Warnings: Blood, violence, major character death
Disclaimer: These characters are not my property.
March, 1943
They were the guardians of the people, the protectors of the innocent, the keepers of secrets - the Men of Letters. Their secrets were many, and dark - things kept from the world for its own protection, things hidden away that were the substance of nightmares, things buried for all eternity in the depths of their bunker, never again to see the light of day.
But their deepest secret was this - darkness corrupts, and when you walk too close to it for too long, it will find a way in, a way to turn you into the very thing you hunt. And when the evil inside you walks among men, blood runs and secrets are born - secrets entombed deep under the feet of those who come after, secrets that wait, biding their time until the day when they will be set free.
November, 2013
Looking back, it's obvious to Sam now that they should have been more careful. It would have been so simple, really, to prevent everything that happened, the death and terror and pain - one simple act could have stopped it all before it ever began.
Hindsight is 20/20 - they should have mopped up the blood as soon as they were done, and everything wouldn't have gone so very wrong.
But they didn't.
Instead, they left it there on the floor of the dungeon, pooling in the lowest spot - demon blood, the blood of a Knight of Hell - Abaddon's blood. And they went out for drinks, out to celebrate the destruction of their enemy, not thinking, not realizing.
There's power in blood, in the rushing redness that is man's life force, and the blood of a demon is more powerful still, corrupted and defiled and filled with all of Hell's rage - powerful enough to set free secrets long since buried.
Evil resonates with evil, and from its pool the blood dripped down, seeping into the concrete, finding its way through the tiniest cracks, ruby red rivulets reaching down into the unseen depths, searching out the secrets that lay hidden there. And as it crept down through the earth, the blood found its way to those deepest, darkest secrets, red droplets running slowly down the bone-white of the skulls, dripping steadily through their gaping eyeless sockets, and waking the evil that had lain dormant for all those years.
There was nothing to mark when it awoke, no thunderclaps or earthquakes or even the flickering of a light to reveal its existence to the world. No, it came in silence, in silence and blood and darkness, for that was what it was. The silence of the grave, the blood of a thousand tortured souls, the darkness of eternal damnation, unleashed on the world above.
It would end the Men of Letters once and for all.