on the obsidian.
"Your kind called us gods because they had no other word. They built temples to catch our attention. Spilled blood to earn our favor. Created anchors to hold fragments of our will."
She stopped behind him. He could feel her breath on the back of his neck—warm, wrong, smelling of incense and old meat.
"Henderson's little statue. You touched it. You resonated. And here you are."
"What is a Stigmata?"
The question surprised him. He had not meant to speak it. But the words were out, and he found he desperately wanted the answer.
She moved around him again. Coming to rest before him, her great silver head lowering until her lapis eyes were level with his silver-white ones.
"Power," she said. "True power. The seed that sleeps in every soul, waiting to bloom."
The word settled into him like a hook.
"Corpus shapes the body." Her voice had changed. Rhythmic now. Teaching. "Materia shapes matter. Animus. Kinesis. Fortuna."
She paused. Let the silence stretch.
"There are others. But those are earned, Vicar. Not given."
"Yours is none of these. Your Stigmata defies classification. That is why The Intent noticed you. That is why I have been watching since before you died."
'Watching. Since before—'
His thoughts stuttered. Caught on the implication. She had seen him on Earth. Before Henderson's statue. Before anything.
"Will is the container," she continued, ignoring his mental spiral. "Will is the fuel. Without it, you are nothing but meat with ideas. With it..." The smile again. "With it, you can clean anything."
The word landed like a blow.
Clean.
The Voice. The Intent. The command that had shaped his every action since arriving in Hell.
She knew.
"Every gift has a price."
Her voice had changed. Softer now. Almost tender.
"You will learn your Burden soon enough. The weight that comes with what you are. It will seem cruel. It is merely honest."
"This world devours the weak, Vicar. But you are no longer weak. You are Acolyte. You can consume. Grow. Transform. Given time..."
She let the silence stretch.
"Given time, you could become something worth keeping."
The offer came soft as silk.
"You have questions I can answer. Dangers I can warn you against. Enemies who would consume you before you ever learn to fight."
Her great head lowered further. So close now. Close enough to feel the weight of her regard like hands on his shoulders.
"Do you want me to guide you, Vicar?"
The question was simple. Reasonable. A mother reaching out to a lost child.
His shoulders dropped. His analytical engine—that rattling mechanism that had carried him through Henderson's cellar and the drowning and the teeth and the endless dying—it wanted to stop. To surrender. To let someone else carry the weight of understanding.
She knew things. She would teach.
His mouth opened.
His tongue shaped the first syllable of yes.
"Careful."
The voice was not hers.
It came from nowhere and everywhere. Mechanical. Alien. Cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the absolute absence of warmth.
The same voice that had told him to clean it on his first day. The same voice that had given him purpose when he was starving in the sack forests.
It had spoken here. In this space. In her space.
Bastet's lapis eyes flickered. A flash of something—annoyance? Surprise? No. Neither. She had been expecting this. Grigor could see it in the way her muscles hadn't tensed, the way her smile hadn't faltered.
She had known he wouldn't accept. She had asked anyway.
"Ah," she said. "The tool speaks. How novel."
Grigor's mouth closed.
The word—yes—died on his tongue. He had not said it. He had not agreed. But he had been about to.
'The tool. She called it a tool.'
The realization landed in his chest like a stone.
Bastet's warmth. The other voice's cold. She called it a tool. Spoke of it with contempt. As if it were something lesser. Something she opposed.
'If they are not the same...'
His mind raced. The Voice that had spoken in the cargo hold—BE the bleach—had that been her? Or the cold one? He had assumed they were aspects of the same entity. Now, standing before this silver goddess, he wasn't certain of anything.
Bastet watched him. Patient. Her lapis eyes unreadable.
"Think carefully, Vicar," she said. "The Intent does not love you. It does not care if you suffer. It speaks in commands, not guidance. It will use you until you break, and then it will find another."
'The Intent. That's what she calls it.'
Another name. Another piece of the puzzle he didn't have.
"I offer something different. Knowledge. Protection. A mother's care for her child."
"All I ask is that you listen. That you trust me. That you call me—"
"No."
The word came from somewhere deep. Deeper than thought. Deeper than the analytical engine that had failed him since he walked through that door.
Precaution. Survival instinct. The same part of him that had learned to count bullets and measure distances and never, ever take anything at face value.
Two voices. Two entities. One teaching him. One warning him. And he didn't know which was which.
'When uncertain: assume the worst. Do nothing. Commit to nothing.'
"I need time," he said. "To think. To understand."
Bastet's eyes did not change. Her smile did not fade.
"Of course, Vicar." Her voice was warm as ever. "Take all the time you need. I am nothing if not patient."
She settled back onto her haunches. The movement made the floor vibrate.
"You will return, and I will be here."
The words hung in the air. Final. Certain. A prophecy spoken by something that had been making prophecies since before humanity learned to write.
Grigor met her lapis eyes. Said nothing.
And then—
She opened her mouth.
And roared.
---
It was not a sound. Sounds had wavelengths. Sounds could be measured, catalogued, understood.
This was rupture.
The temple shook. The pillars groaned. The obsidian floor cracked in spiderweb patterns that spread outward from her haunches like frozen lightning.
Grigor's hands flew to his ears, but there was nothing to block. The roar was not entering through his eardrums. It was inside his skull, reverberating off the inside of his bones, shaking loose memories he hadn't known he'd lost.
Cats do not roar. Lions roar. Tigers roar.
Cats scream.
But this was neither. This was the sound of something that had never needed a throat to speak, expressing displeasure through reality itself. The architecture of the temple bent inward. The shadows reached. The smell of incense curdled into something older—blood and copper and the fear-sweat of a thousand thousand sacrifices.
Grigor's vision scrambled. Colors inverted. Shapes twisted. The great silver form before him became a smear of light and ancient malice.
'Sensory cascade. Neural—'
The clinical catalogue died. There was no cataloguing this. There was only enduring.
The roar stopped.
Or rather, it didn't stop—it simply finished. The last reverberations faded into silence so absolute it felt like deafness.
Grigor found himself on his knees. When had he fallen? He didn't remember falling. His restored hands were pressed against the cracked obsidian, and his silver-white eyes were streaming tears he couldn't control.
Bastet sat before him. Patient. Unruffled. As if she had done nothing more strenuous than yawn.
"Remember, Vicar," she said, her voice warm as ever. "When the cold grows too deep. When the tool discards you. When you have nowhere else to turn..."
The pulling began again.
Not his choice. Not hers either, this time. Something else. Something that had decided this audience was finished.
"Mother will be waiting."
---
He fell.
Through silver. Through darkness. Through the space between spaces.
The last thing he perceived was her voice, echoing in the hollows of his skull:
"Mother will always be waiting."