Chapter Twelve
OuroborosChapter Twelve
“So you seriously don’t know how to drive?”
“I mean I technically know how, I did get a license, but I never really have to drive so…”
“So you don’t know how to dr-”
“Yes fine, I don’t know!”
“Hey there heiress don’t get mad at me for your own lack of skill, sitting there in the backseat all comfortable like. Your chauffeur will get you there.”
“You shut your-!”
“Owww!"
“You two really are sisters…”
Jeongyeon and Momo stopped their bickering and looked to their right at Jihyo sitting in the front passenger seat of the car in dead silence, before all of them burst out laughing Momo releasing her gentle playful hold of Jeongyeon’s hair and neck before sitting back in her seat.
The road they were on winded along the cliffs of the Black Sea, the morning glinting off the surface of the water washing the road and cliffs with warm light. The sight was calming and beautiful and in the front seat Jihyo wished she could have enjoyed it more were it not for the constant back and forth swaying of the car driving in the winding roads. She was starting to feel a little sick and had to focus hard to the front of the car and the horizon.
Having left Istanbul that morning they had been driving a few hours to reach the north coast of Turkey by the Black Sea. The sun was high and blaring on them and the only saving grace was the working AC and the litres of water they had bought for the trip.
For the past couple of days they had been rifling through the books and paper content of their secret lair. This time they were prepared with some filtered masks to help with the dusty environment of the catacomb hideout. Jihyo had also been asking and calling in help to find a place to sell gold in the city, pulling on some strings of trusted sources to sell their gold bars to. To avoid mixing the fortunes of Momo’s current family they had opened up an account in Jeongyeon’s name; the combined Sister’s funds now sitting in the account.
During the combing of the lair and researching the material there they had found a letter. It was dated to as recent as only thirty years ago, over ninety years after the end of the last Cycle. It was written in modern Turkish and signed by a person with a surname that Momo but especially Jeongyeon recognized; Döndeniz.
The Döndeniz family had been close family friends of Jeongyeon’s Turkish family in her previous life and equally had been working for the royal court like her family had been. It was Murat Döndeniz, the younger son of the family whom was initiated in the Royal Guard and was a close friend of Jeongyeon, who had been dragged into the conspiracy and battles of the last Cycle.
Upon the end of the Cycle and its final battles, Murat Döndeniz had promised Jeongyeon that him and his own descendants to come would keep the location secure and safe, keep all the knowledge safe and stay vigil until their return if they ever did. Now they had returned but the Döndeniz family was no longer there.
The letter was from a Mustafa Döndeniz and stated that it had become too risky to stay and the work had dried up for them in Istanbul. There was misfortune with the elders back home and they were in need of care in their family village of Bağırkanlı, so Mustafa and his family had moved back there to help with the property and the other family members. He apologized for abandoning his duty to the Eternal Ladies, but that if they ever return they should come see him there.
With time to spare and hoping that the Döndeniz family could maybe shed some light on what had been going on in their absence with the Cult, they decided to go see him this morning. Armed with the letter that had been left for them and a few other records with the Döndeniz involvement they were only half an hour away from the village.
“Momo, stop playing with your phone and look at the scenery!” Jihyo chided her from the front, annoyed that she couldn’t enjoy the scenery herself and Momo was squandering the opportunity when she could.
“Yeah soon, but did you guys hear of the massive news hack?”
“The what?” Jeonyeong asked making quick glances at Momo through the rearview mirror.
“Someone hacked the frontpages of many major news websites around the world and posted some weird text on th-...” Momo’s words got caught in as she stared at an image of the weird symbols that had covered the frontpages due to the hack.
“Momo?” Jihyo asked turning to look around while Jeongyeon kept stealing glances at the confused and shocked face of her Sister. After a brief pause Momo’s eyes locked with Jeongyeon in the mirror.
“It’s a message to us.”
“What?!” Jeongyeon let out in an unnecessarily loud voice almost turning to look completely around in her seat at Momo before refocusing on driving.
“It’s gibberish. It must be a coded message to us.”
“Okay we need to pull over,” Jeongyeon said before pulling aside from the winding road at the next small outcropping that allowed for a car to park to the side out of the way.
“Pass it here.”
Momo passed her phone over to Jeongyeon who looked at the image with Jihyo leaning over to have a look at what the fuss was about.
“How do you know that’s a text for you?” Jihyo asked. It looked like a random assortment of squiggles to her that possibly were mimicking the form of written script.
“These letters are from the script of our ancient mother tongue. The only reason you’d ever see it was if we were writing something to each other,” Jeongyeon replied still looking at the letters with surprised shock and nervousness at what it was about. To have sent this message so visibly to the whole world to see must have meant that something was wrong with whoever sent it to them. There had to be an emergency.
“We need to decrypt it now, whichever of our Sisters it was that sent it must be in trouble if they did this.”
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
“Decrypt it? I’m impressed they managed to hack so many news websites to display the message,” Jihyo said, still a little lost at this sudden turn of events and the certainty with which the two looked at the message with. This sudden talk of decrypting threw her in another loop altogether.
Jeongyeon was still staring at the image with an intense glare, one that began to shift from one of utmost concentration to a quizzical troubled look, like there was a small hitch in whatever plan she was formulating.
“Do... do you remember the cipher?” Jeongyeon glanced up at Momo from the text. Momo looked back up at Jeongyeon mirroring her exact face of desperation.
“Oh man why am I stuck with you!” Jeongyeon punched Momo in the shoulder as she swung around away from her in frustration.
“Hey those are my words! And I can remember it… kind of,” Momo whined back.
Jeongyeon got out of the car and walked to the edge of the cliff that they were parked by, scrunching her face hard to try and remember even a little bit.
“What’s wrong?” Jihyo asked, still baffled at what the two were so riled up about. Momo exited the car Jihyo following her towards where Jeongyeon was.
“Well, this message is written in our mother tongue but it’s gibberish. It’s probably using our secret cipher but both of us,” Momo eyed Jeongyeon with a glare, “are having trouble remembering which rotation of the cipher we are on.”
“But you remember what the cipher keys are right?”
“Yeah, of course! Kinda…” Jeongyeon looked up quizzically in no particular direction, as if staring at an imaginary shelf looking for a particular memory stored in there. “I can remember the lullabies upon which they are based on.”
“Lullabies?”
“The cipher is based on songs and poems that our Mother, the Void damn her soul eternally, used to tell us before sleep. We sarcastically call them lullabies, in actuality they are more like curses and rhymes of anguish and death,” Jeongyeon finished explaining rather nonchalantly only to see the completely horrified wide-eyed look of Jihyo.
“Your mother did that to you?”
“Yeah,” Momo sighed. “Memories of her are eternally scarred and etched into our brain, and none of them are good.”
A moment of silence followed as Jihyo looked at the two with sympathy and sorrow. At least they were allowed normal and love-filled childhoods in their reincarnations, even if their first and original childhood wasn’t. Her unfocused eyes caught a blur of motion as Momo was spurned into sudden action flying across the space into the car to rummage through her bag before turning back around. “Jihyo, do you have pen and paper?”
“Somewhere in my bag for sure.”
“Please take it out. Jeongyeon, let’s try and recite the lullabies so we can remember the keyword.”
“Now?”
“Now, yes! It’ll be easier to figure out which cipher keyword we are on if we can read it from a paper, and I can work on the coded message while you drive.”
Jeongyeon glanced at Jihyo who had fetched a pen and notepad from her bag handing it over to Momo. A little embarrassed at first Jeongyeon straightened her back and cleared . “Alright, let’s start with the first one then.”
With a timid and quiet volume at first, Jeongyeon and Momo began to recite the first cursed poem of their Mother’s in their ancient mother tongue. The language had long mournful vowels with hard cutting consonant sounds; the tune to which they recited filled with minor falls and a low melancholic hum like a death poem at a funeral. It didn’t take long before Jeongyeon was lost in the poem and her eyes closed, her voice loud and clear, her mind drifting off into a trance. Her voice was magnificently beautiful, the incomprehensible sorrowful tone that she was singing in amplified by her presence and performance.
Momo recited quietly along focusing more on writing the words down. The words jumped out to her when she heard them in song, even if she couldn’t remember them out right on their own. This was one of the reasons they had chosen to use poem and song as the basis for the cipher keywords; in case they ever forgot the cipher rotation they were on they could recite the songs. These songs they would never forget. They were burned into their very being, the memory of them and reciting them causing pain.
The poem was enough to move Jihyo to tears even though she couldn’t understand a single word of what was being said. There was something powerful about how Jeongyeon’s voice lingered in this space; she could feel the anguish behind the words.
As Jeongyeon finished the first poem she opened her eyes to look at Momo to see if she was still in tow. With a little nod she continued off to the second song. It sounded even sadder than the first one, Jihyo quietly sniffling as she leaned against the cars side. She couldn’t explain why she was crying, why she found it so sad, but these ancient words were cutting deep into her soul as if the evil that had spoken them was still living on in the words.
Her eyes glazed from tears she refocused her sight when she realized that Jeongyeon had stopped her singing. Momo had finished transcribing and Jeongyeon looked at Jihyo with a serious look, pain radiating from behind her eyes.
“I’m going to need you to close your ears for this next one Jihyo.”
“Wh- why? What’s wrong?” Jihyo replied standing back up and cleaning the tears from her eyes.
“The last cipher keywords are based on a real curse. It’s the curse our Mother placed on us back when she…” Momo paused for a moment, a sense of dread rising up and welling inside her. She swallowed the hard knot in .
“When she what? Momo are you okay?” Jihyo said as she walked over and took hold of Momo’s shoulder giving it a gentle squeeze.
“Just… please don’t listen to it. I’ll explain it all to you later if that’s okay. Just please…” Momo looked up at Jihyo with pleading eyes, eyes that looked like they were on the verge of an all out storm of tears.
“Oh… okay. I’ll go inside the car and listen to music.”
“Thank you,” Momo placed her hand over the one on her shoulder squeezing Jihyo’s fingers once before the latter walked over to their car to sit and put on headphones to listen to music and drown out all other sounds. From within the car she watched Momo approach Jeongyeon as carefree pop songs blasted in her ears. The gravity of Momo’s voice and request was making her shiver with dread. How horrible could the last words be?
“I really hate reciting this one,” Jeongyeon whined as Momo arrived by her side once she saw Jihyo sit in the car and put her headphones on.
“I know, me too. We’ll say it in small batches and mess it up in between like we always do. I know we don’t have the materials or the right circumstance to actually use and complete the invocation to its fullest but you know how it is…”
“Just in case.”
“Just in case, yeah,” Momo gave a weak smile, “Better safe than eternally damned into the Void a second time, right?”
Watching the two from within the car Jihyo’s heart felt a little lighter seeing the faint smiles on their faces and felt a little hopeful as Jeongyeon closed her eyes and Momo slowly inscribed onto the paper. However the longer she stared at the two, the more the smile on Jihyo’s face and feeling of levity began to somehow twist.
As Jeongyeon’s mouth continued to move reciting the final poem to reveal the keywords for their cipher, the air around them grew colder and there was a creeping sensation of dread slithering its way up Jihyo’s spine. She was suddenly afraid, deathly afraid of disappearing and the cheery pop music in her ears was shifting in tone and stretching thin and eerie, the Korean words becoming incomprehensible gibberish not unlike the ancient mother tongue of Momo and Jeongyeon she had heard.
She threw the headphones off and closed her eyes, tucking her legs as she clamped her ears shut trying to shut away the voices with humming. But it was seeping in through her fingers, the dark and cold was wrapping itself around her. It almost had her, almost swallowed her and even with her eyes closed she saw as from the darkness long wrinkled and decayed fingers were stretching out, with an outline of a face far in the back calling to her threatening to pull her in...
“Jihyo!”
Her eyes shooting open Jihyo saw Momo’s worried face right up to her, her cold hands clasped around her arms.
“Are you alright?”
“I… there were these voices and it was cold and I… I couldn’t understand what it was saying, but it wanted me. It was going to take me,” Jihyo let out a dribble of words as she felt the first warm tears run down her now cold cheeks. She then noticed the cars windows had iced over and she was shivering from the cold. Momo wrapped herself around Jihyo and pulled her out of the car to sit with her on a rock in the sun. Momo’s body felt even colder than hers. Then she saw her surroundings.
“What happened?”
In a large circle around them the ground and road had iced over. All the grass and plants had begun to wither almost to nothing before freezing over, and the ground was drier than on a casual sunny Turkish day. They were sitting in a black cold spot on an otherwise sunny and colourful day. In the heat of the sun the ice was already melting, but it was still evident that something unimaginable had happened here.
“The curse, even in an incomplete form, has an effect on the surroundings. It’s… it’s a death curse, specifically one that sends the soul and body whole into the endless Void, a fate worse than regular death. That is why it drains the surrounding areas of life, that is why you saw those visions even when you couldn’t hear the words,” Momo explained as she hugged the shivering Jihyo tight, running her hands up and down her arms to induce blood flow. “I’m so sorry.”
“This… this is what your Mother sang to you as children?” Jihyo said in disbelief, looking up with her wide eyes at Jeongyeon who had approached the two and sat on the ground in front of them. Until now there had been a lingering feeling of disbelief regarding everything she had learned in the past few days. This experience and the visual proof of it all was enough for her to let those final strands go. She believed it all; the Void, their Mother, the Cult. Everything; and it terrified Jihyo to no end.
“Yes, this last one only once though. This curse was the last thing any of us Sister’s heard in our first life before we… well, died,” Jeongyeon paused for a moment to compose herself, the feelings and memories of the terror of the Void resurfacing. The anguish that her Mother had caused upon them was worse than any betrayal a parent could do. It was also that moment had been the beginning of the never ending Cycle, that which had started this eternal battle they lived through.
“Our youngest Sister Trudi had barely learned to read and write when it happened. Our eldest Sister Sofija has always felt guilty about that fact and is extremely protective of her in particular, almost to a fault. The other younger ones too,” Momo recounted, feeling forever sorry for Seulgi who lived with an eternal guilt that wasn’t a fault of her own, a guilt and burden she shouldn’t have to carry.
“How old were you when…?” Jihyo looked around at Jeongyeon and then at Momo behind her.
“I was ten, Momo was nine, one year younger than me.”
“Only ten and nine? You were all just children…” Jihyo whispered, the horrid fate of the Sisters sinking in, the incredulity of the thought that a parent could ever do such a thing to her children eating her up.
A short moment of silence gathered around them as the ground thawed and melted away and the sun warmed each and all of them so their skin was no longer deathly cold like a cadaver. Jihyo finally broke the silence, the worst of the dread lifting with the warming of the sun.
“So are you still older than Momo in this life? Does it always happen?”
“Yeah I should be,” Jeongyeon looked at Momo, “I’m twentysix.”
“Yup you are older. Momo, you shouldn’t act so rude towards your elder sister!” Jihyo chided getting up from Momo’s lap and hold.
“Right? She is always so rude to me. You better listen to your friend and be kind to your unnie, you dig? Besides, you always get to enjoy a comfy life while I get to struggle, so even more reason to be nice to me.”
“Is she always born rich?” Jihyo looked at Jeongyeon who rolled her eyes and began walking towards the car as she threw her arms in the air with exaggerated frustration.
“Always, every damn rebirth she is rich while I’m always a poor sod. This Cycle is really a cruel master, at least to me.”
Crossing her arms in front of her Jihyo looked back at Momo with a stern look while the latter was still in shock at the sudden accusations and turn of events.
“I’m not rude to you! What do you mean I’m rude to you?” Momo got up from her rock and followed Jeongyeon to the car Jihyo following suite. She came up with the written keywords to the cipher and laid the paper onto the hood of the car. Giving a little shoulder shove at Jeongyeon the latter replied with a cheeky grin before refocusing.
“So these are all the lines that are used for the cipher rotation. Now we just need to remember which keyword we were using the last time.”
Staring at the paper wide eyed and with crumpled foreheads Momo and Jeongyeon focused hard on the words that they were looking at, a pained expression slowly creeping up onto their face. Sweat drops formed on their now complete warmed faces, the cold skin from earlier replaced with suffocating heat.
“I just realized something.”
“What?” Jeongyeon asked while still focused hard onto the words.
“Neither of us two had to use the cipher last time right? So that’s why we have no recollection which one it was.”
Jeongyeon’s eyes shot wide open as she turned to Momo. “Damn it, you’re right. Why am I stuck with you?!”
“Hey! Once again, that’s my line!”
Jeongyeon walked off with her hands on her head while Momo plonked onto the scorching hood of the car lying on her back for only a second before the burning metal was too much and she shot up to stand, demoralized.
Observing from the side Jihyo walked over to Momo wiping her back from the dust off the car before turning her around to look at the words again. “So what if neither of you used it last time, just cancel out all the words you know you have used before to narrow it down. All you really need is to remember one word you’ve used right? Knowing that you can just then count which rotation you’re on by counting how many Cycles back it was.”
Jeongyeon spun on her heel and with a brisk walk came straight to the car having heard Jihyo’s suggestion.
“Of course, how didn’t we think of that! Jihyo, thank you! Momo, you’re useless!”
“Hey!” Momo gave a swipe at Jeongyeon who took the punch without a flinch and was back staring at the code.
The poems were written in three separate lines, each line corresponding to one poem or curse and hence to one layer of their three layered cipher. After a short pause for thinking Jeongyeon identified one keyword with a Cycle, and soon enough both of them had remembered a few keywords from each line, allowing them to calculate what the current rotation of the cipher was.
“Well that was easier than I initially feared.”
“So now you know the key to the ciphers?” Jihyo asked as Momo lifted the paper up to examine their results. Jeongyeon made her way around to the driver’s seat of the car hollering for the other two to get in. Having been turned off for a good half an hour the car was boiling hot on the inside, the three quickly turning on the AC to relieve them from the heat.
“Almost but not quite. The rotating keywords help us find out what the actual keys to the cipher are through an extremely convoluted route. It’s essential to decoding the cipher but it’s not the key itself, although the key and everything within is based on the keywords. I’ll explain to you how it works another time.”
Sitting at the back of the car Momo dived into decoding the message that had been pasted on the news sites of the world while Jeongyeon drove and Jihyo focused on the horizon. She would have wanted to help with the decrypting, it sounded so exciting. For now though her main task was to not feel sick as the car once again swayed side to side, up and down, skirting the edge of the cliffs.
From their unscheduled stop it was only another thirty minutes before the shallow rooftops of Bağırkanlı village houses and the beach with its rugged cliffs came to view. The ride was a little unstable so writing in the backseat wasn’t an easy task, and by the time they arrived on the outskirts of the village Momo had just about managed to find out all the variables that were needed to begin the decoding process. As the car pulled over to the centre of town Momo stopped what she was doing to first focus on finding the residence of this Mustafa Döndeniz.
Asking around the centre of town Jeongyeon quickly found out that the Döndeniz residence was on the eastern side of the village on the cliffs by the sea. With a patchwork of red tile, yellow slate and blue metal roofs on a rise on the cliff it was apparently impossible to miss.
“So, what if this is a trap?” Momo asked as Jeongyeon got back in the car after her final round of questions to the locals in the centre of town. “That letter could have been left by the Cult and us going here will alert them.”
“True, but that would require a few things to have happened; that the Cult found our secret hideout, that they left a safe full of gold uncracked and intact, that they left all that incriminating research on them intact and didn’t burn it, and that they captured my friend Murat after the end of the last Cycle and tortured him to reveal my nickname that only he alone used.”
“Fair. But let’s stay alert still.”
“I know, it’s never bad to be cautious especially when dealing with the Cult.”
It was a short drive from the centre of the village to the residence described to Jeongyeon. The village itself wasn’t too large, and the cliffside stretched for kilometres in each direction. Already visible from the outskirts of the main cluster of buildings the colourful roofed building of Mustafa Döndeniz revealed its location to them and five minutes later they had pulled up by the front gates of the buildings courtyard.
There was nobody outside in the yard right now and Jeongyeon got out of the car, leaving the motor on to keep the air-conditioner running. She approached the front gate and just as she was about to call out for somebody a middle-aged woman in a dress and her hair covered by a scarf came out the front door.
“Iyi günler teyze, is this the home of Mustafa Döndeniz?” Jeongyeon called out in Turkish as the woman looked with intrigue at this tall skinny Asian lady calling out in Turkish, before striding over towards the gate.
“It is indeed. What do you need of him?” the woman asked reaching the gate opening it up and greeting with a questioning but friendly look.
“My name is Jeongyeon and there is a matter from Istanbul that I would like to discuss with Mustafa beyefendi,” Jeongyeon said.
“Hoşbulduk. He is out but should be home any minute now. Come in, come in, have some tea while you wait,” the woman said as she began to open the gates to let the car in. Jeongyeon assisted with the gates before jumping back in the car and driving into the courtyard.
With pleasantries exchanged outside the three were guided into the humble house and into the sitting room where Emine, Mustafa’s wife, began to serve them tea as they waited. The grandparents joined in for the tea from the other room intrigued by these foreign guests and asking them questions about their whereabouts and how Jeongyeon, and Momo to a small extent, knew how to speak Turkish.
After about half an hour they heard the arrival of a car in the courtyard and soon an older middle-aged man with an unshaven, partially greyed beard walked into the room with bags of vegetables. He acknowledged the guests in the room before placing the bags over onto the counter, finally turning to face the three.
“Guests from Istanbul, they had something to discuss with you,” Emine said as she began to empty the bags to refrigerate most of the veggies while leaving some out onto the cutting board.
“Iyi günler. Why don’t we move to the living room to discuss more,” Mustafa said as he guided the guests out into the living room which had a rather low roof and low-seating wide couches filled with Turkish patterned seats and cushions. In the middle there was a wood coffee table with a few simple sweets. Sitting everyone around the table Emine brought a refill of tea for them and a cup for Mustafa.
“We don’t get many guests from Istanbul often, let alone foreign guests. What can I help you with?” Mustafa asked dropping in a few pieces of sugar and stirring his tea.
“I guess it’s easiest if I give you this first,” Jeongyeon reached out handing the letter that they had found from the hideout signed with Mustafa’s name. “Did you write this?”
Mustafa took the letter from Jeongyeon, uncertain what this was about before his eyes shot wide open as he saw what the piece of paper was all about. He placed the tea down onto the table as he felt a tremble reach his hands. “Yes… I did.”
There was a mixture of emotion apparent in his eyes that were now rapidly scanning all three of them; both hope and fear. Hope that these were finally the Eternal Ladies that they had been waiting for all these years, and fear that instead they were Cult members and he had now lead them to him and his family and all the knowledge he had. His hand twitched at his side, as if trying to reach for something solid to grab on to if things came to blows, if he had to fight for the safety of his wife and parents. This encounter was the last thing he expected.
“Well then, thank you for keeping our residence safe. Murat-abi would be proud,” Jeongyeon said with a warm smile.
In an instant the relief in Mustafa’s eyes could be seen as his hopes were proved true and his life wasn’t threatened by the Cultists. The corners of his eyes watered a little as the shakes in his hands that he had been holding in were let out with the relief.
“Alla hallah, what a relief. I was worried you were of the vile sort.”
“Sorry to worry you, it was not my intention. We came here as requested by your letter hoping maybe you could fill in on what has been going on since our disappearance.”
“Of course,” Mustafa nodded, straightening his back and taking a sip of his tea to relieve some of the stress. “Your Turkish is so natural are you perhaps Jannah, the one Murat so often spoke and wrote about?”
“I am yes,” Jeongyeon replied with a smile and a hint of embarrassment, her face catching a shade of red. It was no secret to her Sisters and clearly to Murat’s descendents, that had Jeongyeon not been an Eternal Lady and had to sacrifice herself last Cycle, the two would have most likely had a very familial future together. It would have been a beautiful life. “It’s wonderful to see that Murat was able to have a family like he always dreamed of.”
“I am glad to be alive as well. He told us so much about you Jannah, and about your Sister’s as well. Are they…?” Mustafa motioned towards Momo and Jihyo who had been sitting quietly.
“I am one of them yes. My name is Momo, also back then known as Móna. It’s a pleasure. This is Jihyo our friend who was dragged into this. She doesn’t understand a word of what we are saying,” Momo replied with a little laugh, her Turkish very rusty still but good enough to understand. She had been one of the first ones to join Jeongyeon in Istanbul during the last Cycle and had the most practice with Turkish out of the rest of the Sister’s.
Jihyo was left nodding and smiling as the three conversed. She had been following quietly on the side at this exchange only really able to tell the ranges of emotions that they went through without understanding the context. Her big bright eyes were wide with curiosity as she listened to the three speak, but it was difficult to feel engaged without understanding a thing. Mustafa turned his attention to her.
“I’m sorry, my English…” Mustafa said with a little trouble, finishing off his sentence with the palm of his hand teetering back and forth.
“It’s okay, I understand,” Jihyo replied smiling graciously.
“Don’t worry Jihyo, we’ll fill in all the details after we’re done. In the meanwhile you could try decrypt the rest of message,” Momo said pulling out the encoded message she had been working on. “I’ll transcribe the symbols into Latin letters and tell you the processes how to do it. You should be able to at least do it then.”
“Oh, yes I can do that,” Jihyo said with enthusiasm. She had wanted to help with it this whole time and not understanding Turkish she felt really useless at the moment. Finally she could be of help to Momo today; this was something she could do well.
After a brief explanation of the mechanics of their decryption and changing all the symbols into Latin equivalent letters, Jihyo dived right into decoding the message as Jeongyeon and Momo began to enquire about what had happened after the end of the Cycle, what Mustafa knew of the Cult and their situation.
From what his great grandparents and grandparents had told in writing there had been little evidence of the Cult’s activities after the end of the last Cycle. They had almost disappeared instantly after the end effectively managing to go into hiding and vanish from sight. In Istanbul there had been very little activity for a long time, but things began to change about fifty years ago.
Their family had been visiting the hideout every now and then to keep it clean and safe, and also to make sure nobody else had found out about it. The Cult had never found the Istanbul hideout like they had with Vienna, but they had known about the activity of the Eternal Ladies in Istanbul.
It was about fifty years ago that the family picked up on news articles about certain ritual killings and found the first signs and advertisements for cultish activities, signs that pointed to the Children of the Void. The incidences increased and while in the beginning there were clear investigations into these killings about thirty years ago, around the time Mustafa wrote the letter, there was a clear shift in everything.
All traces and investigations into the Cult activities ceased and all journalist or investigators that continued looking into them privately vanished without a trace. While the hideout had not been found out by the cult at the time it seemed that staying in Istanbul was risky and continued visits to the hideout further risked to expose it to people. The population of Istanbul had exploded, there were more pairs of eyes everywhere and more cameras existed. His job there wasn’t really paying well and his father had suffered an accident. It was safest to disappear for a while.
Since his departure back here to Bağırkanlı he had visited the hideout once about ten years earlier to make sure that it was still intact and safe. As far as the Cult was considered, he had heard some news of them in his subtle investigations but nothing major. All he could say was their numbers were rather high and that it had branched out into subsections, so that not everyone involved knew the whole truth of the matter. Jeongyeon and Momo confirmed that this had happened before when the Cult’s numbers swelled to very large groups. Only a certain amount of core members knew the whole terrible truth.
With the updates finished Mustafa’s father Ibrahim walked over to the living room. He had been in charge of taking care of the hideout before Mustafa and was equally thrilled and honoured to meet Jeongyeon and Momo, or Jannah and Móna as they had learned to know them from the stories they had been told by their fathers. The tense atmosphere from the room relaxed a bit as they exchanged more happy and pleasant stories and catching up. Ibrahim told what he could remember of his time as the caretaker of the hideout, much of the information he shared already told by Mustafa, but the three graciously listened to his story.
“It’s… it’s finished. I think.”
The four stopped talking having heard Jihyo speak up from the corner table after a long bout of silence.
“You’ve finished decrypting it?” Momo said as she got out of her chair. Jeongyeon apologized for the interruption to Mustafa and Ibrahim and followed suit. “Let me see.”
Jihyo reached out and gave the paper with the decrypted message to Momo. Although it was decrypted with the Latin alphabet to Jihyo it still looked like gibberish speech. Momo strode across and grabbed the piece of paper. Face blushed and her eyes wide Momo read the short text on the paper, letting out a little laugh in the process. “No way… it’s been a while.”
Arriving by her side Jeongyeon looked at the text, a smile also spreading on her lips as she saw it. She looked up at the giddy expression of Momo as Jihyo approached them.
“What does it say?”
“There can be only one,” Momo announced happily.
“And what does that mean?” Jihyo questioned as she had a look at the paper once more. It all still looked like nonsense to her.
“It means we know where we need to go next,” a bright smile spread across her lips Jeongyeon looked up at Jihyo.
“Where’s that?”
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