hollow.lexicon

It began in whispers, the kind that slithered between the words of prayer, hissing from the silent gaps of devotion. Father Rafael knelt before the altar, candlelight fluttering against the cracked icon of Christ, and in his marrow, he felt the murmuring of something beneath language itself. A thing that eroded faith, syllable by syllable, like the tide gnawing at stone.

*Et ne nos inducas in tentationem,* he tried to pray, but the words folded into themselves like a paper consumed by flame. Et ne nos— no, no, that wasn’t it. His breath shallowed. The Latin twisted into something that did not belong in this world, something with too many consonants, too much hunger.

He stumbled to his feet. The pews stretched impossibly long, their wooden frames curving where there should have been straight lines. He blinked. Reality snapped back, but it was not whole. He felt it in the bones of the church, in the rotting incense that had once smelled of divinity but now reeked of some distant rot, some ancient, devouring absence.

The doubts had begun years ago, gnawing at the edges of his soul like rats beneath the floorboards. At first, they were simple. The usual kind. The kind every priest wears like an unspoken vestment. Does God hear us? Do we matter? But this… this was something else. Not mere doubt, but the inversion of faith. A slow suffocation of meaning. A rot in the spine of the holy.

He stepped outside. The wind carried voices, but no mouths spoke them. Whispers of parishioners long since buried beneath the churchyard. The sound of his own sermons, played backward and stretched thin. He clutched his rosary, but the beads were wet, pulsing, something alive.

The stars above—no, not stars. Holes. Great, yawning gaps where reality had been punctured. Light should have shone through, but instead, there was less than darkness. A negative space where language had never been born.

He tried to recall scripture.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was—”

Nothing. The words unraveled as soon as they left his lips. Like threads pulled loose from a fraying tapestry. He gasped. His thoughts were fragmenting. He could not remember how to think in sequence. Sentences looped back into themselves. He tried to form a prayer, but it became an echo of a thing that had never existed.

A figure emerged from the blackness between the holes in the sky. It did not walk. It did not move. It was simply there, an outline where a man should be, but inside, only emptiness. And then—it opened its mouth.

It spoke, but not in words. It spoke in the raw absence of words. It spoke in the sound of prayers being unwritten, erased from history, from memory, from time.

And Father Rafael understood.

Faith had never been the answer.

Faith had been the infection.