In a bombed out, derelict industrial area, likely a factory some time ago, homeless children huddle together. It was some slavic Eastern European mining town, grey clouds hid the sun, not quite evening yet, but the coldness was crawling in through the chilly winds.
A girl worked on a contraption beside them on a broken wooden table, she was about 19 in age, though her short height and petite frame caused through malnourishment might cause second guesses.
She lifted her WW2 era plane goggles and ran a hand through her long unkempt, fiery hair filled with dust and soot. She wore a long coat over practical jeans, also covered in dust.
The contraption lit up, a portable heater made of copper wires, batteries and other junk, she touched the coil with a gloved finger to make sure it worked.
While the children winced she herself was fine, to her it only hurt if the nerve endings care, and they didn't complain much anymore.
The children huddled around the heater as the evening coldness came, mists rolling in the broken factory and other buildings, long closed from bad business.
This was their shelter, their home, for the ones lost, who knew nothing of society and warmth
And she was ecstatic about it.
"Big sis, why did you make this for us?" One of the kids asked, referring to the heater. "We've been left for dead by everyone else..."
"Eh..." She scratched her head. "You die, you die, nothing about it. But as long as you're alive, you shouldn't be shivering!" She declared with a grin, putting her goggles back on, about to leave.
"Give her a name! I brought out her inner beauty after all!" She said, pointing at the makeshift heater.
She buttoned up her coat and made her way to the exit.
Just then something sleek rolled up in the fog, cars, many of them. Suited agents stepped out followed by a strange man, wearing a pale suit and black cape, he had tired, baggy eyes, unkempt blond stubble, and the distant expression of someone waiting for the world to end.
He scratched his short blonde hair, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket, his dark eyes gazing over it.
"Aldona Lomidze, you're asked to accompany us." He quickly flashed a high ranking card of local authority.
"Er, Am I being arrested?" She asked.
Faust sighed. "Not quite..."
"Yeah I'm not coming-"
"We have hot food and shelter."
"Do I need to put on handcuffs-"
...
"Okay so... We have good news and bad news." Sighed Jackson. "Good News— We located the 4th Chosen One, now we only need one more!" He tried faking a smile as he relayed the next part. "Bad news is uh, The New Iteration got em first. The Hermitic Order is on the case with agents, but we need help from you guys."
The 3 Chosen Ones sat in the seats of the private jet moving to Georgia, only now getting an explanation for their mission.
"Why the hell can't the Agent Mages get the job done again?" Asked a slightly sleepy Andrew.
"She's going to be a part of you guys, gotta make a good first impression, Chosen One n'all." Jackson replied bluntly.
The plane landed eventually and Jackson guided the Chosen Ones to a car to drive them to a location.
"So um, why isn't Mr. Mike here with us?" Franz tugged at his scarf, sneezing.
"He's dealing with some other guy with a knockoff Relic." Jackson yawned.
"Do we have to fight off those New Iteration goons again?" Andrew asked, already somehow tired.
"Hah! I wish... No we have to deal with Faust." Jackson chuckled.
"Faust?" Juno questioned.
"Johann Georg Faust or Doctor Faustus. He's a 300 year old Mage. He looks like a divorced 30 year old though, eternal youth and immortality, all that junk." Jackson waved his hand his dismissively
"W-Wow, he must be a pretty strong Mage..." Franz adjusted his glasses in awe.
"Nonsense!" Jackson replied. "Dude has a magick sugar daddy! Er Demon. Mephistopheles, he's a high end demon from the Astral Plane, not an Arch Demon of course, but strong regardless. Dude gave him his soul in return for magick, knowledge, pleasure and immortality..."
"Now obviously dude didn't account that you tend to get... Used to pleasure, especially with immortality hah!"
Jackson laughed to himself.
"Now dude can't even take his own life! Mephisto boy takes full enjoyment out of it! He's gonna get his soul and a lifetime of entertainment!" Jackson shrugged casually.
Juno's eyes narrowed at Jackson's slightly sadistic tone.
"That's... Kinda messed up that you're taking so much enjoyment out of it." Juno said, sympathetic towards Faust.
"Right kindness and all that Magna Salus stuff..." Jackson sighed. "Believe me you'd be taking enjoyment too if you've faced Mephistopheles in the field of battle! He's undefeatable!"
"So... How're we gonna deal with this 'undefeatable' demon?" Andrew scratched through his hair.
"We're not. He wants to negotiate." Jackson sighed.
"O-Oh." Juno was surprised at the revelation.
"We're negotiating with... The New Iteration?" Andrew looked skeptic.
Jackson's tone turned more serious:
"More like negotiating with Faust. If they sent him they mean business but... Believe me, Mephisto boy has an agenda of his own, always."
"I thought The Hermitic Order and New Iteration were enemies..." Juno wondered. "We're negotiating?"
"Cold war. Believe it or not we've cooperated before. Whenever there was a supernatural threat that threatened the public enough, we teamed up. Simple math honestly." Jackson shrugged casually.
"They don't want magick to be known to the public, we don't want supernatural threats harming people."
...
The New Iteration remain in the abandoned mining town for the meeting, taking shelter in an abandoned building.
Faust's cigarette glows in the unlit room as gentle snow falls between the darkness outside. He sits in a chair as Aldona roams around the room under the watchful eye of the New Iteration agents and Faust.
"You smell like sulfur and sadness." Aldona comments, not even looking at Faust.
"One of those is chronic, the other demonic." Faust replies bluntly before throwing away the burnt out cigarette and lightning another.
"You seem tired. But that's normal I suppose." Aldona walks around the taller man.
"And you're nosy, scrawny brat." Faust scowls, almost biting his cigarette in two.
"My parents were poor, not much to eat growing up so I remained short!" Aldona smiled, always objective in her deductions, not even herself was safe.
Faust sighed.
"Mein Gott. Of course I get the wierd one..."
He threw away his cigarette.
"Regardless your magick, it's giving machines more... Finesse I see?"
Aldona doesn't stop roaming around to make eye contact, instead speaking while tinkering with an old pickaxe.
"I just encourage my children to be more like themselves! I bring out their inner beauty and 'selfness'!"
"..."
"Enhancement type, got it. Only works on machines she makes... Seems to be able to give them powerful attributes..."
Faust whispered, mostly to himself.
Just then an agent entered the room, giving a salute. "Sir the Hermitic Mages have arrived."
"Very well then..."
...
They sat across from each other, a half broken wooden table between them with hot coffee for each participant. Jackson sat on one side with the three Chosen Ones with the Hermitic Order while Faust sat on the other side with Aldona.
They spoke, well most of them. Aldona was too busy focusing on her cup of joe.
"What do ya want in exchange for the girl Faust?"
Jackson asked.
"Need a bit of help with an... Old colleague, Helga, I believe you know that name?" Faust took a sip of his coffee.
"Helga Kramer? Ah... Sadly we do." Jackson looked at the curious Chosen Ones before sighing.
"Helga Kramer... She was an extremely skilled Mage who joined the Hermitic Order of the Akasha back when it was known as the Order of the Golden Dawn. She was extremely proficient in Magick, her electricity prowess unmatched, easily an Ajna Level Magister Templi, a higher end of it as well."
"Why did she leave...?" Juno asked cautiously.
"She... Got exiled. She didn't care for civilians or about blowing the cover of magick and she was... Exceedingly brutal in her methods, frying the nerves of people, using her electricity to control the nervous systems of rats to eat her enemies alive... She was sadistic. Furthermore..."
Nervousness crept into Jackson's voice like what he was about to say was worse than making rats eat people alive, and to some Mages it was.
"She tried opening the Gate to the Outer Void ."
The room fell silent. The Outer Void, it was a thing heard in passing whispers to the three Chosen Ones, something far too taboo, far too profane to be known by the common Mage.
The chaotic waters in which Elyon created the heavens and the earth, the Astral Plane and The Material Plane. It existed truly beyond human understanding, prior to the Commandments of Elyon which laid the foundations for morality, logic and human thought.
Yet by the way the ones who knew spoke of it, it seemed something far worse...
...
Jackson recounted the tale of one of his first ever expeditions, he was 19, a fresh recruit of the Order. A mission to rescue missing civilians from a few rogue Mages of the Typhonian Order, somehow Helga had managed to convince them to try to open the Ultimate Gate.
While the Typhonian Order specialised in The Left Hand Path, kidnapping civilians weren't their Forté, these guys had gone rogue.
Rain slashed sideways against the rusted skeleton of the old ironworks, each gust making its beams groan like waking titans. Jackson stood at the threshold, his raincoat too big for him, hands trembling slightly as he adjusted the copper sigil dangling at his neck.
"Stay behind me," his expedition leader, Armin, mutters. "Helga likes her theatrics. Don't look impressed."
Too late. Jackson was already impressed, and freezing, also mildly wondering why all eldritch nonsense occurs in abandoned industrial ruins instead of, say, warm cafes, though it added to the pulp, no?
Then the chanting began. English at first. Then something wetter: bubbling consonants like drowning syllables.
Jackson's skin prickled as they moved deeper in.
Civilians, twenty? thirty? All strung up on suspended hooks, their bodies mutilated with patterns he recognizes from ancient diagrams. They were alive, barely, their voices merging as they wailed in pain.
The Mages led by Kramer chanted, their voices strained and choked.
"Æ'zubo Aufhebung! Æ'zubo Aufhebung!"
"Iä Iä Coronzon!"
"Az'gha-thuun llo-gru'nath
Kla ghrii! Kla ghrii!"
The smell of iron and flesh permeated the air as the expedition noticed a machine in the centre being operated by a Mage, clearly enhanced using Crawling Magick.
Jackson had never seen anything like it.
It looks like a radio built by someone who had only ever dreamed of radios: copper coils spiraling impossibly into Möbius shapes, dozens of tuning dials all turning themselves, cables threading into the hanging victims like veins.
Every surface is engraved with sigils, the kind hummed quietly.
A rhythmic static crackled from the machine.
Not random. Not mere noise.
A metaphor for pressure waves in the existential substrate.
Armin cursed softly. "She's actually doing it."
The centerpiece of this horror show the Maleficarum, The Witch.
Helga Kramer.
Her hat and coat drenched in rain, blood and dirt flies in the wind, her hands outstretched like some orchestral showman. Her eyes burn with fanatic revelation. She speaks without turning:
"He who maketh the many as one,
and the one as naught;
let all who falter before Him
be cast unto the Twin Shadows of God."
"Ye lurker of the Threshold, breaker of Gilgul Neshamot, Demon of Dispersion, Dweller in the Abyss."
"Iä Iä Coronzon! Æ'zubo Aufhebung!"
The cultists turned showing that they lacked ears and eyes, having cut them off.
Helga turned, a satisfied smirk on her face.
"Easy to see with your mind when your other senses are gone, they traverse the Aethyrs, to the Threshold where they shall open the gate to HIM."
Her eyes meet the expedition.
"No more illusion. No more suffering shaped by forms or systems. Only unbounded Void."
She outstretched her hands manically.
"To be empty is to be free!"
The Expedition move in, one member firing a concentrated beam of water at the machine.
Immediately, one of the Typhonian Mages jumped to block it with his body, the blast killing him on the spot as it penetrates his abdomen.
The remaining members quickly surrounded the machine, protecting it, as if guided by some inner power transcending their physical eyes.
"I invoke my name written in the Black Book!" Helga shouts.
"Iä Iä Coronzon! Amelek Kla ghrii! Amelek Kla ghrii!"
The machine shrieks, every dial spinning to its maximum position, and Jackson feels it:
A pressure, not on his eardrums, but on his existence.
Something vast is noticing them.
No shape, no angle, no presence, no emotion, just the sense of a horizon folding inward, of infinite darkness examining him the way a microscope examines an ant.
The dangling victims convulsed in unison, shouting and wailing growing faster, more frantic, more wrong. Their voices stretched like rubber bands pulled to breaking, turning into sounds that cannot fit in throats as they writhed in pain.
Jackson tries to look away and fails.
He sees the shadows behind Helga distort.
Not stretch.
Trying to unfold, invert.
Something invisible pushing through, a non-geometric pressure, like the corner of a metaphysical blade scraping the membrane of existence.
Jackson's breath hitched. His heart is pounding so hard he thought it was trying to escape.
He whispers, "Captain Armin… something's coming through-"
"Don't look at it!" Armin snarled. "That's Choronzon's attention. Even a glance can tear your identity, your very ego apart!"
But Jackson felt it anyway.
The touch of the Outer Void.
He felt as if his very self was being torn at by some immaterial, impossible phenomenon.
"Male", "Adult", "19", "Jackson Hersh", "Samuel Chroner." All categories that he imposed upon himself, being unravaled at the seams.
And for a moment, Jackson almost sees himself dissolve. Not physically, conceptually. Personality, name, memory, all melting into undifferentiated static.
He staggers. Vomits. The iron floor trembles.
Helga seemed ecstatic shouting nonsense while no doubt having her own identity torn apart.
"The room knows not the door!
The Clock unlearns to chime!
You touch me where the world dissolves
And call it not yet time!"
"Haha!"
"Iä Iä Coronzon!"
Armin shouts to the rest of the team. Spells erupt. Sigils drawn on the ground quickly take effect.
A barrier slams into place, buying seconds, just seconds.
"Cut the machine!" Armin orders.
Jackson nods, but his legs are jelly. His mind still half-dissolving. Reality feels like its denying its own being.
He stumbles toward the machine, each step bending space strangely. The copper coils ripple like pulsating arteries.
Jackson reacts without thinking, his earth elemental manipulation undoing the metallic machine at the very seams, crippling the abominable contraption.
The Outer Void's gaze snaps shut like a cosmic eyelid slamming. The Typhonian Mages disappearing along with it. Rain returns to sounding like rain.
Helga falls to her knees, although her sadistic smirk remains.
Armin steps forward.
"Helga Kramer… by edict of the Order, you are exiled. Permanently." He sounded like he wanted to kill her, but everyone knew picking a fight with her was a death wish even in that weakened state.
Helga merely chuckled.
"Hehehe... This is merely the beginning my dear Armin. You don't know what's coming, this attempt may have failed but... The Battalion will not."
"Aufhebung will be attained, the Great Old Ones shall tread reality again. Whether by The Lurker of the Threshold or The Thousand Armed Polyp..."
Her gaze turned to Jackson.
"Stay prepared my dear fox~"
...
Jackson blinked, the memories fading. His usual grin returns, but thinner, cracked at the edges.
"So yeah," he says, shrugging lightly. "That was one of my first expeditions. I learned two things:"
"One, the machine they had somehow managed to get belonged to the Germans during WW2, one of their supernatural divisions built it, so they apparently had a supernatural divison I didn't know about."
"And two… the Gods of the Outer Void aren't evil, merely... Primal and... Indistinctively hungry in a... Spiritual way."
He hesitates.
"Hungry in a way that doesn't involve eating. Hungry to erase. To return everything to its base ingredients. Including us."
He forces a laugh, returning to his usual smile, although clearly forced.
"Anyway! That's why we kicked her out, couldn't kill her because well, it's her. And that's also why I still can't listen to static without feeling like I'm about to dissolve into atoms."
The room was silent, very silent.
Even the generally stoic Faust was at awe, wondering if this Witch they had to deal with was even human.
The rest could not help but wonder the same.