By Ausiàs Tsel

The priest opened his eyes. Cassock pooling around his knees, hands folded, kneeling before a tomb that held more dust than bones. Beneath the wooden pew lay Ausiàs March, the engraved letters veiled in shadow.

“We’re all waiting,” the priest said. “I’m just waiting for an answer, yes.”

Guillem Mascaró sat beside him. He rubbed his thumb against his index finger—counting something no longer there.

“There’s no one left to answer.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“So have I.” The priest’s voice wavered. Almost imperceptibly. “Or I’ve seen what the dying see. I’ve stopped asking which is mine.”

The floodlights hummed above them. Yellow. Industrial. No more candles. No more mystery. Just functional lighting and the smell of bleach failing to mask centuries of incense trapped in stone. The Holy Grail sat behind glass like a museum piece. Someone had left a laminated card explaining its provenance. The agate cup that had held—or hadn’t held—the blood of God, reduced to a caption in three languages.

Mascaró had crossed the nave like a man who remembered where the shadows used to fall. A cleaning woman had propped open a side door to air out the chapel. She’d looked at him without seeing him. They never did.

He’d passed the baptismal font. Dipped his fingers in. The water was warm—heated now, for the comfort of infants. He remembered when it had been cold enough to make them scream. The scream had meant something, then. A small death before the resurrection of grace.

He remembered faith as a fist beneath the sternum—the particular tightness after communion, when he’d believed something was listening. The host dissolving on his tongue like a promise someone else had made. Or seemed to.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“Christ.” The priest—Father Vidal, according to the nameplate on the confessional—paused. “My mother saw Christ. At the end. I was holding her hand.”

Somewhere in the cathedral, a pipe dripped against stone. The sound had not changed in 300 years. Only the fluorescent hum was new.

“And I don’t know if she saw Him or if her brain was shutting down. I’ve read the literature. Temporal lobe seizures. Oxygen deprivation. Some say the dying brain floods with dimethyltryptamine.” Vidal looked at his hands. They were shaking slightly. “I chose to believe her. But I chose. You understand? Some mornings I wake up and the choice feels like a lie I’m telling myself.”

“Then, why stay?” Mascaró asked.

“Because the alternative is worse.” Vidal made the sign of the cross. The gesture had the quality of muscle memory—hand moving before thought could intervene. “Because my mother died peaceful, and I want to die peaceful, and I don’t know another way.”

“The bishop kept a stake in his desk until 1987.” Vidal’s voice carried no inflection—a man reporting diocesan inventory. “Now we just have security cameras and under funded restoration projects.”

His eyes hadn’t left Mascaró’s face.

Mascaró went still.

“And yet, you don’t move,” he said.

“No.”

“Your pulse races. I can hear it.”

“It does.” Vidal’s jaw tightened. The pulse was visible now, a flutter beneath the pale skin of his throat. “But I’ve made my peace.”

“With dying?”

“With not knowing what comes after. If anything does.” He met Mascaró’s eyes. In the yellow light, the priest’s irises were the color of weak tea. “You’ve seen more death than I have. Tell me—does it get easier? The not knowing?”

Mascaró considered the question. The pulse in Vidal’s neck. The smell of him—soap and fear-sweat and something older, incense worked into the cassock’s fibers over years of wearing it, and beneath that, smoke that wasn’t there. He knew what the blood would show him. It always did. The priest smelled like the memory of belief. Like something that had once been certain.

“No,” Mascaró said. “It doesn’t.”

The silence stretched. The pipe dripped. The fluorescent light buzzed its single note. Vidal swallowed. The movement traveled slow, visible, down the pale column of his throat.

“Will it hurt?”

The question surprised him. Not the asking—the dying always asked—but the tone. Vidal spoke as if inquiring about a medical procedure. A surgery scheduled for morning.

“Yes,” Mascaró said. “Briefly.”

Vidal nodded. He did not close his eyes. He did not pray. He simply looked at Mascaró with an expression that might have been curiosity, or might have been the particular calm of a man who has already made his choice.

Mascaró moved. Vidal’s hand rose—not to push away, but to grip his shoulder. The grip tightened. Slackened.

The blood came with a sound like wet cloth parting.

And then the taste.

Warm. Copper and salt. Fifty-seven years carried like sediment—the first confession at seven, sins invented. The ordination. His mother’s hand going slack. The word Christ, half-formed, and decades wondering: vision or hallucination or simply the sound a brain makes when it empties.

And beneath it all—Xàtiva, 1707, smoke reaching them before the soldiers did, his mother’s mouth shaping a word that never came. Three centuries, and still the same confusion in the eyes of the dying.

Beneath it all: the taste of choosing.

Copper-bright. Cellular. Indistinguishable from faith.