Chapter 2: The Weight of Scripture

Chapter 2: The Weight of Scripture

The pounding on the door was the heartbeat of a world gone mad. Each thud against the oak was a hammer blow against Kenneth’s sanity, keeping time with the frantic pulse drumming in his ears. The flock was hungry. Their shepherd was dead on the floor. And the wolf was his own sister.

“They will tear this shack apart,” Kenneth breathed, his eyes wide with terror, darting between the shuddering door and Abel Thorne’s still form. “They will see what you’ve done.”

“Let them,” Samantha said, her voice a sliver of ice. She hadn’t moved. The bloody arrowhead was still held loosely in her fingers, a grotesque punctuation mark to her proclamation of heresy. “Let them see the lie for what it is.”

“It is not a lie!” Kenneth’s voice cracked, a desperate, frayed thing. He backed away from her, stumbling until his back hit the shelves crammed with leather-bound books—the sacred scriptures he had dedicated his life to transcribing. His hand, as if by instinct, closed around the spine of one. The Book of Thorns. Its familiar weight was the only solid thing in his dissolving reality. “The Devouring Truth speaks through pain! It tests us! The scriptures are clear!”

He fumbled the book open, his ink-stained fingers tracing words he knew by heart. “‘The thorn purifies the rose,’” he recited, his voice shaking. “‘Through its blessed wound, the true fragrance is released.’ Father was… he was our thorn. To test our faith.”

“Our thorn?” Samantha’s gaze hardened. She took a deliberate step toward him, forcing him to press himself harder against the shelves. “Is that what you call it? A test?” Her eyes flickered to a dark corner of the shack, a corner he instinctively avoided. “Do you remember when Mother couldn’t stand? After he’d spent a night ‘purifying her soul’ for spilling the rosewater?”

Kenneth flinched. The memory surfaced, unwelcome and warped by years of indoctrination. He saw it through the filter his father had provided: a holy scene. His mother, crumpled on the floor, weeping. His father standing over her, his voice a righteous thunder. “Rejoice! For the Truth has found you worthy of its attention! Each pang of the flesh is a syllable of its name spoken into your very being!”

In Kenneth’s memory, his mother had looked up, tears streaking her bruised face, and whispered, “Thank you… a blessing…”

“She was thanking him,” Kenneth insisted, his knuckles white on the book. “She knew it was a blessing.”

“She was delirious with pain and fear, you fool!” Samantha’s voice was a whip-crack in the tense air. “I was there after he left. I held the cup of water to her split lips. Do you know what she really said to me? Not to the Prophet, but to me?”

Kenneth stared, his throat closing up.

“She whispered, ‘Make it stop, Sammy. Please, make it stop.’” Samantha’s face was a mask of cold, ancient grief. “She wasn’t praising a god. She was begging her daughter for a mercy her husband would never grant. She died believing that the pain was her fault, that she was unworthy. He didn’t purify her. He broke her, and told her it was salvation.”

The walls of the shack seemed to ripple. Kenneth’s carefully constructed memory fractured, the image of his beatific, suffering mother cracking to reveal a woman in agony, her words twisting from a prayer into a plea. Make it stop.

He shook his head, trying to dislodge the poison of his sister’s words. “No. You’re twisting it. You always resented the faith.”

“I resent him,” she corrected, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous whisper. “And I resent the book in your hand.”

Outside, the mob’s tone was shifting. The pleading was curdling into impatience. “Prophet, do you hear us? The child is burning with fever! The blighted rot is on her skin! Your flock suffers! Do not forsake us!”

“He taught you to read the old tongue,” Samantha continued, ignoring the cries from outside. “He taught you to brew the rosewater. But did you ever truly read the scriptures, Kenneth? Or did you only read what he told you to see?”

He didn’t understand. “They are the words of the Truth…”

“Are they?” She pointed the arrowhead at the book he clutched. “Turn to the chapter on the First Sacrament. The Consecration of the Heir.”

Hesitantly, his fingers clumsy, Kenneth leafed through the brittle pages. He knew the passage. It described the ritual that would have been his, one day. How the new Prophet must drink a chalice of pure, undiluted rosewater to receive the first full vision.

“Read the last line,” Samantha commanded.

“‘And he shall be filled with the blinding light of the Truth, and his voice shall become its vessel,’” Kenneth read aloud, the holy words a comfort on his tongue.

“Now,” she said, her eyes glinting. “Find the book bound in goatskin. His father’s transcription. The one he kept hidden under the altar.”

A cold dread trickled down Kenneth’s spine. He knew the one. Father had forbidden him to touch it, calling it a flawed interpretation, a draft. He’d never questioned why. Now, he knelt, his hands trembling as he reached into the shadows beneath the blood-soaked altar. He pulled out the older, cruder volume. It smelled of dust and secrets.

He found the same passage. The script was archaic, spidery, but the words were mostly the same. Until the end. His breath hitched.

“‘…and his mind shall be scoured by the thorns of Truth, and his sanity shall be given as tribute.’”

He read it again. And a third time. Sanity shall be given as tribute. Not filled with light. Scoured. His gaze shot up to meet his sister’s.

“He changed it,” Kenneth whispered, the realization a physical blow. “Why?”

“Because the lie is easier to swallow than the truth,” Samantha said, her voice devoid of triumph, filled only with a grim finality. “Our family isn’t blessed, Kenneth. It’s cursed with a madness that gets passed down. A madness that makes us see things. Feel things. He knew. He knew it was a sickness, but he preferred being a prophet to being a madman. He chose power over truth. Every single time.”

The foundation of his world crumbled to dust. Every lesson, every ritual, every moment of awe in his father’s presence was now tainted, revealed as a deliberate, self-serving deception. He wasn’t the heir to a divine legacy. He was the next victim in a long line of diseased minds. The Devouring Truth wasn't a god. It was a cancer of the soul.

The pounding on the door stopped.

An unnerving silence fell, broken only by the low, guttural moans of the sick child outside. Then, the single voice from before, louder and clearer than ever, filled with a new, terrifying edge of suspicion and command.

“The Prophet is silent! The Truth is withheld!” the man roared. The voice was raw, fanatical. It was Silas, the village’s most zealous disciple.

“Heir to the Gospel! We know you are in there!”

Kenneth’s blood ran cold. The man wasn’t calling for the Prophet anymore.

“Kenneth Thorne! Show yourself! Your flock is waiting!”