Chapter 14: The Final Piece

Chapter 14: The Final Piece

The final blog post from November 1999 hung on the screen, a digital epitaph for his brother’s soul. Alex stared at it until the words blurred into meaningless grey lines. Leo had made a choice. He had willingly stepped into the dark. The knowledge was a physical weight, crushing the air from his lungs, breaking something fundamental inside him. He felt an instinctual urge to slam the laptop shut, to throw it against the wall and shatter the screen, to erase the poisonous words from existence. But he couldn't.

He knew, with a certainty that defied all logic, that the blog wasn't finished. Whitney’s last entry had been a triumphant declaration of a new beginning. But the process she described—the transfer, the rebirth—it felt incomplete. It was a prologue. And Alex had just lived through the first few bloody chapters.

His hand, moving with a will of its own, scrolled down the page.

Below the final dated entry, there was a gap. A vast expanse of empty, grey background that seemed to stretch for an eternity. And then, new text appeared. It was undated, unformatted, looking less like a blog post and more like a series of fragmented field notes, a madwoman’s addendum to her own gospel. The tone had shifted from triumphant faith to a cold, procedural fanaticism.

The Process requires structure. The Saint is a seed, but the soil must be prepared. It cannot take root in nothing. It must grow in the garden of its former life, and it must consume the other plants to make itself strong.

Alex’s stomach clenched. He was one of the other plants.

The First Tithe is essential. It must be a life connected to the host, a thread from their tapestry. But not the strongest thread. It is a sacrifice of medium importance. The First Tithe serves as the Anchor. Its life force, its memories, its place in the world are consumed and repurposed. This consumption provides the energy necessary to perform the Great Edit. To rewrite what was.

The Great Edit. The phrase sent a jolt of ice through Alex’s veins. He saw it with blinding clarity: the impossible memory of a sleepover, the sound of a man being murdered in the dark, the spectral image of Chris’s childhood racecar bed rotting in the woods. It hadn’t been a simple psychic illusion. It was a fundamental alteration of the past, a patch applied to the source code of reality. Chris’s entire life, his friendship, his very existence, had been burned as fuel to make that single, shared memory real. His death wasn't the goal; it was the cost of the transaction.

He remembered Chris's final, frantic text: They're making me remember. The bed wasn't mine. He hadn't just been remembering. He had been experiencing his own history being actively overwritten moments before his life was consumed as payment.

The method of Tithe is a mark of the Saint's grace. A gift of the host's own suffering. As Leo was consumed by a cancer of the cells, so too shall the Tithe be. A rapid, blossoming decay. A sign of the Saint's power over the flesh. The vessel for the Tithe must be symbolic. A vessel of love, turned to a vessel of sacrifice.

The teddy bear. The grotesque image of Chris’s body sewn into the fabric of Barnaby, the seams pulling at his skin like a monstrous mockery of an embrace. It wasn’t random cruelty. It was ritual. Chris had been dressed for his own sacrificial slaughter in the one thing that perfectly symbolized Alex’s childhood affection, the very love the entity coveted.

Alex felt a raw, agonizing grief for his friend, sharper and more terrible than before. Chris hadn't just been murdered. He had been used. He was a tool, a resource, a stepping stone in a cosmic horror story that he had never even known he was a part of. He was the catalyst, the one who had sent the link, and he had become the first casualty, his curiosity repaid with the most gruesome death imaginable.

His eyes fell to the final set of notes on the page. Whitney’s words here were spare, chilling, and stripped of all metaphor. They were a simple, brutal equation.

The Tithe anchors the new past. But the Anchor must be secured. The rebirth is not complete until the seed has consumed the root from which it sprang.

The final piece of the ritual is not a sacrifice. It is a consummation.

The Saint must feed on the strongest bond. The purest love. The one whose memories hold the most weight, whose absence would leave the largest void. For the host to be truly reborn, he must erase the one person who remembers him most clearly as he was. It is the final severance. The cutting of the last cord to the old life.

The beloved older brother was always the designated meal.

Alex’s world narrowed to the single, glowing rectangle of the screen. The air in his dorm room became thick and heavy, the walls seeming to press inward. This wasn't a prison cell. It was a fattening pen. He was not a random victim caught in a web. He was the prize pig, groomed and prepared for the feast.

Every interaction, every step of this nightmare, had been designed to lead him here. The teddy bear, a symbol of his affection for Leo. The Watcher, his own logical mind turned against him. The torment of his sister, a demonstration of the entity's reach into his family. The pilgrimage back to his hometown, a herding of the animal to the slaughterhouse. Chris’s death was the appetizer. He was the main course.

His love for his brother—the deep, aching grief that had defined him for years—was not his strength. It was his primary vulnerability. It was the scent of his blood in the water. Leo hadn't just made a pact to save himself; he had signed his brother’s death warrant as part of the deal. I don’t want to leave my brother all alone, Whitney had quoted him saying. The words, once a comfort, were now the most terrifying threat imaginable. He wasn't going to leave Alex alone. He was going to consume him, to absorb him, to make sure they were together forever in the most horrifying way possible.

He was the final piece. The last ingredient. And with that knowledge, the quiet in his dorm room was no longer the silence of peace, but the silence of anticipation. The hungry silence of a predator that has finally cornered its prey. He was exactly where the entity—where Leo—wanted him to be. Alone, terrified, and fully aware of his role in the impending ceremony.