Prologue

  Throughout our fair Eden, you’ll find some of the more zealous folk remaining are prone to whisper a never-ending supply of terrible thoughts. God hates us; He’s forgotten us; He’s wronged us; on and on it goes. But chief at the forefront is a simple prospect that many—even those who have forgotten the Lord—do believe: they say we are in Hell. They say our ancestors, so blinded by fear and cowardice, were in the midst of their folly of flight dragged to the depths by the wrath of God.

  And who knows? Perhaps they’re right.

  I never believed such a thing. How could I? This world is all I know—all I’ve ever known. And that went for those who said such things too. No. No. All I’ve ever seen is a world of horror. True horror. But Hell? Daemons and fire and all those hideous machinations of the fell angel? I can’t. I won’t.

  Sure, during my years carrying out the tasks of my order, I’ve seen things one might consider strange. Monsters. Winged, fanged… horned. But in the days of the old imperium, men had seen these things a thousand times before—on a thousand other worlds. We’d most likely see them again.

  No. To… to wail, to cry out in anger at the sky, trembling, shaking in anger at some ‘great sin’ by God instead of coming to terms with the truth of our own arrogance, our own ego, our own humanity? That is a deviation of the spirit I will not succumb to.

  But regardless of my own… pride, I will not sit here and claim that these past hours had not made me feel like I might be a fool. A coward, even.

  When the master of my order came to me with a new mission, I did as I had a hundred times before: accepted without hesitation. Such was my loyalty. Such was my drive. And when I learned of the task, I thought I had been rewarded for my unwavering service—such was my hubris.

  To investigate the Maintenance Floors underneath the district of New Troy, and to discover the source of the incidents.

  The ‘incidents’, you might ask? Well, these were the occurrences that had raped and wrought the jubilation and joy that we’d felt since Enoch was risen from the dirt last year. These were harbingers of woe, and they had succeeded in crushing the hope for something better. The hope we didn’t know we had.

  In the district of New Troy, the southernmost area of our subterranean haven, men had gone missing; left their wives, their children, their families, their jobs. That was only the start, however. Soon enough, those wives were found dead. Defiled. Before… and after.

  And their kids? Missing too, same as their fathers.

  Whether it was the same fathers who did it, we can’t say. We’ve no DNA to reference, and no clues as to whoever might’ve done it. All we have is we know where they came from—and where they went: the floors beneath the district.

  One of the vigils patrolling the roads during the night had seen a naked man flee into the tunnels. His face was concealed. Hidden behind patchwork skin and fur crafted from the critters of the caverns in which we had built our city.

  Some of those upper echelon cretins, whose jobs were to think, had the unwelcoming idea that we’d finally come across a serial killer—or a cult of them, perhaps. It wasn’t unexpected, truthfully; the world we once knew had them—an abundance of them, actually. But others deemed this foolish. ‘Retarded’ was the word used by Viceroy John, if I am to believe my master. The viceroy argued that the Rot had evolved once—and it could evolve again. Clarification was needed.

  And so, instead of purging the tunnels of any life, the Vigils were actually forbidden from entering. It wasn’t like they could’ve done much, anyway. They weren’t of the few important enough to use the limited supply of weaponry we had. But regardless, the task was instead given to us—twenty-eight of us, in sets of two. I was given Gate Eight, alongside Acolyte Hildebrand—a young man of a respectable calibre… even if the rumours had me believe otherwise.

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  But he had proven himself in the hours we’d been down here. As we descended the brass stairs of New Troy and wandered corridors of tangled copper, all the while dodging rogue spurts of browned steam as dull red lights flickered overhead, we found the air to be turning strange. Overwhelming.

  It had started to cling to our throats like some ichor. A dragging flem which caught the back of our throats and reminded me—more than once—of that old saying of bile and death.

  Even though we knew it wasn’t the Rot—for we were not dead—we still made the move to wear our gas masks—a long, ancient form of a breathing apparatus which, frankly, looked more an elephant’s trunk than the standard of ‘high tech’, but regardless, it did the job.

  Following our better instincts, we pressed on. Masked as we were, the prolonged rasps of our filtered breathing seemed to slowly, yet surely, align with the ever-dying lights.

  About an hour into the cacophony of steam, rattles and the silence that waited for their passing, we found a skinned Imp, with its arse up against the sky. Its purple flesh contrasted a malignant scene against the red flickers overhead, and something in me came to an understanding of what that ancient, old fool thought.

  It wasn’t that kind of imp, mind you—although they certainly looked the part. The aforementioned old fool, in the early days of Eden, had noticed the familiarity and, in his arrogance, cursed us with an ever-lasting reminder of the reality we cannot accept. He did it five more times, too.

  Regardless of my hate towards the name we bestowed upon it, the little beasts served a marvelous purpose: food. We had scores of them huddled into pens, awaiting the butcher’s knife. It tasted good too—like chicken, or so they used to say.

  Although the very fact one was down here—instead of awaiting death in some farmer’s lot—had but one answer: this was the beast from whom the killer’s mask was crafted. The fur mentioned must’ve been its spinal mane, gone alongside its skin and fashioned into some wicked wig.

  Soon enough, we turned a corner and came across a decompression chamber. This was the mark of an exit to the caverns we were all too prone to forget. And also was entirely useless to us, as it was only to be used on the return. Thus we pressed on, turning a narrow corner four more times—as per the regulations.

  And there we saw it, the green door we were longing for; the end of our investigation, the sign for us to pack up and rest another day…

  Only the door wasn’t green. It was red. A stark, crimson red. In that moment—in our heart of hearts, we knew instantly: it was not paint. Our unspoken suspicions were confirmed when we came to a stop before the door.

  Acolyte Hildebrand shuddered as he slowly trailed his hand down the door—the wet, sloshing sound of the blood of the innocents breaking its structure and staining his glove. He wiped it off on his raven robes and drew the short, slender rifle from his waist, pulling back the bolt.

  We both knew what could only lay behind this door: without a mask, in such short supply, no man could survive out there. Yet there had to be something behind it. We had to look. Even if we didn’t want to.

  And we couldn’t call for backup, or reinforcements, or a centre of investigation. Our frail radios didn’t work down here. And we can’t even retreat. ‘Cowardice’ they’ll call it—they’ll call it for what it is. Without ascertaining what lay beyond, it would simply be retreating in fear of the unknown. That was not the mark of a Blade. There would be no relief. We alone must face what was beyond this door.

  I took hold of the slippery, blood ring in the dead-centre of the door and turned to the young man I’d only met today—yet he was the only one here. “Are you ready?”

  “Duty of the Blade,” he declared, uttering the motto of our order. The reassurance of our work, the consolidation of our duty. And, judging by those trembling, pale blue eyes behind the circles of his mask, it was needed—for him and me both.

  Strengthening my grip as splats of scarlet dropped and stained the floor, I turned the ring.

  The moment it creaked, you could see the darkness of the caverns on the other side. It was bereft of matter. A gate to nothing. Literally nothing. It creaked and croaked and in those passing moments I heard an old hag weeping and an image of a pointed nose, leaking snot into my ears, flashed through my mind.

  Finally, the door was open all the way and my lips began to tremble. Shaking. The rasping of both our masks had increased tenfold. Our bodies were chilling, our blood running cold. The air turned a thousand times cooler, and the flem in our throats hardened to stone.

  There was something in the eternal dark.