The Second Mission

In January 1712, a Portuguese Jesuit expedition departs the port of Salvador under a royal grant from Dom João V. Six priests, twelve indigenous bearers, a lieutenant and eight colonial soldiers, fifteen iron axes, ninety days of provisions, and a charge to found a new mission among the peoples of the upper Paraguaçu. Its director and chronicler is Padre Inácio de Oliveira — forty-two years old, Coimbra-ordained, Aquinas-trained, a cautious man who keeps a private Latin diary his provincial does not know about. Seventeen years earlier, an eleven-man party went up the same river under Padre Gaspar Fernandes. Four men walked out. The report was too thin to determine anything and was shelved.

Somewhere past the river bend where an old woman stands on the bank and tells them to go back, the expedition passes into a territory that has been kept for generations under a covenant — a compact between a small community of twenty families and something in the forest that is older than the Society of Jesus, older than the Catholic Church, older than written language on this continent. Most of the expedition does not listen to the old woman. Inácio listens, and writes down what she says, and this turns out to be the difference between twenty-seven deaths and twenty-six.

Of twenty-seven men, the forest lets one walk out. The diary hidden in the stone chamber beneath a ruined altar is everything he had time to write. The final entry, written alone, is two words: “Nos tetigimus.” We have touched. A standalone found-document horror novella in the universe of Calix Sanguinis — Padre Inácio’s private Latin diary of the 1712 Paraguaçu expedition, the same diary Dr. Rafael Volkov carries out of a ruined mission on his phone in June 2026. Read it cold as a self-contained eighteenth-century account of a failed Jesuit mission, or as a deep cut for trilogy readers who want to hold the document in their hands.