Scrawled in frantic red ink beneath a rotting floorboard:

 Scrawled in frantic red ink beneath a rotting floorboard:

“Unalive him. The rage isn’t his—it’s what they put inside him.”

Father Alden Voss never saw evil.

He called it holy.

And Kym Mûryer—the keeper of broken truths—

would make sure the world finally did.

(...He handed the man a pen and a fresh page.)

“Write your name,” Kym said.

“Not the one he gave you.

The one you choose now.”

 It wasn’t metaphor. Not poetic license. It was the phrase scrawled in red ink across the inside cover of a leather-bound journal Kym found tucked beneath a floorboard in an abandoned rectory outside Savannah. The handwriting was frantic, jagged, as if the pen had been driven by something beyond the hand that held it. Below the words, a single name: Father Alden Voss.

Kym knew the name.

Not from headlines—there had been none—but from whispers in shelters, from the hushed confessions of boys who’d flinched at the sight of a collar. Father Voss had run a home for “wayward youth” in the 1980s, a place where troubled boys were sent to be “cleansed of sin.” He’d passed away quietly in 2003, buried under a headstone that read Beloved Shepherd. No charges. No trials. Just silence, thick and suffocating.

But someone had known.

Someone had needed it to be known.

Kym turned the page.

“I tried to pray it away. I fasted. I scourged myself. But the rage would not leave. It lived in my bones like a second spine. And when I touched them—oh God, when I touched them—it wasn’t me. It was the rage. Demonic. Hungry. Holy.”

The entries grew darker. Not confessions of guilt, but justifications wrapped in scripture. He called his violence purification. His victims, vessels of corruption. And his rage—a divine fire sent to burn away the unclean.

Kym closed the journal. His hands were steady, but his chest felt hollow, scraped raw.

This wasn’t just a monster.

This was belief, weaponized.

A man who believed his evil was sacred truth.

And that made him more dangerous than the five combined.

Because the five had taken lives out of grief, out of justice twisted by silence. But Father Voss? He killed because he thought God demanded it.

Kym stood and walked to the window. The rectory was deep in the woods, the trees pressing close like sentinels. Rain had begun to fall, soft and steady, washing the dust from the stained-glass saints above the altar.

He hadn’t come here looking for another monster.

He’d come because a boy—now a man in his thirties—had tracked him down in a bus station in Atlanta, trembling, holding a photograph of himself at twelve, standing beside Father Voss on church steps. On the back, the boy had written: “He called it love. I need to know it had a name.”

Kym had brought him here.

Now, the man waited outside, leaning against the hood of a rusted sedan, smoking a cigarette with shaking hands.

Kym stepped out into the rain.

“He wasn’t possessed,” Kym said, holding up the journal. “He was just a man who refused to see his own rot.”

The man exhaled smoke into the damp air. “Then why did it feel like evil?”

“Because it was,” Kym said. “But evil doesn’t need demons. It only needs men who call their cruelty holy.”

Silence settled between them, broken only by the patter of rain on leaves.

“What do we do with it?” the man asked, nodding at the journal.

Kym looked at the rectory—its doors hanging open, its pews rotting, its altar stained with mildew. A place built for grace, turned into a slaughterhouse of souls.

“We don’t burn it,” Kym said. “We don’t hide it. We give it to the ones who survived.”

He walked to the car, opened the trunk, and pulled out a box filled with similar journals, letters, recordings—testimonies gathered from survivors across decades. This journal would join them.

Not as evidence for a court that would never convene.

But as proof for the living that they were not alone.

Because men like Father Voss didn’t just steal lives.

They stole truth.

And Kym Mûryer—once bad guy, now keeper—would spend the rest of his days returning it.

He handed the man a pen and a fresh page.

“Write your name,” Kym said. “Not the one he gave you. The one you choose now.”

The man took the pen. His hand didn’t shake this time.

And in the rain, under a sky that offered no answers but held them anyway, a survivor began to speak.

Not to a demon.

But to himself.