The old book opened to a final section, annotated by the trembling hand of the priest-scholar. The ink grew drier, the margins wider, as if the man had slowly emptied himself between the lines. Niyus read softly:
"…There is no other choice. What I hunt, I must host. I must understand it to the last fiber, to the last silence. The Myophores only fully reveal themselves from within. I have sealed the experience in my own body."
A page break. Then, a single, slanted note in the corner of the yellowed parchment:
"He no longer speaks. He dreams in my flesh. But now I see through his eyes."
And nothing more.
No date. No record of death. Even the ink seemed unfaded, as if this had been written just yesterday.
Niyus frowned.
He's dead… but how?...
The thought haunted him. A man possessed by a Myophore to his last breath-no screams, no known end. Was it disappearance? Fusion? Erasure? Transformation?
What can kill a Myophore's host?
And above all…
Does the host's death kill the Myophore?
He stepped back into the library's shadows, spine pressed to a shelf of screaming books, and breathed in.
Think, Niyus. Not as a mystic. As an assembler of truths.
He stood motionless for a moment, eyes vacant, then slowly straightened. He knew where to look next. But what he was about to do was not recommended. Some books, even locked in lead cases, still whispered to each other. He chose three. Three volumes said to be incompatible, their principles so divergent they sometimes caused conceptual burns to those who tried to read them together.
He set them before him, forming a triangle of blackened leather.
The Codex of Reflections
Bound in salt-mirror, it documented parasitic entities called "psychomorphs." The most notable: the Speculars, who could only survive as long as the idea they embodied was believed, felt, or feared. Once a society stopped believing in the curse of the reflection, the Specular dissolved-not killed, but forgotten to the point of being unable to re-form.
"Kill the idea, and the monster dies in its chamber."
The Treatise of Silent Returns
Parchment of blind skin, it listed cases of empty deaths. Bodies without wounds, poison, or trauma-just pure absence, as if the soul or animating force had been subtly and permanently dissolved. It said that a being sufficiently inhabited by a foreign entity could eventually surrender its existential structure and vanish from reality. Death was not an event, but a state of non-recall.
"The being has fallen silent, so deeply that even the gods no longer hear it."
The Sacraments of the Broken Glass
A forbidden book, written in a specular dialect, readable only by those fragmented within. It described rituals for voluntary soul-splitting, where practitioners became vessels for formless entities until their personal boundaries collapsed.
Some hosted entities temporarily and expelled them. Others… did not. Then came strange effects: inverted visions, distorted perceptions, emotional phase-shifts, temporal disintegration.
"The denser the Other becomes in you, the blurrier You become to the world."
Niyus mentally assembled the three.
In the shimmer of their contradictions, he finally formed a hypothesis:
A Myophore does not die with its host. It unbinds, disperses, or anchors elsewhere-unless the emotional or conceptual core that generated it is dissolved before death. Like a Specular, it can be killed not by fire or steel, but by extinguishing the belief or fear that feeds it.
The priest-scholar was not killed by the Myophore, but likely entered a state of existential erasure, where host and parasite became so merged that the world forgot them both. Neither alive nor dead. Just lost between planes of being.
So… to kill a Myophore:
You must force it to densify outside the mind: to take form, become fixed, perceptible.
This may require a ritual of binding, a mental or symbolic structure that pulls it from mental fluidity.
Once solidified, a constraining artifact-possibly an object of antithesis ("Embodied Contrary Idea")-could deliver a decisive blow.
Niyus jotted in the Codex margin:
"They die like ideas: when no one thinks of them, or when a contrary truth consumes them."
He paused. A strange silence stretched between the shelves. Not heavy… but focused. Something, or someone, seemed present. Not behind him. Within.
He slowly lifted his gaze.
A bead of sweat ran down his back, cold as a hand on his spine.
And in a blackened shard of the "Sacrament" glass, he saw-just for a second-his own eyes, but turned toward him.
A presence.
Behind the books, in the weave of shadow. Two eyes.
Not hostile. But vast.
Niyus felt his stomach knot, fingers frozen on the vellum. He did not scream. No panic. He knew that look. An ancient light seeing through the layers of reality.
Rivhiamë.
The voice landed in his mind like a burning feather:
"You've grown, little seeker."
He sighed, wiping his brow.
I thought… I'd summoned a Myophore without realizing it…
Rivhiamë laughed, crystalline, in the flesh of his thoughts.
"If that were so, you wouldn't be speaking. Not with me, not with yourself."
Silence returned, but the presence remained. Gentle, but watchful.
Then Rivhiamë whispered:
"Niyus… This Myophore ravaging the neighboring village… Don't you think it could be the priest-scholar's? They were so close, geographically… It's plausible, isn't it?"
A dizzying intuition flashed through Niyus's mind.
He closed his eyes. Visualized. Reconstructed.
The book… It's 73 years old. So the priest died 73 years ago… How could a Myophore bound to him wait so long to resurface? It makes no sense.
Unless…
Unless there was a spell. Something to hold it. An anchor. Some form of prolonged or suspended existence…
He rushed to another shelf, hands trembling, thoughts sharp. He pulled three dusty books, bound in kray skin, and began to read aloud.
Book I: "Of Soul Knots and Dark Chrysalises"
"A parasite bound by oath to its host can remain dormant in a spectral zone until the mental space it knew is recreated. If no one thinks of it, it waits. But if someone reads, seeks, doubts… it begins to weave again."
Niyus felt his blood run cold.
So the Myophore could have survived in a kind of frozen mental plane, absent thinking beings… and reemerge as soon as someone remembers it? Did I wake it?
Book II: "The Grimoire of Diluëh, the Shaper of Memories"
"Some priests fixed their parasites using 'intentional locks,' mental glyphs left in relics or places. These glyphs trap entities in a loop of oblivion. But if the object is consulted, or ignorance is broken…"
Niyus closed his eyes.
The priest's book. The emptied sanctuary. The forgotten knowledge… now awakened.
He didn't kill it. He imprisoned it. And someone turned the key by reading.
Book III: "Chronicles of Parasitic Inertias"
"An entity like a Myophore, if sufficiently charged with a strong concept (sin, guilt, obsession), can survive for centuries. It only needs fertile mental soil to bloom again."
"Some rare forms become passive carriers: without a host, they wander, attached to places, to undissipated memories, until reinfection."
Niyus looked up, still haunted by the lines.
It didn't wait. It was chained. It survived because oblivion fed it.
And someone freed it. Me… or someone else.
He scribbled in his notes:
"The priest's Myophore is not dead. It was put to sleep in a memorial stasis. A word, a memory, or an emotional resonance is enough to break this sleep. Then it seeks a new host, or reconfigures its original form if that still exists in the mental limbo of the place."
He stood slowly.
And Rivhiamë, still present, murmured:
"Now you understand why some books should never be reread. Some contain more than a story. They contain a breath waiting for oxygen."
Niyus swallowed, slowly.
He knew what he had to seek next:
the priest's place of death.
And what was left behind.