By then the only ones left were me, Nora, the two pensioners, and a Frenchman in his thirties. The Frenchman stuttered irritatingly, sometimes tugging on his lower lip, as if that would wake him up from this nightmare.

‘You know, maybe we’re all dreaming,’ I said to him. ‘Our brain is dreaming every single second, Nora told me. Maybe when we die we awaken in a new life that’s not part of a dream.’

He looked at me like I was mad, and I realized I had spoken to him in Hungarian and that he hadn’t understood a word.

I never spoke to him again.

The transformation

I began hearing Jufus’ voice more and more often from the woods. Once I thought I saw him out of the corner of my eye. I asked Nora whether she had heard or seen our guide too, but she just shrugged her shoulders. Her lips were cracked from dehydration, her skin stretched tight over her bones.

The pensioners walked cheerfully along the impassable roads, their clothes still immaculate. They were committed to their goal; they had a higher purpose, just like Nora.

At last they found the place they had been looking for. Of course it could be that I was only hallucinating from fatigue, thirst, hunger, and madness, but who cares? By this point, the traveler no longer cares about the line between illusion and reality.

‘This is the place where the ritual is performed,’ Jufus whispered in my ear, coughing up dead air and blood from his lungs.

It was a cave. Around the opening hundreds of wolf skele­tons lay scattered.

‘They all bring human flesh in their stomachs as an offering,’ whispered Jufus, the eternal guide. ‘They lie down here and wait to die, that’s the only way for them to deliver the offering, in exchange for which they receive nothing. Such is the power of the Lords.’

The ritual of transformation is very rarely seen, as I learned from Jufus, who continued to whisper in my ear. It is rare for maguses of such a caliber to embark on an Abaddon Travels trip, but when they do, it provides an additional wonder to a trip already filled with monstrous delights.

The old people started the ritual right away, paying no attention whatsoever to our presence. In a way, the two of them had always been alone on this journey. We had traveled on the same road, but not together. Especially considering that their goals were opposite to the rest of the group’s.

The preparation for the ritual and the summoning of the Servant takes time. It mainly consists of chanting, strange dance moves, fucking, and drawing blood. We watched the whole thing apathetically from the edge of the tree line. By then my attention was mostly focused on my hunger, but I didn’t take my eyes off the pensioners, even if I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.