The Recording By Unknown

“H-hello? C-ca-an you hea-h-h-hearr me well?”

A man’s voice mixed with static came through the radio, his words slowly straightened into a sentence as the person on the other side adjusted the frequency.

“Please, repeat the sentence.”

There was a brief pause on the opposite side before the voice came again, loud and clear.

“Hello? Do you hear me now?”

“Yes,” The timer started. “You may begin, professor.”

“T-that’s g-g-great.”

The timer was stopped.

“Wait, your voice is-”

“Kah! I'm just joking, it's all fine!”

A faint laugh came through the radio with the sound of pens and papers, professor's tone light.

“I suppose we can start from where we stopped last time, Body, right?”

“...”

“Hello? Hello, hello? Don't tell me your radio broke!?”

“Soul.” He was corrected in a cold tone.

There was a pause.

“Right, soul, soul it was.” He sounded flustered, but gathered himself immediately like the person he was.

“Let me just get the script… I think it's somewhere here in my drawer…”

“Professor, time.”

“Fine! Fine! Improv it is…”

Through the line, there was a sound of coughing, four times until the professor's voice returned slightly slurred.

The Recording began.

“Soul.” One of the three fragments of Ignis - the power of faith.

“No matter how many times I hear it, people always ask how it truly functions. It's an intriguing thing that none can comprehend until it's either too soon or too late.” He began in a tone meant for stories rather than an explanation, his words going over one another attempting to hide their true, hidden meaning.

A riddle.

“From what we currently know, the ‘Soul’ is one of the three core foundations of faith required for achieving one’s true beliefs, and, as you may already know, the hardest known element to master.” Mostly due to its undiscovered properties.

This text was lifted from www. without permission. Reading the author's chapter there helps support their continued work.

Paper cracked beneath his voice, something was brought out.

“The first mention of Soul was back in Year 243, when a young boy from a rural village found an old ruin from the Aeternitas era that held murals depicting a young goddess Victoria.” The individual was declared deceased ten days later.

Akin to a page being flipped, the static flickered through the radio quietly.

“Then in Year 461 when a dying priest was found standing in the middle of a forest, his eyes were littered in scars that indicated self-harm and there were no clothes on his body despite it being a rainstorm. Townsfolk from a neighbouring settlement reported sightings of a ‘dying sun’ walking through the night.” The individual died of old age the day after being reported to the authorities.

“Events such as these kept on happening all throughout the three kingdoms, most were connected to finding ancient texts with the information of the Goddess herself or an unbelievable sign of faith that could not be shaken to its very core until the current era of Renascentia, Year 1632-”

“Professor.”

The voice was cut off momentarily, the professor's lecture stopping right as it was about to reach its destination.

“...yes?”

He asked carefully as if thinking he’d made a mistake.

“The purpose of this recording,” the person on the other side reminded him. “You remember it, do you not?”

“Of course!” The response was cut by static.

“But we have to present an example of what we’re dealing with here, you won't know the answer if you never face the problem will you?” …True.

The line fell silent for a longer while than it should have, the professor didn't wait for them to answer, he only coughed and went back to talking.

“So, as I was saying, 1632. The year when the Harbingers Fire began to eat away at the world.” A Great tragedy foretold by numerous psychics, it took over a million innocent lives with it before being stopped with the power of Saint Sunday the Kind.

He flipped the page.

“As we all remember, it was also the year when a young youth discovered the three fragments of faith and showed us how to advance two steps further! Oh Victoria, If only I could have been born back then…” It was…

His voice trailed off into a rant about his life, the professor mentioned the boring days at the academy and his practices as a teacher in a regular school with regular children. The struggles he went through as his research could never reach a true conclusion and earn him a proper reward matching his efforts, always ending with him barely making the deadline and restarting his research. The person also commented on their hairdo and the fact that later that day he would visit a barbershop. Useless.

“...and that is how much I hate autumn! The wet leaves are just the worst!”

“Professor, time.”

“Ah…” A faint gasp came through the static. “How much do we have left?”

“Five minutes left.”

The answer caught another gasp from him, his line quiet.

“...Well, I suppose that was enough.”

“Sorry?” Nothing.

Professor didn't respond to the call… but he didn't step away either. Through the old radio there was an audible sound of writing something, he was already working, humming to himself a silly song. It looked as if he truly had nothing more to say, waiting for the time to end. Four, three, two and at last, one minute was left, the time already in seconds.

Before it could end, his voice once again came through, relaxed.

“What is a soul?”

The question hung as the sound of coughing came through, wet and sharp like emptying your stomach.

“I'm sorry.”

“You don't have to apologise.”

“No, I really am.”

There was a pause, a long one that waited until the timer was already coming to an end.

A quiet voice came out, clearer than all sentences spoken before.

The man wasn't speaking to the person on the other side of the radio but rather the one reading it, the reader.

“Maybe… the real question is what kind of people we truly are…”

The line closed abruptly.

And the recording stopped.

***

As he looked at the text coming to an end, Valentine furrowed his brows, closing the book with a low sigh.

What even is this bullshit?