Chương 63: Chapter 62: The Hidden Manifesto

They reached the cave as the sun was beginning its ascent toward the zenith, bathing the entrance of black stone in a light that the insects in the jars reflected in bluish glimmers. Kaela took her by the arm —a gesture that had already become a habit, an anchor in the midst of the gloom— and they entered, passing between the jars of luminescent insects, their lights pulsing like tiny sapphire hearts. They reached the threshold.

Elian was waiting, meditating, seated on his stone with his legs crossed and his hands resting on his knees. In solitude and silence, his figure seemed carved from the very rock that supported him. Sensing their footsteps, he opened his eyes and looked at them both. Then he spoke, his harmonious voice filling the space with a calm that contrasted with the urgency Selena carried inside. —Welcome. He stood up, straightening himself with a grace that betrayed years of discipline.

—Selena, you are free to read as much as you wish. You have already fulfilled the bargain. Only the master may guide the questions. Enjoy reading. It was almost a complicit wink, a smile appearing on his thin lips. Kaela stayed with him, making conversation about the letters she was learning, about the progress she felt, about this new life opening before her. Selena went through the passage, her feet guided by the torchlight, her heart beating with a mixture of anxiety and expectation.

Once in the library, she inhaled deeply, smelling the scent of the books. She approached the shelves, running her fingers over the spines, almost enjoying the simplicity of the touch. Leather, parchment, cloth, each texture a promise, each title a door. Until, as if feeling a tug in her fingers, she took one. It was made of black velvet with red trim at the corners, a combination that made it stand out among the others like a bloodstain on velvet. No visible name, at least not on the hard cover.

Selena took it in her arms almost like a treasure, feeling its weight, its texture, the promise of danger emanating from it. She went straight to the desk, placed it in front of her, and sat in the chair. Then, in her usual routine, she opened it wide. There, on the first page, was the title at last: "Shadow and Sap: A Treatise on the Hidden Factions of Erabergh." Below it, the author: The Deserter. With her curiosity piqued, she imagined what was to come. The name was a statement of principles, a confession.

A man who had inhabited the shadows and then abandoned them, who had been part of one of those factions and was now betraying them. This is completely heretical, she thought. Forbidden. And if the author wrote this book, he must be the most wanted man in the kingdom, or the best hidden. The thought gave way to a slight trembling in her hands. She inhaled deeply, feeling how the air filled her lungs, how it calmed her. Then she began to read.

The introduction was a manifesto launched from the shadows, a declaration of war against lies. It spoke of what had truly pulled the strings of the kingdom for millennia —the hidden forces operating behind thrones and altars. It detailed how not only in the kingdom, but within the churches themselves—specializing its vitriol against the Church of the Eternal Sap— these factions manipulated people. Politicians, nobles, doctors, scholars all within their reach were pieces in their games.

They orchestrated wars and administered power as if it were a disease to be dozed. They mapped the corrosion of power with chilling precision, detailing how these organizations had never been corrupt in the traditional sense, because they hadn't fallen into corruption: they had been born that way. Sprung from the roots of the human soul, they were corrupt from their very conception. The Deserter paused to clarify a crucial point: these were not underworld conspiracies, not marginal groups operating from the slums.

The most direct proof was that the author himself had been a part of one. The Rotting Sap, the name stood out, underlined with a stroke that looked like a wound. This institution was the hidden shadow of the Church of the Eternal Sap. They were not only dedicated to burning heretics, but to manufacturing them. They created enemies to justify their own existence; they sowed doubt about harvesting obedience. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

This book, proclaimed the final line of the introduction, stood as a revolution for those who, like him, sought truth not in the blinding light of faith, but in the deepest darkness where its secrets nested. Selena took a breath. She released it slowly. Then, with curiosity like a burning fire, she turned the page and submerged herself deeper into the quagmire revealed by the book. Each faction had its dedicated section, a small treatise within the larger one.

But her gaze fixed first on the one the author knew from the inside, the one that had been his home and his prison: The Rotting Sap. The Deserter described it with the coldness of one who had been its instrument, with the precision of a surgeon dissecting himself. For them, the Flow was not just a life force to be venerated, but a system to be defended by any means necessary, regardless of the moral cost. The end —the preservation of the true faith— justified any means.

Under this dogma, they performed forbidden human experiments, aberrant research in secret dungeons where sunlight never penetrated. Their power not only manipulated faith and politics from the shadows, but actively kidnapped and distorted knowledge. They ensured that their interpretation of the Flow remained the only unquestionable one, the most powerful faith of all, guarded by terror and secrecy. She turned to the next, and a different shiver, more visceral and ancient, ran through her: The Threads of Thar'ven.

A sect that worshipped Thar'ven, the Dark Weaver. For them, life was a great loom where blood and silk intertwined to weave destiny. Their rituals, a macabre blend of sacrifice and art, produced the dreaded "Soul Veils" objects of power eagerly sought by the most depraved nobility and feared for the sinister implications their possession carried. They wove with threads of reality and life, and their creations were as beautiful as they were deadly. Then, The Nurses of the Void.

A radical and nihilist schism of the seemingly peaceful Church of the Milky Mushroom. They had taken the teachings of decomposition and carried them to their logical extreme. They worshipped decay not as a phase of the life cycle, but as the pure state of final liberation. Their goal was to actively accelerate the collapse of civilization to bring about a "rebirth in rot."

They were a slow and poisonous threat, poisoning crops and desecrating graves in rural areas, sowing decadence as an offering to their god of nothingness. The fourth, The Eyes of Dust, was perhaps the most insidious due to its subtlety. It was the espionage and information network of the very Sibyls of the Church of the Eternal Sap.

They used divination with mineral dust not to foresee disasters and help those in need, as they preached in public, but as a tool for blackmail, manipulation, and the removal of obstacles. They controlled the flow of information in the kingdom, ensuring that only what was convenient for power reached interested ears. Everything else was lost in the dust. The Conclave of the Transformed Flesh was both repulsive and fascinating to her.

A circle of heretical alchemists and doctors obsessed with transcending the limits of the human body through extreme physical modifications. Their experiments included organ transplants from beasts, tissue grafts from creatures, and the search for serums of immortality. They defied not only all ethics, but the very laws of nature that the rest of the kingdom venerated. For them, the body was just another material, malleable and improvable.

A pang of disappointment and fear overcame her as she read about The Silent of Kael Rhun. A dissident and violent faction within the Path of the Inner Voice. They had abandoned the peaceful and contemplative philosophy of their founder to embrace sabotage and assassination as legitimate tools to avenge the persecution they suffered. They were proof that even the search for pure reason could be corrupted by bitterness and rage, that critical thinking could be twisted into a violent dogma.

Selena took a deep breath, processing every name, every description. Six proofs that the world was much more complex and dangerous than she had imagined. Then, she reached the last entry. The seventh faction. It had no name. The author referred to it only as the Omnipresent Shadow. Its existence was a rumor, a whisper within the hidden circles themselves, a legend that the conspirators themselves told in low voices.

It was not only the most widespread, with tentacles reaching every corner of the kingdom, but it had members infiltrated in all circles of power: the royal court, the Church of the Sap, the universities, the merchant guilds, even within other hidden factions. But the most terrifying part was its goal, of which even The Deserter seemed not to have all the details. They manipulated everything from the shadows for one single purpose: to obtain an artifact.

An object completely unknown, whose nature and power were a mystery even to the person who had written this compendium of horrors. No one knew what it was, where it was, or what it was for. Only that it existed. And that the Omnipresent Shadow sought it with an obsession that transcended generations. The author emphasized this, again and again, in marginal notes, in parenthetical paragraphs, in obsessive repetitions: it was the key piece, the final prize in a game whose rules he was only beginning to glimpse.

Everything else —the wars, the heresies, the political manipulations, the forbidden experiments— was nothing more than a means to that end.