Ice Voices Interviews: Nick Roberts

 

Nick Roberts is a native West Virginian and a doctoral graduate of Marshall University. He is an active member of the Horror Writers Association and the Horror Authors Guild. His works include Anathema, The Exorcist's House, Mean-Spirited and others. He currently resides in South Carolina with his family and is an advocate for people in recovery from substance use disorder.

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K.L.: Hi Nick, thank you for doing this. My first question is: How would you describe your particular brand of horror and what kind of experience do you hope your reader to have?

N.R.: Hey! I would describe my brand of horror as horror with heart…a heart that sometimes gets ripped out and stomped on before the book’s end. I say that because I am always trying to scare the reader. I’ve heard others advise against this, but that’s bullshit. No one strategy works for all writers. I try to create interesting characters and a dramatic situation that engages the reader. If I can do that, ninety percent of the job is done before I even introduce the scares. 

When I begin a new novel, I have the mindset of writing a terrifying opening scene to a horror film. That’s the process I did with Mean Spirited. I had the idea of opening with a tonal blend of The Strangers and Stolen Tongues because I knew it would start with a woman alone in her bedroom at night, and she hears something downstairs. That’s all I had to go on–a creepy home invasion premise. I kept coming up with different ways of freaking myself out by sensing what the character did. I focused heavily on sound with that one, and whenever the hairs on my arms would stand on end, I knew I was onto something. The prologue became what it became, but it was never meant to be about a dog.

If I’m doing my job correctly, I’m scaring the reader but leaving them with a lasting impression. I don’t want my books to be horror popcorn stories that are creepy in the moment, but then you forget about them once you move on to something else. So, I guess the most appropriate answer would be, I want them to be haunted in some way. My favorite horror novels do that, and that’s what I try to replicate. Books like The Exorcist, House of Leaves, Penpal, A Head Full of Ghosts, Stolen Tongues, American Psycho, The Wasp Factory, Pet Sematary, and The Collector are all prime examples of this. Having said that, reader response is subjective, so I’m never going to “haunt” everyone. 

I definitely agree that the battle of Good and Evil, whatever you want to call it, is prevalent in all my works, some more than others. In looking at the physics of the universe, it’s the oldest story there is: Light vs Darkness. I love the quote from True Detective where the two cops are looking at the night sky and Marty remarks on how much darkness is in the universe. His partner, Rust, says that he’s looking at it wrong because “Once there was only dark. You ask me, the light’s winning.” I’m also fascinated by the concepts of absolutes existing for the sake of existence. True evil has no motive. Chaos has no motive other than to inflict chaos. 

These are heavy themes, but they resonate with readers because they are, quite literally, universal. This isn’t to say that there’s no room for morally gray characters. I’m inspired when reading something like Game of Thrones because Martin can make you love a character, have them do something so reprehensible that you hate them the next chapter, and then they redeem themselves and become a fan favorite again. It’s amazing. So I like to have characters with flaws, people who are susceptible to the influence of absolutes. That’s when it gets interesting, to see how characters you think you know react to conflict and possibly subvert expectations.

We all have good and bad in us, even if they are just random, reactive, intrusive thoughts. If someone cuts  you off in traffic and almost causes an accident with your kids in the car, you turn homicidal for a few seconds. We revert back to our primal selves. Putting relatively ordinary characters in extraordinary situations in my stories and watching what happens is a joy for me as a writer. This is why I don’t outline novels. I don’t know the characters well enough to know how they’re going to react when this thing happens to them at this point in the story. I like to keep things fresh and chaotic. It keeps it exciting for me.  

K.L. Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor! Sorry, couldn’t resist it, as I am a major geek when it comes to Game of Thrones and, of course, True Detective (season one, naturally). No one does morally gray/complex like GRMM and it’s unfortunate that many people dismiss his work because it falls under the rubric of “fantasy.” I agree that the struggle between Good and Evil is universal, but what are your thoughts on presenting it through the Judeo-Christian or Biblical lens? I am thinking, for example, of Swan Song by Robert McCammon where this struggle is rooted more in evil versus life, nature, and the world, drawing on pagan and explicitly tarot-esque imagery. Another example is Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alyson Rumfitt, where evil is seen from the Marxist perspective, in the sense that it is produced and distributed by the concrete material conditions.

Would you say that horror is generally apolitical and if so, what are your thoughts on that? It is, of course, true that most of us need a space to escape, yet the present seems to be posing so much moral urgency for us that the idea of escape becomes dangerously close to quietism. 

N.R: How the struggle between good and evil is presented can be explicit or understated, surface-level or subtextual, and this is what makes it compelling. Whichever lens the storyteller chooses to present it through (religious/spiritual/metaphysical/biological/existential/etc.), should be chosen to serve the narrative. If the central conflict is compelling and treats readers like they have functioning minds, then the framework is contextual and shouldn’t be viewed as a reflection of the author. 

I can write a possession novel in the exorcism subgenre without believing that the “power of Christ compels” demons. I look at religious horror as just another subgenre. I got flack over The Exorcist’s House from both sides of the aisle. Some readers said it was too religious, and others said it wasn’t religious enough. I saw a review or a TikTok video the other day where the person was running through a list of trigger warnings, and religion was one of them. To say that people take that shit seriously would be the biggest understatement in the history of mankind. 

Regarding horror as apolitical is naive. The genre itself is the most effective vehicle for metaphor because we can create these evil and scary things as stand-ins for the horrors of real life. But, again, the author doesn’t have to believe in the message to employ it. Politics run on fear. That might sound cynical, but it’s true. Fear is the most efficient motivator for action in the world today, and the ability to play off those fears gives one control, power. Whether you’re an effective horror novelist or a politician, you’re manipulating a desired outcome by understanding what scares people. 

People need escapism, but sometimes their escape can be a trap. On the other hand, if you don’t take a mental reprieve every now and then, you could drive yourself crazy screaming into the void. It’s ultimately about balance and media literacy. You can’t transmit what you don’t have, so if you want to take a stand in this world, make sure you’re well-rested and battle-ready. 

K.L.: What is your theory on why some of us are drawn to horror (and true crime isn’t too far off)? Why is it often the case that some of us who are most traumatized (I, for one, have C-PTSD) look for the darkest, maddest thing to read and watch? 

N.R.: Horror is a safety net. It’s a zoo where we can go look at creatures that could kill us in the wild, but are confined to their cages/pages. For some of us, the darker the better. When we choose to enter the darkness, it gives us a sense of power over the content. It provides the illusion that we’re conquering our fears.

This especially applies to true crime. In reading about Charles Manson or watching a Jeffrey Dahmer miniseries, we’re slowing down to look at the carnage of a car accident. It’s as much morbid curiosity as it is a relief that it didn’t happen to us. Even people who don’t read horror often find themselves glued to the latest salacious news story. 

I think it all boils down to the reality that we are all going to die, but our conscious brains refuse to accept this fact. Horror lets us get close to death on our own terms. 

K.L.: The darker the better, indeed. It is interesting what you said about death. I am forever struck by Tarkovsky’s quote in Solaris, something like, “We’re basically immortal because we don’t know the hour of our death.” 

Now for my next question. Who is your favorite character in Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire? You have already alluded to the complex moral gayness of George Martin's characters, and I couldn't agree more. For example, I think Jamie is the only one who understands that the form of the vow (to always obey and protect the king) isn't always the same as the context of the vow (killing half a million civilians). It's also really interesting to me that the characters we hate, we really, really do, like Cersei Lannister, get their time of humiliation and pain. They appear to pay for has been done. Yet Cersei's walk of atonement never feels like justice. It just doesn't. It's the perverted justice, done for the wrong reasons by the wrong people.  

N.R.: Oh, wow. That’s a tough, tough question. A Song of Ice and Fire is packed with so many memorable characters, some just for a few episodes, others  for the span of the series. I’ll give you my top five (and this is a hybrid of the show and the books):

5.) Daenerys Targaryen (more so in the books because we know her plan from her first appearance)

4.) The Hound, Sandor Clegane (I love a good curmudgeon with a soft spot.)

3.) Tyrion Lannister (The mind, the dialogue, the heart, the will to live; amazing)

2). Jamie Lannister (Arguably the most loathed then loved, then loathed again character throughout the series, he’s as complex as they come, and I would argue, based on the books, the polar opposite of Daenerys.) 

1.) Tie between Bronn and Jon Snow (I know this is a cheat, but they both deserve the number one spot because of their earnestness. Jon is a man who lives by a code and has to overcompensate for growing up a bastard. His ascension in bravery and leadership is truly heroic. Bronn, on the other hand, is arguably the most deadly human in the show. He’s a lethal hitman who’s loyal to the highest bidder, and we love how good he is at his job. He’s funny, charismatic, and a total “man’s man.” But, just like Jon, there’s a drive to do the right thing in the end, no matter what the cost.)

What are the three books and movies that have had the most impact on you? I am not limiting this to horror. 

Books:

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

Movies:

Pulp Fiction

The Dark Knight

Scream

K.L.: Most of us horror aficionados have a favorite obscure (a book or a movie) that we really want others to discover. Movie-wise, for me, it is probably Ganja & Hess. How about you? 

Book: Dopefiend by Donald Goines

Movie: Session 9 

K.L.: What’s the strangest or most unsettling compliment you’ve ever received about your writing?

I can’t think of a specific strange compliment, but there is a scenario that unsettles me. Whenever readers point out something that I didn’t mean to do and say how brilliant it was that I did this or that and connected this to that or alluded to this classic work or literature…I just nod my head and die a little inside. 

K.L.: If you had to design a horror story that could only be told through scent — no words, no images — what would it smell like?

Smoke. There are so many flavors and varieties of smoke. I feel like the options are limitless. I used rolling sulfuric smoke in The Exorcist’s House that smelled like rotten eggs, but I also used pipe tobacco smoke as a comfort smell because you know the character with the pipe is coming to save the day. 

K.L.: Is there a horror trope or image that still genuinely unsettles you no matter how many times you encounter it? Something that slips past the intellectual part of you straight into your spinal cord?

Being lost in a forest is a big fear of mine. That’s a rational fear and one I have because I lack a sense of direction, but you can mostly credit that one to The Blair Witch Project and one episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? called “The Watcher’s Woods.” Even though I don’t believe in the supernatural, I still won’t fuck around with saying Candyman in a mirror or using a Ouija board. Like, what’s the upside? 

K.L.: When you look at the horror landscape today — extreme cinema, true crime obsession, elevated horror’s grief-core — what do you think audiences are really asking for? Catharsis? Punishment? Permission?

I think the pandemic gave many people an existential crisis and took away the illusory security blanket we had. Seeing mass shootings on the news every week, war, and climate changing in real time has made our society confront its own mortality in an unprecedented way. This information age in which we currently live amplifies it. So, I think people are turning to these sub-genres to cope with the horrors of the real world, to feel not alone in death and try to rationalize it. 

K.L.: Does horror have — or need — an internal ethics? Unlike ancient Greek tragedy, which traditionally insists upon it (and where violence was almost never shown directly, taking place off-stage): that suffering must lead to recognition, to consequence, to some unbearable clarity — even if it destroys everyone involved. 

N.R.: My only ethos is narrative authenticity, not content. If it serves the story, it stays. And even that, I somewhat struggle with. How do you put restrictions on art? How do you regulate an abstract, subjective concept? Yes, I’m aware there are some horrendous subgenres in horror that push the boundaries of social norms, and there are certain taboo subjects I don’t enjoy reading, but I will never say any genre needs a filter. People need education and media literacy. I had to be taught how to learn. 

K.L.: What needs to change — not just in horror’s characters, but in horror’s very architecture — for there to be real room for a disabled protagonist? Not a metaphor, not a victim, not a symbol — but a center of gravity.

A great story. It’s simple, but not easy. Paradigm shifts happen when people are made to feel something that alters their outlook. And I think those stories need to be written by people in that community for it to really stick. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that artists can write any character they want and from any perspective they want to explore. That’s a fundamental right one has as a creator. But the voices that are most likely to resonate and effect change come from those demographics. See Robin Williams’ monologue in Good Will Hunting about being able to talk about the SIstine Chapel versus standing inside of it.  

K.L.: Can you envision them? Not just what haunts them — but what they haunt in return. What are they like? How do they move through horror’s machinery? What part of horror’s traditional structure breaks — or has to break — to make space for them?

N.R.: There has to be empathy with the characters. The audience has to see themselves in them. That’s true of any great character, though. Horror has always been about fear of the “other,” and that can be interpreted in different ways. I might be naive, but that’s truly what I believe. The story will move the audience and recalibrate the machine. 

K.L.: Thank you so much for your time! It’s been a pleasure.

Nick’s books (check them out, peeps!): click here.

The Hierophant (V)

 

The Hierophant

“The Hierophant is the master of sacred objects — not because he owns them, but because he tends their silence, their strangeness, their demands on the soul.”

— Unknown tarot scholar

“This is not the priest of comfort; this is the priest of terror.”

— Meditations on the Major Arcana (anonymous Catholic mystic text)

The vaults breathed.

Each day, the Hierophant moved through their slow, heavy respiration as he had for decades, his figure absorbed into the vast anatomy of stone and silence, another organ stitched into the endless dreaming of the black halls.

The space stretched far beyond sight, a cathedral of twilight and broken memory, hewn from ancient rock that remembered the weight of fire long after the flames had died. Its roof disappeared into darkness; its corners folded inward like dying stars. Here, twilight always hung—a bruised, suspended gloom that clung to the air without brightening, without fading.

The architecture was skeletal: arches that bore no weight, pillars that reached for nothing, corridors that ended in silence. Shadow was not the absence of light here—it was the very stone itself.

Among these vast open tombs, groves of candles bloomed in scattered clusters, their flames trembling like fragile creatures, casting reflections that slipped and recoiled across the cold floors.

The Hierophant moved among them in robes dark as iron, so densely woven that the fabric seemed to drink the little light it touched. The hems and cuffs were embroidered in black thread—symbols so tightly stitched that they devoured sight itself. His appearance was as severe as his garments: a body carved thin by service, a face hollowed by decades, a gait shaped by the slow patience of erosion. He no longer looked like a man. He looked like something the vaults themselves had grown.

Before the first light touched the world above, he descended each day into the sacred halls where the relics waited.

The Black Mysteries themselves were held only once each year, when the breath of the earth thinned and the bones of the seasons ground against one another.

But the relics required daily tending, daily reverence, lest their dormant hunger slip loose into the waking world.

The Gnarlstone crouched within its iron cradle, a gnarled black knot that twisted the air around it into blurred, flickering images of things that could not be.

The Mirror of Inverted Light hung veiled between two broken pillars, its surface swallowing all reflections, birthing instead glimpses of inverted noons and impossible births collapsing backward into oblivion.

The Choir Fabric—a tapestry woven of grave shrouds, gold wire, sinew, and human hair—hung heavy along the southern wall, breathing in slow, bruised waves when the vaults were silent.

And buried in its pit of packed earth, the Vessel of Second Wounds whispered grief that had not yet found the tongue to name itself.

These were the tools of the black miracles.

The Hierophant tended them, anointing, binding, repairing. He was not a celebrant. He did not witness the miracles themselves. He worked behind the canvas, tending the machinery that shaped sorrow into ritual. What happened beyond his sight was not his to know.

The pilgrims came.

They came from the ruins of cities where streets had turned to dust, from coasts where the sea gnawed at the bones of abandoned villages, from places where the dead outnumbered the living a hundredfold. They came wrapped in rags, in cloaks heavy with dust and old blood, bearing the look of those who had wandered too long without finding either shelter or forgiveness.

Before crossing the threshold, they took the Vow of Silence, promising never to speak of what they would see in the vault.

And within those weeping groves of candles, the black mysteries unfolded.

The Hierophant could not see them, but he could feel the world unraveling at the edges of his senses, a mad kaleidoscopic abyss that pressed against his skin and filled his mouth with the taste of iron.

He could feel it breaking the world around him, flooding the vault with smells that no body was made to endure: the cloying sweetness of overripe fruit blooming thick and urgent in his nostrils, the iron tang of blood curling into the back of his throat, the burning hair stench folding into the sharp coldness of ozone, the resin breath of wounded trees, amber and rosewater and grief trapped forever in the sap of dead forests.

Sounds battered him: the wet roaring of beasts too large for the vaults, the brittle clatter of teeth without mouths to hold them, the slow grinding of stone against stone like jaws chewing through the foundations of the world, the angelic singing of hundreds of children's throats unraveling into sobs, the weeping that was too vast, too deep, too endless to have ever belonged to anything human.

And among these drowning sensations, he could hear the bodies breaking: the retching of pilgrims unable to withstand what they saw, the gasps of those whose bones collapsed inward, the silent crumpling of those who could no longer find even the strength to scream.

Some transformations came swiftly.

Some staggered out into the broken dawn, their skin flowering with black lesions. Some awoke days later, their screams tearing open the nights, as wet wings erupted from their backs, the bones of their shoulders twisted into alien anatomies. Some walked into the woods beyond the vault and were never seen again. Some tore themselves open, carving their griefs into their own bodies. Some wore their new forms—winged, broken, radiant—without shame.

The mysteries did not offer salvation.

They offered only change.

And they devoured.

Until the man came.

The Hierophant found him standing at the threshold one morning, half in shadow, half in the weeping candlelight, a man of no special height, no special mark, his cloak dust-streaked and his boots worn as if he had walked from the edge of the world to this place.

“I couldn’t tell you why I came here exactly,” the man said, voice low, his expression unreadable.

“Maybe it’s about your daughter.

I was walking home once. Years ago. She was playing in a field of white flowers — tall enough to sway around her knees. Her eyes—God, they were luminous, like they pulled the whole sky into them. And that hair… chestnut curls, bouncing as she ran. She wore a dress. Turquoise? No… sea green, I think. It caught the wind like it wanted to lift her away. She was all light. All softness.

I took her.”

His voice turned syrupy then. Slow. Heavy. Sweet in a way that rotted as it touched the air.

“We had some fun. Funny times, you know. For years. So many years of fun.”

The word hung between them like something wet.

“I thought she’d forgotten you,” he said, smiling faintly. “But in the end…”

The smile vanished.

“…when I savaged her, she called out for you.”

He paused then, and when he spoke again, the word came out spat from his mouth, feral and sharp as broken bone:

"Savaged."

The Hierophant said nothing.

The man’s face was average. Utterly forgettable — the kind of face no one sketches, no one dreams.

And yet it occurred to the Hierophant then that this was not his real face. His true face was his voice.

That slow, syrup-thick voice. That unbothered smoothness.

Every man has a true face.

Every woman.

But it can take time to learn where to look.

Not all faces appear in mirrors.

The Hierophant moved without hesitation.

The blade he drew was ceremonial, not meant for killing, but it parted the man's throat all the same, a clean, cold line that spilled his blood across the stones.

The vault breathed it in without judgment.

No questions.

No pleas.

Only the endless respiration of stone and shadow.

Later, in the deep solitude of his small cell carved from the stone, the Hierophant found the tiara.

It lay in the guttering light of a single candle, a child's toy, bent, tarnished, absurd in its fragility, the fake gems dull and cracked.

And tangled in its broken frame, glinting faintly in the faltering light, was a single strand of golden hair—fine as a thread of spider silk, trembling like something still alive.

He lifted it with gloved hands, careful not to disturb the delicate filament, and held it against the flickering darkness, feeling the coldness of it seep into his palms.

For a long time—days, or perhaps years, for time had no meaning beneath the vault—he kept it hidden, pressed against the bone of his ribs, a wound he could neither close nor name.

But grief ferments. It curdles and thickens and demands expression.

And so at last, he brought the tiara into the sacred halls.

It did not belong.

Among the dense, unspeaking relics—the Gnarlstone, the Mirror, the Choir Fabric, the Vessel—the child's tiara looked grotesque: a fragile absurdity, a discarded toy placed among the architecture of anguish.

The space itself seemed to recoil from it. The Gnarlstone hummed with a higher, more painful frequency; the Choir Fabric twisted in its frame, breathing in uneven gasps.

But he placed it there, trembling, and did not remove it.

The first time it stood among the relics, the mysteries spasmed.

Each day, after the pilgrims were gone and the candles guttered down to stubs, the Hierophant made his rounds.

That night, the Hierophant lingered longer than he ever had before. He stood before the tiara, the vault stretching out around him like a stone sea, the last of the candlelight flickering weakly at the edge of his sight. The twilight that lived inside these chambers never changed, but tonight it seemed to shiver around the tiara, as if the object itself disturbed the air. He watched it for a long time, unmoving, as if by sheer stillness he could unravel the thread that tied it to the breathing dark.

And then, out of the endless silence of the vault, a note sounded.

It was thin, crystalline, almost painful in its purity—so sharp and sudden that for a moment he thought it must be some sickness of his own mind, a hallucination born from too many years spent alone with the breathing stones. But then another note followed, delicate as a crack forming in ice. And then another, threading itself into the air with a patience that belonged to neither life nor death. The vault, which knew no songs outside the measured agonies of the Black Mysteries, seemed to draw a slow breath around the sound, as if the stone itself were listening.

Then—almost beyond the threshold of hearing, so faint that it seemed it must be imagined—he heard words forming, woven into the trembling lattice of the notes:

"Where the pomegranate bleeds, the claws remember."

The Hierophant did not move at first. The air around him had thickened, not with heat, but with the weight of something that had always waited just beyond sight. Slowly, he lifted the tiara, cradling it with the reverence he had once reserved for the oldest and most dangerous relics.

As he lifted it, he felt the change.

It was no longer merely the brittle weight of a child's toy. It was intangible now, lighter than air and yet denser than sorrow, as if he were holding a halo that had not been shaped for human hands. The feeling of it was unbearable: a holiness without mercy, a sanctity that pressed against the bones rather than blessing them.

In that moment, he understood.

The tiara had not been added to the Black Miracles. It had been recognized by them. It had always belonged.

And he understood what he must do.

He must show them—all of them, the pilgrims, the penitents, the lost—that the Black Miracles did not merely exist. They hurt. They had always hurt. Their nature was not salvation, nor wonder, nor awe. Their nature was wound and fracture and irreversible knowing.

Unlike the weave of the original Mysteries—born from the endless frolicking war between light and shadow, stitched together from shattered reflections, a mad latticework of broken mirrors where every shard reflected ten thousand others in impossible geometries—the tiara's legacy was different. The first Mysteries had been woven of enchantments, of the laughter of gods who no longer cared if their playthings lived or bled. They had been riddles of illusion and impossible light.

But this—this was not illusion.

The song that sounded now in the bones of the vault was not made of light or dark, nor of the tangled dance between them.

It was pure.

It was severe.

It was truth.

It was the first and final cut.

The architecture of miracles shuddered, the black scaffolding of rites spasming like a body struck by a deathblow.

The very vault itself seemed to seize against its own breath, stones grinding in protest.

But the Hierophant did not withdraw the tiara.

He kept it there.

And the black miracles changed.

They spasmed.

They bled.

They evolved.

Slowly, the tiara was kneaded into the foundation, worked into the breathing stone as grief is worked into bone, as a blade is worked into flesh.

It became another rib in the skeleton of the sacred.

Another bone the vault could never shed.

The transformations grew stranger after that.

Some pilgrims staggered from the vaults haunted by visions of those they had once loved—and failed.

Some returned with the certainty of their own death burned into their marrow, the hour known to them and to no one else.

Some spoke—haltingly, fearfully—of a child's crown, glowing and floating downstream, always downstream, and felt that something was coming for them.

One night, after the ceremonies had ended and the last pilgrims had fled or collapsed into silence, the Hierophant moved among the pillars, his footsteps hushed by centuries of ash and dust.

He thought he was alone.

He was not.

A woman's voice, broken by grief, drifted through the shadows:

"I saw his face.

I loved him.

I loved him so much.

And I failed him."

A man's voice, hollow and shaking:

"I knew the hour of my death.

It settled into my flesh,

and now it waits for me like a second shadow."

A girl's voice, thin as smoke:

"I see it… the crown… floating…

I think it's coming for me…"

The tiara was now infused into the foundation, a discordant thread woven so deeply into the breathing of the vault that no hand could unpick it without tearing the whole edifice apart.

Why had the man confessed?

What had he wanted?

Why had he come here at all?

What had he hoped to find?

No answers were ever given.

The Hierophant did not seek them.

The vault absorbed the confession, the blood, the tiara, the golden hair, into its endless, patient breathing.

In the final days, the Hierophant knelt before the relics, the tiara gleaming faintly in the flickering light of dying candles.

He whispered the only prayer he still remembered, a broken thing stitched from the ruins of older tongues, words whose meaning had long since decayed into something deeper than meaning.

Cherni Chuda… Cherni Chuda…

Gospodi, vedi mene skvoz' noch'…

Cherni Chuda, Cherni Chuda…

Moya krovi, moya pechat'…

Ne vernotsa svet, ne vernotsa dom…

Cherni Chuda, Cherni Chuda…

Ot' zemli, ot' vody, vzyata dushá…

Cherni Chuda, Cherni Chuda…

Uvedi mene v pesok, uvedi mene v son…

Cherni Chuda, Cherni Chuda…

He whispered until his voice was nothing, until even his breath was nothing, until the vault exhaled him into its endless, patient dreaming.

He became a stone among stones, a relic among relics, a wound that had once wept and now only waited.

The mysteries endured.

The pilgrims came.

The vault breathed.

The black miracles devoured and remade the world, one silent, shuddering breath at a time.

It is rumored that, in the darkest recesses of the cavernous temple, after the last candle has died and every pilgrim has long departed, you can still hear a faint lullaby weaving through the stone—a thread so fine it seems it must snap, but never does.

"Where the pomegranate bleeds, the claws remember.

Let the claws in. Let them in. Let them in."

Not many truly understood what it meant—

not even those who knelt until their knees broke, not even those who tore their own skin open to make a wound worthy of hearing.

But the vault knew.

The stone knew.

And somewhere, deep beneath the breathing earth, the Hierophant who once had a name and walked among men, knew.

The only thing separating the sacred from the monstrous was a single child's hair.