1087: Story 1087: Psalms of the Unseen 1087: Story 1087: Psalms of the Unseen There were songs in the ruins—songs no living ear should hear.
In the withered heart of the Deadlands, where storms of ash blotted out the moon, there stood a cathedral not built by human hands.
Its spires twisted into clawed shapes, its stained glass windows were filled not with saints, but with writhing, eyeless beasts.
It was said the Unseen sang there—beings not born of this world, whose worship devoured sight, memory, and even the soul itself.
When the last plague scattered the survivors, some were drawn by a strange music on the wind.
A melody promising safety, reunion, absolution.
Those who followed it found only the cathedral… and vanished.
Now, under a gibbous, sickly sun, Rein Varro, an old scavenger with nothing left to lose, crept toward it, a blade of bone clutched in his trembling hand.
He was not seeking salvation.
He sought revenge.
Years ago, the Unseen had taken his son.
Whispered to him until he walked smiling into the mist, never to return.
Rein had tracked rumors for decades—of choirs that could rip the mind apart, of psalms that could resurrect the dead, but only as hollow shells.
As he crossed the cathedral’s threshold, the music grew louder.
Not from instruments, but from the stones themselves, humming a symphony of loss.
Faces bulged from the walls—half-formed, half-forgotten—moaning in rhythm with the unseen choir.
Rein pressed wax into his ears.
He moved carefully, every step a prayer of anger.
At the altar, something waited: a robed figure with no face, its hands a blur of shifting, twitching fingers.
Around it floated a black book, pages flapping in an unseen wind, bleeding words in languages older than death.
The book was the source.
The Codex of the Unseen.
Rein gritted his teeth and lunged.
The moment he touched the Codex, his mind was pulled into a realm of impossible geometry.
He stood on oceans of broken glass under skies of splitting bone.
The Choir was here—a vast congregation of formless things, their mouths wide with hunger, their throats pouring endless hymns.
They saw him.
They sang to him.
Rein felt his memories burning away—the birth of his son, the face of his wife, even his own name.
But he held onto one thing: his hatred.
He drove the bone blade into the Codex.
A shriek like the sundering of worlds split the dreamscape.
The cathedral shuddered in the waking world.
Cracks raced across its impossible pillars.
The Unseen screamed, their forms dissolving into shadow and ash.
When Rein awoke, he was outside, the cathedral a mound of blackened rubble behind him.
The music was gone.
His ears bled, but he smiled.
In the ruins, the ashes shifted.
The Choir had been silenced…
but somewhere, scattered on the winds, their psalms still whispered—waiting for new ears to hear.
Waiting for the next soul to listen.