From the damp polders of the Netherlands to the sun-dappled vineyards of the Rhineland and finally into the heart of France, the name Mephisto began to take on a life of its own.
Faust had successfully compartmentalized his life.
By day, he was the premier "magician-fool" of El Gloriosa, a role he had grown to love for its chaotic freedom.
He had even received a formal (and quite lucrative) invitation to join a rival Bulgarian circus—a proposition he found hilarious.
The thought of leaving Wunder's grumpy mentorship and the ragtag family of El Gloriosa just as he was starting to master the "Alchemist's Flourish" was unthinkable.
Besides, he was a man on a deadline.
The "Ars Goetia" sat heavy in his trunk, a silent reminder that his time in the Old World was a temporary detour.
The book had changed him.
He was no longer just a doctor looking at the world through a lens of humors and anatomy; he was a scholar of the shadows.
He moved through the night with a new, sharp-edged caution, always aware that if you stare too long into the darkness, something with far too many eyes might just stare back. Well, at least for now nobody... or nothing did.
Paris was a city of two faces for Mephisto.
While the circus set up on the outskirts, he found himself drawn to the towering Gothic majesty of the Church of Saint-Eustache.
He wasn't there for the sermons.
He had discovered a pattern: where the spires were highest, the shadows were deepest.
The Order of Ash seemed to have anchored its subterranean markets beneath the oldest cathedrals in Europe. Or the biggest ones, it doesn't matter. The only thing was clear: The Order was much more powerful in the past than now, big underground markets and catacombs were more of a proof.
As he stepped into the cool, incense-heavy air of Saint-Eustache, Mephisto smoothed his crimson velvet coat, the bells giving a muffled, respectful chime.
He approached a priest near the altar—a man whose eyes were far too sharp for a simple man of the cloth.
Faust leaned in, his voice a low, gravelly vibration, repeating the words Azazel had used in Amsterdam:
"Ce monde n'est ni juste ni clair, mais nous marchons sans lumière."
The priest simply bowed his head and beckoned Mephisto to follow.
They moved with practiced silence past the high altar and through a narrow, hidden door tucked behind a massive tapestry of the Archangel Michael.
The descent was familiar now.
A spiral stone staircase coiled into the dark, the air growing cooler and damp with the smell of centuries-old earth.
Faust expected the usual: the low hum of forbidden commerce, the clink of gold, the smell of rare herbs and ancient parchment.
But as he reached the final step...
The air didn't smell like a market.
It smelled of copper.
It smelled of iron.
It smelled of blood.
The silence in the cavern was absolute, a heavy, suffocating blanket that seemed to swallow the sound of his bells.
Mephisto stepped off the stairs, his boots splashing into something shallow and warm on the stone floor.
He didn't need to look down to know what it was.