Lloyd was unconscious, but his unconsciousness was not like sleep.
It was like a bottomless well, and he was falling through it, never reaching the end.
But his body was here.
Suspended in the air.
Floating.
Floating in a space that no longer resembled any underground chamber.
A temple.
A temple in the heart of a desert, but a desert upon which no sun had ever shone.
The ceiling was so high that the light of the black and white lamps could not reach its end.
Pillars of black stone, carved with figures of beings that had never drawn breath on Earth, stood in rows to the far end of the hall.
The floor was covered in cold, uneven flagstones, and upon them, drawn in blood still wet, were symbols.
Circles within circles, lines written in the language of the dead, and at the center of them all — a perfect circle of goat heads.
Eight goat heads.
The skin flayed from the skulls, their eyes closed, yet somehow still watching.
Their twisted horns rose toward the temple’s stone sky like praying hands.
Eight men in white stood around the circle.
White gloves.
White hoods that cast shadows over their faces, shadows that concealed all emotion.
None of them moved.
They were like statues, but statues that breathed.
And around the circle, at a respectful distance — the agents stood.
Sai, with his smiling mask, had his hands shoved into the pockets of his suit and was rocking impatiently on his heels.
Anusha, with her red tie and small round glasses, had her arms folded across her chest, her gaze fixed on Lloyd’s suspended body.
Calculating.
Always calculating.
Tara, with her braided black hair and oak wood necklace, stood near one of the pillars.
Her fingers were slightly dusty.
Her eyes were on Lloyd, but not like the others.
Her gaze was not measuring, not scrutinizing, not pitying.
Her gaze was recording.
As if she wanted to remember every detail, for later.
For when Lloyd was no longer Lloyd.
Valerius, with his long blond hair falling over the shoulders of his black suit, stood one step ahead of the rest.
His hands were clasped behind his back, his chest thrust forward — always resembling the statue of a victorious general.
Even in this temple of death, he maintained his self-esteem.
And at the center of it all, closer than anyone to Lloyd — Sofia.
Her long black hair was tied back, and her golden-brown eyes gleamed in the temple’s dark light.
A smile rested on her lips.
The same smile James had seen, in the final seconds of his forgotten life.
Lloyd’s body floated at the center of the circle.
Seven chains held him.
Not from the ceiling, not from the walls — from the air itself.
Chains of black metal, with links that did not catch the light, only swallowed it.
Two chains at the right wrist.
One chain at the left hand.
Two chains at the ankles — right and left.
One in the spine, right between the shoulder blades, driven so deep that its tip glowed beneath the skin.
One passed through the throat.
From one side, out the other.
And the final chain — in the heart.
Precisely on the chest.
Where, if you removed Lloyd’s clothes, you could see the chain moving beneath the skin, coiling around the heart muscle, quickening and slowing with each beat of his heart.
Lloyd was bloodied.
His face was covered in a layer of dried blood that had formed tiny cracks.
His clothes were torn, and beneath the torn fabric, wounds fresh and old, one on top of another.
No one here cared about treating him.
This place was a prison.
The silence was heavy.
Even Sai wasn’t talking.
Even Anusha wasn’t turning her dice in her pocket.
Sofia took a step forward.
Her shoes made no sound on the cold flagstones, as if she didn’t walk but glided over the air.
Her gaze fixed on Lloyd.
On that black, bloody hair.
On those bound hands.
On that chain passing through his throat.
And she smiled.
“Well… let’s begin.”
Her voice echoed through the temple, from pillar to pillar, from wall to wall.
It was calm.
Very calm.
But every word was like a knife being slowly twisted in a wound.
Sai stepped forward.
He joked — but his voice no longer carried its usual playfulness.
At the bottom of his voice was something like…
caution.
Even fear.
“Sofia… he’s your nephew. Do you really want to put the Prince of Hell inside him?”
Without taking her eyes off Lloyd, Sofia answered.
Calm.
Deadly calm.
“I know. That’s why I want to give him the Prince of Hell as a gift.”
A pause.
Sai’s breaths sounded far too loud in the temple’s silence.
“If he survives…” Sofia tilted her head slightly.
The light slid across her honey-colored eyes.
“…I’ll turn him into a puppet. My own. Like the rest.”
Valerius laughed.
His voice was loud and hollow, the kind that echoed through the temple and repeated several times.
He brought his hands from behind his back and folded them across his chest.
Lifted his chin.
“You really are a model aunt, Sofia. They should give you the Best Aunt of the Year award.”
Sofia didn’t even turn her gaze to Valerius.
Her smile deepened.
Tara took a step forward.
Her voice was calm — not sarcastic, not afraid.
Just factual.
“Emotions have no meaning for us.” She gestured toward an agent standing in the corner of the hall — one of those in a black suit and a plain white mask.
“He has always been at the human breeding farm. Not just him — his entire lineage. Thirty thousand years. The Comson Organization has killed three billion humans over the course of history. In secret. Without ever filling a single page of any newspaper.”
Tara turned her gaze back to Lloyd.
“He is not just one of the victims. He is a vessel. It makes no difference what we put inside him. The soul of a child, or the Prince of Hell.”
Anusha cut her off.
“Enough. Begin.”
The eight men in white took one simultaneous step forward.
And the chanting began.
Their language belonged to no human.
The sounds emerged from their throats, but never passed through their mouths — they leaped directly from their larynxes into the air.
Frequencies that settled in the bones, in the brain, in the soles of the feet.
Each word was like someone hammering against the wall of your skull, but not from the outside, from within.
The air grew cold.
So cold that breaths turned to vapor.
Water droplets settled on the metal of the chains and froze.
And then — a sound.
A scream.
Not from the mouths of the men in white.
From the goat heads.
Eight goat heads, simultaneously, their sewn-shut mouths opened, and a sound emerged from the depths of their being — a scream not made of air, but of memory.
The sound of three billion dead.
The sound of breeding farms.
The sound of those who never were because they were never allowed to be.
The heads caught fire.
Black fire.
Flames that gave no light, only shifted darkness from one place to another.
The heads burned one by one, the skull bones crushing, the horns bending and collapsing inward — without turning to ash.
And in the midst of that black fire, one of the men in white — the tallest of them, close to two meters, with a stature straighter than the rest — rose from the ground.
He floated.
He rose, rose higher, until he reached the level of Lloyd’s eyes.
Lloyd was still unconscious.
Still suspended.
Blood still dripped from the chain through his throat onto the flagstones, drop by drop, like an hourglass whose time had run out.
The man in white raised his hand.
In his hand was a knife.
Not a ritual knife, not a ceremonial knife.
A butcher’s knife.
Its handle was of bone, its blade of black stone honed in black fire.
His gaze fixed on Lloyd’s closed eyes.
And he struck.
The knife sank to the hilt in Lloyd’s chest.
Right where the heart chain moved in and out beneath the skin.
Blood erupted.
Not like a spring, like a cloud.
A crimson cloud that rose from Lloyd’s chest and spread through the cold temple air.
Each drop fell into the black fire and made a sound like a hiss — the sound of oil poured into a hot skillet.
Lloyd didn’t even stir.
He was unconscious.
Or perhaps something beyond unconsciousness — somewhere between death and life, between mortal and something that was not.
The man in white pulled the knife out.
More blood came.
And then — he himself caught fire.
It started from his fingers.
Black fire settled on the white gloves, and a moment later covered his entire body.
He opened his mouth — he wanted to scream — but no sound came out.
Only fire.
Only blackness devouring him.
In three seconds, nothing remained of him.
Only a trace of ash floating in the air, and then — nothing.
As if he had never been.
The second man in white caught fire.
The third.
The fourth.
The fifth.
The sixth.
The seventh.
The eighth.
One by one.
Like candles whose time had come.
They didn’t scream.
They only caught fire and vanished.
No trace remained.
No bone, no tooth, not even a scrap of their white garments.
Sofia moved her lips silently: “Hurry…”
And suddenly — the chains moved.
Not to release.
They sank inward.
Directly into Lloyd’s body.
All at once.
Like snakes slithering into their holes in fear, but this was not fear, this was purpose.
The two chains on the right hand sank from the wrist into the forearm bone, the one on the left hand passed through the palm and traveled to the elbow.
The ankle chains coiled from the ankles into the calves, splitting the bone and vanishing into the marrow.
The spine chain bent and wound around each vertebra, like ivy around the trunk of an ancient tree.
The throat chain — that one — tightened, then loosened, then settled right behind the larynx, where the voice comes from.
And the final chain — the heart chain — stirred.
It coiled tightly around the muscle.
One loop.
Two loops.
Then it passed through the left ventricle and knotted in the aortic valve. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Lloyd stirred.
For the first time.
His mouth opened.
Soundlessly.
His body began to change.
He grew taller.
Before everyone’s eyes.
The vertebrae of his spine lengthened one by one.
His arms and legs stretched, his shoulders broadened.
His skin turned red.
The color of lava.
The heat of his being was so intense that the air around him began to ripple, like hot days above asphalt.
The veins beneath his skin had turned black.
He grew lean.
Not weak — honed.
Like a sword pulled from the heart of fire.
The muscles beneath the red skin were gathered, compressed, ready.
His hair turned white.
The black was drawn from the ends to the roots, and from the roots, whiteness burst forth like poison.
The hair grew longer, to the shoulders, to the waist.
His eyes.
Became voids.
Pure blackness.
Emptiness.
No pupil, no iris, no white.
Two holes into nothingness.
Whatever fell into those eyes did not return.
And then — the horns.
From the forehead.
From both sides, right above the eyebrows.
First a small bulge beneath the skin, then the skin tearing, then two twisted horns rising toward the temple’s stone sky.
They were black, like the chains.
Their surface smooth and glossy, like volcanic glass.
And the wings.
From the back.
Right where the spine chain had entered.
The skin tore, but no blood spilled — only blackness.
Two bat-like wings, enormous.
A black membrane stretched between long, slender bones.
Each wing was as long as Lloyd’s own height.
They opened him up, in the air, like an angel.
A fallen angel.
He was no longer Lloyd.
He was Ignaras.
Prince of Hell.
His eyes — those two voids of nothingness — slowly swept across the temple.
Over the white-robed men who had turned to ash.
Over the burned goat heads.
Over the black-suited agents who had taken several steps back.
And then — he spread his wings.
Just slightly.
A meter or two.
But space bent.
The lamplight bent.
Not that it went out, but its path altered, as if distances had been rearranged incorrectly.
The stone pillars that had stood for a thousand years groaned — the sound of cracking, the sound of stone under the pressure of something greater than stone.
Everyone stepped back.
Sai, one step.
Valerius, two steps.
Anusha — only half a step, but her hand had gone into her pocket, toward the dice.
Tara neither stepped back nor forward.
She only watched.
But Sofia — Sofia stepped forward.
One step.
Two steps.
Three steps.
Until she stood beneath the shadow of Ignaras’s wings.
Her smile was the deepest smile she had ever worn.
Her honey-colored eyes gleamed before the two black voids.
As if she were unwrapping a birthday present.
“Welcome.”
Ignaras placed his feet on the ground.
The cold, black flagstones cracked beneath his bare feet.
Black fire burst from under his steps and then died out again.
His stature was now two and a half meters — taller than everyone in the temple.
His twisted horns cast monstrous shadows on the walls in the dim light.
He did not fold his wings — he kept them half-open, ready.
And then — he spoke.
His voice did not come from the bottom of his throat.
It came from the bottom of non-being.
A voice that was both rage and calm.
Like a volcano that has just decided to awaken and is contemplating whether it’s worth it.
“So… this…”
His gaze at Sofia.
At her smile.
At her honey-colored eyes.
At the hands that had designed this ritual.
“…is the mortal world?”
Sofia did not answer.
She only smiled.
To be continued…