The wind had changed.
It no longer carried the scent of rusted cars or smoke—but of soil. Freshly turned, damp, and ancient. Like something had clawed its way up from beneath the city.
Aidan Cross moved through the ghost of Boston with his weapon drawn. The streets were hollowed out—not just abandoned, but emptied. Storefronts gaped like skulls. Fires burned unattended. The sky hung low and red, the blood moon still suspended like a wound above the horizon.
He hadn't seen another living soul in hours.At least, not one still fully human.
He turned onto Shawmut Avenue, boots crunching through glass and broken rosaries. That's when he heard it—a voice rising from the ruins. Not a scream, not a cry.
A chant.
"Domine, miserere nobis..."
The Latin sent something cold down his spine. Not fear—recognition.
He followed it, down a narrow alley to a shattered stone archway. The sign above it, faded and crumbling, still read:
St. Helena's CathedralBuilt 1874. Abandoned 2020.
Except it wasn't empty.
Candlelight flickered within, moving like breath against the stained-glass ruins.
Aidan stepped inside, the old wooden door groaning under his weight.
The interior was devastation layered in ritual.
Pews overturned. Icons burned. But the altar had been cleared—scrubbed clean, lit with a dozen bone-white candles. At its center lay a corpse. Pale. Rigid. Its skin carved with deliberate sigils—triangles, spirals, broken suns. Blood leaked slowly from the lines, but did not spread. Instead, it pooled into a perfect circle.
A man stood above the body in ragged priest robes, whispering in rhythm.
He looked up as Aidan entered.
Eyes gray. Not empty—resigned.
"You've come," the priest rasped. "Praise be. I wasn't sure you'd hear the Call."
Aidan kept his weapon raised. "You're the one doing this?"
The priest chuckled softly. "No, soldier. I only interpret. The real authors wrote this moment long before either of us were born."
He stepped back from the altar with a slow, deliberate grace.
"I was once called Father Elijah. But names are distractions now.""Only blood and purpose remain."
The corpse on the altar twitched.
Just a single muscle. Then another.
Aidan's grip tightened. "What the hell is this?"
Father Elijah gestured to the glowing runes beneath the body. "A test. Of lineage. He bore the Flame. But his vessel was unworthy."
He reached into his robes and drew a thin ritual knife—obsidian, jagged. With one motion, he slit the body's throat. A last breath escaped. The blood sizzled against the symbols.
And then the body disintegrated—ash to air. The candles blew out all at once.
Aidan stepped forward, fury boiling just under his skin. "You kill people to test your theory?"
Elijah looked him dead in the eye. "Not people. Bloodlines."
A pause. Then:
"You've felt it, haven't you?""The heat under your skin. The voice in the silence. The light that answers when you bleed."
Aidan's left hand pulsed faintly. The veins glowed like fractured glass under his skin.
He said nothing.
Elijah smiled, not unkindly. "You are not the first. But you may be the last."
"The Hollow God has awakened. The old pacts are broken. Those who carried the Flame are being hunted—by their kin, by beasts, by what's left of Heaven.""You survived Moldova. That alone makes you different."
Aidan flinched. No one had ever said that word to him since the incident.
Moldova.
The raid. The chanting villagers. The command to burn everything and speak of nothing.
He still dreamed of the girl who stood in the flames and did not burn.
Elijah stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Do you dream of the fire, Aidan? Of the screaming stars and the mirrors that show your death before it comes?"
Aidan nodded slowly. "Every night."
The priest sighed. "Then you are one of the Ignarii—the sleepers. The Flame burns in your blood, waiting. You don't need faith. Only pain."
Lightning cracked across the sky, though no storm came.
The church trembled.
Something moved beneath the floor—something massive. Like breath rising from the stone below.
Aidan stepped back instinctively. "What the hell is that?"
Elijah turned toward the altar. "The flame does not rise without trial. You must be tempered. You must burn."
"They're coming for you, Aidan. Those who lost the Flame long ago.""They wear flesh now. And they do not die easy."
Suddenly, every candle in the cathedral flared.The stained glass exploded outward.And from the ruined roof above, a howl descended—inhuman and wet.
They weren't alone anymore.
Aidan turned toward the sound, muscles tensing.
Elijah only smiled.
"Now… the Covenant answers."