The old chapel stood at the village's heart, its stones dark with age and moss. I'd avoided it as a child---the place always felt wrong, like a tooth that had rotted from within.
Now, in the fog-thick twilight, it looked worse. The tower leaned more than I remembered, and the windows gaped like empty eye sockets.
Mira met me at the gates. She'd insisted on coming, though I could see the fear in her eyes.
"The consecrated ground is in the crypt," she said. "Below the altar. But Elira..." She touched my arm. "No one's been down there in fifty years. They sealed it after---" She stopped.
"After what?"
"After they first tried to bind the Collector. It didn't work. Three priests died, and the thing they summoned..." She shuddered. "They sealed the crypt and swore never to open it again."
The mark on my back pulsed, a reminder of what waited if I did nothing. "I don't have a choice."
Inside, the chapel smelled of damp stone and something sweeter---decay, barely masked by incense. The pews had been pushed aside, and in the center of the nave, someone had drawn symbols in what looked like ash and salt.
"Recent," Mira whispered, kneeling to examine them. "Someone else has been here. Someone who knows the old ways."
The thought of another marked soul, desperate enough to try the ritual alone, made my skin crawl. Had they succeeded? Or had they become one more victim?
The crypt entrance was behind the altar, sealed with an iron grate that had rusted through in places. Together, we pried it open, the metal shrieking in protest.
Stone steps descended into darkness. The air that rose from below was cold and stale, carrying whispers I couldn't quite make out.
Mira handed me a lamp. "I'll wait here. If something happens---if you don't come back in an hour---I'm sealing the entrance."
I wanted to argue, but the set of her jaw told me it would be useless. "An hour," I agreed.
The descent felt endless. The walls were carved with symbols I didn't recognize, spirals and jagged lines that seemed to writhe in the lamplight. Some looked like warnings. Others like prayers.
At the bottom, the crypt opened into a circular chamber. Stone coffins lined the walls, their occupants long forgotten. But in the center, where the consecrated ground should have been, was a pit.
No---not a pit. A well. And from its depths came a sound like breathing.
I approached carefully, lamp held high. The well was lined with the same spiraling symbols from the walls, but these had been carved deep, as if with desperate force. And at the bottom, perhaps twenty feet down, something glinted.
Glass. Or crystal. Arranged in a circle around a dark stain that could only be blood.
This was where they'd tried to bind him. This was where it had gone wrong.
And standing on the far side of the well, watching me with those forgettable features, was the Collector.
"You shouldn't have come here," he said, his voice mild as milk. "This place remembers what was done to me."