Memories of Ink and Loss

In daylight, the cathedral devours sound. A cough ends at the lips, the gasping exhalation silent. A murmured psalm disappears between one heartbeat and the next. No echo, no murmur, not even the whisper of feet across flagstones.

A hymnal dropped slaps the stones without a hint of sound.

Every voice is its own prison; sound reaches only the speaker’s ear through bone; on breath it dies.

The people still enter—because they must. Their God, if she is anywhere, is here, and her right to their worship may not be denied. So, they mouth their prayers into silence, believing that their God’s ears can hear what theirs cannot.

Their faith feels more fragile when shared in silence.

At night, the silence breaks. The cathedral’s doors are barred, the stained glass windows emit no light, yet the walls sing.

The Cantor exhales.

The first decade it was faint, a chorus like wind through reed pipes, rising only within the nave. The miller’s laugh, once bright, returned as a low drone threaded with grief. The choirboy’s sobs, broken into shards, rose again as a litany in a language no one knew. A dropped basket of donated carrots became a rolling drumbeat, hollow and eternal.

The years passed, and now they listened from the street outside, candles guttering in their hands, tears running as though the inhuman hymn had pried them open. None dared stay inside. None dared ask who—or what—arranges the sounds into such mournful unity.

Now, decades on and the hymn has grown. Not louder. It grew larger.

More voices.

More reach.

Not a radius, not like a circle cast wide across the land—but along a line. A direction. A reaching. Every night the silence spreads further down the valley road, the song extending its unseen hand toward the coast.

The voices do not vanish once sung. They layer. They linger. Every new tone is absorbed, bound to the countless that came before. If you listen carefully—close, dangerously close—you can hear the ones from times long past.

A father long lost to fever, weakly calling his son’s name. He came to his father’s hand then, but now? Now he remembers and tears of loss fall once more.

A child, taken too young, repeating the half-learned lullaby her mother sang. A mother long past mourning, hears and mourns afresh.

Lovers now married hear themselves swearing devotion in voices too young to be remembered. Maybe they smile.

Maybe not.

The living shudder, but they cannot turn away, dare not stop their ears. For who would not stop to hear the echoes of a familiar voice again, even carried on the wind in impossible chorus?

What manner of man would have ears that did not reach for one more hint of his father’s voice?

Night by night, the hymn crawls seaward. Each night it gains—maybe a pace. Maybe five. Each morning, the silence lingers a little longer after dawn.

Some whisper that when the song touches the sea, something long drowned will rise to answer it. Others believe the sea itself is what the Cantor longs to reach—that it will open its vast throat and sing back in answer.

None agree on what will follow.

Some say that the Cantor reaches for what no longer exists.

Maybe they’re right.

What if they’re wrong?

1

O Lord of flame, we burned Thy name,

Our faith to cinders was felled;

Ash in the chalice, ash in the vein,

Ash where the angels once dwelled.

2

O Christ once crowned with thorn and flame,

We breathed Thee out in smoke;

Thy body blackened, Thy blood made clay,

Thy covenant we broke.

3

The Choir sang with empty throats,

And yet the void replied;

No cross remained, but tendrils rose,

Where our once Saviour died.

4

O altar cracked, O pulpit torn,

O temple drowned in breath;

We kneel in ash, we drink the mourn,

We feast on holy death.

5

Forgive us not, O ash-born Lord,

Thy mercy we destroy;

Our hymn is teeth, our psalm a cord,

Our worship of Thy void.

It waits at the lane’s end, looming with the sun behind it, its long shadow reaching towards the first houses. Always, it waits at the same spot. Hunched, folded into itself, uncountable limbs looped in ways that the eye insists must break bones—if bones were in there to be broken.

It just is.

They know it.

It knows them.

No one names it. No one dares.

They measure their lives by its arrivals. These don’t come regularly. There’s no markings on a calendar to tell of its visits. They just know that it wasn’t always, and that it will always be. They measure themselves against the groan of weary shutters and straining beams when it settles its weight against the village. Children stop their play to listen. The dogs fall silent. Chickens retreat to their roosts and the town’s cats? They’re nowhere to be seen.

When it leans close, when it stalks their lanes and alleys in the hour after the sun passes from the skies, there is an easing.

For a time, things brighten. Breathing is deeper and cleaner. The smith hammers lighter, less strain, better aim. The grocer remembers to smile, handing sun-ripe plums to children sticky-fingered with stolen sugar. The priest raises his voice in sermon and praise and almost convinces himself that he means every word he preaches.

The air itself seems less sour, less heavy.

While it’s welcome, when it comes, the easing never lasts.

The cracks return, in time, and with them comes the village’s usual tenor, what has become its default tone.

---

The baker’s apprentice burns another loaf. The baker’s hand is quick and hard, the slap sharper this time. The boy hides his tears, or at least lies to himself that he does. That night, he wakes and slices the baker’s boots into ribbons, tosses his socks into the midden. In the morning, the baker rages barefoot across the stones. His curses hang in the air like incense, thick and cloying.

The villagers? They laugh.

At him. Not with him.

He’s not laughing.

The priest’s wife accuses the grocer’s son of theft. She has always distrusted his family. She spits in his mother’s face. His mother spits back. The missing coin turns up days later, disappearing into the priest’s pocket.

She deserves it, right? Why shouldn’t she have a little something for herself for once?

The carpenter blames his door for sticking. He blames the forest. He blames his wife’s nagging, the weather, the years, his old master, dead these last fifteen long years. When his dog whines at him, he kicks it. The dog leaves and does not return. Why would it?

The silence it leaves behind is louder than barking ever was.

---

They remember the before-times. They don’t talk about them other than in whispers, but they do remember.

Their fathers told them of days when the village was like any other—market days bright with voices, weddings loud with bells, laughter spilling like wine. Before the thing came. Before it leaned its weight against them and drank from them..

Other towns have stayed that way. When they send a messenger beyond the valley, he returns with reports of joy. Of neighbors who forgive. Of arguments that end in reconciliation instead of rot.

But those towns do not welcome them. Since the thing came, it’s like they carry its darkness with them, wherever they go.

The messengers return with other news too: the villagers are tainted. Touched. Twisted by whatever dwells at the lane’s end. No one will marry into their families. No one will take their trade. Their very presence at another village’s well is treated like poison poured into the bucket.

They know it should not be this way.

They know there’s nowhere else to go.

---

Each grudge lasts longer than the easing. Each wound festers sweeter.

The villagers are vessels, refilled by the only thing they now know: bitterness and taint. Old arguments resurface. Quarrels long buried claw their way back into daylight. They dig them up willingly, polishing them, turning them over like prayer stones in their hands.

It is easier than forgiving.

Forgiveness isn’t in them any more. They know only how to fill that void with bile.

That’s what the thing at the lane drinks from them.

It does not consume wheat or water. It does not hunger for meat. It takes the acrid taste of argument, the rancid oil of envy, the sharp copper tang of bruises blooming under skin. Every whispered insult is an litany. Every clenched fist, a sacrifice.

Every blow? A sacrament.

---

Once, years ago, the villagers tried kindness. They thought to starve it. They smiled when they did not mean it. They prayed together and sang as if the sound alone could drive it away.

The thing waited.

It did not leave.

Their kindness curdled within weeks, soured into resentment that burned hotter than ever. They spat harder for having swallowed sweetness too long. They struck deeper for having stayed their hands.

When the thing leaned again, it pulsed brighter than before. Its ribs gleamed wet in the dark.

They understood the lesson.

Now, they no longer resist.

---

A few have even learned to welcome it.

The widow sits at her window and whispers her grievances aloud, even when no one is there to hear. She savors her bitterness, proud to offer it up, proud to feel the thing stir outside.

The baker’s boy, now grown, holds on to every strike of his master’s hand, repeating each one in his memory like a catechism, until they become holy to him, the bitterness of his belief..

The priest, when he kneels at night, does not pray for salvation. He prays to be seen, to be tasted, to be taken into the bright, wet light of its sight.

They all know it will never go hungry here.

In the quiet moments, each one of them feels the same thought coil cold in their hearts:

Better to be food than forgotten.