Chapter 380: That Which Is Hidden in the Deepest Depths

The group rounded a rock wall slanting to the left, and the Acetylene Lamp came to a halt.

Yellow light spilled across the cave wall, illuminating a line of silver.

The silver thread wrapped completely around the rock face, clamping the tunnel ahead into a doorframe.

"We're here." Hathaway pushed past the others and stepped up to the silver thread.

"That crew from 1763 really knew their craft."

"It held tight for a hundred and fifty years. It only cracked in three places when that artillery shell hit the west gate."

Richard stood behind Gerard, examining the silver ring with his Spirit Vision.

An incredibly thin layer of ether still clung to the inner edge of the thread, and the trapped sounds behind it could be heard crashing against the barrier.

A man was shouting to turn the rudder, while another voice recited the Lord's Prayer, cutting off right at "thy kingdom come" before starting over from the beginning.

Someone else was cursing heavily. Richard couldn't understand it himself, but judging by the deep frown on Hathaway's face—a local—the profanity was exceptionally vile.

"Can these voices hurt people?" Phillips asked, leaning in.

"No," Hathaway replied without looking up.

"Separated by a hundred and fifty years, they can't bite you. They're just loud."

It truly was loud. The flame of the Acetylene Lamp trembled in the sound waves.

Hathaway took a leather pouch from her waist and poured a small pinch of silver powder into her palm.

Dipping her fingertip into the powder, she traced another arc just outside the old silver thread.

With every line she drew, the shouts from inside grew quieter, like someone turning down the volume on a remote.

She drew seven consecutive arcs, enclosing the old silver ring and the overflowing voices behind it.

The voices still echoed, but now they sounded as if they were behind a thick wall.

Hathaway dusted the silver powder from her hands and stood up.

"The owners of these voices were given their last rites long ago. The sounds just got caught in the silver thread and never fully faded."

Corbin raised the Acetylene Lamp forward.

"With the first layer cleared, we move to the next. Stay close—the layer behind this is different."

Phillips tilted his head toward Richard. "It gets colder the further down we go. Are you cold?"

"I am."

"Me too," Phillips said, shivering.

"My dad made me leave my teapot at home. Thinking about it now, I really should have fought him to the death to bring it.

In this godforsaken place, a hot drink could save your life."

From ahead, old Phillips's voice drifted back, overpowering the cave's ambient noise.

"Keep talking, and you won't be drinking any tea at home either."

Phillips instantly fell silent.

The group continued downward, walking another stretch.

The second ring of seals appeared in a recessed section of the rock wall. This ring wasn't made of silver thread.

Richard swept his Spirit Vision over it and saw needles driven into the rock, piercing seven distinct points.

Around each needle, the ether was twisted into a dead knot.

Hathaway reached out, using the tips of her tweezers to delicately lift something near the first needle.

"There's hair in the stitching."

A gossamer-thin strand was pulled up on the tips of the tweezers.

The hair was tangled into the suturing thread, twisted together so tightly it was hard to tell which was thread and which was hair.

"In the name of St. Hilda, the Church sewed a stitch into each of this thing's seven mouths."

Corbin had checked the archives beforehand.

"St. Hilda was an abbess from the seventh century. She built Whitby Abbey."

Hathaway held the strand of hair under the light.

"This can't be St. Hilda's own hair."

She lifted the thread by the second needle—another strand of hair, slightly darker in color.

"After the Norman conquest, the abbey was rebuilt."

Hathaway examined them one by one.

"During every transition between abbesses, the nuns of the Benedictine Order would cut off a lock of their own hair and wind it onto the thread left by the previous generation."

"They thought it was a holy relics ritual, believing that tangling their hair onto the 'holy ribbon' left by St. Hilda would let them bask in the saint's glory."

She lowered the tweezers.

"In reality, they were using their own lives to reinforce this seam."

Richard probed inward with his Spirit Vision along that lock of hair.

Sealed within the hair was the conviction of a woman at the exact moment she cut it: to preserve her chastity for the Lord and shield the world from unclean things.

That conviction wove into the thread, and the thread dug into the mouth of the sealed entity.

"We need to thank them before undoing it," Hathaway said.

She pinched a bit of silver powder from her pouch and sprinkled it delicately over the seven strands of hair.

"Girls, you've stood guard long enough."

She spoke in a local accent, the soft cadence of the River Esk region: "It's time to rest."

As the silver powder settled on the hair, those ashen, dark gray, and near-black strands grew dim, layer by layer.

"It gets difficult from here."

Corbin stood up, his knees popping twice.

"With the stitches gone, all seven of the Serpent Mother's mouths are loose. The moment the inscription is undone, all seven vocal tracts will open simultaneously."

He swept his gaze across everyone present.

"Twelve hundred years of sound will pour out all at once."

The Chief Inspector glanced at Gerard, and Gerard gave a slight nod.

"All Hunters, step forward," the Chief Inspector ordered.

Colonel Javier stepped out from the middle of the formation.

He shrugged off his overcoat, revealing a snug wool sweater underneath, its cuffs tied tight.

Gerard also took off his hat and stuffed it into his pocket. The two Hunters took their positions behind Corbin, one on the left, one on the right.

"Scholars and observers, fall back thirty paces."

Richard retreated alongside Montagu and Phillips to the corner of the bend thirty paces away.

The corner provided just enough cover from the direct ether shockwave, while still allowing them to poke half a head out to watch.

Corbin pressed both hands against the first of the seven inscriptions.

The Latin letters, chiseled in with iron nails, began to heat up beneath his palms.

"Defigatur... (Extract)"

He pronounced the first syllable of the inscription.

This was a reverse reading. He was unraveling every word the Church had carved all those years ago, one by one, in the exact opposite order they were inscribed.

What was hammered in as nails had to be pulled out as nails, one by one.

"oblinatur... (Unseal)"

The second syllable.

The scale-like patterns on the cave wall trembled violently.

"...recondatur in imis (That which is hidden in the deepest depths)"

The instant the third syllable dropped, all seven inscriptions shattered simultaneously.

Iron rust flaked off the rock face, drifting down in a flurry.

The Serpent Mother's seven mouths opened in unison, and the cavern flooded with sound.

It was on an entirely different scale from the strands of noise that had leaked out earlier; twelve hundred years of sound had its floodgates thrown open all at once.

The shouts of dozens of generations of fishermen, work chants on stormy nights, and roars as anchors were hauled up.

Someone clinging to a mast chanted at the monstrous waves, only to be swept into the water halfway through, their final words dissolving into underwater bubbles.

The prayers of dozens of generations of nuns—Lauds, Vespers, Matins—some recited with devout reverence, some rushed and sloppy, and a few places where the chanter could clearly be heard dozing off.

"Odinn á yðr alla!" (Odin will have all of your souls!)

A Viking war cry, accompanied by the grinding crunch of a ship's keel crushing against the shallows.

"Herjaföðr, gef mér sigr!" (Father of Hosts, grant me victory!)

The wails of ancient Angles lingered in the gaps between the Viking war cries; occasionally, one or two screams would surface through the cracks before being shoved back underwater.

"En avant! En avant!"

(Forward! Forward!)

The clatter of marching Norman knights' armor and the thudding of horse hooves merged into a muffled drumbeat.

The hammering of coffins being nailed shut during the plague years—one strike, then another.

The intervals between strikes grew shorter and shorter, the coffin-nailers growing ever more frantic, ever more numb.

And from a certain winter, a child playing near the cavern entrance, his laughter echoing across the centuries.

All these sounds layered over each other, so dense that the boundaries of every individual voice were completely crushed.

They morphed into a wall built of sound, continually advancing forward.

Colonel Javier stood at the very front, ether flaring out to form a golden light screen before him.

The light screen of a Solar Tradition Hunter could dispel dark domains behind the veil, and in the material world, it acted as a barrier of pure ether.

When the wall of sound slammed into the light screen, the barrier caved inward.

Standing diagonally behind Javier, Gerard casually drew a short dagger. Silver runes of the Moon Hunting Tradition were etched into the blade.

He held the dagger horizontally across his chest. With a flash of the blade, a silver screen cleaved the wall of sound in two, sending it crashing against the cavern walls behind them.

The moment all seven mouths fully opened, the veil flipped.

The ground beneath Richard's feet became the ceiling.

The cavern's vaulted roof became the floor.

The stalactites originally hanging from the ceiling transformed, one by one, into inverted houses.

Stone fishermen's cottages, abbey spires, dockside warehouses, church bell towers...

The entire town of Whitby was suspended upside down overhead.

No, it wasn't just one Whitby. The eighteenth-century fishing village pressed down upon the seventh-century abbey; Viking wooden palisades were embedded into medieval stone streets.

Whitby from every era had been swallowed into this thing's belly, half-digested, and spat back out exactly as it was.

Shadows of people were walking along the inverted streets.

Some wore fishermen's oilskins, some were draped in the black-and-white habits of nuns, and others were wrapped in Viking furs, a rusted husk of an axe strapped to their waists.

They wandered back and forth through the inverted town, pushing open one inverted door after another, entering one upside-down house after another.

They didn't know they were dead.

Richard looked up at the upside-down town—or was he looking down?

The Still Water of his mirror condensation technique spread across his skin, allowing him to clearly see that all the figures were doing exactly what they had done in life.

A young boy ran down the suspended street, sprinting past one upside-down house after another, pushing open every door, and rushing into every empty room to shout.

"Mom!"

His voice rippled through the inverted town, smashing against the upside-down walls and bouncing back.

"Mom, where are you?"

He shoved open the next door. The house was empty, so he dashed toward the next.

Hathaway explained from the side.

"That boy only came in twelve days ago."

"An apprentice went missing in town last month. His family reported it, saying he fell into the sea."

"He doesn't realize he's already in the belly. None of the people in here know."

The Serpent Mother's largest head opened its eyes.

Its eyeballs were a cloudy, muddy yellow, the pupils split vertically like a knife wound. The remaining six heads, varying in size, completely encircled it.

The Serpent Mother drew in a breath, and the sheer force of it caused the entire inverted town to shake violently.

The largest head reared up, but it didn't look at the living humans first.

To it, Richard's group was just background noise, no different from the stalactites filling the cavern or the dust lining the bottom of the world.

It only stared at one spot—the rift overhead (underfoot?).

A sliver of the living world's presence was seeping through that crack, and it intended to climb up.

"Corbin, the three of us will buy you time."

Colonel Javier tossed his coat to his feet. "Focus entirely on the ritual."

As the Colonel exerted his strength, golden light shone from the blood vessels beneath his skin, crawling streak by streak from his neck to the backs of his hands.

The light abruptly exploded outwards.

There was no natural light in the cavern, yet at this moment, the area where Javier stood was as bright as day.

The golden radiance splashed across the inverted streets and washed over the Serpent Mother's seven heads.

The Serpent Mother's seven heads simultaneously recoiled. Having lived in the depths of a lightless cavern for twelve hundred years, the sudden blast of light triggered an instinctive fear.

Treading on the light he bought by burning his own life force, Javier charged forward.

He wielded an enchanted battle axe, ether flowing smoothly along the edge of its blade.

As he swung it down, that solar radiance was compressed into a blade of pure white, slashing out along the arc of the axe.

It chopped dead-center into the side of the Serpent Mother's largest neck.

With a loud crack, the agonizing scream of some half-digested fisherman she had swallowed drifted out of the wound, only to be immediately incinerated by the light.

Stung by the blow, the Serpent Mother sent all seven heads snapping down at Javier at once.

Because its neck was wounded, the largest head swung slightly slower.

But the other six unharmed heads converged on him from six different directions.

In the wake of the Serpent Mother's movements, the ether whipped up a violent gale, locking tightly onto the target and leaving him no chance to dodge.

At the exact instant Javier was about to be bitten, a sun materialized out of thin air on the cavern wall behind him.

Richard's Spirit Vision shuddered, and he refrained from looking directly at it.

That was clearly not Javier's own power. It was surging up through the conduit of the Montagu Family's Ancestral Spell Technique.

Elevated by the power of the family's Virtuoso ancestor, Javier was pushed to heights he could never have reached in his entire life.

As the miniature sun poured down its light, the darkness in the entire space was burned back.

In the glare of that light, the seven snake heads snapping toward Javier caught a clear look at themselves.

Beneath the seven heads was a body reduced to nothing but a layer of skin; underneath, it was completely hollow.

Over twelve hundred years, while devouring so many voices and dead echoes, she had also been devouring herself.

Illuminated by the light, the Serpent Mother saw for the very first time just how hollow she was.

That split-second of hesitation was enough.

Javier brought his axe down once more. Where the blade passed, the snake's scales were crushed into shards of solar gold, flying up piece by piece before extinguishing into ash in midair.

The inverted city swayed under the force of the blow.

Several upside-down houses tore loose from the vault, plummeting downward and scattering into mist mid-fall.

The miniature sun blinked out. The Virtuoso had withdrawn his power.

Javier stumbled and fell to the ground, a tear ripping open in his ether circulation.

He rested on one knee, panting heavily, yet he was smiling.

"Gerard, old Phillips... you're up."