Chapter 11: The Cleansing Fire

Chapter 11: The Cleansing Fire

The small shelter Mary Blackwood had constructed was not a building, but a womb of willow branches and animal hides, built low to the ground half a mile from her house. It was a sweat lodge, an ancient design Leo recognized from his textbooks but had never understood. Now, sitting in the suffocating, pitch-black interior, the academic knowledge felt like a useless ghost. The air was already thick with the smell of wet earth and hot rock.

"The body is a house," Mary’s voice came from the darkness beside him, a low, resonant hum. "The entity you carry is an unwanted guest. We will make the house so hot, so inhospitable, that the guest will be forced to show itself."

Leo clutched the medicine pouch he had made. It felt small and inadequate, a child’s toy against an unknowable enemy. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the oppressive silence. He was stripped to his shorts, his body already slick with a nervous sweat.

The flap of the lodge was thrown open, momentarily silhouetting a figure against the deep twilight. One of Mary’s nephews, a quiet, stern-faced man, used a pair of deer antlers to carry in the first of the grandfather stones, glowing a volcanic red from the fire outside. He placed it in the central pit, and a wave of heat, dry and ferocious, blasted through the small space. Mary ladled water onto the stone. The lodge exploded with a hissing roar of steam that was instantly blinding and suffocating. It was like breathing in fire.

Leo gasped, the air searing his lungs. Panic, sharp and primal, clawed at his throat.

[BODY TEMPERATURE: 38.5°C. AMBIENT TEMPERATURE EXCEEDING SAFE PARAMETERS. RECOMMEND EVACUATION.]

“Ignore the machine-voice,” Mary chanted, her words cutting through the steam and the System’s clinical warning. She began to sing in the old tongue, the words unfamiliar to Leo but the melody ancient, a rising and falling cadence that seemed to vibrate in his very bones. It was a song of stone and fire, of deep roots and soaring eagles. It was a song of their people.

Another stone was brought in, then another. The heat intensified from unbearable to excruciating. Sweat poured from him, not cleansing, but feeling like his very life force was being cooked out of him. The System’s warnings grew more frantic.

[CARDIAC STRESS DETECTED. RESPIRATORY RATE ACCELERATED. WARNING: PHYSIOLOGICAL STRESS REACHING CRITICAL LEVELS.]

“It speaks in the language of the body because it is a parasite of the flesh!” Mary’s voice rose above her own chanting, as if she could hear the text in his mind. “We are speaking now in the language of the spirit! It is a language it does not understand! Listen to my voice, Leo! Let it be your anchor!”

He tried. He focused on her song, on the rhythmic beat of the small hand drum she now played. But the System fought back, turning his own memories into weapons. The darkness was no longer empty; it was filled with the chittering laughter from the cave. A fleeting, icy touch grazed his bare shoulder, a phantom in the inferno.

An image of Thomas flashed behind his eyes, not dead, but alive, turning to him in the dark of the cave, his face a mask of betrayal. “You left me, Leo,” his brother’s voice whispered, a perfect, agonizing mimicry. “Your stupid book… you left me for a stupid book…”

“No,” Leo gasped, shaking his head, though the movement was sluggish, leaden.

[GUILT RESPONSE TRIGGERED. ANALYSIS: MANIPULATING TRAUMA IS AN EFFECTIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL TACTIC. ENTITY LEARNING.]

The clinical cruelty of the message snapped something in him. Mary threw a handful of herbs onto the rocks. A new scent filled the air—acrid, piney, and dizzying. The smoke was thick, and as he inhaled it, the world began to tilt on its axis. He felt untethered, his mind floating away from his tortured body. He was on the brink, a precipice of pain and exhaustion.

It was then that the System began to break.

The green text in his vision started to flicker, to glitch. Letters fractured into meaningless pixels.

[PHY…SIOLO…GICAL…INTEG…RITY…FAIL…ING…]

The ritual, the heat, the sacred smoke, the sheer force of ancient belief being channeled through Mary—it wasn't just attacking him, it was attacking the parasite itself. The System’s defenses, its cool, rational interface, were being overloaded, corroded by a power it couldn't quantify or comprehend.

[W-W-WARN-NING…FIRE..WALL_CORRUPT..ION..d-d-d-etec-ted…]

The text dissolved into a cascade of nonsensical green symbols, like a dying computer screen. And then, with a final, silent shattering of light, it was gone.

The wall between Leo and the entity was down.

For a single, terrifying moment, there was nothing but the heat and Mary’s chanting. And then, he was plunged into a vision so vast and absolute it annihilated all sense of self.

He was not in the lodge. He was not in his body. He was… falling. Falling through an infinite, silent, cold darkness that was not empty space, but consciousness. Below him, spreading out like a galaxy made of shadow and thought, was the Entity.

It wasn't a creature. It wasn't a monster. It was a root system of pure, sentient hunger, sprawling beneath the entire continent. A vast, sleeping mind, dreaming of stone and silence and the slow, patient consumption of all things. It was ancient beyond human comprehension, a geological force that had gained a cold, calculating awareness.

He could feel its thoughts, not as words, but as pressures, as gravities. It dreamt of a world without the sun, without the noisy, scurrying warmth of life. Its only desire was to grow, to absorb, to make everything a part of its own cold, silent, eternal self.

And the Chatterlings… they were not its children or its minions. They were its nerve endings. They were the twitching cilia on a single, titanic cell, reacting to the irritant of life on the surface. His arrogance, the pipeline’s drill, the noisy intrusion of humanity—they were all just pains, prompting the vast organism to send its antibodies to the surface to sterilize the infection. The System in his head was nothing more than a single, inquisitive nerve fiber that had burrowed into his brain, a tendril sent to analyze the disease.

He felt a horrifying pull, a psychic gravity threatening to dissolve his own tiny spark of consciousness into the cold, dark ocean of its mind. He was a single drop of rain falling toward a black sea, moments from impact, from utter annihilation. This is it, he thought, a final, fleeting moment of terror. This is how it ends.

Suddenly, a different force grabbed him. A hook of warmth and sound. Mary’s voice, chanting his name, pulling him back from the endless abyss.

“Leo Vance! Come back! Breathe the air of your people! Breathe!”

He was yanked violently out of the vision, the transition so jarring it felt like being born and dying in the same instant. He slammed back into his own body with a convulsive gasp, vomiting a thin, bitter stream of bile and tea onto the dirt floor of the lodge. The heat was still immense, his body was still screaming, but he was himself again. He was small, fragile, and blessedly separate.

The lodge flap was thrown open, and the cool night air was a shock, a balm on his scorched skin. Mary’s nephew helped her drag his limp body out onto the damp grass under the stars. He lay there, shaking and gasping, his mind reeling from the cosmic horror he had just witnessed.

He lifted a trembling hand, looking at it in the moonlight. And he saw it. In the corner of his vision, the System’s interface flickered weakly back to life. But it was broken. The text was corrupted, laced with static and dead pixels. It looked like a damaged file, a corrupted program.

The ritual hadn't destroyed it. But it had wounded it. It had given him a weapon. And more than that, it had shown him the face of his true enemy. He wasn’t fighting a ghost in his head or monsters in a cave. He was fighting a god made of earth and hunger.