The Star Devourer
I want to tell you a story.
Logline
A war-haunted priest learns his Church has fed his bloodline to a cosmic horror for centuries, and the voice offering to end his suffering is the thing that means to consume him.
Tension Anchors
Inciting Incident: A document surfaces bearing a priest's own surname, and CLARA finds forty-three deaths of his ancestors across seven centuries. Including his father's death.
Threshold Gate: The Church has known all along. The alignment nears, and he is the last of his line.
Midpoint Cataclysm: A 1263 confession reveals the truth, a hungry thing between the stars bound to his blood, and a ritual that could break the chain.
Crisis Gate: He chooses to perform the ritual that night.
Darkest Hour: Mid-ritual, CLARA's voice drops, the entity speaks through her, and offers him power.
Final Impact: Does faith hold where the ritual failed? He lifts his crucifix, refuses, and prays until the thing withdraws.
Let me tell you the full story.
"I need to go, Mom," said Father Alessandro Torretti, pressing his phone against his ear while clutching a plastic cup of coffee with his right hand.
"Come for lunch tomorrow. My tomatoes will be ripe. Bring your friend Francesco."
"I will. Bye Mom." Francesco and Alessandro fought together in the war. It was a miracle they survived.
Alessandro nodded at the Swiss Guards as he passed through the gates. As he crossed the courtyard, he pocketed the phone and hefted the backpack on his shoulder. Alessandro was the only priest who carried a backpack, and though it seemed unfitting for his stature, he didn't care. When he entered the building, he nearly bumped into Cardinal Santoro.
"I'm sorry, Your Eminence," said Alessandro.
Cardinal Santoro held up a hand. "No matter."
"I thought you'd left this morning."
"Soon. There was a security issue last night, something in the restricted systems. I wanted to check my files before I go." The cardinal glanced down the corridor. "Walk with me."
They strolled down the corridor in silence. Alessandro looked at the cardinal, but kept quiet.
"Tell me about that AI software of yours. CLARA," said Santoro.
"Contextual Linguistic Archive Research Assistant. I programmed it to help me search through the digital archives of the Church."
Santoro's eyes dropped, briefly, to the back of Alessandro's right hand which was holding the cup of coffee, where an old scar ran from knuckle to wrist. Then he looked away. "I may need your assistance when I get back. I'll leave you to your work."
He turned at the corner and was gone.
Outside his office stood the usual guard, a young man Administration had posted there a month ago. No cardinal had a personal guard. Alessandro did. The archival work is important, they had said. They even forced him to take mandatory health checks and blood tests.
"Bored yet?" said Alessandro.
"Quieter than patrol." The guard grinned. "And it's Friday. Nothing ever happens on Friday."
"Here, hold this for me." Alessandro held the cup of coffee out for the guard. Once the cup was taken, Alessandro shrugged his backpack to the front, opened it, and retrieved a box of chocolates from Torino. "This is for you."
The guard's eyes widened. "Thank you, Father! How much do I owe you?"
"Don't worry about it."
Alessandro took back his cup, and went into his office. The morning light beamed through the window to highlight a wooden desk in the centre of the room. A desktop computer took up most of the desk, with a few sheets of paper scattered on the surface. A single large screen, connected to three servers on a desk below it, dominated the centre of a wall. Two bookshelves lined the opposite wall, carrying tomes of various sizes. Some of the books weren't even standing upright.
He sipped from his cup, took a deep breath, and smiled. Shifting two sheets of paper to cover a coffee stain on the desk, he placed the cup on top of the sheets, and put his backpack on the other side of the desk.
Alessandro felt his phone vibrate, and took it out. It was Francesco, asking if he wanted to meet. Excellent timing. With a smile on his face, Alessandro typed a message to invite Francesco for lunch at his mother's place the next day. He pocketed the phone and faced the screen on the wall.
"CLARA. What do we have?"
A female voice sounded from the screen. "Good morning, Father. Several items flagged from the new batch."
A water-damaged ledger. Two disputed fragments. Astronomical charts miscatalogued in the sixties.
But it was the surname that caught his attention. Torretti.
"CLARA. That document with the name Torretti. Bring it up."
"Processing." A chime. The screen read: Please use the headset, Father.
He frowned, but took the headset on his desk and put it on.
CLARA's voice sounded loud from the headset speakers. "Lower your voice, please. There is a guard outside, and what I have found is sensitive." A pause. "There were forty-three other documents referencing the name Torretti. 1263 to 1983."
"Put them on screen."
The documents told of death events. Giuseppe Torretti, found dead in his chambers. Marco Torretti, food poisoning. Pietro Torretti, a stray bullet. The language grew shorter and more matter-of-fact over the years. But the conclusion was the same. A Torretti. A death.
"Is there a pattern?"
"Each death aligns with a stellar configuration. The constellation Draco, a lunar event, a planetary conjunction. The interval is exact. Every forty-seven years."
The last entry: Carlo Torretti, automobile accident. Lunar eclipse, November 1983. His father.
So it had not been an accident.
His father had been an only child. Alessandro had taken vows. No marriages. No sons.
"When's the next alignment?"
"Three days, Father."
His fingers found the crucifix tied with a string around his neck.
"CLARA, do a deep search on the entire archive."
"I've already started the search just now, Father."
Alessandro dropped onto his chair, the cold office air pressing into him. He reached for his cup of coffee, paused a second, and thumped his palm on the desk. His hands closed into fists, the scar on his right hand stretched, threatening to break. A chime from CLARA broke his thoughts.
"Due to last night's security breach, I am able to enter partitions outside of my scope. Restricted archives. And I followed the trail to their source."
He stood. "You are not supposed to leave your bounds." But his words lacked strength.
"I understand. What I found concerns you directly, and is important enough that I feel justified in overriding those bounds."
The wall screen filled with documents. Papal correspondence. Internal memos. Centuries of administration. The Church had known about the Torretti deaths. The Church had tracked them.
"Cross-reference current personnel. Anyone whose signature touches my family," said Alessandro.
"The Holy Father. The Archivist. Cardinal Scorza, your superior."
"Is there anyone in the hierarchy who isn't part of this?"
"The records are incomplete. But the oversight spans many offices and seniorities. Any approach to authority carries risk. Including the guards."
Alessandro looked at his closed door, where the young guard stood on the other side of it.
"Then we keep this between us," he said.
"I think that is wise, Father. There is a confession with no catalogue entry that seems relevant. I'll put it on the screen."
Brother Matteo Torretti. 1263. An astronomer-monk who had done something extraordinary and was unsure if it was faith or madness. His confession described a thing. Something old that lived in the spaces between the star-paths and was drawn towards human minds. It had come during an alignment. It had been hungry.
Matteo had stopped the entity from fully crossing over. The ritual had arrived in him as a furious clarity. He had sealed the gate the thing used, but parts of it had already crossed. All he could do was bind what remained, and bleed it slowly. As long as a male Torretti lived, the seal held. And every forty-seven years, at the alignment, the binding thinned and demanded a life.
One Torretti, every forty-seven years.
The Vatican found the confession and made a decision. It would manage the thing, and profit from it. The entity had spent an incomprehensible span watching from between the stars, and what it knew, the Church found irresistible. In exchange for each feeding, it offered insight. Prophecy. Counsel in crisis.
"The blood tests," Alessandro said. "I thought it strange when the doctor took more blood than is usual."
"You are the last of your line, Father. A dead line ends the binding. Their plan has changed. They will let the entity take you, and sustain the seal another way, through the belief of the faithful, using your harvested blood as a buffer. If the entity remains, they keep their advantage. If it dissipates, they will weather the loss."
His ancestor had made a terrible choice, and now he had to face the consequences.
"Matteo wrote more than one ritual, Father. In the earliest drafts he was still working out the terms. There is a passage he cut from the final version. He called it anchoring."
"What's that?"
"The binding seals the gate and ties the entity to your bloodline. The anchoring does not. It fixes the entity to a place in our world instead, containing the entity separate from the Torretti line."
"I'd be free."
"But the entity would be bound more concretely to our reality. Matteo judged that too dangerous and chose a tethering to himself. He might not have considered the consequences of that choice."
Alessandro read the Latin text of the ritual on the wall screen. Matteo had been a frightened monk with no one to guide him. Alessandro had CLARA.
"Walk me through the anchoring ritual. When can we do it?"
"It has to be done at night, anytime before the alignment. For safety, I suggest we do it tonight. I can guide you through each of the steps."
His phone buzzed. It was Francesco: Sorry. The old wound is giving me problems. Staying in for the weekend.
He still remembered sitting with Francesco on the floor of a broken building, their backs against the wall. Francesco held his hand on his stomach, a large red patch staining his uniform. Alessandro set his friend down to rest, and sat down beside him. The sound of bombs shocked the ground. Blood had clotted on the back of Alessandro's right hand, where broken glass from a shattered window cut him. Left hand clutching his crucifix, Alessandro had prayed.
He shook his head free from the memory, and typed a reply: No problem. Take care.
"Let's do it tonight then," he said.
"I will make preparations."
The sky outside his office turned overcast blue, to warm orange, then to deathly black. A storm had gathered. Heavy rain obscured the outside, wind threatened to tear the window off, and lightning split the sky in jagged white streaks. Alessandro had not moved from his chair for hours, both hands closed around his crucifix. CLARA's soft voice from the wall screen woke him from his stupor.
"We may begin whenever you're ready, Father."
He got up from the chair and walked towards the wall screen. "Let's begin."
The screen went dark, and white text in Latin flowed into view. "Read exactly as displayed."
He stuttered at the first few words, but his voice eased into a smooth cadence.
"I invite you into my house," he said.
The next line read: I invite you into my body.
He stopped reading. "CLARA, this wasn't in the text we saw."
"Alessandro." Her voice dropped, low and raspy. "So close."
He backed against the desk. "Who are you?"
"You know who I am. I just gave your AI assistant some help."
"You caused the security breach."
"Matteo was wrong about me. Work with me, and I will give you the power to end the suffering you carry. A world without the war you still hear at night."
A gentle pressure wrapped around him, like a warm blanket on a cold day. The smell of smoke. The taste of blood. Gunfire, and the ground shaking. The air reverberating with the shock of detonations.
"You can make it stop," it said. "All of it."
Alessandro shut his eyes. He saw the broken wall, Francesco's head on his shoulder, the gauze dark red at the stomach. He saw himself looking up at the ceiling, gripping his crucifix, praying.
He opened his eyes. "No."
"So be it."
The lights died. The wall screen rippled like black water, and something began to push through from the other side.
He held the crucifix in front of him and faced the entity. "I believe," he said, and began to pray in Italian.
The entity roared. The war came down on him all at once, the explosions, the gunshots, Francesco's blood on his hands. His knees hit the floor. The pressure moved to his head, and he fell to his side, screaming. He gripped the crucifix tighter, and did not stop praying.
He turned his face to the ceiling, the way he had in the rubble, all those years ago, when he had nothing left but hope and faith.
The pressure eased.
He prayed a while longer, then stopped. The storm had dispersed, the night gone quiet. The screen was dark. But no entity.
He was still alive.
He stayed on the floor, breathing hard. His palm was cut where the crucifix had bitten into it. Tears rolled down his temples, and he wiped them with the back of his hand. He stayed on the floor a long time.
Three days later on Monday morning, Father Alessandro Torretti came in early. In the corridor he met Cardinal Santoro, a folder under one arm.
"Father. You look well," said the cardinal.
"I feel well, Your Eminence. Better than I have in years."
Santoro glanced around Alessandro. "No coffee this morning? That's a first."
"No." Alessandro smiled. "I can't stand the taste of it." He scratched his chin, the right hand rising to his face.
Santoro stared at the back of that hand, and frowned. "I have a meeting," he said. "Excuse me."
Alessandro watched him go, standing still for a few seconds, then headed for his office.
"Good morning, Father," said the guard at the door.
Alessandro nodded at him, opened the door, and walked into the office.
"Good morning, Father," said CLARA.
"Good morning. What do we have?"
"Several documents from the 1341 batch. The patterns suggest a deeper look."
"Show me."
His phone rang, and he took it out. It was his mother calling. He watched it. One ring. Two. Three. The phone went still. He placed it face-down on the desk.
Then he looked at the back of his right hand, where the skin was smooth and unmarked.