He had lost control. Despite his promises. Despite his oaths. Nickolai had lost control. He could think of only one thing to do.

Nickolai forced himself to take a deep breath, to re-center himself, to still the spasms in his right hand. He did not allow himself to inspect the carnage around him too closely; if he looked into the fear-twisted faces of the men he once knew, the men he had destroyed, he would break.

He could not break.

Instead he glanced at the other things left in the room, things that had never lived and were therefore beyond his wrath. What had been the table was now nothing more than twisted shards of wood that shone as dully and darkly as spilled red wine, or blood. Papers flapped like broken birds' wings against the floor, stirred by a draft that seeped into the room through a window that had once framed stained glass. Coffee and tea formed small streams, flowing from smashed mugs into a larger river of liquid that fixed a steady course toward the lowest part of the room. The room smelled like death.

A few candles had not been extinguished.

Nickolai strode over to a candelabrum in which one flickering candle remained, picking his way deliberately around the bodies instead of stepping over them. Delicately, almost reverently, he drew the candle from its place, murmuring a soft prayer under his breath.

But his movement to toss the candle to the ground, to the waiting paper that fluttered like dying birds and the speckles of wood that looked like blood or wine and the emptied husks of seven men and one woman, was sharply curtailed.

Stop.

Someone spoke with the assured command of the old. Something about the voice--the tone, the timbre, the pitch--sounded familiar. But he knew no one here beyond the members of the Council, and all of them were spread at his feet, lifeless.

Nickolai replaced the candle and whirled around, desperate to discover the witness to his crime, his shame, and found no one.

Surely you are not going to destroy the cathedral to cover up your guilt, the voice continued, and suddenly Nickolai knew why it was familiar. He crouched, gripping fistfuls of hair in agony and frustration, and shook his head.

"I must," he muttered, the words half-growl, half-moan. "I must, father. Alexander...Alexander, you of all people should understand. This place is ruined; it reeks of death; it must be cleansed."

No no no no No NO NO, rose the clamor in his mind. Nickolai picked out the echoes of the rest of the Council's voices, some much fainter than others, as though they spoke from behind the white noise of a fuzzy radio station. One, so indistinct as to be nearly inaudible, sounded vaguely feminine. He bared his teeth at the floor, at the voices, at himself.

You mustn't destroy this cathedral, Alexander insisted. It has its safeguards, evil cannot enter--

"I will rinse this place," Nickolai asserted, overriding the old man. With a great effort, he straightened back up and took the candle in his hand once more. "The blood of holy men corrupts this place, breaks the bindings and wedges a door open to death. Your presence in my mind is an indication of that. I will not have this breach taken advantage of--I have done enough here already--I am so sorry." The last words came out as a whisper.

He threw the candle to the ground, and fled.

It slept with the knowledge that it was asleep, but that it would soon awaken from its slumber of centuries. Its dreams were dark and desolate, filled with the grey sky, grey dust, grey sand of destruction. It dreamt that the land above had crumbled to ash, consumed by flame, and that it rolled in the ashes, satiated with the glut of death at last.

The land above was far too complacent; the memories of it had faded even out of legend by now, and it grew restless with what it could sense of that place. But doors that had been tightly locked and closely guarded for millennia were suddenly beginning to creak open, their guardians mysteriously absent. It could sense the coming change, and it shifted restively within its bindings.

This was what it had been waiting for all these centuries, biding its time since its last imprisonment in the land below, brooding, dreaming, planning.

It had been waiting a long time--too long. But now the doorways gaped open, and could not be contained much longer.

Ash. It would reduce the land above to ash, and finally be at peace.

Calina was in the grocery store, picking out ingredients for dinner, when a spark seemed to ignite in her blood. She staggered, leaning against a shelf for support, while a series of convulsions raced up and down her body. For a moment she panicked--Father died after his seizure, was all she could recall in that instant--but the tremors gradually lessened and she stepped away from the shelf, feeling...

Well, certainly not as though she had suffered any significant damage. In fact, she did not feel sick or hurt at all. And yet, there was a strangeness that had not been there before the episode, the kind of peculiar frantic feeling she always got whenever she misplaced her glasses.

She glanced up and down the aisle; no one had witnessed her odd behavior. Gathering...