Diego vanished in smoke again.
One second he was there—claws raking for Moonveil's throat, eyes burning green, ribs glowing faintly under ruined skin. The next, the tunnel filled with black vapor that tasted like burnt copper. When it cleared, there was nothing. No footsteps. No scent. Just another message carved into the wall, this time in a script older than the language of the city around it.
Moonveil wiped dust from the letters with the back of his hand. Curved lines, angular corners. Not Spanish. Not English. Not anything human.
He laughed once—short, dark. "Why does Diego keep running away?" he muttered. "He begs for an ending and then sprints from it."
The riddle wound across the stone like a scar: symbols that hurt to look at, as if the mind wasn't meant to understand them while still attached to a living body. He took a picture with the old camera anyway, because that's what he did: recorded things that shouldn't exist, then pretended paper and ink could hold them in place.
Then he left the tunnel, the laughter dying behind his teeth.
---
The mansion Diego chose as his sanctuary had once belonged to a family whose name had been important enough to carve into stone. That name was now drowned in moss.
It squatted on the outskirts of London like the ghost of old money, three stories of rotting wood and crumbling stone—windows boarded or shattered, ivy strangling its balconies. The iron gate leaned crookedly, its crest devoured by rust. The air around it smelled wrong—not just of mold and damp, but of something older. Something that had been patient for a very long time.
Diego slipped through the gate like he'd done it before. He had. Many times.
Inside, the air was thick with spores and dust. Wallpaper peeled in long, curling strips. The chandelier in the foyer hung by a single chain, swaying slowly of its own accord. Floorboards sagged under his weight, complaining in tired creaks. Mold spread across the walls in intricate patterns, more like veins than decay.
He moved with purpose now, with a strange, ritual grace. The madness that had once scattered his thoughts had tightened into focus. His eyes, still burning faintly, traced paths only he could see.
In what used to be a ballroom, a new kind of decor filled the space.
A table had been dragged into the center and stained almost black with dried blood. Human organs glistened on tarnished silver platters. Animal bones hung from strings like wind chimes, clicking together when the draft moved through. On the floor, drawn in a mixture of ash, blood, and a thick black substance that pulsed faintly, was a door—a massive circle etched with sigils in both Nahuatl and Spanish.
Above it, on the wall, a stone tablet had been embedded into the cracked plaster. Diego had carved it himself, each stroke driven by a hand that no longer felt fatigue.
The tablet bore lines of ancient script, interwoven with clumsy, obsessive Spanish:
ABRE LA PUERTA ENTRE LAS EDADES.
QUE LA SOMBRA CRUCE SIN FIN.
NO ES CIELO, NO ES INFIERNO.
ES LO QUE VINO ANTES.
Open the door between ages.
Let the shadow pass without end.
It is not heaven. It is not hell.
It is what came before.
Below the words was a drawing—a door drawn in profile, but wrong somehow, its angles inverted. Looking at it too long made the brain itch, like trying to see a color that didn't exist.
Diego stood before the mold spreading across the wall beside it, tracing his fingers through the odd, branching patterns.
"This mold is special," he murmured to himself. "It doesn't grow like others. It follows the lines of the house's memory. It remembers where people prayed the hardest."
He pressed his palm against a dark patch. For a moment, the fungus shimmered, catching a faint, otherworldly light, then sank back into stillness.
"I've been buying time," he said, pacing slowly, claws scraping grooves into the wooden floor. "Every fight, every riddle. All stalling. It needed time to grow. To finish."
He turned back toward the drawn circle, where the door was.
"And now it's almost ready."
---
That night, he brought her in.
The woman was conscious but dazed, eyes glazed with pharmaceutical fog. Her heels dragged along the floor as Diego pulled her by the wrist. The house almost seemed to lean in, the mold darkening where she passed.
He stood her in the center of the circle, beneath the painted door. Her breathing hitched; somewhere inside her, the part that still recognized danger screamed, but the drugs muffled it into a whimper.
"No llores," he said quietly. "You're only the messenger."
He began to chant, reading from the stone tablet. The ancient words rolled off his tongue with inhuman fluency now, braided with Spanish in a rhythm that made the air shudder.
The circle ignited—not with flame, but with darkness. Shadows deepened around her ankles, thickening into tar-black tendrils. The air above her rippled, like heat over tarmac, and then it split—a vertical seam, thin and black, right over her head.
A door. Not metaphorically. Literally.
Diego's heart hammered—not with fear, but with savage joy.
"Go," he told her.
Her eyes were wide, pupils swallowed by black. She stepped forward because her body no longer belonged to her. She passed through the seam of darkness and vanished. The door closed with a sound like a breath being held.
Silence swallowed the ballroom.
Diego waited. The mold across the walls twitched faintly, like an animal dreaming. One second passed. Then another. Somewhere in the house, a pipe groaned, and a shutter banged softly.
Then, as suddenly as it had closed, the door opened again.
The woman stumbled out and collapsed. Her skin was clammy, her lips gray. A long, purple bruise curled around her forearm like a handprint. Her eyes stared at the ceiling, unblinking, but she was breathing.
Diego's grin spread slowly, crack by crack. "Completed."
He crouched beside her, studied the bruise. Whatever was on the other side had grabbed her. Not hard enough to keep her. Just hard enough to prove it existed.
He stood, turned to the stone tablet, and pressed his forehead against it.
"Moonveil," he whispered. "When I lure you here, you won't come back with bruises."
---
Across the city, Moonveil stared at riddles spread across a table like evidence and entrails.
Some were written in Spanish, some in the old script he was still trying to decode, some in English that felt wrong, as if the words had been lifted from dreams rather than dictionaries. He circled phrases, drew lines between repeated symbols, trying to find the spine of Diego's madness.
The TV droned quietly in the background. Another broadcast. Another speech.
William stood in front of a new banner—no crown, no royal sigil. Just his company's emblem and a stylized crescent turned on its side, like a smile drawn by someone who'd only heard of human faces.
> "…and as your new steward, I vow that this city will never again be shackled by old blood and inherited power. We will be a nation of merit, not of titles. Together, we will be free."
Moonveil muted the sound. He didn't need to hear William's voice. The man's body language said enough: the confident hand sweeps, the calculated pauses, the fake humility.
"King without a crown," Marc muttered. "And the people are clapping while he sharpens the knife."
As night deepened, the lab lights felt harsher. His head ached, his bones heavy. The moon outside was thin as a fingernail, its light weak. He brewed tea just to have something warm in his hands.
That was when Tecciztecatl spoke.
---
The voice didn't arrive like usual—no booming echo, no grand heralding. It slid into Marc's mind like a sigh.
Champion.
Marc didn't look up from the riddles. "Is this about my sleep schedule or the lunatic carving door diagrams in blood?"
The latter, Tecciztecatl said dryly. Diego has done something William never dared to. He has opened a gate.
Marc frowned. "A metaphorical one, or…?"
A portal, the god clarified. A true doorway. It leads to a dark entity from another time and place. Something that was here before your species walked upright. It can't be killed. It can't be changed. It can only be sealed… and forgotten.
Marc leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight. "So he's gone freelance. Left William behind."
He was never truly William's, Tecciztecatl replied. He followed Juarez. They shared a mother. Blood bonds different from contracts. The other two—Salvatore and Rafael—they share only a father. Their loyalties are thinner.
Marc exhaled slowly. "So Diego's not just lost. He's… unanchored."
He is grief wielded like a weapon, Tecciztecatl said. He wants to burn the board, not just flip it.
Marc rubbed his eyes. "Then maybe it's time to put him out of his misery. Send him to join his brother."
There was a pause. A long one.
When Tecciztecatl spoke again, his tone had changed. Softer. Older.
That is where you are wrong, Marcson. Bodies can be ended. Souls cannot.
Marc scoffed, but it lacked conviction. "You telling me there's no heaven, no hell? Just… endless recycling?"
Not in the sense you've been taught, Tecciztecatl said. Your religions wrap truth in fear and stories. The reality is more… inelegant.
The lab felt smaller suddenly. The hum of the machines grew louder, as if they too were listening.
The soul is not tied to one body, Tecciztecatl continued. It's a current. It wears flesh like clothes. When the cloth tears, the current moves on. Sometimes to a similar shape. Sometimes to something entirely other. You, for instance—this time you are Marc Stevenson. In another age, you might have been a priest. Or a soldier in a different war. You may yet be a bat or a fly, a star or a stone. Function, not dignity, dictates form.
Marc swallowed. "So what? No reward? No punishment? Just… spin the wheel again?"
Some call that punishment, the god said. Others, mercy. There are realms, yes—places where souls rest, regroup, are weighed. But not as your stories paint them. There is no eternal burning pit or golden gate. Only… cycles. Paths. Some souls take the long road. Some refuse to move and become ghosts, clinging to unfinished business until they dissolve into madness.
"And Diego?" Marc asked quietly. "Where does he fall?"
He is dangerously close to becoming a fixed point, Tecciztecatl replied. If he dies unchanged, his soul may warp around his grief and become something worse. Not a man. Not a demon. A… knot. The kind of thing even gods prefer not to touch.
Marc stared at the riddles on the table. They suddenly looked less like puzzles and more like chains.
"So killing him might not solve anything."
It may make it worse, Tecciztecatl agreed. That is why I say: the body is only a tool. Destroying the tool without resolving the purpose behind it often leaves the purpose looking for sharper blades.
Marc let out a bitter laugh. "You're a moon god and a philosopher."
I've had time to think, came the wry answer. Then, more firmly: We have to seal the gate. That is the priority. If the entity on the other side crosses fully, even your new… status will not easily contain it.
Marc glanced toward the window, where the thin slice of moon hung above the city like a tired eye. William was consolidating power. Diego was carving holes between worlds. And he—caught between a god who was losing his champion and a city losing its mind—was being told that death wasn't an ending, just another step in a long, stupid spiral.
"Alright," he said finally. "We seal the gate."
You will have to go through it first, Tecciztecatl said. To know how to close it, you must see what lies beyond. Just as Diego did.
Marc closed his eyes, feeling the weight of that settle in his bones. "And if I don't come back?"
There was no hesitation this time.
You've died once already, Tecciztecatl said softly. You came back changed. That is… our curse. And our advantage. But this time, champion, try not to make me watch you break from the inside.
Marc opened his eyes again. The riddles on the desk looked sharper now, their lines like teeth.
"Fine," he said. "Let's go knock on the door Diego built."
Outside, the night thickened around the city.
In the abandoned mansion, the mold climbed higher up the walls, reaching toward the strange, invisible seam in the air that pulsed like a heartbeat.
In his tower, William smiled at a world that thought surrender meant safety.
And somewhere in the cosmos, something old and hungry turned its gaze toward the little gate in the rotting house on the edge of London, pleased that mortals were finally remembering how to open doors they should have left buried.