The disease was in him.

Valdemar felt it crawling under his skin. A horde of bacteria sailed his bloodstream in an attempt to infect the island of his heart. The blackened fluids that had transformed Bertrand into a monster spread like a puddle of oil on clear water.

Valdemar’s body was no fertile ground for conquest. His will inhabited each cell of his body. His organs were a self-aware conglomerate. He didn’t particularly need any of them to live anymore, so they could focus their resources on fighting back the infection. Valdemar was born from the black blood; it was simply a matter of assimilating this sample.

“By taking on the sins of others, you have opened yourself to darkness.”

But the black blood was more than a plague. It was a vector between man and the divine, the part and the whole.

Valdemar showed no hint of the conflict within himself to others. He stood alone as Marianne moved to her retainer’s side.

“I…” Bertrand looked around, his hands trembling. He had recovered his human form but not his wits yet. “I remember the rat man and… and the black…”

“It’s alright, Bertrand,” Marianne comforted her retainer as she helped him get back on his feet. Hermann tossed the vampire his scholarly robes to protect his nakedness, revealing his own reptilian glory for all to see. “You are home.”

She’s struggling to hold back tears, Valdemar observed. Marianne had struck him as stone-faced when first they met, but now he understood that she was quite the emotive person underneath. After so many sacrifices we finally achieved a victory.

“This changed nothing.”

The voice in his mind had changed. It had grown deeper, clearer, and multiplied. The voice of Shelley reverberated with that of an old man and the ceaseless chittering of countless vermin. A billion mouths spoke with hideous unity.

“The black blood reveals what lies within. An inner beast grows wilder. The evil within is magnified.” Valdemar sensed an otherworldly presence peek through his eyes when he looked at Bertrand. “This man spent his unlife suppressing his hunger for blood. Merciful Ialdabaoth only stripped the veil of deceit he had cast on himself.”

Besides Hermann, who was checking up on his canvas in preparation for the Painted World ritual, Lord Bethor alone did not tend to Bertrand’s woes. Whereas Liliane checked up on the vampire and Iren helped him stand, the Dark Lord instead eyed Valdemar with an unreadable gaze.

He knows what’s happening to me, Valdemar realized. Was Lord Bethor considering whether he should strike him down where he stood in case he fell under Ialdaboath’s influence? Or did he trust the summoner to prevail on his own?

“Does it matter? He cannot stop what is to come. You feel it, don’t you? The end is here, the time is now.”

Valdemar might have burnt the hedge maze to cinders, the air smelled of rancid fumes and putrid waters. A current of foul magic barely suppressed by Empress Aratra’s sorcery flowed through the ground beneath his feet. The great black pillar at the center of the institute breathed as if its blackened stone had turned to flesh. Ktulu was tenser than ever.

Valdemar glanced over the tall walls of the Institute and beyond the shield protecting Lord Och’s fortress. A tall pillar of crimson light had risen from the city of Pleroma and the terrible well at its center.

The seal binding Crétail was breaking down.

The dam holding back the tide of the Nahemoth’s power would fall sometime soon. The entire cavern would transform into a demiplane where the frontier between imagination and reality meant nothing. Madness would rule the waking world.

Worst of all, Crétail would follow the blood to his brother. Twins separated in the womb would become one again; one with their Father Ialdabaoth. The seals shall break and all of Underland would return to the Blood from which it originated.

And the mastermind behind this disaster would soon show his dreadful face.

“We are rot and vermin,” sang the swarm in Valdemar’s mind. “We are the plague prophet of the red prince and the unholy spirit. We are the angel of the abyss. Men called us Aleksander, and Shelley, and so many names, but in truth we are Swarm. We are Hunger.”

Images flashed through Valdemar’s mind. Visions of an old man with the Verney look the summoner had inherited, a cadaverous ghoul with red-rimmed eyes and rats crawling out of his mouth. The monstrous face of Shelley grew out of the back of the creature’s head, laughing.

“None of us were not worthy,” the ghastly figure whispered as a thousand red eyes blinked in the darkness surrounding him. Our blood was thick and strong, but lacked the richness of a foreign world. But our work was not in vain. Your mother became the fertile soil from which the Red Grail grew.”

“Why?” Valdemar muttered to the abomination. He wasn’t certain if this dialogue was entirely happening in his mind or if the others could listen to his words.

“Why?”

“Why serve Ialdabaoth?” Valdemar asked. “Whatever it promised you, immortality, divinity, a place at his side, it’s all a delusion. It will absorb all life in Underland into itself once it awakens. We will all become cells in a greater superorganism, unable to influence anything.”

“We know,” the abomination that had once been his great-grandfather Aleksander Verney and Shelley answered without hesitation. Its bloody lips morphed into a toothless grin. Its eyes were eaten from within, leaving only two black pits atop a husk of hollowed skin.

“Then why?”

Why all this suffering? Why did his mother have to bear him and Crétail against her will? Why did so many have to die to create the Red Grail and bring about the world’s end? What did he hope to gain?

“Life.”

Darkness swallowed the world.

Once more Valdemar stood alone on the cold surface of Ialdabaoth’s stone skin, under the faint light of the Whitemoon. The terrible planetoid that had haunted mankind’s nightmares and deprived it of its sun grinned like Lord Och’s skull. Its rocky surface changed into the Mask of the Nightwalker on Valdemar’s face: an unending spiral of death and infinity.

“Open your eyes.”

Valdemar saw through the Whitemoon and the baleful constellations.

He peered beyond the light and saw the tentacles wiggling behind, the eyes and the flesh festering at the heart of shining stars. Each of them was a fragment of broken light, cast down from a realm of brightness.

The Pleromians believed the stars were evil. That anyone watching under the sky exposed themselves to their malign influence.

“They are all alive,” his great-grandfather declared. His words echoed with the despair of someone who had seen too much. “All Strangers.”

The Pleromians had been right.

Life and lights were Strangers to this universe. An infestation from another realm.

Space was death. It was cold and ice and lifeless stones wandering a barren expanse without ends. It was the opposite of life’s corrupt warmth and chaotic movement. It was the utter sterility of nothingness, the perfect order of death.

And when the darkness gazed at the stars, it could only feel hate.

“The universe despises us.”

The void hated the life that had despoiled its emptiness. The universe yearned to return to its original state, to the lifeless expense it had once been before the Strangers and the stars infected it. It sought to extinguish all warmth and light until only barren rocks and darkness remained.

So the void fought back.

Valdemar’s sight expanded further, beyond the solar system around which Ialdabaoth orbited. He gazed at the sea of darkness and the ships of stone sailing it: malicious asteroids looking for inhabited planets to crash on; clouds of cosmic dust and ice large enough to blanket the light of stars, and rogue moons roaming the cosmos searching for warmth.

Some were so large that they made the imprisoned Ialdabaoth look like a small moon.

“Their numbers are beyond count.”

One day, the universe would know peace again. Even if it took a billion years the darkness would never stop yearning for the peaceful coldness of death.

Valdemar’s sight shrank, back to Ialdabaoth and the Whitemoon. Two soldiers fighting in a conflict spanning all of existence.

“This is the War in Heaven.”

Once more Valdemar stood alone on the cold surface of the world. His ancestor Aleksander faced him, now a man again. His eyes were blackened with forbidden knowledge and the madness of someone who had seen too much. A human-faced rat stood on his shoulder, his eyes a malicious shade of red. Shelley.

“Our existence is an error,” Aleksander Verney declared. His voice no longer echoed with that of a festering swarm, but with the cold certainty of a true nihilist. “Our survival is meaningless. Our time is limited. Ialdabaoth and the Strangers are on the side of life. Our side. The Cold will turn us into dead things and then nothing. If Ialdaboath does not wake up, the spiral of death will drag us ever closer to annihilation.”

He had stared into the abyss and blinked.

“Ialdabaoth is our promised land. The nightmare of the Outer Darkness will vanish as it awakens, ending our eternal torment. All souls will return to him and achieve peace in a great singularity. Our memories, our history, our past, and our future will forever survive inside its mind. We will surrender our individuality and find freedom from the torment of mortal existence.”

The madman smiled as if truly at peace, as did his rat familiar.

“All will be one.”

Valdemar, who hadn’t said a word, looked on as his great-grandfather extended a hand in his direction.

“You are our messiah,” Aleksander Verney said, praying, begging. His rat familiar was silent. “Save us. Save us all. Save us from ourselves.”

Valdemar gazed at the bleak, uncaring cosmos surrounding him. He stared at the cold darkness of space and the hateful stars populating it, at the Whitemoon hanging above his head. Then he looked down at his maddened ancestor and the dark truth he embodied.

And at that moment, Valdemar came up with his own answer.

“Are you done prattling on?”

He didn’t care.

“All I hear from you is fear,” Valdemar told his ancestor, his resolve strong as steel. “Fear of the unknown, of the future, of trying. You believe we humans have already lost, that we are helpless; so you do not even attempt to find a better solution.”

“There is none.” Aleksander’s words were as hollow as his resolve.

“Then make one.”

The rat familiar cackled and his master snorted. “Can you?” Shelley rasped on his master’s shoulder.

“Yes.”

Maybe his ancestor had shown Valdemar the full truth, or at least the one he believed in. Maybe the forces hostile to mankind were strong and mighty. Maybe the universe hated them. Maybe life was a meaningless error and randomness ruled the cosmos.

And so what?

If the Strangers and the Cold were so powerful, one of them would have won by now. And though existence was full of hardships and without meaning, it was still worth fighting for. People like Marianne, Hermann, Liliane, and Iren deserved to live free from the god’s shackles. The Empire of Azlant was a bad place to live in, but it was still better than the alternatives; and for all of its dysfunctions, it wasn’t a hopeless case either.

“I will never stop believing that I can make the world a better place. I will never surrender to fear and ignorance.” Valdemar glared at his ancestor. “For I would become like you.”

Aleksander Verney’s sneer turned into a scowl and Shelley snapped his jaws.

“Foolish child.”

They struck without warning.

Valdemar’s spiritual self stumbled as a telepathic assault crashed against his mental defenses like a tide. The icy surface of the world cracked open to unleash a tide as thousands of vermin emerged from the rifts. Rats crawled on Valdemar’s ankles and swiftly buried him under their mass.

It wasn’t a single soul attacking Valdemar but billions of them. The malformed spirits of rats, the twisted souls of maddened cultists and Ialdabaoth’s desperate thralls combined their power to strike as one.

The sheer weight of a hive mind overwhelmed Valdemar from all sides faster than he could muster his defenses. Without Marianne present, his dream defenses were poor.

“You have sipped the milk of the gods,” Aleksander Verney and Shelley declared as their prince drowned under the weight of the flood. The rat familiar merged into his master’s shoulder like a twisted tumor. “Your human half may resist the inevitable, but the other will answer the call. Your father invested us with the power to bring you to heel. You will serve your purpose as we did.”

No oneiromancer could have created barriers powerful enough to repel the onslaught of a million souls.

So Valdemar ate them.

A hundred mouths opened all over his skin and bit the rats on his skin. Their fangs cut through the essence making up their dreaming selves and swallowed their memories like fine wine.

Valdemar’s fingers turned into black tentacles that grabbed attackers by the dozens. They fed his gluttonous maws. No amount of victims could satisfy his hunger. Souls fell down his gullet and joined the Pleromian’s remnants at the bottom of his belly.

Aleksander Verney’s and Shelley’s eyes widened in shock as their hive mind fell back. Its members didn’t fear death, but Valdemar offered them no such mercy. “How?” man and rat asked at the same time.

“My dreamscape has been malformed since my birth,” Valdemar mused. “The doors were broken. Oneiromancers thought it was a defect and no doubt you thought it would make me easier to control.”

But after he had devoured the Pleromian’s soul, Valdemar had understood the truth. He was not born to defend, but to invade. To infiltrate the primordial dream and consume the psyche of mankind from within.

A predator had no need to bar access to his lair.

Those foolish enough to challenge him there would only find death.

“You said it yourself, swarm. As deluded and loyal as you are, in the end you are no more than a tool of the Strangers. While I…”

Valdemar changed his dream visage into a swirling abyss of darkness from which no light could escape.

“I am half of one.”

Valdemar had made peace with that. He would embrace the Stranger and the human in equal measures without sacrificing one for the other.

He had been born a bridge between worlds and accepted it.

The dreamscape around them trembled as Valdemar’s power destabilized it. The plague prophet’s swarm retreated into the cracks, abandoning their terrified leaders to the mercy of the monster they had created.

“What’s wrong, prophet?” Valdemar mocked him as his spiritual avatar grew in size until he overshadowed the baleful stars above. “Don’t you recognize the face of your messiah? Isn’t that what you wanted to see?”

Aleksander Verney and Shelley seemed to have a crisis of faith all of a sudden.

“I will eat your soul and shit it out.” Valdemar’s tentacles lashed at his enemies’ spirits. “Not even Ialdabaoth will pick up the pieces.”

Aleksander Verney and Shelley collapsed into a pile of worms before the tentacles could grab them.

Their souls had run away rather than stand their ground.

“Crawl back to your tomb, you apostles of cowardice!” Valdemar snarled as the dreamscape collapsed. “I deny you! I deny the oblivion you crave! I deny your god its victory!”

The vision world shattered like glass.

Valdemar returned to the waking world where less than a second had passed. Lord Bethor alone seemed aware of what had transpired, his chin moving down and up.

A nod of approval, with a dash of respect.

Valdemar would prove that he deserved it today. “Hermann?”

The troglodyte nodded. His painting stood adorned on a stone wall, the symbols on the canvas simmering with a magical glow. “Liliane, Iren…” Hermann rasped. “You must evacuate with the wounded… while you still can.”

“Bertrand, I am sorry my friend,” Marianne apologized to her retainer. She alone would stay with Valdemar and Hermann as they ran their ritual. “I will tell you everything later. I must ask you to rest for now.”

“I cannot…” Bertrand coughed red blood and never finished his sentence. He covered his mouth with a hand. “My lungs…”

“We’ll get him to the infirmary, don’t worry,” Liliane reassured Marianne.

Iren smiled as he helped Bertrand move by putting the vampire’s arm over his shoulder. “It’s up to us, the supporting actors, to make sure the leads can shine in the spotlight.”

“There are no leads nor supporters,” Valdemar replied. “Everyone matters.”

“Never said that friend,” Iren replied with a smile that implied otherwise. “But all we can do right now is pray that your plan succeeds.”

“Do not pray, doppelganger.” Lord Bethor’s eyes were cold. “Think.”

Iren knew better than to talk back to the Dark Lord. He and Liliane carried the dizzied Bertrand away from Valdemar’s sight to take cover in the Institute’s bowels.

Hermann turned to his colleague and friend. “Valdemar, if something goes wrong… My art collection is yours to distribute. If possible… I would like for my work to go back… to my people.”

“You will not die,” Valdemar replied. “I won’t let you. But I appreciate the faith you put in me.”

“It is not faith… but trust, my friend.” Hermann’s claws trembled with a mix of fear and anticipation. “At long last… we shall make our Painted World.”

“The Nahemoth will be freed sometime soon,” Lord Bethor said as he looked at the walls. “Its herald is already here.”

A quake hit the Institute. A second followed and then a third.

“Footsteps,” Marianne whispered.

The plague prophet peered over the walls with his thousand eyes.

A hooded cloak of flayed wererat skin covered a festering mass of vermin assembled in the vague shape of a human visage. Rats and mice formed the bulk of them alongside dismembered bats. Their skins were stitched together, their tails were interwoven like a cloth’s fibers, their mouths chittering with hunger.

Shelley occupied the center of the foul tapestry of the swarm’s grim visage. The wererat’s face was twisted into an expression of rapture, the unbridled joy of a martyr enjoying the pain of unholy rapture. The familiar had returned to his master at last.

This was a preview of the fate that awaited all life in Underland. The individual subsumed into the whole. Flesh stitched into a grim singularity of moribund flesh.

Aleksander Verney had returned from the dead in his master’s image.

The giant horror was a living mountain taller than the Institute’s walls. Its hood reached close to the ceiling of stone that overshadowed the entire Domain of Paraplex. Shoulders appeared as a hand of stitched rats lifted a scepter of bones thick as a stone tower. The tip was shaped into the form of a cross where the Lilith had been nailed with black spikes. A weapon she had been, a weapon she would be.

We are Swarm, the vision had said. We are Hunger.

The abomination flung its scepter at the Institute’s shield with a shriek that shook all of Underland.

The magical barrier collapsed in a rain of crimson dust alongside a chunk of the stone walls. The Knights unfortunate enough to stand on fortifications were swept aside. Qlippoths that had battered helplessly against the barrier immediately moved into the Institute.

A thunderbolt bounced off a hundred of them and turned them to dust. Empress Aratra floated into the air and vaporized a hundred more monsters with a wave of her hand.

Lord Hagith teleported where Aleksander had shattered the walls and grew in size himself until he covered the hole with his body mass. Lady Phul and the transformed Lord Ophiel struck the demonic swarm from above with spells. Lord Phaleg banished Qlippoths back to their realm with his summoning expertise.

The Dark Lords had the situation well in hand.

Lord Bethor, unwilling to leave all the glory to his associates, snapped his fingers. Space cracked with a bolt of crimson lightning and a mighty creature appeared behind him. The creature was thrice the size of a carriage beetle, a mighty behemoth of blackened scales. Long raven wings supported its lizard-like body. Crimson eyes peered at Valdemar with inhuman intelligence.

“Impossible…” Hermann whispered in shock and awe. Marianne didn’t say a word, but her widening eyes betrayed her surprise.

Even Valdemar struggled to trust his own senses.

A dragon.

A young one, but a dragon all the same.

As for the way Lord Bethor had called the beast to his side… Dragons weren’t creatures from other worlds. They couldn’t be summoned like Qlippoths. It could only mean one thing.

A familiar.

Lord Bethor’s familiar was a dragon. Somehow, Valdemar strongly suspected that it was related to the one whose corpse rested beneath the Dark Lord’s tower. Its spawn perhaps?

“We will deal with the vermin,” Lord Bethor said as he leaped on his dragon’s back with supreme confidence. “Bind the Nahemoth and prove us wrong, Valdemar.”

The Dark Lord’s steed took flight in a cloud of ash and dust. The dragon breathed fire at the plague prophet the moment he came into range. Hundreds of charbroiled rats fell off the creature, only to be immediately replaced.

“Amazing,” Marianne said as Lord Bethor’s mount dodged a swing from Aleksander’s mighty staff. “Simply amazing.”

“Ktulhu,” Valdemar’s familiar blurted. Its summoner sensed an undercurrent of jealousy in his partner’s voice. “Ktulhulu!”

“But where is Lord Och?” Marianne asked with a frown. “I don’t see him.”

To Valdemar’s confusion, he realized that she had a point. The ancient lich wasn’t among the Dark Lords confronting the swarm nor the creatures flooding into the Institute. Lord Och had vanished when his demesne was besieged.

Has he been destroyed? Valdemar couldn’t believe it himself. Knowing the lich, he was probably preparing some kind of foul play. Are you finally springing your plan into action, my teacher?

Valdemar didn’t have time to wonder.

The world snapped.

Valdemar sensed it. Something in the very fabric of reality had broken. An invisible cog holding time and space together had dysfunctioned, creating a subtle breakdown in the machinery of the universe. An invisible force rippled through the air, the stones, the flesh and the soul. For a split second, nothing visible happened.

A moment later, madness ruled the world.

The air turned purple. Pictures of screaming faces and broken hands formed into the Institute’s walls. Yellow fumes erupted from the ashes of burned trees and Qlippoths in maddening shapes that bent the mind. Eyes opened on the Institute’s black pillar, atop which blue brains grew alongside trees of neurons and tendrils. Space bent and twisted into crooked angles and twisted turns.

The Institute was turning into a demiplane of madness.

“The Nahemoth… is freed,” Hermann rasped as his hands brushed against the Painted World. “It’s… it’s here.”

Valdemar sensed its approach. A black hole in the fabric of reality opened above them as a terrible horror manifested through; the shadow of a malformed, stillborn child the size of a dragon. Black tentacles erupted from his pale skin and his jaw opened to reveal a hundred sharp teeth. The Nahemoth’s wail chilled Valdemar to the bone.

I hear you Crétail, the summoner thought as Marianne immediately moved in front of him. She couldn’t protect him from that creature. Among mankind, only a Dark Lord could hope to defeat a Nahemoth in single combat.

But Valdemar had made friends in strange places.

Valdemar removed the mask from his face and sprayed it with his blood. The vile artifact let out mist where the unholy fluid touched it. The dark force which had gifted Valdemar with it had taken notice.

“Come, Nightwalker.” Valdemar slammed the mask against the ground and poured his magic into it. “May the Cold freeze the Blood!”

The Mask of the Nightwalker shattered into splinters as the spell took effect.

A dark shadow rose from the remains and the world became cold.