The silence in the subterranean market of Saint-Eustache was more than just a lack of sound; it was a suffocating vacuum that seemed to suck the very jingle from Mephisto's bells.
Each step he took felt like a thunderclap in the stillness.
He navigated the broad, stone-paved street of the market, his boots clicking rhythmically until they hit the dark, slick patches of blood.
Shadows danced at the edge of his vision—flickering shapes that seemed to dart between the stalls.
Mephisto tightened his grip on his sleeves, his dark eyes darting from side to side.
"Paranoia, Faust," he whispered to himself, the scholar in him trying to override the fool. "The mind creates ghosts in the dark to explain the absence of life."
But the evidence of a physical menace was undeniable.
As he moved deeper, the carnage came into full view:
Some stalls stood eerily open, their owners slumped over counters in frozen poses of terror.
Others were smashed to splinters, goods scattered across the cobblestones as if a gale-force wind had torn through the cavern.
Bolts of rare silk, jars of crushed medicinal roots, and ancient scrolls lay trampled into the blood-stained mud. It wasn't a robbery; nothing had been taken.
On the damp stone walls of the cave, jagged claw marks had been gouged deep into the rock. They weren't the clean cuts of a blade, but the frantic, powerful swipes of something with immense strength.
Faust knelt by a massive depression in the earth—a footprint.
It was staggering in size, easily the width of two of his own heads. In the deep burrows of the track, a thick, viscous black liquid pooled, smelling of rotted lilies and old copper.
Beside the monstrous print was another: a smaller, cleaner boot print.
Faust's mind raced through the pages of the Ars Goetia.
Pictures of dragons, drakes, and the jagged-clawed basilisks floated in his mental periphery.
He compared the tracks to the sketches in Johann Weyer's journal.
"The claw shape is wrong," he reasoned, his logic acting as a shield against the mounting dread. "Basilisks have a more serrated grip. This is smoother, more serpentine... yet heavy. It cannot be real. These are fairy tales for children and Inquisitors."
He suppressed the urge to reach into his crimson robe and pull out the tome.
He didn't want to admit that the book held the answers.
He didn't want to admit that the "unnatural" was currently his only reality.
He stood up, his heart suddenly giving a sharp, erratic thrum—a warning signal from his biological "engines."
His intuition, that strange natural affinity he inherited from his parents, prompted him to turn, to run, to leave this street immediately.
But the bells on his suit were too loud.
A low, wet hissing erupted from the darkness directly behind his back.
The air turned cold, and the scent of that rotted-lily black liquid became overpowering.
Mephisto froze.
The red-painted grin on his face remained, a ghastly mask of joy in a house of the dead, as a long, flickering shadow stretched past his own on the stone floor.