Closer and closer, Vik came. We locked eyes. His were cold, lifeless, enslaved. I tried to fill my own gaze with sympathy. I tried to bring him back with just one look.

“Vik… please,” I whimpered, tearing, “don’t do this.”

“You’re wasting your breath,” Epistola sneered down at me. “Vivek is mine now.”

That thought terrified me more than the pain I knew was coming. It couldn’t be true! Vik, my Vik, had to still be in there somewhere.

“Vik, please,” I begged. “Try to remember… She has you brainwashed! Fight back! It’s not just my life that’s at stake. Don’t you see? She’s insane! She wants to destroy the whole world! All of existence as we know it! Fight her! Or you’ll die too—”

He thrust the candle in my face, stopping only an inch from my skin. The heat of the flame clawed at me, and my words froze on my tongue.

“Yes.” Vik leaned in close, the flickering light illuminating his features on the other side of it demonically. “I know,” he spat. “I would rather die than exist any longer in this world which contains such pain as that which you and your selfishness have forced me to endure.”

I knew he couldn’t possibly mean them, but Vik’s words lacerated me with the blades of a thousand cutlasses. Even if he could have fought Epistola’s mind control, he did not want to. Because of me.

“Orr’e d’faechlk,” he hissed, and he lowered the flame of the candle to my embarrassingly bare stomach.

“Please,” I sobbed. “Vik…”

“Orr’e d’faechlk!”

I screamed as he pressed the fire against my flesh. But the pain of the burn was nothing compared to the pain of knowing, fully and finally, that Vik was lost to me. My best friend was truly gone, taken over completely by that pathetic shell of a woman, a woman who was nothing but the casement of her skin and what little she did to cover it up.

I could only barely hear her next command over my own sobbing.

“Purify!”

A deluge of icy water fell upon me, filling every crevice of my body with wetness and dread. It was everywhere, permeating my very being. I could not escape it as the cultists poured and poured from some giant ceremonial shell.

When the last drops had trickled out, the chanting increased in volume. I was gasping for air erratically, sweating and shivering at the same time.

When I looked up, Epistola was on the stage before me again, her meteorite knife in one hand and the Grimoire in the other.

“Now,” she recited, “let the flesh of the Heart be broken.” She pressed the tip of the knife to the exposed flesh over my own heart. I winced as a droplet of blood oozed up around it. “Let it be marked with the Seal of Azathoth.”