Firstly, I must emphatically state that this is not meant for the production of profit. I do not own the intellectual property of any of the established canon of Ms. Medrano's wonderful, fantastic underworld of people and places established in both Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel. Second, I must say that for the purpose of this story, non canonical liberties were taken to ensure the continuity, though not compliant with the established lore, of this particular story; which takes place twenty five years before the events of Hazbin Hotel and its sister property, Helluva Boss. I would also like to thank the artist Dani Draws, whose fantastically drawn colored daguerreotypes guided me in envisioning how Stolas' parents would look like. Please check out all of their other wonderful and awe-inspiring works at DaniDraws666 on Twitter. This work is, simply, a fan effort. I am and always will be a fan of this series, and this story is simply an exercise of my affinity and enjoyment of the blissful content Ms. Medrano and her dedicated team produce. I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading.

Safehouse Zulu is only used when other locations are believed to be compromised. We were headed there. It was across the river from Persephone Hills, that grand opulent stretch of neon and chrome that blinded most of the city's denizens with the comfortable starlight of what they never could have. It was where most of the white collar financiers and executives worked, those pseudo-deific businessmen and women that believed themselves equal to the lords and princes of Hell's vast royalty. They weren't, but the amount of weight they had in the commercial market alone made them integral to the sustainability of Hell's economy, placing them in a bothersome position of registrable power. Bram always spoke ill of them, citing them as an, "irrepressible nuisance, the rats in the walls of Versailles." Ornthir shared similar ideas, though it was less patronizing and more observational. He saw them as a time bomb, an irrasbale landmine eager to go off at the slightest detection of unauthorized movement. We shared a resentment for The Hills, us and half the city; but we ourselves, Ornthir and I and, in fact, the whole of the royal guard, were in a unique position.

We served the Goetia's. We were their protectors and their hitmen, we spent more time around them then our own families. Our workplaces were decadent, gilded palaces and lush, verdant gardens of colors unimaginable, of opulent marbled balconies and sumptuously decorated hallways. It was different behind the walls of the palace. The world seemed to stop at the door, not a single ounce of our imp reality existed past that point. Life within the palace was absent, disconnected from the streets. The truth of the outside only manifested whenever Bram permitted it or when one of his advisors or chamberlains unexpectedly let it slip. Ornthir couldn't stand it. He hated the disparities, the condescending platitudes, the fact that most of the time the guard was relegated to concealed, hidden posts that kept all of our imp faces tucked away from the delicate eyes of the palace's inhabitants. I was impartial to it. Power has a way of contorting the mind in irredeemable ways. It changes a man, changes a mind. I'd seen enough, even at 30 I was well versed in that inevitable calculus. The royals were nothing but another head on the chimera that was power in Hell, and I anticipated the same degrading treatment I got working for stock brokers and CEO's.

The Goetia's didn't disappoint, though Bram handled matters in a way that always puzzled me. He was a man of few words yet, though he treated us like objects, there was always the same level of unspoken recognition with his orders. If we completed the task, accomplished the objective to his liking, it was his silence that was the reward, a calm and stoic nod was all he needed to do, and it was all we needed from him to know that he was satisfied. Yet failure was answered with a different silence, one surgically cut with cold, stone-like words from his ossified beak. When he talked, it was a sign of trouble, a harbinger of icy reproach. He only used words when his silent edicts went unheeded, when those tacit rules of class and place and station were foolishly ignored. We were instruments. Things to be used and ordered and lorded over. It was part of the job. Part of life under the employ of the Goetia's.

Ornthir wanted to change that, wanted to fumigate that noxious evil polluting the minds of Pentagram City. It wasn't out of rage or violence, though many suspected as such. His desire for change was born from a more patriotic notion, a belief that equality was an extant, tangible virtue that should be freely expressed and exercised, especially by those who were never given the chance. It was a brilliant idea, one that got him a very devout and loyal following within the guard, but Pentagram City was never kind to pleasant notions like that…

He was quiet for most of the drive outside of his occasional mutterings of a problematic traffic condition. His tail hung off the nylon seat next to his legs, its pointed head twitching whenever he muttered. The loose fitting tee he wore, when creased against his sturdy body whenever he turned the wheel, showed the defined volume of his athletic build. His gaze was steady and observant as he navigated attentively through the fluctuating stream of cars and buses, never once grinding to an abrupt stop nor lurching back with a hastened start. Though, I did notice on occasion his eyes darting to the sides of us; to the cars boxing us in and, whenever we stopped, to the often crowded sidewalk. They were quick movements, but enough to tell me that he was maintaining a constant vigilance, as if he was looking for the suspicious.

We were off that day, it being a Sunday, and the city was still full and pulsing with the last bits of energy from the morning commute. Oso Village was always the last to simmer down to the mid-morning tedium even though most of the neighborhood was residential, save for the spare ramshackle bodega or nail salon. It was, comparatively, a stark oddity to the rest of The Lower East Side because it was, simply, the most beautiful. I've never heard of such childhood laughter outside of its border, never saw the bonding strength of its inhabitants anywhere else in the city. It still had the same worn brick and broken concrete as Imp City and Bifons Park, but the amount of personal decoration and graffiti that was tapestrated over the ugly and broken walls of the neighborhood was almost infinite, unending, stretching interminably from block to block, as if a dream unawoken. The aged, calcified scars left by the old bombers of The Men of Sodom were all still there, blasted out walls and irreparable, cratered roads, but they seemed to heal with each and every new visit. Every time I'd drive down those same brick enclosed canyons of street, I'd notice the wounds less and less and see the color of those peoples lives more and more, dancing wild and free within every new swirling addition to those mosaics of pastoral street art. I saw a rapture for living, a glee uninhibited that made the disenfranchised infrastructure seem less harsh, less horrid and shameful. I had seen that where the city had failed, the people of Oso Village filled the broken cracks of their lives not with more things, but with each other.

The car dipped slightly as one of its wheels dug into a pothole, its shocks absorbing all of the impact. Ornthir had them installed mainly because his son loved taking trips down to the village, but got scared that every bump had a bomb in it. We turned down a tight, grimy alleyway and parked the car in a boxed in back lot. It typically was used by the owners of the buildings the lot crouched behind, but Katie-Lin was gracious enough to permit us to park there. She was good people, a devout loyalist even in spite of her being a sinner. It was the Goetia family that helped her, and motivated sinners like her, to establish a vague presence around the city. Ornthir spoke poorly of the initiative in a placid, factual manner, stating that it was actually an effort to keep sinners out of the more important, hellborn populated areas. I understood his grievances and, given his close orbiting position with the Goetia's, didn't doubt his credibility. I did, however, deny his cynicism from affecting my view on the subject. Insidious redlining or not, it was through the initiative that Ornthir and I first met Ms. Lin, a purely coincidental affair that had only gotten better as time progressed. She was enraptured with her ownership of her shop, and the fact that we helped her with an issue about some "businessmen'' wanting to talk about some "title renegotiations'' only brightened her disposition. Ornthir and I both told her that we wanted to help not because of our appointed position but because we simply wanted to make sure she was taken care of. That and, as I found out, it put us in a good position with her such that when Ornthir asked her if the guard could use her basement as a "meeting place", she did not hesitate to say yes. The discrepancy between what she thought we were doing there and what we were actually doing was never lost to me…

When we entered, the smell of ginkgo and sage greeted us with benediction, pushing the stink of the city off of us and ushering it out the door with patient haste. A sense of peace wafted through the room, as if it was there, among the generational bric-a-brac and hand-me-down trinkets, that lived the relieved sighs of the city; ensconced comfortably among the cabinets lined with old toys and weathered books, present within every rouge slice of light that glinted off of the polished glass display cases dotting the display floor. Musty smelling mannequins dressed in outdated, oftentimes confusing attire filled the shop floor, creating a second system of heavily unused walkways. I had always liked Katie's shop, how well kept it was, how preserved and cared for each and every object was, like they were all of significant importance. That they, at some far away time, would all be consigned into a time capsule, each item as crucial as the next, all silent emissaries of a time made manifest in their pristine curves and edges.

A happy buoyant melody flowed out of the speakers, themselves recessed in the corners of the walls and covered with a thin film of dust. I had never heard music like that before, and when I inquired one day of what those strange beautiful rhythms were she told me everything. The romping, smiling melodies were carried by the guzheng, the erhu dancing along in a weaving harmony that would join in boisterous celebration only to run free like a child in a meadow. But the music would always come together in the end, as if to be tucked in by the loving, tender hands of a mother. Every time I entered Katie's shop I was always comforted by those alien sounds that would trickle and pass throughout the store. It was, in a word, healing; the tunes felt like a warming salve over the soul, a thing in which I usually forgot I had. But not when we visited Katie.

The air of tranquility, though, felt askew with something sharp and irritating, a dissonant mood that grated against the mellow feeling permeating through the store. I heard a distant, agitated muttering come from behind the front desk and began to move towards it. What almost arrested my approach was the fact that Ornthir lagged behind. I was usually the one to, though it was decided over nanometers, follow his lead. He tracked behind and as we got closer, the irritated flapping of wings accented the sound of some kind of mumbled frustration. When we rounded the corner, we entered the stale air of the store's small loading bay. It was quite contained, around the size and depth of an auto garage, but longer, with a ground floor that walked in from the street only to kiss the stained concrete lip of a loading dock. Industrial style shelves like those found inside of warehouses took up half of the wall space as smaller, more civilian shelves took up the other half. The tall, thick shelves were lined with dense steel totes full of assorted odds and ends. Labels clung onto the shelves under different boxes; 'bed frames' here, 'metal scrap' there.

I saw Katie behind the leg of her bulky loaderbot with an access panel open, herself mounted between the shoulders of a spare mannequin body that was fruitlessly twisting at the secondary ignition switch we helped install a year ago. Ornthir looked inconvenienced. He peered in my direction, glancing towards the recessed hallway that led to the safehouse's entrance. Though, I felt his gaze on me. It was as quick as his glance down the hall, but it felt calculating, as if he were a clerk cross referencing his projected inventory with his actual stock. His tail twitched before he gave an absolving breath.

"Not starting?" he asked, strolling over to the toolbox.

Katie never jumped at spontaneous appearances, be it from us or any unsuspecting customer. I admired that given that she was, in comparison to the rest of the denizens of Hell, rather small. For a winged head that could control humanoid shapes, she didn't do too bad for herself.

"Hey General," she greeted, "yeah, bitch always likes to do this whenever I need something done," she turned the ignition switch again. Like before, the engine sputtered a few weak chugs before falling silent. Ornthir looked at it from below. It dwarfed both of us, easily ten feet tall, our imp sizes doing nothing in the way of helping with ground level diagnostics. Ornthir pursed his lips before swiftly clambering up the rough steel.

"Think it's the battery?" I suggested as I walked to the side of the mech and peered up at it.

"Maybe; but I charged the damn thing, plugged it in and everything. Even let it go all night and tried a new one for good measure," she gestured over to a nearby shelf, which had a sable block of a 12 volt battery on it, "same thing. Engine surges but doesn't start."

Ornthir was atop the mech's shoulders, arms akimbo, peering down at the machine with a discerning scrutiny.

"When was the last time you used this?"

"Before that bad ash storm a few months back."

"Was the mech in here?" I asked.

"No," she sighed, "fuckin' thing got jacked by some of those Woo Yun punks. Had to get Jan to bring it back."

The Woo Yun Family had yet to establish themselves as the formidable scourge they are today. During those days, The Family was just a wayward band of thugs that thought looks were the only qualifying credential for becoming a profitable "business". They were always one lapsed financial decision away from complete collapse, and as such they stuck to low and medium risk crimes. They chiefly tried selling back market recordings of "sinner talent," exploiting those hopeful individuals who believed the profitable lies The Family told them. They also weren't afraid to dabble in petty robbery and other thievery when talent would dry up. They were seen mainly as a nuisance that sporadically bounced around the borough, like a mischievous crow pulling at your tail. Things were safer back then…

"That could be the issue," said Ornthir, "Golipski, see if you can get the chest open, expose the engine."

I wasn't used to him calling me by my last name, and for a few split seconds my mind locked me in place as it tried to recover from almost tripping over itself.

"Yeah sure," I replied, " 3/8 right?"

"Yup."

I dunked my hand into the toolbox. It was an unorganized thing, a cold mass of shimmering chrome and faded metal of lengths both long and short, all loosely compiled to make one whole moving pile, rolling like the tides as I dug and displaced. It was a quick venture, I knew where to plunge my hand, when to twist and where to turn. We three had worked on that grand old mech for what felt like months together. We knew every bolt, every screw, every rough vetted slab of bastardized steel. If we had to, we could strip it down blindfolded to the exact bolt without so much as breaking a sweat. Troubleshooting, however, was not Katie-Lin's strong suit. It wasn't that she was incompetent, but rather preferred to still possess a slice of wonder at the magical functioning's of her large chugging hulk of a loader machine. Plus, as she's mentioned multiple times, she needed a reason for us to come over and say hi, since our frequency of visitation was lacking to say the least. There were days when I forgot her smile's luminance, times when the peaks and satin valleys of her bright traveled face became smoothed over into a nebulous plane of neutrality, a face not right, an almost-just-halfway-there uncertainty. My skin sizzled at that notion and I found myself looking at her, my eyes half covered by the open flap of the thick, blocky toolbox.

She was looking up to her machine with a reflecting piety, like a questing pilgrim to a silent and towering idol. The dress her slender mannequin body was wearing evoked the feeling of an eastern summer; its strong, pastoral shades of sapphire, jade, and ruby shined with a gentle glow, making the space around her seem more vibrant, more worthy to be near her. Her healthy black hair was up in a neat bun, secured with a reed-like piece of bamboo.

She was ensconced in its shadow, the cool dark shade softening the sharp, worn edges of her cheekbones. Her smile was loose and resting, her neutral face. I was always baffled by that. The way she, as if possessed by some kind of joyous inertia, always maintained some degree of a smile. It was rare, if not notional, for people to consider their lives in Hell that of a happy one. The only smiles that existed in Pentagram City were on billboards, embossed across the laughing faces of sparkling giants that only ever looked down at us. Katie-Lin didn't live near the billboards and tower-sized screens, but everyone still frowned, still looked over their pinched up shoulders as if expecting some kind of phantom whirlwind to come careening down upon them. But not Katie. Never Katie.

If I didn't know any better I would say that I loved her, in some strange way. That kind of way where respect and admiration combine to form an unknowing, unspoken feeling that stuns the bewildered mind, stupefying all senses that only love could ever do. Maybe I did love her, maybe I still do. Maybe I just miss that smile; that warm, immortal smile.

I grabbed what I needed, my mind and muscles remembering the specific weight and feel of the wrench, and traversed my way up and around to the mech's stout and sturdy chest, moving aside a small panel to expose a dirty, heavily wrapped handle. I fastened my palm around it tightly and got to work loosening the myriad of hex bolts buttoned on its chest.

"Katie," called out Ornthir, "I didn't see a 3/8 ratchet in the tool box, mind showing me where I can find one?"

"There should be one in there," she replied. Her shoes click-clacked against the hard concrete, her steps echoing closer to me. Metal shifted, churned, sounding like ice fractals clinking off of each other. Then a pause.

"Yeah, see, right under the 9/16."

"Katie-Lin, you are a lifesaver," I could hear his gratitude; it felt relieved, thankful, as if he was reassured of the recovering vitality of an ill and dying family member.

"You coming down to get it or?"

"Just toss it up."

With a quiet whiff through the air that seemed to hold time in anticipation, I heard the solid contact of metal on flesh.

"Thanks," he said before descending to me.

"Don't mention it," Katie replied, "so what do you think?"

"Probably a gummed up carburetor," I said, placing a loose screw in my pocket, "or, hold on, how long was it out there?"

"More than a couple hours, Jan said it was running rough when she got to it."

"Yup, air vent must've gotten a good fill of the stuff too."

"My thoughts exactly," concurred Ornthir as he awkwardly clutched onto the metal.

"You guys need the harnesses?"

"That would be great," I replied, my forearm softly burning from clamping onto that small, improvised foothold.

"I'll get them," interjected Ornthir. He dismounted the steel wall of the mech's chest, crossing down its arm, and walked over to the tool wall that sat behind the motionless golem.

Katie-Lin looked over to me disquieted, as if there were some kind of rock or obstruction buried in the bottom of her black loafers. I reciprocated that feeling, though I just sent back a small concerned shrug. We both knew that there was something on Ornthir's mind. She didn't know about the severity that usually accompanied our visits there, a notion I usually pushed far back into the depths of my mind, but even still Katie-Lin was heavily perceptive. She knew something was wrong, could feel it deep within the cold flat concrete, could sense it quietly hissing in those oblong shapes jutting out of all of those thick, dense totes perched like scowling gargoyles atop the shelves, gazing down at us.

With a huff and a grunt, Ornthir hoisted himself up and began to fasten the harnesses to the collar of the mech. I climbed up and met him, taking my own and adjusting it to my liking. I gave it some considerable slack while Ornthir wrenched the strap tight, flattening the nylon taut against his body.

"You good?" I asked

"Always."

We repelled down and began our mechanical dissection, taking off the main plate that covered the engine housing in just a few minutes. A few bands of dust drooled out when we lifted off the plate, the chasm's dark shadowed maw hid most of the engine until Ornthir and I clicked on the small tap lights hugging the internal walls of the cavity. Bathed in a soft incandescent light was the engine block, that old clunky thing we spent months tinkering and toying with, fiddling it to an acute perfection to run as soundly as it did in its heyday, giving Katie-Lin the best that we could do. The engine block itself looked clean for the most part. I smiled at its upkeep. Given the vintage nature of the majority of its parts, replacements were all but non-existent for most of its vital areas, carburetor included. Ornthir reached a hand in and wiped the top of the housing. When he brought his hand back into the fluorescent lighting of the docking bay, his burgundy colored skin was blackened with a thick film of damp ash.

"Perfect," Ornthir griped, "We're going to have to get a new engine."

"What? No, that's a terrible idea."

"How so?"

"We just need to clean the housing and make sure this panel is on tight when we're done. That, and, honestly, it's just a carburetor issue. We should just put a good helping of some of that ocean breeze into both the air access vent and gas line. Let it set for a day or so and it should be able to start up."

"And if not?"

I shrugged, "Then we'll try again."

Ornthir grunted at that, not in protest or disbelief, but in acknowledgement.

"Alright then," he said, "let's get to it."

Ornthir, though not explicitly, rushed the process along. It was with a polite impatience, as if an officiant trying to push along the proceedings of some arbitrary and time consuming ceremony. We finished the chore quickly and before I had time to wipe the thin film of grease off of my hands, Ornthir motioned for me to follow him down that offshoot hallway that led to the basement, our original destination.

"Elias," called out Katie-Lin, "can I steal Oz for a few minutes?"

"I'm sorry, Ms. Lin," he said, "but we're in quite the time crunch. Can it wait?"

She looked both of us over, one of her wings shifting slightly as she did.

"Yeah, sure."

"Thank you, Ms. Lin, we won't be long, I promise."

"Okay."

She wrung her hands as she took her leave back to the storefront, the echo of her clicking shoes fading until the calm stillness of the empty docking bay hummed.

"She's worried," I said.

"I know, Oswald, but…" he gave a weighted sigh, "I need to tell you something. Come on."

I was curious about what he had to say, but what made me anxious was his demeanor. His tensed shoulders didn't seem to relax, his eyes were determined but laden with a distinct uneasiness, that kind one sees in the eyes of a despondent parent whose resolve is only maintained for the sake of those loved ones around them. He never looked weak, never vulnerable, but there was within his eyes the beginnings of desperation.

We walked down the cold, hollow staircase in silence. Reaching the landing that crept into the rest of the safehouse felt like an eternity, each descending step we took deeper into that ill-lit room felt more sinister than the next. It was one of the most important walks of my life, now that I think about it. I'm not sure if the future would have been the same if I turned my face back up to the promising light seeping through the flush cracks of that basement door, nor am I sure if Ornthir would have done anything differently if he, too, decided not to take a single step further. Perhaps if I reached out to him, if I brought my hand down upon the smooth cotton of his shirt, pressed tightly into the firm warmth of his shoulder with an unspoken resolute plea, a plaintive cry to go back up those steps, to rid ourselves forever of that whole unspoken affair. But I knew better. Ornthir was headstrong, always was. When he had the notion of an idea in his head, he made it his duty to see that idea through to clear, perfect fruition. That's what made him a good operator, a good leader. A good father. If he wanted you to live, if he wanted you to see the other side of tomorrow, then you would. There were many days and nights in which my own personal belief in such a statement wavered, but Ornthir had an uncanny ability, as if a hidden psionic, to know when belief faltered in the minds of his allies and how to correct such weakening faith in a way that didn't just stop the atrophy, but actively catalyzed a blossoming confidence that would stretch and grow like bamboo. There was a purity in his thought, an unshakable belief that he could protect all that he loved, that his efforts were in some way impervious to the lashings of life, that, born from his will, he could save all that his heart held dear, could remain uncompromising to his duty to protect and sustain. I never fully understood him, and as our hooves touched the barren concrete of the basement floor, all conjecture vanished. All possible futures coalesced into one patient, insidious absolute. We were, from that point on, irreversibly subscribed to the irrevocable fatality of the events that would transpire that day.

"I feel that I can trust you with this," he said, rounding the sharp corner of an empty steel table. There were three runs of fluorescent lights that crawled along the ceiling, dripping pale artificial light that stung before our eyes adjusted. It was a desolate place, a flat concrete desert with a few shy rooms off to the wings. The main area looked as if it were a church basement, wide and empty save for the matte steel table in the back that Ornthir stood behind. He waited with a grave restlessness, his body rigidly steady as he stood almost inert.

"What," I said, attempting levity, "four years of friendship doesn't cut it?"

He didn't answer. Instead he reached down and, unfolding a rolled up piece of newspaper, produced a long cylindrical tube, its density resonating in a solid thud as it made contact with the cold metal table. It was steel, though there was an awkward webbing of thick and thin copper wires haphazardly splayed over the tube, bare naked circuitry was crudely soldered to rusted and heavily galvanized metal plates and clamps and screws and bolts. I wished, at that moment, that it was any other kind of weapon of destruction. A sleek pistol from the Yan Woo Family or a blood covered mace from The Apostates. The trashy construction, the second-rate slapdash welding; it was as good a calling card as any other signature weapon. It was an inactive bomb made by The Men of Sodom.

"This was under my car this morning," he stated. My chest tightened as I felt my tail flick against the hard concrete floor. Ornthir's gaze hardened as I digested the news.

"Lords, are-"

"I'm fine, Isaac's fine, everyone's fine. But that's not the reason we're here," he grabbed something laying in the small shadow of the bomb and flipped it over to my side. It looked like a tag that would be attached to a birthday gift, complete with an almost too crisp shape of a price tag. The writing on it looked to be stenciled in a steady, if not a little manic, hand; the peaks and valleys of the letters taut with a forgien tension. I felt a deep chasm in my stomach as I read the words, my worry freezing over into a cold hollow dread.

" Tonight is our Audition. We Want In."

Ornthir's eyes surveyed me, never moving as my mind struggled for a way to process. I wanted to articulate a preface, some kind of preamble of caution and steadiness, but my mouth moved faster.

"Oh fuck," I shuttered.

"Yeah."

"You think…" I couldn't say it out loud, the mere thought of it clamped my throat shut. Ornthir just nodded.

"I do."

They knew. What was worse was that they wanted to be a part of it. I knew Ornthir wouldn't entertain the idea and, given his resolute stance on terrorism, I felt confident that he didn't want to talk about a merger. What worried me was the inopportune timing. The yearly cleansing was a month away and with it the eve of our rebellion. Up until that point, we had a firm and iron-like hold on the city's threats against the royalty. The Apostates were dealt with, The Oh-Three's were disorganized and too busy with killing themselves to mount any kind of actionable offensive against us, The Bazzel Street Gang was paid off, we even had a beneficial understanding with Valentino and his thugs. It was a difficult road, one that took the better half of four years to travel down, but by that point in our careers a threat against The Goetia's was worrying, chiefly because it meant that there was someone we weren't paying attention to.

The fact that it was The Men of Sodom, however, made a contorted kind of sense. They were ghosts, abject silhouettes sunken deep into the cold darkness of Hell's history. Yet Hell was haunted with the aging specters of those tormented souls of centuries past, brimming with the forgotten, ageless cries of the unavenged. We hellborn had a word for them: "The Unanswered." To not consider them was a fool's choice, yet to do so would be to suspect Hell itself of treachery. I knew Ornthir saw the best in man, saw the good that existed in the hearts of those fellow people who made Hell their home. Yet I also knew of his exacting precision in determining those who possessed the capability of redemption. The Men of Sodom, in this case, were one of those groups that Ornthir deemed too old to change, too calcified with anarchistic rhetoric to shed free from the over-encumbering carapace of their past selves. They were old, though, decomposing, and in Ornthir's eyes their lengthy absence was proof enough of their demise. I knew that to have him consider those dying revenants as a measurable threat would be as difficult a task as skinning a hell hog. That was before they put a bomb under his car.

His eyes were glued to it, a loose fist covered his mouth as he contemplated the device, his eyes occasionally going over to me before hurrying back the the bomb. That tension in the loading bay was still there in his shoulders, but they were less hiked up. He looked more pensive, more plotting, much more like a General then he had ever looked up until that point. There was a decisiveness in his features, a resolute assuredness that made him look as if he was made of stone. He looked not at peace, but understanding, as if resigned to a finalistic idea. He looked as if his mind was made up. He took a breath as he looked at me, but before he got any further, I let myself speak,

"You didn't tell Bram, did you?"

He paused and let out a tired sigh, "No."

"Ornthir, we need to let him know."

"Someone told them about the coup, Oswald" he said, "Our circle is compromised. We need to take care of this now."

"What the heaven are you talking about?"

"You know what I'm talking about and no I don't like it either but the fact is that one of our guys cracked, meaning there is a leak that, if allowed to continue-"

"Continue?"
"It will compromise every conspirator, you included."

He let the air hang between us, let it fester. Ornthir was a man of control, of discipline, and though he never raised his voice, I could feel the tension in his words.

"You're serious."

"Our families, Oswald, that's what's on the line."

"Bullshit, they've always been on the line, you know that."

"And I was fine with that because I thought I could trust my men."

"Do you trust me?"

"Oswald-"

"Do you trust me?"

I made sure to say it again with emphasis. I could feel the downward gravity of the conversation taking over, that sinking feeling in your gut before a hurdling drop. I had learned by then to deal with the vertigo, that being entrusted with protecting the Goetia's elicited a degree of judicial impunity that would otherwise get entire mercenary outfits court martialed. Ornthir tried his best to act above board, to make sure that the mission was accomplished without compromising the moral integrity of the group, but there were days…there were days when we couldn't look at each other.

Ornthir's gaze on me was leveled, steadied, "Yes," he said, "of course I do."

"Alright, so trust me when I say that there's got to be another way of handling this."

"There is," he stated, easing into a cool demeanor, "We can't just kill the leak, we need what they know. We have to grill the guard, test them, see who slips up." He considered the bomb, "All we got is that whatever they plan is happening tonight."

I flipped over my wrist to look at the bland watch face. 11:13. We had time, but it didn't feel like it. If anything it felt like the bomb had already gone off and we were scrambling to find a way to survive past the shockwave that was barreling towards us.

"An emergency meeting." he pitched, "We host one at another safehouse, tell them the truth and extend an olive branch to whoever talked and send them back with a message. We'll accept their terms so long as they let us know when and where the bomb'll go off. That way we can protect our kin and get ready for what's to come."

"Are you insane?" I said, "you really think Durin would let that happen?"

"I know he'll make some kind of display, but he's a loyal bastard, he backs whatever I do, you know that."

"Even still Elias, this is a big risk. We're talking about civilians; men, women, and children. We're talking about letting them die on what could be a bluff."

"What do you think will happen if The Sodomites let out that Bram Goetia's very own royal guard is actively plotting against him? Even if it's not credible, it'll be enough for Bram to get paranoid. He is not a forgiving man, Oswald, you know that. If he gets so much as a whiff of our plans, he'll erase not only us, but our entire bloodline. He'll make it like our families entire fucking existence wasn't so much as a thought. We have to clean house."

The last time I had heard those words, it was full of hate, full of vile and vindictive ecstasy, spoken by a thug, reaped by marauders. When a clean house sweep happens, it assumes that any and all participants are guilty until empirically proven otherwise. Trust is the first thing to go and, with its absence, madness takes its place. The last and only time I partook in a clean house sweep I barely survived it; the cause of my survival is still something in which I struggle to fully understand. My mind recoiled at him mentioning it. The situation with those distrustful mercs all those years ago was the culmination of years of unspoken protests and grievances that metastasized into the horror that I alone endured. By the time I joined them it was, on a good day, a crucible of quiet strife and cutting looks thrown around like piercing javelinas. Their fate was decided the moment they barred themselves from talking with one another. Our fate, however, did not feel like that. The people I worked with under Ornthir were dependable, strong willed as much as they were tenacious, valorous to a fault. He hand-picked each and every guard and pushed them beyond all thresholds of character to ensure that they would be more than a gun, but an ode to the idea of service and protection. Even those who were part of our seditious plans against the Goetias and felt how Ornthir felt about them were those that he had no doubt towards. They were people that he would gladly hand his own pistol to and tell to protect his sleeping family while he was impossibly out of reach from them. No one within our circle possessed the potential of being guilty, of acting against the leadership and direction of Ornthir, but it was the existence of that bomb that proved a sobering contrary that opened up the door to every single fallible possibility. It was there, in the musty dank confines of that almost derelict safehouse, where I began to have doubts.

"Oz," Ornthir began sincerely, "I don't want to do this and I have worked every possible angle, but this is how we salvage this mess. If we stop this and word gets out; you, me, my family, are all dead. We have to let this happen."

He paused, as if registering the very words that he just spoke. It looked as if he had, at that moment, aged a century. I thought about my mother; her emaciated, smiling visage gently withering away into the soft fabric of her hospital pillow. I knew she didn't have time, knew that within a year or two she'd join my father, be buried among the innumerable nameless masses of some crowded, low budget graveyard no one would visit. She was always proud of me, regardless of how mediocre I regarded my own achievements. The last time I visited her, she was beaming when I told her the exciting news of my own civilian milestones: decorating my apartment and using coupons like she did. I thought about her, about her warm inviting smile, about her strong, calloused hands that taught me how to hold a knife, how to take in the kickback of a Stratton 82 and how to gently pluck the tune to Another Morning on a guitar. I knew she was dying but I, at that moment, felt my heart shatter at the thought of being the one to engender her death.

Yet was I to be the one to permit a massacre? The Men of Sodom had a storied history, but the gap between what they were at present versus what they used to be was a vast canyon maw. They had mellowed out, faded away, sheltered themselves in some unknown place living out some unknown fate. The genocidal terror of The Sodomites, though never forgotten, become pliable to the weight of current events. They weren't news, weren't important. If anything, what was important about them was that their bombings amassed an almost nonexistent casualty count. Their most recent attack was at Gamigin Park, one of the most vacant and dilapidated parts of Northside. The worst catastrophe that happened there was that some sinner had their car's windshield cracked from a rogue piece of flying debris. The Men of Sodom were acting as if they had given up, had their fun and decided to pack their things and only ever occasionally bomb when they were bored. They were a decaying trifle. A shadow of their former selves.

Ornthir's proposition was, in theory, sound. I had no doubts that out of the vast contingencies he thought of, entertained, and saw play out, that what he proposed was the best possible scenario. I wanted to try and offer a counter proposal, that perhaps there was something that he may have missed, some crucial detail that we could levy against The Sodomites to reject their offer. I knew that there was something The Men of Sodom aimed to gain outside of our integration, that there had to have been something more insidious at work that neither Ornthir or I could have seen; But as I speculated the facts in that basement, I slowly found the weight of reality pressing me down.

"They can't be this dumb, Elias," I said finally, "you have to know that."

"I do," he confessed, looking away, "but the fact still stands that they have us. If we don't allow this, we're dead."

"If we do, we're dead," I replied. I had hoped that by the time I got to the end of that sentence, I would have reached some kind of tangible concept that I'd be able to grab onto and implement to effectively levy against him. But I had nothing. If we stopped The Men of Sodom, if we denied them that bittering leverage they had over us, word would've gotten out and the entire lineage of every single member of the guard would have been reduced to nothing but a forgotten afterthought. I weighed the decision, felt the abyssal chains of dread pull at both ends.

He sighed, "Oswald, I know that what I'm asking is momentous. I trust that you won't divulge any of this to the rest of the guard, but if you don't want to do this…I'd understand if you walked."

I looked at Elias. I was almost offended. Out of all the grand principled infringements we had done up until that point, Ornthir had offered on out. I knew that he meant well, knew that he was attempting to extend some kind of belated mercy to me, but it was pointless. I felt an odd kind of weightlessness; as if I had found myself, quite suddenly, terminally edging over the steep crest of culmination. Working for the guard, fighting alongside Ornthir, plotting against the Goetia's; it was all simple physics, the perpetual motion of our murky, impure actions begetting more, harsher impure actions, compounding into that exact, singular moment. If I walked, I'd be consigning not only my own fellowship to a swift death, but the chaste, guiltless lives that were intrinsically attached to them. If I stayed, I would be the negligent arbiter of the murder of innocent lives. I was, however, painfully aware of the compromised paradox the decision created. It was based, simply, by proximity. The wide ocean of faceless innocents was a nebulous concept, a vague generalization of the goodwill and existence of the common man. An affront to them would be like the shattering of one of the many innumerable mirrored faces of a skyscraper. An attack on my comrades, however, an attack directed to them and their loved ones was more significant, more personal simply because I knew them by extension, by contiguity. An attack on random bystanders was, by some convincing means, less significant than an attack on the known personalities of those many wives, fathers and children that I've overheard my fellow guardsmen rhapsodize about. My mind clouded over with the harsh, grating truths of either decision. The impossibility of it all numbed me.

I know that I am guilty of a great many infringements to the morality of man. I know that to assuage myself of such guilt would be a vain and futile task. This is by no means a record of my absolution. I am not a hero. Moreover, I am not a man that is by any measure a good person. The missions we had, the scenarios that we were subjugated to elicited a swift and fatal consequence for anything outside of the immediate. If we didn't act, we would've died or worse, failed. Inside the raw crucible of loyalty and survival, the hard upstanding line the guard and I tried to walk was, in the end, a crushing Sisyphean endeavor that eventually broke the wills of even the most resolute and fortuitous soldier. The guard was fatherless, motherless, childless; despite the devout parents and siblings that joined, they all ended up belonging to the guard, soul and all. Our familial connections outside of those grand palatial walls was as if they didn't exist, as if we were ghosts walking amongst the worried, faithful living. Our partners forgot our scents, our parents overpopulated our voicemails with unanswered concerns.

Bram broke us, we all knew it, yet to accept such a fact was to accept a defeat that he himself molded us to resent. We were his will, his actionable pawns in the great vast chessboard of Hell and it was us that paid for his decisions. He was the sole adjudicator of our misery, of our noiseless suffering that took most of us by our own hands. Bram was what led Ornthir to me, Bram was what led us to that basement, and as I reflect upon that day, it was Bram that led my decision.

The air between us seemed to hold within it a grim austerity as my breathing steadied. My mind was made up.

"Elias," I began, "We're going to burn for this."