London, 1302.
They say the first curse clawed its way out from the mouth of a dying priest, black-veined and vomiting litanies in reverse Latin, choking on a rosary that twisted like a snake between his teeth.
He died in St. Dunstan-in-the-East.
Not from plague. Not from poison.
He died because something had seen him from the other side of the Veil — and it remembered his name.
The church bell cracked at the moment of his final breath.
Not from time. Not from rust.
But because a sound was heard inside it, and that sound had never been meant for this world.
They melted the bell. Tried to sanctify the metal.
Buried the priest's tongue in lime.
It didn't matter.
The curse had already seeped into the walls. Into the stones.
The altar bled for seven nights.
And on the eighth, the rats began speaking.
⸻
The scholars called it blasphemia spiritualis, a rupture of divine order.
The Church called it heresy and lit fires.
The people, those who had no words for it — simply stopped praying near the Thames after sundown.
Some said the water began to whisper back.
It was the beginning of what the Order of St. Clement would later call The Veil-Split — the first moment in recorded scripture when a mortal soul glimpsed the Netherworld, and something inside it glimpsed back.
Not a place. Not a hell.
A realm of monstrous memory, where ancient sins took shape, and dead faiths roamed like wolves.
⸻
The curses come from that place.
Not as spells. Not as diseases.
They come as infections of truth truths too terrible to bear.
A man discovers his dead wife never loved him and finds her reflection in every window.
A nun loses faith and her prayers begin tearing holes in the air.
A child asks what happens after death and receives an answer with teeth.
These are not accidents. These are not myths.
These are wounds in the world.
And someone must stitch them shut.
⸻
So the Order of St. Clement was born. Or reborn. Or perhaps always existed, waiting for the age of rot to ripen.
Hidden beneath Blackfriars, beneath the catacombs where plague carts dumped the moaning half-dead.
They kept no Bibles — only scripture bound in skin, and bells made from melted curses.
And they trained men.
Not to pray.
But to see.
To open the eyes within the skull.
To walk the hallways between heartbeat and shadow.
To learn their Gift.
And to suffer for it.
Because the curses are not leaving.
Because the Veil has thinned.
Because the Netherworld is hungry — and London, choking on smoke and sin, has never smelled sweeter.
———
London 1400
London is a corpse that forgot to stay dead.
Its bones are made of cobbled streets, its breath a mix of chimney soot and butcher steam, and its blood — oh, its blood — runs thick with old oaths, salt rot, and secrets whispered into privies behind cathedral walls. It wheezes beneath fog that never lifts. Fog that sweats, that listens, that moves when you're not looking.
Above, the steeples rise like black nails pinning heaven to a sky that forgot God's name. Below, a thousand tunnels wind through earth that remembers the dead too clearly. Catacombs, sewers, forgotten Templar vaults, Roman crypts where curses nest like pigeons, feeding on mildew and sermons.
The Thames is no river. It is a vein — thick and brown and sentient. It drinks sins. It murmurs dreams to those who sleep too close to it. It gives back nothing but bones and bells.
There is no part of London untouched by the Netherworld — though most do not see it.
A man might sneeze in the market, and with it expel a curse his grandfather swallowed from a tainted communion wafer.
A beggar woman hums a tune in a church's vestibule — and birds begin to fall dead from the air, all bearing her name on their beaks.
A locksmith forgets the name of his dead son — and finds himself unable to open any door but one: a door that leads beneath his own shadow.
Curses do not arrive with thunder. They grow like mushrooms — in dark, wet places, unnoticed, thriving in silence.
They are not spells.
They are moral tumors, emotional infections, memories given teeth.
A woman lies about love on her wedding day — and years later, the child she bore has no reflection.
A monk rewrites a passage of scripture he no longer believes in — and his ink begins whispering in the night.
⸻
The holy places are not safe.
St. Paul's has been sealed off since the priest melted during morning mass — his cassock untouched by fire, his mouth reciting verses from a gospel no one had ever written.
St. Bartholomew's gates open only at dusk — and from it, emerge smells that should not exist, like wet wool and screaming silver.
Every church has a secret beneath it.
Every bell tower hums wrong.
Every stained glass eye watches you long after you pass.
⸻
The poor say the city breathes.
The nobles pay coin to pretend it doesn't.
And the Order of St. Clement — cloaked in brass-threaded robes, their sigils etched in reverse into their teeth — keeps a ledger. Not of men, but of truths so unbearable, they become real.
In that ledger are things like:
• "A midwife heard a baby name itself."
• "A plague mask cracked open and laughed."
• "A book in the Bodleian screamed when burned — and thanked them."
• "Rain fell upward in Shoreditch. For three hours."
———
This is London.
A city built on blasphemy and forgetting.
The living walk above.
The cursed walk beneath.
And somewhere in between — in the mist, in the alleys, in the space between bell tolls — the Netherworld waits. Not to invade…
…but to be let in.
———
London 1405
It was morning.
Not the kind that sings with birdsong or promises warmth — but a red morning, cast under a sun that bled like an open wound in the sky.
The Red Sun, they called it now. No one remembered when it changed. No one asked why. It simply was, and London moved beneath it like worms beneath dying leaves.
People passed through the light like they were used to being watched.
The market bustled, but no one spoke above a whisper.
The fog clung to everything like a second skin — wet, sour, and breathing.
And there, across from the blackened arches of a shuttered cathedral, stood the Order of St. Clement.
It was not a building so much as a stone confession, hunched and bitter, wedged between the rotting teeth of two abandoned guildhalls.
Its façade bore no symbol, only a ring of crows carved in granite, all pecking inward at an unseen heart.
Stained glass windows were long since bricked shut, leaving only narrow slits — not for light, but for observation.
Its door was iron, banded with tarnished bronze, carved with a language no one wrote anymore. It hummed faintly in the mornings.
Outside its threshold sat a boy.
He looked nineteen, maybe. Maybe younger. His coat was too neat for the filth around him, a pressed black thing with silver buttons dulled by fog.
A white shirt, clean despite the grime, a dark tie, poorly knotted.
His hair curled a little around the ears, and his eyes — though quiet — seemed to be watching something that wasn't quite there.
Julian Bellamy, waiting with the stiff patience of a soul newly displaced.
He did not flinch when the carriage stopped before him.
Its wheels squealed like metal being chewed.
The coach was old, fashioned from some wood that no longer grew, reinforced with dull brass plates marked with the sigil of a burning wheel inside a sunless halo — the mark of a Field Agent of the Order.
The door opened with a soft click.
Out stepped Owen Darnley.
He wore the field robes of a veteran: dark wool cloak, edges stitched with protective litany, reinforced greaves beneath, and a doublet of oil-dark leather that creaked like old pages.
A chain of glass beads wrapped around his right wrist — prayer-stored ammunition in case the Word ever failed.
His beard was trimmed close, his face scored with pale scars, and one of his eyes bore a sigiled lens—spiral-etched glass, cracked faintly across the middle.
He looked at Julian like a man sizing up a blade still in its sheath.
"You must be Julian. Julian Bellamy," he said, voice low, crisp — a voice used to breaking silences with fact, not warmth.
Julian stood.
"Yes. I am."
"Well then," Owen said, glancing once at the sun as if it were late, "Let's get going. We've no time to waste."
He turned and stepped back into the carriage.
Julian hesitated only a breath, then followed.
The carriage door shut with a whumpf, sealing out the murmur of the street.
And then they were moving — wheels grinding over uneven stones, hooves clacking in rhythm. The inside smelled faintly of iron, old tallow, and something else: wet parchment, just before it rots.
Owen sat across from him, unblinking.
———
The carriage rolled heavy through the narrow streets of East London, wheels clattering over crooked stone and old horse bones half-sunk in the road. The air smelled of boiled onions, soot, and something faintly metallic — the scent that always followed the Order like a distant iron bell. Smoke curled from chimneys that hadn't paid tithe in years, and somewhere in the mist, a dog barked and didn't stop.
Inside the carriage, Owen adjusted the leather strap across his chest and said, "So. Were you briefed on the mission?"
Julian shook his head. "No. I was told you'd explain everything along the way."
Owen gave a slow nod. "Alright then. Here's the situation. Over the last two weeks, the rate of missing persons in Whitechapel, Spitalfields, and the surrounding parishes has gone up by nearly forty percent. Men, women, even children — gone without trace. No bodies, no screams. Just… silence."
Julian stared ahead, but his fingers tightened against his knee.
Owen continued, his voice more clipped now, colder. "We can't afford hysteria. Not with harvests failing and the clergy squabbling over bleeding relics. So the official story is nothing. Drunks gone wandering. Workhouse records lost. But off the books, we've been tracking a pattern. A common point."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a thin folder, yellowed and bound in twine. On the front was scrawled: Covenant Street, #11 — Unregistered Estate.
"Last week, a field scribe cross-referenced the names of the missing with old land tax records. Turns out five of them lived within three blocks of the same empty property — number eleven, Covenant Street. It's been condemned since the fire in '93. But no one's torn it down. And for some reason, it still receives coal deliveries every Friday."
Julian looked at the folder in Owen's hand, then out the window. The fog grew thicker as they rode east.
"We think that house is where they're being taken," Owen said. "Or where they're ending up."
Julian swallowed. 'Possessed people. Missing bodies. An abandoned house that still burns fuel.'
"How safe is it gonna be…?"
Owen watched him for a moment. "That," he said, "I don't know. Just stay sharp. Read the signs. Use your head. You've got good instincts — better than most, if what your file says is true."
Julian met his gaze.
Owen leaned back slightly. "You awakened when you got shot. That's not common. That's… something else."
Julian dropped his eyes to the floor.
"Yeah," he said, voice flat. "Tragic."
The word hung in the air like a dropped coin.
Six months ago.
The fog hadn't thinned yet. The sky above Clerkenwell hung low and bruised, the gaslamps flickering like starved lungs. Julian stepped down from the hackney and crossed the cobbled street, boots scuffing against soot and old candle wax. He was humming — something small and forgettable — as he reached the steps of his family's flat.
The door was ajar. Just slightly. It swayed like it had been nudged open by a passing breeze.
Julian paused, the hum dying in his throat.
He knocked, gently. "Mum? Dad?"
No answer.
He stepped in. The hall was still warm, filled with the scent of boiled cloves and the dull musk of coal dust. Nothing unusual — but quiet. The kind of quiet that waits with its back turned.
He called again. "Mum?"
Nothing.
Julian climbed the stairs.
Each step gave way beneath him like old teeth. The wallpaper peeled in pale strips, untouched in years. When he reached the landing, something pulled at the air — wrong, like meat left in the sun. The door to his parents' room was open.
He stepped inside.
And the world ended.
Two men stood there, dressed in white. Not robes — not holy — just simple, pressed white. Stained to the elbow with blood. His parents were already dead — that much was clear. And yet the men kept stabbing. Over and over. Mechanically. Like priests gutting the truth from flesh.
Julian's mother had no face anymore — her head split, skull glistening through torn skin like wet paper. His father's mouth was missing. His eye hung by a single nerve. There was no scream. Only the sound of steel through bone. Over. And over. And over.
Julian froze. He could not move. Could not breathe. He watched.
Then one of the men looked up — eyes dull and distant.
He turned. Drove his blade through his companion's chest.
Before Julian could even flinch, there was a crack — a sound like wood splitting.
A bullet entered the back of his skull.
The world inverted.
And Julian fell, eyes still open, staring into his parents' broken faces.
He awoke hours later on a stretcher with blood crusted in his lashes… and a second world flickering at the edge of his vision.
—
"We're here," Owen said.
Julian blinked back to the present.
The fog was heavier now. It pressed down on the roof of the carriage like a sleeping corpse. He managed a small smile and stepped down. The road was narrow and silent. The houses around them sagged like they'd seen too much.
Before them stood Number Eleven, Covenant Street.
It wasn't a house so much as a wound in the city.
Its walls were Gothic — not in the way of churches, but in the way of old scars. The brickwork was pitted and scorched, the wood swollen and streaked with something darker than soot. A cathedral of rot. It exhaled mildew and smoke and the faint perfume of something long dead but still trying to speak.
Owen stepped beside him. "Remember—stay sharp."
Julian nodded once.
They moved forward, and Owen pressed his hand to the iron-laced door. It gave with a groan — a sound like breath caught in a dying throat.
Then the stench hit them.
It wasn't just rot. It was confusion made flesh — a stench so chaotic it couldn't be parsed. Burnt hair, spoiled milk, scorched iron, candlewax, bile, incense, and sweet tea left out for the dead.
Julian recoiled, hand to his face.
Owen stepped through without flinching.
They entered the foyer.
From above, strung like lanterns from the ceiling beams, hung six bodies, nude, turned upside down. Their skin was gray-green, weeping fluids, lips curled back to show blackened teeth. One had no eyes. Another was missing her feet.
Julian stumbled backward. "What in God's name—"
"Ritual," Owen said grimly. "A sloppy one. Might've been a summoning. Or a silencing. Hard to tell when it's done by amateurs."
He turned to Julian. "Your Gift is Sight, yes?"
"Yes."
"Then begin."
Julian took a breath and stepped forward. He knelt, drawing a quick circle in the grime with the heel of his boot. Then he whispered: "Blood leaves its trail. The soul is broken. Bear my eyes to those who do not come. And among silence… I shall see."
His eyes rolled back for a moment, then opened wide — pale blue rimmed with silver veins now glowing softly beneath the surface.
The air shifted. Threads of faint light bled into view, curling down the walls, spidering through floorboards. He saw footprints — recent ones — and the heat signatures of breath lingering like ghosts. But more than that… he saw presence.
Julian inhaled sharply.
"There are up to five men in the west corridor," he said. "Armed. Standing still. Waiting. Their hearts beat faster now… they know we're here."
Owen's hand went to his weapon. He turned and clapped Julian on the shoulder once, firm.
"You're good," he said. "Too good for a first-time seeker."
Julian allowed himself a smile — thin, unsure, but real.
Owen returned it with a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes. "Let's go introduce ourselves."
———
The door swung open—
—and death greeted them.
No sound, no warning. Just the whip of a bullet cleaving air.
Owen moved before it sang, instincts shrieking in his marrow. He grabbed Julian by the coat and threw him sideways, sending the boy tumbling behind a shattered pew.
The bullet splintered the stone wall where Julian had just stood. Smoke trailed behind it like a snake's hiss.
Owen didn't blink.
He straightened slowly and stepped into the dim corridor.
There they were.
Five men, or rather… five former men.
Their skin was stretched too tight, pallid and blistered, their flesh warped like wax left near flame. Their eyes were soaked in red, not merely glowing—but dripping, as if the rage inside them couldn't be contained. The whites were gone, replaced by a churning, obsidian black that looked hot to the touch. Their teeth clacked unconsciously. Twitching. Grinding.
Each carried weapons fashioned of bone — jawbones used as grips, ribs as crossguards, femurs sharpened to killing points. Every movement they made creaked—like their bodies were being driven by something not made for skin.
Owen's smile was a thin slash.
"Possessed," he said. "And sloppy."
He half-turned to Julian, who was catching his breath.
"Stay back. See if any of them are still human beneath all that. There might be something to save."
Julian wiped blood from his lip. "What about you?"
Owen's gaze didn't leave the advancing five. His voice was dry, iron-flat.
"I've got this."
Then they lunged.
—
The first one came swinging a femur-blade like a flail.
Owen ducked beneath it, boots sliding across the ash-streaked stone, and drove his elbow upward with a sharp crack. The man's jaw snapped back, a spray of blood and broken teeth bursting from his mouth like wet chalk.
Owen grabbed his collar mid-fall and slammed his face sideways into the brick wall — once, twice — until the skull caved in with a muffled pop, the sound of fruit bursting under heel.
The second came low — a skittering crawl like a spider — but Owen was already turning. His foot arced into a spin, catching the creature under the chin and lifting it clean off the ground. Before it landed, Owen reached forward, caught its throat, and twisted violently.
A crack. A spasm. A fall.
The third and fourth attacked together — one high, one low.
Owen side-stepped, hand flashing toward his belt. He drew a short iron hook, curved like a question, and parried the first blow. Then he slammed his head forward, cracking his brow against the third man's nose. Bone split. The man stumbled back shrieking.
Owen caught the fourth mid-swing and punched straight through his shoulder socket, ribs snapping beneath the blow like wicker. The man reeled. Owen hooked his foot behind the man's ankle and dragged him down, stomping hard on his chest until it caved in like a collapsed bellows.
The last one stood watching—trembling.
Then it screamed. The sound peeled like boiling tar in the ears. The red in its eyes pulsed, trying to burn its way into Owen's vision.
Owen narrowed his own eyes, unreadable. "Ah," he muttered. "You've still got something in you."
He moved. Fast.
Too fast.
He appeared behind the creature, shoulder brushing the wall — and before the man-thing could turn, Owen seized its spine through the coat and lifted. One hand crushed its ribcage from behind while the other drove his iron hook under its arm and yanked outward.
The arm came free with a wet, meaty rip.
The thing screamed — and Owen kicked the back of its knee, dropping it to the floor, then stomped its face into the stone, once, twice, a third time — until there was nothing left to scream with.
He stood still, chest rising and falling slowly.
Blood dripped from his coat sleeves.
Owen looked at the carnage.
"…With the way I'm moving tonight," he muttered, almost amused, "my Gift must be acting up again."
He rolled his shoulder, and the bones cracked back into place on their own.
[Owen Darnley Gift: "The Hound's Boon" — a relic-infused inheritance passed through the Darnley line, said to originate from the bones of St. Hubert. It grants the bearer extraordinary reflexes, accelerated perception, and bone-deep instinct. In battle, time seems to slow for Owen — just enough for him to rip it apart.]
He turned to Julian, who stood wide-eyed, caught between horror and awe.
Owen gave a small shrug.
"Don't just stand there, Bellamy. Seek. There might be more behind the walls."
Then, more quietly—
"…and I'd rather not break another five if they're not cursed."
———
Owen stood among the broken bodies, breathing slow and steady. Blood clung to his gloves in thick ropes. He flexed his fingers once, then reached into his coat, pulled out a rag, and began wiping the filth away like he was brushing dust from an old book.
Julian stepped forward, eyes wide, voice barely above a whisper.
"He's… extraordinary."
Then he closed his own eyes, knelt on the stone, and whispered: "Blood leaves its trail. The soul is broken.
Bear my eyes to those who do not come.
And among silence… I shall see."
The words curled into the air like smoke from a dying candle.
His head fell back. His eyes rolled over white.
Then—slowly—they opened again. Pale blue.
But now lined with silver veins, glimmering just beneath the skin, like light refracting through cracked glass.
And he saw.
Not walls. Not floorboards. Not wood or brick.
He saw threads — hundreds of them. White. Almost luminous.
Threaded through the very beams of the house like veins through skin.
Some pulsed faintly. Some writhed like sleeping things.
Some ended abruptly… others drifted beyond sight, through walls, across thresholds, down into darkness.
Julian stumbled backward, breath catching in his throat. His vision blurred back to normal, and the glow receded like a tide.
Owen noticed instantly.
"What is it?"
Julian wiped the sweat from his brow. His voice was flat. Hollow.
"There are still more," he said. "Humans."
"Where?"
Julian looked up. Eyes haunted.
"All over the house," he whispered. "They're in the house. It was built with them."
Owen stilled.
He said nothing.
Only stared at the walls now — at the beams, the floorboards, the plastered ceiling — as if seeing them differently. Differently than ever before.
And then—
A noise.
Wet. Twitching.
Like ropes tightening. Like meat being stirred with a hook.
They turned—
—and saw the five corpses Owen had broken twitching, writhing. Veins spilled from open wounds, black and glistening, snapping across the floor like eels. They found one another. Joined. Fused.
The bodies began to pull together, bones twisting unnaturally, skulls snapping into torsos, hands curling into necks. The meat refused to die, refused to stay separate. It wanted unity.
It wanted to become.
And it did.
What rose from that pile was not a man. Not a collection of them.
But a thing — hunched, towering, its arms made of braided limbs, ribs twisting outward like antlers. Its mouth stretched from ear to ear, wide, filled with rows of mismatched teeth, like a child's drawing of hunger.
And where eyes should be—
Nothing.
Just skin. Scarred shut.
Julian staggered back.
"When did possessed humans begin to… do that?"
Owen drew his iron hook again, this time slower. Eyes locked on the creature.
He didn't blink.
He didn't smile.
"This isn't possession," he said grimly.
"This… these are damned souls."