Chapter 15: A Hollow Note

The mirror sat on her desk like a relic too dangerous to be held in daylight.

Celia hadn’t slept. The night had unraveled into a slow, suffocating spiral after she left Saint Rhosyn. The mirror’s shards reflected nothing — not her face, not the room around her — only darkness, as if the silvered backing had peeled away into another realm altogether.

She tried once to look into it directly, thinking it might reveal something her brother meant for her to find.

But what she saw…

A room. Not her own.

A boy, trembling.

And a choir, not singing but screaming.

Then the mirror blackened.

She hadn’t dared look again.

Instead, Celia spent the early hours cross-referencing the vault registry logs with missing persons reports from the last two decades. She filtered the names of parishioners, priests, and even the children recorded under St. Jude’s foster files. Patterns emerged slowly — names that appeared twice under different aliases, birth certificates altered with matching handwriting, school transcripts that listed the same guardian.

The pattern told a story.

And it began with one name.

Aedric Lowell.

Her brother’s final unsolved case.

—

The phone rang once. Twice. Then:

“Detective?”

It was Mara Vex.

Celia hadn't heard from her in days, not since she’d gone silent after the First Reader’s body was found. She had assumed the precinct had pulled her into another case — or, worse, told her to stay away from this one.

“I found something,” Mara said, her voice tight. “Something in the precinct archives. I had to go through one of the off-books servers.”

Celia's blood quickened. “What did you find?”

“You’re not going to believe me.”

“Mara—”

“They kept a file on Aedric Lowell. Internal. Classified under the Saints division.”

Celia froze. “He was never on their radar. He was too young.”

“He was on their radar because of you.”

The silence wrapped around Celia like a noose. “What?”

“You filed his missing persons report. They flagged it for observation. And not just observation. They—” Mara hesitated, as though the next words might burn her throat. “They moved him.”

Celia stood up from her chair, breath short. “Moved him where?”

“There’s no location. Just a name. ‘Bellward.’”

That name stirred something primitive in her — a memory just beyond reach, like a word caught behind her teeth. Bellward.

It wasn’t in the city. It wasn’t even in the current maps.

But she’d heard it before.

“Send me the file,” Celia said. “And meet me at my place.”

—

An hour later, Mara stood in Celia’s kitchen, watching the mirror from a careful distance.

“That’s the thing from the vault?” she asked.

Celia nodded, sliding the file onto the table. “What does Bellward mean to you?”

Mara didn’t answer. She simply stared at the mirror, as if expecting it to blink.

“The precinct used to have an experimental site off-grid,” she said slowly. “A decommissioned ward facility. Used during the Ash Riots to house children they couldn’t place. It was shut down after the fires.”

Celia pieced it together. Bellward. A ward of bells. Silent ones now.

She flipped open the file Mara brought.

Photos of Aedric. Younger. Thinner.

Handwritten notes: “Observed unnatural behavior. Subject resists sleep. Claims to hear ‘hymns’ in the dark. Refer to Saint Choir Protocols.”

“Saint Choir Protocols?” she whispered.

Mara shook her head. “That’s the part I couldn’t trace. Redacted in every mention. But this—” She pointed to a timestamp. “This photo. Look at the date.”

Celia stared. “That’s… six months after his reported death.”

He was still alive.

—

They drove in silence.

The further out they got from the city, the more the roads seemed to blur. Asphalt turned to gravel, gravel to dirt, and dirt into old stone trails, half-swallowed by moss and time.

Bellward wasn’t on any map, but the name whispered through the trees.

When they arrived, the ruins rose like a broken cathedral. The fence had long rusted away, and the gate hung by a single twisted hinge. Vines had claimed the outer buildings, but the main structure — a boxy stone hall with blackened windows — remained.

It smelled of mildew and burnt paper.

Celia stepped inside first.

Dust breathed around her feet like fog.

“There’s writing,” Mara whispered behind her.

On the wall, smeared in faded red, were the words:

“Saints do not sleep.”

And beneath it, etched into stone with something sharp:

“The choir listens.”

A sound stirred deep within the building. A note. One long and low, like an organ chord trapped in a throat.

Celia turned toward it, pulse leaping.

Another sound followed — not music, but a voice:

“Hart…”

She drew her weapon instinctively, scanning the halls.

“Hart…”

Mara backed toward her. “That’s not an echo.”

A door creaked open at the end of the corridor, exposing a hallway lined with shattered mirrors, each reflecting only shadows. At the end stood a figure — or a silhouette of one — unmoving, with a priest’s collar stained black and ash trailing from his fingertips.

Celia raised her gun. “Identify yourself!”

The figure didn't speak.

Then, it tilted its head, and a voice that was not human came out of its mouth:

“You seek the dead who sang.”

The mirrors hummed. One cracked.

Celia took a step forward, but Mara grabbed her arm.

“This isn’t a place,” she whispered. “It’s a recording. A loop. We’re walking inside someone’s memory.”

The figure raised its hands.

The air went cold.

And the choir began.

A low chorus filled the halls, discordant and layered. Celia gritted her teeth. The sound scraped at her bones — not merely heard, but felt. As if it crawled through her marrow.

From the mirrors, shapes emerged. Children, their eyes hollow, mouths open as though mid-hymn. Not real. Phantoms.

One of them stepped closer to her. He couldn’t have been more than ten.

“Aedric,” Celia whispered.

He looked up. And smiled.

Not with joy. But recognition.

Then he turned and walked through the cracked door behind him, vanishing into the dark.

The figure raised a hand.

Celia and Mara were thrown backward by an invisible force. Her back slammed into the wall, knocking the breath from her lungs. The mirror she’d carried in her bag shattered in the distance.

Then, silence.

When Celia opened her eyes, the figure was gone. The choir gone. The air heavy but still.

Mara coughed. “We need to get out of here.”

Celia helped her to her feet. “Not yet. We’re close.”

She picked up one of the broken mirror piec

es. This time, when she looked in — she saw a room filled with children. And in the center, a boy.

Aedric.

And on the wall behind him, carved in ash:

“The last hymn is not yet sung.”