Chapter 9: The Ritual of Severance

Chapter 9: The Ritual of Severance

The violation was a greasy film coating the inside of his soul. Alex knelt on his parents’ plush carpet, his body wracked with a violent, uncontrollable tremor, the aftershock of being used as a puppet. He could still feel the phantom stretch of his own lips into that grotesque, predatory smile. He could still hear the echo of that ancient, contemptuous voice using his own vocal cords. The thing inside him had looked at his father—his weak, terrified, guilty father—and had sized him up for a future meal.

William Carter was a wreck, his face a mess of tears and horror. He was babbling apologies, promises, a lifetime of cowardice and guilt pouring out of him in a pathetic, incoherent flood. Alex didn't hear him. The words were meaningless. The only thing that mattered was the chilling threat that now hung over his entire family: I’ll know just where to find the rest of my flock.

His survival was no longer the only thing at stake. He was the cage door, and the lock was starting to fail.

He found Elara back at her shop, the scent of dried herbs a strange comfort after the sterile normality of his parents’ home. He didn’t have to say much. The haunted, hollowed-out look in his eyes, the residual tremor in his hands, told her everything.

“It manifested,” she stated, her voice devoid of surprise, replaced by a steely resolve. “Partially, but it took control.”

“It spoke to my father. It threatened him. It threatened all of them,” Alex said, his voice a low, ragged rasp. He felt the anger from before returning, but now it was different—less like a wild fire and more like forged, sharpened steel. “You said we couldn’t fight it directly.”

“We couldn’t,” Elara corrected him, her dark eyes intense. “The situation has changed. Before, you were fighting for awareness. Now, you’re fighting for control of the vessel. Your defiance, your anger, everything you learned from Lillian’s diaries—it’s filling the hollow spaces inside you. You’re no longer an empty house. You’re a contested territory. The war has already begun, Alex. The only choice we have left is where and how we finish it.”

Her words landed with the finality of a death sentence and the barest glimmer of a pardon. This was it. The point of no return.

“Lillian’s diaries,” Elara continued, her mind already moving to logistics. “They spoke of her sixty-year fight. She turned her own soul into a fortress. That defiance is your birthright now. But it’s not enough to build walls. We have to tear out the foundation. We have to sever the entity's connection to our bloodline. Forever.”

She called it the Ritual of Severance. It was an arcane, dangerous piece of lore she had found in their family’s oldest, most forbidden texts—a last resort, a suicide mission for the soul. The theory was both simple and terrifying. The entity was a parasite, physically anchored to this world through an object, but spiritually anchored to Alex. To kill a parasite, you couldn’t just attack the host; you had to go inside and rip it out by the root.

“You will have to willingly lower every mental and emotional defense you have,” she explained, her voice low and grave as she laid out candles, bags of salt, and several small, iron railroad spikes on her counter. “You have to open the door, let it think it’s finally won, and follow it back to its source. On the ethereal plane, in the landscape of the mind, you will confront it. Not as a ghost possessing you, but as an equal.”

Alex’s blood ran cold. The memory of the shattering mirrors, of his own voice whispering his deepest insecurities, was still raw. “It will tear me apart.”

“It will try,” Elara said, meeting his gaze, her own unflinching. “But you won’t be alone. You’ll take Lillian’s defiance with you. While you’re in there, I will be out here. I will protect your physical body, I will guard the circle, and I will keep this world from breaking in, and that thing from breaking out. But Alex… once it begins, I can’t pull you back. You either cut the cord, or you become the cord forever. There is no other outcome.”

There was no real choice to be made. They drove back to Lillian’s house under a sky the color of a fresh bruise. The sagging Victorian seemed to crouch in the twilight, a predator waiting for their return. It knew they were coming. The air was thick with a static charge of anticipation, a low hum of malevolence that vibrated in Alex’s teeth. This wasn’t just Lillian’s house anymore. It was the entity’s nest. The heart of its power.

They went straight to the master bedroom, the room where Lillian had fought her longest, hardest battles. It was the nexus of the house’s pain. Working with a grim, silent efficiency, they cleared the debris from the center of the room, the slashed mattress and torn curtains. Elara used a thick piece of chalk to draw a large, intricate circle on the warped floorboards, connecting symbols Alex had never seen before. She lined the chalk with a thick barrier of salt, and at the four cardinal points of the circle, she hammered the iron spikes deep into the wood, each strike of the hammer echoing like a tolling bell.

“Iron holds back the physical, salt holds back the spiritual,” she explained, her breath misting in the unnaturally cold air. “This circle will hold your body. It will be the only safe place in this house once we begin.”

She placed Lillian’s three diaries just outside the circle, their worn leather covers facing inward like silent guardians. Alex was to sit in the center. He stripped off his jacket, the cold in the room seeping into his bones, and lowered himself onto the floor, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs.

Elara knelt before him, just outside the salt line. “It will show you things, Alex. Horrible things. It will use your memories, your father’s face, your own voice. It will offer you power. It will promise you an end to pain. Do not believe any of it. Remember Lillian. Remember what she wrote on that last page. I am not the monster. I am the cage. You are the cage. And tonight, you are going to open the door and set the beast loose, so you can finally kill it.”

He took a deep breath, the air tasting of dust and decay. He looked at Elara, his sole ally in this impossible war, and gave her a single, sharp nod. He was ready.

He closed his eyes. He let go of the anger, the fear, the defiance he had been clinging to like a life raft. He dismantled his own mental walls, brick by brick, until there was nothing left but the raw, hollow emptiness the entity had found so inviting in the beginning. He made himself a perfect victim, a willing sacrifice. He opened the door.

For a terrifying moment, there was nothing but silence and cold.

Then, from deep inside his own mind, he felt a flicker of triumphant, ravenous joy that was not his own. The parasite was taking the bait.

A split-second later, the house responded.

It began with a sound—the thunderous, impossible slam of the front door, a sound that shook the entire house to its foundations. Then another, and another—every door, every window, every cupboard in the house slamming shut in a percussive, deafening cacophony.

Elara gasped, scrambling to her feet. Alex’s eyes flew open. The world outside the grimy bedroom window was gone. It wasn’t dark; it was simply… nothing. A void of swirling, featureless grey had replaced the yard and the trees.

The very geometry of the room began to shift. The hallway visible through the doorway seemed to stretch, elongating into an impossible, dark tunnel. The claw marks on the wallpaper began to writhe and squirm, the plaster groaning as if the house were alive and in pain. The floor beneath them tilted, a sickening lurch that sent a loose candle skittering across the floorboards.

They were no longer in a house. They were inside a trap. A nightmare made of wood and plaster. The ritual had begun, and the labyrinth had just sealed them inside with the minotaur.