The Lost Gospel
I shouldn't have taken it. I tell myself this over and over, even now, even as my fingers trace the edges of the brittle pages. The paper feels too thin, too ancient, as though the oils of my skin might erase the words. And maybe they should. Perhaps they were never meant to be read. I found it in the basement archives of St. Augustine's Library, a place so forgotten that even the dust seemed layered in history. The room smelled of rot and neglect, and the books there were wrong—not in content but in their presence—forgotten, discarded things that shouldn't have existed in the first place. I wasn't looking for it. I was supposed to be researching something else, digging through old theological texts for an article I'd been assigned—a mundane, academic piece about apocryphal gospels—nothing dangerous, nothing blasphemous. And yet, it was there, hidden beneath a stack of untranslated fragments, wrapped in a leather cover that had darkened with age. At first, I though...