The Plot Calls #17 : "Sing for the Purpose"

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and/or Ai-assisted-content-generation. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Celeste Halloway never lusted for fame.

She lusted for the ache—the sacred, soul-stirring ache of expression.

As a girl, she sang in cathedrals. No mics. No monitors. Just stained glass, polished oak, and echoes that made her feel eternal.

She didn’t sing to be seen. She sang to transcend.

People told her she had it—a once-in-a-generation gift. She floated through youth on choirs, conservatories, televised pageants. But it wasn’t the trophies that moved her. It was the hush right after the final note. The stillness of a crowd holding its breath, not because they were impressed, but because they remembered something—something inside them that the song stirred awake.

She called that her purpose. For years, it guided her. But purpose is a fragile thing. And time—indifferent.

Celeste grew up. The hymns faded. The silence between notes became noise: contracts, image consultants, auto-tune, lip-syncing for late night.

She tried secular. Tried soul. Tried synthpop. Labels called her “inspiring,” “angelic,” “vintage-chic”—until they stopped calling altogether.

Spotify said she was “unplaceable.” TikTok said she was “old-soul-core,” which apparently wasn’t a good thing. Comments called her "a ghost from another era."

And maybe she was.

Her reflection certainly thought so.

She looked in the mirror and didn’t see a singer anymore. Just a shape that used to matter. A hollowed-out voice box wearing hope like makeup.

She tried writing again. Nothing came.

Tried singing in her old style. It felt thin. Empty.

The ache remained—but without the song, it was just pain.

That night, she sat alone in the back pew of the cathedral where it all began. Her fingers traced the worn grooves of the hymnals. Her breath fogged the air. Her heart begged for something—anything—to remind her of why she ever opened her mouth to sing in the first place.

And that’s when she heard it.

The whisper.

It didn’t enter through her ears. It entered through memory—a vibration that didn’t belong in the air, but hummed just behind her ribs. It didn’t say a word. It didn’t have to.

Celeste stood. Candlelight flickered without wind. The pipe organ groaned in the silence. From behind the altar, beneath the cracked floorboards of the crypt, came a glow—faint. Violet-black. Alive.

She followed.

Down the spiral steps, past cobwebs and rusted sconces, into a crypt that hadn’t been touched since choirs wore robes and bishops bled for politics. There, beneath a broken floor tile, pulsed the soil.

Black-violet. Iridescent. Breathing slow like a creature sleeping lightly. No porcelain hand this time. Just the shimmer. Just the presence.

Celeste reached into her coat pocket and pulled out an old Polaroid.

Her, age sixteen. Caught mid-song, cheeks flushed, arms open wide, joy radiating from every cell.

Back when she believed that singing could heal people. Back when she thought it healed her.

She laid the photo gently on the soil.

It sank. The whisper vanished. So did the ache.

She exhaled—and for the first time in years, her breath didn’t shake.

Upstairs, somewhere distant and holy, a bell rang out the hour.

It was midnight. Something inside her had changed.

Celeste woke to stillness. No dreams. No fatigue. Just… breath.

The ache that had dogged her chest for years—gone.

She padded barefoot into the kitchen, made tea, and hummed a tune she didn’t recognize. It floated up effortlessly, like it had always lived in her lungs, waiting for the ache to leave.

The melody was haunting. Delicate. Beautiful in a way that felt wrong. Like a requiem for something not yet dead.

She sang it without thinking. Not just the notes. The words.

Lyrics spilled out like confessionals. Full verses. Chords she couldn’t name. Whole stanzas written in a voice that was—hers, but wasn’t.

She recorded a 30-second clip on a whim. Posted it under an old account.

Didn’t think about it again. Until the notifications started.

At first, a few comments. Then, thousands.

Then, a direct message from a major producer.

Then, a flood: interviews, studio invites, bloggers begging for quotes.

The internet called it haunted gospel. Funeral soul. The voice of modern melancholy.

Celeste just called it… strange.

Because every time she opened her mouth to sing, something else came out.

She tried to write her own songs again—couldn’t.

Her hands moved on their own. They scribbled lyrics she didn’t plan, sung melodies she didn’t learn.

She was back in the studio, but the joy wasn’t.

The ache had been replaced.

Not with peace—but with hunger.

Her own voice sounded unfamiliar in playback—otherworldly, raw, laced with something…feral.

She released her first full project in years. It was called “Seven Hungers.”

Track titles haunted her:

“Craving Your Lust” “Glutton for the Game” “My Prestigious Pride” “Sentimentally Sloth” “Envy Us” “Adjust to my Wrath” “Idle Gods”

Critics called it a masterpiece. Listeners wept. Religious leaders condemned it as sacrilege.

She couldn’t remember recording half the songs.

And when she performed live, it wasn’t a concert.

It was a seance.

Crowds stood silent, reverent. Some wept. Some screamed. Others left shaking, saying they saw shadows move beneath the stage.

Celeste felt none of it.

She stood there, mouth moving, songs pouring out of her like oil from a broken pipe.

She didn’t feel joy.

She didn’t feel anything.

Only the craving remained.

And then, the mirror changed.

She stopped recognizing her own face.

Her skin looked thinner, almost translucent in certain light. Her eyes? Hollow, wide, glassy—like she was always halfway between waking and sleep.

Makeup wouldn’t hold. Food lost taste. Colors dulled.

She’d hum in her sleep—slow, whispery songs full of names she didn’t know. Sometimes, she woke with her hands clawing at her throat. Other times, with words scrawled in lipstick on the mirror:

“More.”

She tried to stop.

Tried to sing something else. Anything else.

But the voice didn’t obey anymore.

In interviews, her answers grew erratic. Her smile stretched too wide. At one point, she was asked what inspired her new sound.

She blinked and said, “I don’t remember. I think the soil remembers for me.”

The host laughed.

Celeste didn’t.

That night, alone in her home studio, she found a draft of a new track.

Unlabeled. Unplanned.

Just a title: “The Plot Thickens.”

No lyrics. Just silence.

And the faintest sound of something shifting… beneath the floor.

Celeste stopped booking shows.

She stopped doing interviews. She stopped responding to her team. She stopped singing.

But the music didn’t stop.

She’d wake to new songs written in her notebook—perfectly penned in her own handwriting.

Tracks uploaded themselves.

Rough demos turned polished overnight. Songs she never recorded appeared on her page with thousands of plays. Lyrics she couldn’t remember writing scrolled across digital billboards in cities she hadn’t visited.

The world called it a resurgence. Celeste called it possession.

Fans begged for more. She begged for quiet.

But the voice wasn’t hers anymore.

It lived in her lungs, stitched into her vocal cords, pressed behind her eyes.

When she stood too close to a mirror, her reflection moved out of sync. Just slightly.

Enough to be noticed. Enough to send her reeling.

She tried to leave her house once. Just once.

The street pulsed beneath her feet. Not metaphorically. Not emotionally.

The actual ground shimmered black-violet in a perfect spiral that led back to her studio.

She understood. She wasn’t Celeste anymore. She was the vessel.

The hymnal. The singer of the soil.

The voice for something older and hungrier than fame could ever satisfy.

That night, she wrote her final song.

She didn’t remember doing it. There were no lyrics. Just a timestamp: 3:32. Title: The Plot Thickens.

She uploaded it. No promo. No post. And then she vanished.

No one saw her leave. No camera caught her exit. Her studio remained untouched. Her phone still buzzed with notifications. Her last voicemail was from her sister, Marin:

“I understand now. I’m sorry. I think it’s happening to me, too.”

Fans dissected the final track obsessively.

Exactly three minutes and thirty-two seconds of ambient noise. No melody. No instruments.

Just the faint, rhythmic shifting of soil. Like something tunneling. Like something listening Like something waiting.

Celeste’s home was eventually sold. Her studio boarded up. Her name, debated on forums and whispered in niche communities like urban folklore.

But her voice? It still played.

On random speakers. On playlists no one made. At funerals. In elevators. In dreams.

Sometimes, those who heard it said they saw a faint glow beneath their floorboards.

And sometimes, when the room is very quiet and very still—there’s a hum.

Not from the throat. Not from the chest. From beneath. From the plot. From the place where purpose once lived and now only hunger sings.

And if you listen closely, at the end of the track, barely audible behind the shifting earth, you can hear a whisper with no voice say:

“The Plot Thickens.”

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