SILENTIUM

[Whispered]

TOMMASO: Ok, posso farcela.

[Slight reverb - isolation chamber]

[Deep breath]

TOMMASO: 16th October 2024. Custodia Ultimae Vocis. Isolation Chamber Three. Father Tommaso Lanza analyzing Case TM-2024-047.

[Sound of papers being arranged]

First things first: I'm sorry for the audio recording quality. I've tried several methods and several pieces of hardware and even though I'm using a modern standard microphone and not some kind of old tape recorder or something like that, the audio seems… kinda off and, I don't know, corrupted.

I guess it's the isolation chamber effect or something like that, but I've got no time to waste so I'm stuck with this quality. I hope this will be clear enough because the journey is pretty long as I can see.

But anyway.

I should explain what that means, I mean the case number. TM stands for "Tongue Manifestation." The year is when it was documented and not when it occurred. And 047 means this is the forty-seventh case submitted to the Custodia this year.

Forty-seven and… we're only in October. This is why I said it will be long.

This will be my first independent translation. I have three months of probationary training, working under supervision, and now... this. They gave me a modern case. Clear audio recording. I mean by the standards of this work, if we can still talk about standards and… work, this should be pretty straightforward.

I don't even know how to properly call it. Work. You see, I was a linguist before I was a priest. Seven years teaching at the University of Bologna; dead languages, comparative phonetics, Proto-Semitic reconstruction.

I know how language works. And this is why the Church wants me here. Anyway.

Let's start with the case. The subject is Marcus Chen. Thirty-four years old. He died March 14th, 2023 in Detroit, Michigan. Cardiac arrest while livestreaming to an audience of 10,247 people.

He started streaming at six PM. He made his living streaming video games online, broadcasting himself playing to thousands of viewers, six days a week and that day was no different.

The manifestation was captured on video. Digital audio, perfect fidelity. Two syllables, clearly articulated.

For three hours and forty-six minutes, it was a completely normal stream. Marcus was good at this: engaging, funny, responding to his audience while playing. He was streaming a fantasy game, I had to look it up. His viewers loved watching him struggle through it.

His setup was professional: multiple monitors, good microphone, proper lighting. You could see him from the chest up, and behind him, his apartment. Posters on the wall. Books on shelves. Some toys and a pretty messy room with a pretty messy bed.

The stream was going pretty good as I said, this until 9:46 PM, when Marcus stopped talking mid-sentence.

Not dramatically, no chest clutching, no gasping for air. He just... stopped.

His hands stayed on the keyboard. His eyes stayed on the screen. But he'd gone completely still.

And of course viewers started reacting to this. Messages appearing in the chat like: "You okay?" or "Stream frozen?"

The video quality was fine and he was still breathing, you can see it. But something was wrong.

Ten seconds.

His breathing changed. Deeper. Slower. You could see his chest rising and falling with these long, measured pulls of air.

Fifteen seconds.

Someone in chat said they were calling 911, while others thought it was a prank, but most were confused.

Twenty seconds.

His expression was… blank. Not frightened, not in pain. Just... empty. Like he was looking through the screen.

And then

his mouth opened.

[Long pause]

He was not going to speak, it was pretty clear. His jaw dropped open wider than it should, and his throat? You could see it moving under the skin. Not swallowing, not gagging. No, nothing like that, it was just moving. Like there was something underneath, pressing outward, testing the shape of his neck.

The veins on his throat, they stood out a bit too much. Dark lines forming a pattern. It was geometric. Too precise to be random. Later, when the Archdiocese of Detroit submitted the case to us, they included frame-by-frame analysis. The pattern held for exactly seven seconds before he collapsed.

Seven seconds and seven straight lines radiating from his Adam's apple.

The official medical report: Marcus Chen, age thirty-four, died of sudden cardiac arrest at 9:47 PM. No prior heart condition. No warning signs. Autopsy found nothing unusual. His heart simply stopped.

This case came to us through Father Michael Morrison, Saint Kieran's Parish in Detroit. One of the viewers was his parishioner Officer Raymond Ramirez, Detroit PD.

Ramirez watched the stream live. And he heard something the other 10,230 people didn't.

And I say this because over the next three days, sixteen other viewers came forward independently. Different countries, different time zones, different backgrounds. None of them knew each other very well. But they all reported the same thing:

In the seconds before Marcus collapsed, while his throat was moving and those vein patterns were forming, they heard him speak.

He didn't speak words they recognized, but they heard it clearly enough to write it down at least phonetically. And their transcriptions matched.

Seventeen people, out of 10,247, heard Marcus Chen speak

The Tongue.

[Long pause]

The Tongue. That's what the Custodia Ultimae Vocis calls it.

[Small pause]

Custodia Ultimae Vocis—the Guardianship of the Last Voice.

We've been documenting this phenomenon since… well, since a lot of centuries actually.

The Church's official position, established in the Constitutio Custodiae over sixteen hundred years ago, is that the Tongue is lingua liminis, a the threshold language. The voice of the boundary between life and death. When someone dies, some of them speak it. Not all. Just some of them and we don't know why.

The Church calls it a sacred mystery. Says it's neither demonic nor holy in conventional terms, it simply is. The language of transition itself.

I mean when angels appeared to mortals in scripture, they said "be not afraid" because encountering the divine overwhelms human capacity.

And the Church says the Tongue is the same: it terrifies because it touches something beyond human comprehension. And it's close to God, it's close to God's design, to sacred mysteries.

I'm just a probationary translator. Three months of training, I mean it's pretty much nothing. And this is my first independent case.

I want to believe what the Church teaches, I really do.

But I've spent many many years studying how languages work. And everything about the Tongue violates every principle of linguistic evolution. I mean, there is no evolution at all across centuries.

Languages change. They drift. They borrow from each other. Pronunciation shifts across generations and geography. That's pretty much fundamental.

But the Tongue? Phonetically identical across centuries, continents. That's not how language works, at all. And I get it, it's beyond human comprehension, it's holy or whatever it is. It's a sacred mystery. But that's not how language works. It's difficult to translate something if it's not a language. That's more akin to how code works.

Anyway, I'll do my best to help the Church to understand this Tongue, this lingua liminis.

Maybe this will bring us closer to understanding God's design and this… this fills my heart with joy.

So I've isolated the timestamp from Marcus's stream. The platform's audio file is clean: high quality, no compression artifacts.

Most people hear nothing unusual at this moment. The audio analysis shows game sounds, ambient room noise. That's pretty much all.

[Sound of papers rustling]

The spectrogram analysis though, I can see it here, this looks pretty concerning.

Anyway I'm going to play it now, so I can hear it personally. As I said, most people hear nothing unusual at this moment, but God knows I won't.

[Silence...?]

[THE TONGUE SPEAKS]

[Not silence.]

---

[Whispered, trembling]

Dio ti prego, dammi la forza.

[Long pause - breathing heavily]

I don't know what to say, uhm. This brings us so many bad memories, it's pretty overwhelming. I need a moment, I'm sorry.

[Pause]

[Deep breath]

I can confirm I heard the Tongue, two syllables and everything they said it's correct. So we will proceed with the translation and we will cross reference what I heard. I need the Lexicon.

[Sound of heavy book being pulled over]

The Lexicon is an enormous book we have here. Handwritten entries dating back to Byzantine script. Every translator who's worked in the Custodia has added to this, so we have centuries upon centuries of documentation, phonetic analysis, contextual interpretation.

We've identified about forty words with high confidence. You see, patterns emerge when you see the same phonemes appear across multiple deaths, different eras, different circumstances.

[Pages turning]

So the two words I've heard were "kheth-voram".

"Kheth" appears in seventeen previous cases. The first is documented in Constantinople, 428 AD. A Byzantine merchant dying during confession. The priest heard it, wrote it down in Greek phonetics.

The translation, established after cross-referencing multiple occurrences, is threshold or opening or boundary.

[More pages turning]

"Voram" appears twenty-three times. First documentation is in Lombardy, 673 AD. A monk's death during evening prayer.

Translation: witness or observer or generically speaking one who sees.

But "kheth-voram" has been spoken before. The same compound word, exact phonetic match, across centuries.

We have… here it is.

[Papers rustling]

Case TM-1349-087. Avignon, France. July 23rd, 1349. The Black Death.

Brother Alphonse Bertrand, Franciscan Order, was documenting plague deaths. His chronicle is extensive: death counts, prayers, symptom descriptions. Standard medieval record-keeping.

But on July 23rd, he recorded something else.

He was summoned to the Orphanage of Saint Catherine. Twelve children lay dying of plague, all in final stages. Sister Marie had called for him because the children had been singing for eight hours straight. Same melody, perfect unison. She thought it was a hymn, something from God.

Brother Alphonse arrived at dawn. The twelve children, ages four to eight, were arranged in the dormitory. Six on each side. All of them showed advanced plague: buboes, blackened extremities, high fever.

But their eyes were open. All of them. Staring upward at nothing anyone else could see.

And they were singing.

Alphonse tried to transcribe the melody. Quill to parchment, listening carefully. But when he wrote, his hand cramped. The quill moved, but the letters that appeared weren't in Latin. Weren't letters at all, just angular marks. Geometric shapes.

He tried again. Same corruption. Like his hand was being forced to write something his mind couldn't process.

And then all twelve children turned their heads toward him. Simultaneously.

Twelve pairs of plague-clouded eyes, suddenly focused and clear.

And they sang louder.

[Pause]

Alphonse preserved the geometric symbols. For six hundred years, they were undeciphered.

Until 1847, when Father Dominic Rothstein developed a method for converting what he called "Tongue-script" back into phonetic sounds.

Rothstein's cipher applied to Brother Alphonse's symbols produces: "Kheth-voram."

The same word. Marcus Chen in Detroit, 2023. Twelve children in Avignon, 1349.

Six hundred and seventy-four years apart.

And both deaths were witnessed. Marcus had 10,247 viewers. The children had Sister Marie and Brother Alphonse watching them die.

The Church's interpretation of "kheth-voram" is one who witnesses at the threshold. The sacred language describing the sacred moment. Marcus was literally at the boundary between life and death, and he was being witnessed by thousands. And the same applies to the twelve children.

But I think there's another way to translate it. More literal:

Threshold-witness

Not someone witnessing the threshold, but someone who is the threshold. Someone being used as an observational point. Some sort of window at the boundary.

This makes much more sense for me and I'm fully convinced this is the correct translation.

But there is something that disturbs me most: in both cases, only some witnesses could perceive it.

Brother Alphonse heard the children singing clearly enough to attempt transcription, though his hand was forced to write symbols instead. And seventeen of Marcus's viewers heard him speak.

But Sister Marie apparently heard nothing unusual, she described it as a "hymn" in her report. The other 10,230 viewers watching Marcus heard complete silence at that moment.

So, what determines who can hear the Tongue? And what makes someone sensitive to it?

And if you can hear it... what does that mean you are

for God?

Anyway, it's getting pretty late. I've been in this chamber for seven hours, apparently.

[Sound of gathering papers]

The Custodia's mission, as explained to me during training, is to document and preserve. We're not some kind of exorcists or archivists or something like that. We're not trying to stop this or prevent it. We're trying to understand it.

The Church maintains that understanding the Tongue brings us closer to understanding God's design. That death is a sacred threshold, and the Tongue is the language of that threshold. Every manifestation we document, every word we translate, reveals more of the divine pattern.

[Papers rustling]

I've taken a quick look at some other old cases and I don't understand why is it accelerating?

I mean we've documented forty-seven cases and it's only October. We're on track for sixty-plus in 2024 alone.

The Tongue is appearing more frequently. Almost like it's exponential.

The Church says this is because modern medicine allows us to witness more deaths, document them better. We're just seeing more cases that were always happening.

[Pause - exhausted]

I really don't know and my head is about to explode.

So my official analysis for TM-2024-047 will state this: manifestation consistent with documented phenomena. Phonetic match with historical cases confirmed. Subject appears to have served as observational threshold at moment of death.

[Pause - formal closing]

Translation analysis complete. TM-2024-047. Father Tommaso Lanza, Custodia Ultimae Vocis.

"Kheth-voram": threshold-witness.

One word added to the Lexicon.

[Recording continues for a couple of seconds in silence]

[Very faintly - Tommaso humming. Three notes ascending, two descending.]

[Recording ends]

---

Translation Summary

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