The Forbidden Ritual: Vatican Archives

The cold smell of the fire stayed deep inside the wood for weeks. That smoke was the exact air that filled my little sister's lungs at the end. I breathed it in just so I could feel like I still had something left of her. She was 22. Anastasia. I'd been raising her since she was 11, since our parents left. And then the mill fire, and then nothing. Grigory stood in my doorway with his hat in his hands. He couldn't look at my face. His boots were still muddy from the yard. Only the mill caught late at night. No one knew exactly how. A lamp left burning, maybe, or a spark off the grinding wheel that had been throwing sparks for weeks. By the time the smoke was visible from the village, there were already a dozen people gathered outside By the time one of them, finally, finally moved toward the door, she wasn't answering anymore. Grigory kept saying it wasn't anyone's fault. He kept using the word hesitation. Like there's a meaningful difference between a man who puts his hands around a throat and a man who stands in a yard, listening to someone die and can't find the will to take a step. I got back the same night it happened. Saw the glow through the trees, before I even reached the village. People came to my door. Old women holding my hands. The priest with his soft, useless voice. They all wore the same look. Grief, and guilt, and wanting me to tell them they had nothing to feel guilty about. I couldn't do it. Every time I looked at a face, I looked for the shame underneath it. I couldn't separate the ones who'd been there from the ones who hadn't, so I stopped. I stopped answering the door. Then people stopped knocking. Then they crossed the street when they saw me coming. And that was fine. That was honest. At least it matched how things actually were. I drank for a while. Not badly. Not in a way that made a scene. Just alone at the table in the evenings. A cheap rye spirit that burned going down and burned in my chest. I drank until my chest went numb. Until the room was just quiet. I wasn't eating much, and I wasn't sleeping much. So I just sat there. I went to the tavern. Sat in the corner with my glass. The place smelled of pipe smoke and sour beer. I kept to myself until I heard the old men at the next table. Three of them, all past sixty, red-faced from the cold. They'd been talking about something for a long time, and lowered their voices without deciding to. I caught the name first. Babkin. Then a little more. Something about the forest. Something about the old ways. And then one of them said "judgment rites" in a half-whisper that carried anyway. I shouldn't have listened. I did. Damien Babkin. A disgraced priest. Exiled to the forest for practices that weren't exactly sanctioned. He lived alone now. Deep in the forest. A half-day's walk from the village. The old people who came to him with the right kind of grief. "Judgment rites" they called it. And the oldest of the three said the phrase like he wasn't sure he should be saying it aloud. I laughed. And one of them looked over and I waved my hand and looked away. But then I turned back. And I asked them, casually, I made sure it sounded casual, where exactly in the forest this man lived. The oldest one looked at me He knew who I was. He knew about Anastasia. The whole village did. He looked at me like he was trying to decide something and then he told me. I thanked him, finished my drink, and walked home. The path back took me through the birch trees at the edge of the village. The night was clear and very cold. Cold enough that the mud had gone hard and crunched underfoot. The white trunks stood out in the dark. My breath came out in short clouds that disappeared fast in the dry air. I kept my head down and tried not to think at all and I'd gotten about halfway through when I heard it. Footsteps behind me. Careful. Deliberate. Matching my pace almost exactly. I stopped and they stopped. The silence came back. I turned around and the path was empty and I was about to keep walking when I saw it. Between two of the white trunks far enough back that I could have been wrong in the dark and the cold and weeks without proper sleep. A shape. A person-shaped thing standing very still. A woman or the posture of one turned toward me. I stood there and looked at it. I told myself it was a branch. Told myself I was exhausted and putting a shape together out of shadow which is what happens on no sleep and three weeks of grief. And I almost believed it. And then the thing. The branch. The shadow. Whatever it was. Was simply gone. Not moving away. Just no longer there. Gone. Walked the rest of the way home fast and didn't look behind me again. I packed before the sun came up. A change of clothes. A little food. The small amount of money I had left. It smelled of rye spirit and cold ash from a stove that had gone out in the night. And it felt smaller than it had before Anastasia died. The icon on the wall caught what little light there was. I thought about going back to sleep. About leaving the whole thing alone. I wasn't praying. I hadn't prayed in twenty years. Not since I was young enough that it still made sense to talk to things that might not be listening. But I stood there in the dark of the room and said it aloud to nothing in particular. If there is anything listening show me what justice looks like. Then I picked up my pack and walked out into the dark and the birch trees were waiting at the edge of the village white and still and quiet as they always were. And I didn't look between them. But I listened. The path gave out about an hour in and by then the birds had already stopped. Not gradually, just gone, the forest went completely still. Half a day's walk sounds reasonable until the ground is frozen solid and there's no trail to follow. My pack straps had gone stiff in the cold and bit into my shoulders. My breath kept coming out in short white puffs that disappeared fast and the frost had sealed the mud. Every step cracked loud in the quiet. No wind in the branches, no sound from the trees. Just the white trunks close on both sides pale and quiet and my footsteps and nothing answering them. Then I came down off the ridge and saw the chapel and I understood why the old man had said it like that. A broken chapel. Like that was a landmark and not a warning. The stone walls were still standing stained with long black streaks of damp running down from where the roof was and there was a river with dead creeper crawling down into the open space inside. It smelled of wet stone and standing water and rot. The kind of smell that gets in your nose and doesn't leave and it looked like something the ground was slowly pulling down. A low wooden fence ran the perimeter of the clearing, rotting, half eaten by undergrowth and on the gate post someone had nailed a flat piece of wood with marks carved into it that I didn't recognize and didn't touch. I sat behind the chapel, small, older than it looked, a stovepipe trailing a thin thread of gray smoke straight up in the dead air. The door had ash marks drawn on it in something grayish white and chalky. Simple shapes I couldn't name. Three ravens on the roofline watched me with their flat black eyes. I stood at the fence a while before I knocked. Not because I was afraid, I told myself. I was thinking. Damien Babkin opened the door and the warmth came out immediately, dry and woody with smoke and beneath it something boiled a long time ago, barley maybe. And it made me understand how cold I'd gotten on the walk without noticing. He was older than I'd expected and smaller, with a beard going gray and hands that were rough and thick-knuckled, a working man's hands and he had the tired look of someone carrying something heavy in his ears, not a man who just needed sleep. He wasn't in vestments, just a wool shirt and trousers and he looked at me without any surprise in his face at all, which wasn't comforting. He said, "You're Ostinov, Anastasia's brother?" I said, "Yes." Nothing after that, just stepped back from the door and I went inside. The cabin was clean, which surprised me. book. properly shelved, a table with a candle, an old icon in the corner, paint worn smooth in the middle from years of hands, the gold leaf around the edges gone brown and dull. He sat across from me, folded his hands, and waited. I told him everything, the fire, Grigory, the ash, the old men in the tavern. And he listened without his face changing once, the candle shifting in some draft I couldn't locate, the icon's face moving slightly with it. When I finished, he stayed quiet long enough that I wondered if he'd speak at all. This ritual doesn't summon the dead, it summons what stands between grief and judgment. I told him I didn't know what that meant. You don't need to, you only need to know what it isn't, so that you can't tell me later you weren't warned. He agreed after another long silence. "I think it was my face that did it, not my words." He looked at me like someone past arguing with and made a practical decision. He explained the forty nights while the stove cracked and the candle drifted. A line of salt along the base of each wall. He didn't explain it, and I didn't ask. He pointed at the ash circle. That is where the ritual lives. The cabin holds the boundary. Nothing crosses the salt while it holds. The circle is where you open the door. From midnight until the ninth hour, you stay inside it. You don't step out of it, you don't break the line, you don't so much as lean across it while the vigil is open. He looked at me. Outside those hours, the cabin is yours. Move around, sleep, eat. Fasting. Bread, water. Nothing that clouds the mind. No spirit, no wine. Night vigils, prayers spoken aloud, and it didn't matter whether I believed them. The words were the words, and they needed to be said. Daily confessions. Ash circles around the sleeping area, redrawn every night. No contact with the village for the full forty nights. I asked what would happen if I broke one of the terms. "What would happen if I broke one of the terms?" "What would happen if I broke one of the terms?" "What would happen if I broke one of the terms?" I don't know exactly. I know that nothing good comes from breaking a circle. He showed me where I'd sleep, a cot against the far wall, a coarse blanket folded at the foot, and told me to rest before the first vigil. The rope webbing pressed through the thin mattress against my back and I stared at the low ceiling and listened to the forest being completely silent and thought, "This is the stupidest thing I've ever done." "This is the stupidest thing I've ever done." "This is the stupidest thing I've ever done." Then I fell asleep anyway. The first several nights brought nothing I couldn't explain. Sleep deprivation does things to a person, not mysticism, just biology. Kneeling on bare oak, planking in the dark, cold coming up through my knees, saying prayers in a language I didn't understand. When something shifted in the trees, I told myself, "Branch settling. An animal." The cold contracting the wood. Almost certainly right. But there was one thing I couldn't explain away, and it came back almost every night. The feeling of being watched. It would come on during the vigil, a pressure sitting in the back of my neck, and I'd go still and wait and eventually it would lift. I spent a lot of nights telling myself it was exhaustion and never quite got there. The ninth night, or the tenth, was the most exhausting night of my life. Or the tenth. I'd lost count. I heard movement outside that I couldn't explain at all. Not wind. Not a branch. Footsteps on frozen ground, deliberate and unhurried. Each one landing with the same hard crack the frost had made under my boots on the walk-in. Sat up on the cot and the webbing creaked and my heartbeat was very loud. The glass was cold against my palms and my breath fogged it as fast as I wiped it clear. And through the lantern light, yellow, close, not reaching far, at the exact edge where the light ended, something was standing. Woman-shaped, but the proportions were off and looking harder didn't fix it. Too tall, too thin through the torso. The head tilted past where a neck stops, far enough that I kept waiting for it to correct and it didn't. The face was in shadow. Or distance. Or something my mind kept trying to sort into one of those two things and couldn't. Completely still. Went and shook Damien awake, told him there was something outside and he came to the window with me and there was nothing. No shape. No movement. Not even a sense of something recently gone. Just the treeline and the dark and the lantern light ending where it always ended. He stood there a moment with his hands at his sides. Don't look for it again. He went back to his cot with a glass full of blood. He went back to his cot without another word. Stayed at the window a while, looking at the empty dark. Told myself. Exhaustion. The vigils. No proper sleep in weeks. The mind stitching shapes out of nothing. Kept my eyes on the ceiling and counted my own breaths to stay still. The silence after was worse. I didn't sleep. Not that night. I lay on the cot with my eyes open and listened to the silence after the footsteps stopped. The blanket had gone damp from my breathing, the rope webbing pressing through in a ridge along my spine, and the cold was coming up through the floor, steady, the kind that starts at your feet when the ground beneath is frozen solid. By the time grey light started coming in through the gaps in the shutters, I'd maybe gotten an hour, maybe less. My eyes felt packed with sand. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. My hands were shaking when I finally sat up. There was a chamber pot in the corner and a bucket with a lid beside it. I'd been using it since the first day without thinking much about it. That morning I cracked the window to empty it, and that's when I saw them. The frost had come down hard in the night, covering everything. The fence posts, the dead grass, the flat top of every stone. And there were prints in it. Going all the way around the cabin. Set deep into the frost. And they were barefoot. And something about them kept pulling at me that I couldn't name. Because the shape was human enough, but the stride was too long, and the toes pressed in too deep, like something much heavier had left them. Both feet planted, close together, facing the door. And nothing after that. No prints going back. No prints turning away. Whatever it was had come to the door, and then simply wasn't anywhere anymore. And I didn't have words for what I was feeling. Not fear, exactly, or not only fear. I'd been telling myself for weeks that the vigils were fatigue and the sounds were forest sounds. Standing there looking at those prints, I understood I'd have to stop saying that now, and I didn't know what to say instead. I didn't tell Damien what I'd found, not that morning. He didn't ask. The days blurred after that into a cycle of dry bread, broken ice from the water bucket, and cold that never left my bones. The vigils pressed on, the silence of the forest heavier than before. The voice came on the seventeenth night or the eighteenth. I was in the middle of the prayers, candlelight throwing a low yellow circle on the floor, reciting the words out loud, and in the space where I drew breath, I heard her. It wasn't in my head. I need to be clear about that. I've had her voice in my head every day since the fire, and I know what that is. Memory has an edge to it, a place where it starts and stops. This was a sound in the room, close and low, from somewhere between the door and the window, and it was her actual voice, lower than you'd expect from someone her size, a little rough at the edges. They watched me burn. Four words, and nothing after. I didn't move. I didn't breathe. I sat there on my knees on the cold floor with my hands pressed together, the candle flame perfectly still in the dead air, and I just felt the weight of those four words. Six weeks of grief and all the names I'd been trying not to say aloud. I told Damien in the morning. He listened without changing his face, which I was used to by now. And when I finished, he was quiet a long time. Long enough that the stove popped once and a piece of wood settled in it. "The ritual gives what the heart truly seeks," he replied. "Not what the mouth asks for. What the heart seeks." I told him what was underneath was grief, and I wanted someone to answer for it. And I believed that. I thought that was honest. Yes. Just that. And then he stood and went to put more wood in the stove and didn't utter anything else for the rest of the morning. The vision started a few nights later during the prayers. The candle would shift in some draft I never located, and in that flicker of I'd see it, just a fragment, just a piece. The mill lit orange against dark trees, windows full of fire, and with it, the smell, wood smoke and something beneath the wood smoke that was sweet and sickening. The cold cabin air was still there, I could still feel the floor under my knees, but the smell was real enough that I'd swallow against it. And once, just the once, faces. A half circle of them, lit from the front by the fire. Faces I'd grown up seeing, and none of them were moving toward the door. I'd come back from those moments shaking and not from cold. I knew I should wait. Whatever the ritual was showing me, it was showing me in pieces, and I should wait for the rest. But the waiting kept getting harder, and the anger kept getting easier. And by the 22nd night, I wasn't saying the prayers anymore. I was saying names. Not aloud, not fully, but between the words. Lips moving in the cold air, barely any sound, just the shape of them. Mikhail Drenov, Pavel Osin, Yakov Tereshev. The men who'd been there, who'd stood outside a burning building with my sister inside and decided their own fear was worth more than her life. I'd known them for years, and there I was on my knees in the dark, saying their names into the floor, not asking what happened anymore. Demanding that something answer for it. It was that same night, or close to it, that I raised my head from the prayers and found a figure standing in the corner of the room. Still, just inside the space where the candlelight ran out. Not behind anything, just in the corner where the dark was a little thicker, and it should have been close enough to see clearly. The room was small, and the candle was lit, 8 feet at most between us. But the corner didn't take the light, the way the rest of the room did, and whatever was standing in it was staying inside the part that didn't. I looked at it, and it looked back, or did something that felt the same as looking back. The candle flame straight and still between us, no sound, no smell, and then I picked up the candle from the floor and held it toward the corner. Empty. The flame didn't move, no trembling, just clear and steady, throwing its small yellow circle against a plain wooden wall, and nothing else. I put the candle back down, folded my hands again, and kept going. It came on the 24th night, or close to it. I'd stopped tracking the count carefully some time back, just marking time until it ended, and I might be off by a day or two, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that the visions changed. Not gradually, not with warning. One moment they were holding, and then another. The candle was still there, and the candle was still there, and the next they weren't, and I was already through. The candle was burning low, and the tallow smell had been in the room so long it had stopped being a smell. It was just air. I was deep in it by then. The state three weeks of short sleep and short rations gets you to. Knees numb against the planking. Cold worked up through the floor until I couldn't feel anything from the knee down, a pressure behind my eyes that never fully lifted. Not asleep. Not awake. Somewhere between, where the edges of things go soft. The fire came again, the mill lit orange against dark trees. But this time it kept going. I saw the crowd. Not the half-circle of still faces I'd been seeing. But moving. Actually moving. Heat came with it. Not real heat, but the memory of it. That standing-too-close feeling across the front of your face and your hands, and underneath it the smell of burning wood and something else caught in it, sweet and wrong. In the back of the crowd, barely visible, was the old man, Tereshev, the one whose name I'd been saying into the floor. And he wasn't arguing, wasn't running, just standing with his arms at his sides and his mouth open a little. He hadn't chosen not to go in. Something in him had simply seized, body locked, legs gone useless. And he stood there while the fire burned. That was that. I came back up out of it, still on my knees, hands pressed together on the cot, the candle a low yellow stub throwing barely enough light to reach the floor. I waited to feel something else. I didn't. I just felt cold. "Fear is no excuse," I whispered to the empty room. I heard Damien before he spoke. He murmured my name quietly, and when I turned, he was standing at the edge of the candlelight with his coat on. Which meant he'd been up. Which meant he'd been watching. He wasn't afraid. He just looked tired. He knew what I was doing. "You need to stop," he warned. "The ritual had shown me what it was going to show me," he explained. "And what it was showing wasn't the end of the sequence, but only the part that would harden what was already in me if I let it." Then he moved to the circle, drawn in ash each night before the vigil, and crouched down and broke it with his palm. Smeared it. A wide gray streak across the floor where the line had been, dry against the wood. I looked at the smear. "She's still dead." He didn't answer. I went to the shelf and got the ash tin and knelt down on the cold floor and drew the line back. He stood up, but I couldn't see anything. I couldn't see a thing. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't see over me while I did it and didn't intervene. The ash was gritty, my fingers black with it, my hands smelling of it the way they had for weeks, and I thought about none of that while I drew the line. When I was done, I put the tin back on the shelf and turned around and he was still there. We looked at each other in the candlelight, and I understood in that moment that whatever he'd agreed to at the start, whatever it meant to him to carry this right forward for someone else's grief, I had just handed it back. He knew it. So did I. He packed slowly, methodically. Coat, his book, the thing wrapped in cloth on the shelf I'd never asked about. The buckle on his bag clicked once and went quiet, his boots two steps to the door, and then he stopped. Whatever answers you now won't leave with mercy. Then he opened the door and went out, and a wall of cold air hit the back of my neck and the candle bent sideways in the draft and came back, and the door closed, and his footsteps crossed the frozen ground, each step a short crunch, evenly spaced, not hurrying. And then there was nothing. I stayed where I was. The room was empty. The cold he'd let in still moved around my ankles. The candle was nearly gone, a half inch of wax in a ring of its own, still, light barely reaching the walls anymore. I watched it burn down and thought, this is what I wanted. Not Damien gone specifically, but this. The end of the part where someone else had authority over the proceedings. I was alone with the ritual now. Alone with whatever had been circling the cabin and standing in the corners and speaking in my sister's voice. And I had a choice I'd already made, and there was nothing left between me and the making of it. The candle went out. The smell of hot wax hung in the air for a second. Then it was just dark and cold and quiet. And in the dark, behind me, I heard breathing. Not wind. Not an animal. The rhythm was wrong for both. I turned around. The cold at the back of my neck had a direction to it. The doorway to the inner room. That's where it was. I'm going to describe it accurately, because there's no reason to be different about this now. The skin was grey and pulled too tight, no softness left anywhere in it. The eyes were black, depthless, set deep in the face. The mouth was too wide, human teeth in a mouth that went too far across, and something hung loose from the head. Grey-white, cloth or hair, moving without any air to move it, shifting slowly without cause. The fingers bent the wrong way, at the middle joint. Built wrong. It was woman-shaped. It wasn't a woman. The air near it was dry. It tasted like ash. It stood in the doorway and looked at me with those black holes where the eyes should have been, then opened that too wide mouth and spoke in my sister's voice. Choose. Just that. The only sound in the room was its slow, deliberate breathing. I looked at it, and I looked at the ash circle on the floor around me, the one I'd drawn with my own hands not an hour ago, and I thought of Damien's footsteps going away into the trees, and I thought of the woman reaching for the door and being pulled back. I stepped forward into the circle. She was there before I finished the step. That thing was still in the doorway, grey and wrung, and breathing its slow, deliberate breath, but inside the circle with me, or the idea of her was, or something that had her shape so exactly that my hands started moving toward her before I understood what I was looking at. Not the voice, Not a sound in a dark room. Her. The way she held her weight when she was thinking. The way she crossed her arms when she was tired. I'd seen that posture a thousand times across kitchen tables and barn doors and the backs of carts. I could have drawn it from memory, and here it was, and I couldn't catch my breath. She was looking at me the way you look at someone you're trying not to frighten. Careful, steady, and not sad. That last part was what broke something open before I could stop it. Whatever I'd expected to find at the end of six weeks of ash and cold floors and Damien's warnings and that grey thing in doorways speaking her name. It wasn't this. Calm. She looked like someone who had come a long way to say something simple and just needed me to be quiet long enough to hear it. She didn't speak at first. The ash circle was maybe three feet across. And the air inside it was different, stiller than the rest of the room, heavier, smelling of ash and cold wood, and underneath it, something I couldn't name, sweet and very faint. She just looked at me, and I looked at her, and the breathing in the doorway went on behind me, steady and patient, and I wanted her back so badly in that moment that my whole chest felt caved in. Not my anger, not the mill, not the faces I'd been saying. bang into the floor. Just her. Just Nastia. The way I had not let myself want her since the morning they came to tell me. Then she spoke, and it wasn't the voice from the corners of the room, the one that had been leaking through the ritual for weeks, the one that had learned the rhythms of her speech without getting the weight of it right. This was her voice. Let me go. Just that. Then she waited. I knew what she meant, not because anyone explained it, but because I already knew. She'd been here partly because I wouldn't release her. Every night for six weeks, I'd knelt on the cold floor and called her name into the ash and refused to accept what had happened, and my refusal kept her here. She wanted to pass, and she was asking me to let her. And I knew something else too, because the ritual was still working and I could feel the shape, the shape of the answer it was handing me. There was no justice coming. Not from this. Not from anywhere. The people at the mill were afraid. Human and afraid, and she had died for it. And I could name every one of them a hundred times into the floor, and it doesn't make her less dead. It wouldn't undo the fear. Their fear killed her. Naming them wouldn't change that. No punishment, fixes it. All of it was there, standing in the ash circle in the dark. Every word of it, clear and settled. I looked her in the face. They let you burn. She didn't answer, and her expression didn't change, just that careful steadiness, that patience more awful than any argument. And I felt the moment. I knew it was my last chance. And I turned away from it. I said the names, starting with the two men arguing at the door, then the husband dragging his wife back, then the old man frozen at the back of the crowd, then the others. Each name went into the dark. The same as I'd put them into the floor for weeks. No ritual preamble. No kneeling. No ceremony. Just names, one after another. My voice was flat and dry in the still air. Answer for it. My throat was raw by the end. My hands shook slightly at my sides, not from fear. I didn't look at her. I looked at the ash on the floor. I said the names and meant every one of them. The light came from nowhere. Not fire. Nothing flickered. Nothing burned. Just a cold, sourceless brightness spreading from the floor of the circle outward, slow and without sound. And then something entered me. Warmth. That's the only word. Starting in the chest, then out through the arms and into the fingers. And with it came the feeling of the grief lifting. Actually lifting. Something going loose and light where there had been six weeks of nothing but weight. And the pressure behind my eyes that had been there so long I'd stopped noticing it was gone, and my shoulders dropped and I thought, "This is it." "This is what the forty nights were for." And then it kept going. The warmth spread and the grief kept lifting and I let it. Because it felt like relief. Because I'd been carrying it so long, I'd forgotten there was anything underneath. And by the time I understood, it was taking more than the grief it had already taken it. I sat down on the floor. Hard planking. Cold even through my coat. And I tried to find her. Not her face. The facts of her. But the feel of having known her. The specific pull of it. The facts were still there. Sister. Fire. Forty nights of ritual. I could picture her face clearly enough. The exact shade of her hair. The gap in her front teeth she'd hated since she was eight. But the feeling underneath. I finally understand what the ritual did. It didn't give me justice. It just took things away. It took the sadness. The anger. It took the love I had for Nastya. I can still picture her face perfectly. But now she just looks like a stranger on the street. I'm glad the pain is gone. I'm glad I don't have to feel anything anymore. The ritual took her from me. And in exchange, it gave me exactly what I asked for. It didn't just show me a crowd in the yard. It showed me exactly who argued. And the ones who held others back. It showed me exactly who needs to be punished. It feels good to be this empty. It feels good to have a job to do. I have the lantern. And I took the heavy iron nails from Damien's shelf. I know exactly what is going to happen when I reach the village. They watched her die in the fire because they were too afraid to open the door. I am going to nail theirs shut and burn them inside. Hey guys, Rex here. Sorry for the lack of uploads lately. Just had to handle some real life stuff that came up. But we're back to business as usual next week. Keep an eye out for new videos, on Sunday and Thursday night as usual. Thanks for all the support. Take care, good night.