Chapter 12: What the Water Wants

Chapter 12: What the Water Wants

The thrumming from the abyss was a sound felt more than heard, a subsonic pulse that vibrated through the marble of the shattered altar and up into Leo’s bones. The last vestiges of the watery Collectors, those echoes of past victims, stopped their chaotic dissolution. They turned as one toward the gaping maw in the floor, their fluid forms becoming still and reverent, like iron filings aligning to a vast, unseen magnet. The air grew impossibly cold, carrying the primordial stench of decay and stagnant, lightless water from the dawn of the world.

“It’s coming,” Elara breathed, her face a pale, sweat-sheened mask in the gloom. She scrambled to her knees on the edge of the broken altar, the satchel ripped open beside her. With trembling hands, she unrolled the brittle parchment scroll. “Leo, whatever you do, you have to hold its attention. The Mark is your connection. It will focus on you. You have to endure it. You have to give me time!”

Leo didn’t have time to answer. A sound began to rise from the Well, a sound that would haunt him for the rest of his life. It was the sound of a thousand people drowning at once—a symphony of gurgles, wet coughs, and the soft, churning rush of a slow, powerful tide.

Then, it rose.

It wasn't a creature of flesh and bone. It was a column of living darkness, a pillar of churning, black water and swirling mud that ascended from the hole in reality. It had no single shape, its form constantly shifting, coiling like smoke, yet heavy as the ocean floor. It towered over them, blocking out the last of the bruised light from the stained-glass windows, plunging the altar into a deep, abyssal twilight.

And within its form, Leo saw the collection.

Pale, contorted limbs surfaced from the black liquid, twisting in silent agony before being sucked back into the depths. Faces—bloated, grey, their eyes wide with an eternity of shock—pressed against the surface of the churning column as if behind dark glass, their mouths open in silent, unending screams. He saw the face of the farmer, Thomas Miller. He saw the child, Elspeth Blackwood. And then he saw Father Renwick, his spine bent in that impossible arc, his torn mouth forming the gurgling laugh-sob that had been the Patron’s herald. They were all there, preserved in their final moments, unwilling bricks in this living, liquid mausoleum.

The entity had no head, no single face of its own. It was a gestalt of its victims, a god made from the sum of its collected agonies.

“Ancor vinco, umbra fundo!” Elara’s voice suddenly rang out, sharp and desperate. She began to chant from the scroll, the words alien and guttural, a language that scraped at the air. “Spiritus in sicco, carnem in osso!”

The towering column of water and bodies seemed to pause. It turned its vast, unfocused attention toward them. And Leo felt it. The Drowned Mark, the cold brand on his soul, flared with an incandescent, freezing pain. It was a hook, and the Patron was pulling on the line.

The confrontation was not a physical one. It was an invasion. The world dissolved into a deluge of cold, wet sensation as the Patron’s consciousness flooded his. He was no longer standing in a church; he was submerged.

He felt the rough, splintered wood of a rain barrel against his cheek, cold water closing over his head, his small lungs bursting. Elspeth Blackwood.

He felt the shock of icy river water in the dead of winter, his heavy traveler’s coat pulling him down into the mud, his surprised cry turning into a mouthful of silt. The Traveler.

He felt the snap. The blinding, white-hot agony as his own spine was bent backward, his ribs cracking, his vision tunneling as his connection to the world was severed by a force as casual and immense as gravity. Father Renwick.

The Patron wasn’t just showing him these deaths. It was making him live them, all at once. It was a torrent of terror, pain, and ultimate surrender. He was drowning in a sea of stolen memories. His own identity, his own life as Leo Vance, a graphic designer who worried about deadlines and drank too much coffee, was a tiny, insignificant island about to be swallowed by a tsunami of horror.

This is what it is to be collected, a thought whispered through his mind. It was not a voice, but a pure, cold concept, injected directly into his consciousness. You are afraid. You are alone. You fight. It is the same for all of them. But the fear passes. The pain ends. There is a great, quiet peace in the deep. In me.

Through the flood of stolen agony, Leo fought back with the only weapon he had: his mundane, terrified, desperate self. He clung to the memory of sunlight warming his face through his apartment window. He focused on the frustrating feeling of a pixel that wouldn’t align in a design. He remembered the taste of stale pizza, the sound of a car alarm in the street, the rough texture of his unshaven jaw. He held onto the image of his own two hands, solid and real, not watery and dissolving. These were his anchors. Pathetic, fragile, but his.

“Vinculum rumpo! Aqua, te abjuro!” Elara’s chant grew louder, more frantic. He could hear the strain in her voice, the sound of her very life force being poured into the ancient words.

The Patron loomed over them, the faces within its form twisting in a chorus of silent mockery. It sensed his resistance, and its assault deepened.

Why cling to a life of such quiet desperation? the presence whispered. You are unnoticed. Unremembered. Here, you will be part of something eternal. Something beautiful. Look.

The vision shifted. He was no longer experiencing death, but seeing through the Patron’s alien eyes. He saw life not as a thing to be lived, but as a raw material. He saw people as fleeting sparks of light and terror, beautiful curiosities to be captured, reshaped, and preserved forever in their most potent, emotional state. It was not murder. It was art. It was collection.

The gurgling laugh-sob echoed all around him, a hundred voices joined in one chorus of blissful agony. He felt the pull of it, the seductive promise of an end to the fear, an end to the thirst that was a raging fire in his throat. To surrender would be so easy. To let go. To just… sink.

He stumbled, his knees buckling. The fragile anchors of his memory were slipping. The cold, quiet peace of the Well was a siren song, and he was so, so tired of fighting.

“Leo!” Elara’s scream cut through the psychic maelstrom.

He looked up at the towering, watery horror. And in its swirling, dark surface, a new face began to form. It was pale and gaunt, its eyes wide not with terror, but with a profound and placid emptiness. Its lips, which should have been his, were beginning to curl upward at the corners into that familiar, impossibly wide smile of the Collector.

It was his own face. He was watching himself become the newest piece in the collection.