When Hell Sings

The boy who cried wolf

An ominously dark night befell the town of Hell's Pass, a small but thriving village in the woodland outskirts of Transylvania as an equally dark and majestic steed gallops through its mysterious wood, carrying tales of evil men. The steed stood higher than any other before seen in Hell's Pass, its eyes like the siblings of the moon in the darkness of its coat. Unseen amidst the darkness that surrounded it, all that could be heard was what seemed to be the thundering sound of the heart beats of angels as its mighty hooves met the forest floor and the shine of its armour, like polished silver, reflecting the icy chill of the moons gaze.

The rider was muscular, his poise confident, his direction true to his mission, true to the image his presence seemed to present as if on a canvas. A painting to inspire one’s courage, one's instinct for justice. He wore a black leather cowl, his hood and cape were rough, rough as if made of the scales of giant reptiles. Its surface was darkened like a starless night sky, yet glistened in the moonlight as if it were made of black pearls. On his torso he wore a black leather jacket with silver buttons holding it closed, going all the down its front. The buttons were engraved with the symbol of the Black Church, a black dire wolf’s head with a silver cross on its forehead, between its eyes. On its sleeves, small rectangular armour plates made of pure silver were sewn into the lining of the jacket’s leather, the plates ran from the wrists all the way up his sleeves to his shoulders, where shoulder armour plates made of polished silver and in the form of a wolf’s upper jaw, cupped and protected his broad shoulders. Though he was dressed as a battle ready knight, riding into the gut of battle, he had a rather strange feature on his person. Along with the battle armour of what they call the Silver Knights, the rider also wore a priest’s collar, a sure sign of being a priest of the Black Church.

His eyes cut through the shadow of his hood, staying true as he rushed through the Lord’s Forest towards Hellsing Manor, seeming unstoppable to anyone or thing that would wonder into his path. While on route to the manor he’s ears start twitching as he hears a far off wail, a desperate cry for help from the terrified heart of a young boy. As though made of quicksilver, the rider makes his way to the source of what seemed to be the cries of distress. He raced through the dense wood, ducking under large collapsed trunks and low hanging vines that would brutally separate him from his steed, or knock him off his high horse. As if riding in the day time, he manoeuvred through every obstacle the wood had laid forth with ease. Loud, echoing whispers came from the darkness around him, growls of strange beasts rung his ears, the wallows of lost souls chilled his blood. Through all of this he remained true, never wavering from the call of duty that he had sworn to always answer.

The faster he rides, the closer he gets, and ever so louder the cries become. A shiver makes its way up his spine shaking every bone in his body, his breath visible to the eye, his heart audible to the ear. “Death awaits thee.” He whispers to himself, with no fear present in his eyes, only determination, focus and anger. His words freeze in the wind.

It is when he reaches a meadow at the end of the tree line that he commands his horse to stop, a meadow covered in bright daisies almost green having been touched by moonlight. The horse comes to a stop with a slight skip on the narrow, muddy path. The rider urgently jumps off the horse with his eyes still pointing straight ahead, never wavering, not even as much as a blink, as if he were locked on to a far distant target. They begin to glow a luminous blue from within the darkness of his hood as he scans the vast area ahead of him, a meeting of the meadow and the Lord’s Forest in the form of a forked road. On the side of the road there stood an old wooden sign with arrowed ends pointing down both the road to the left and to the right. The arrow pointing down the road to the left read, “Blessed Mine”, with the arrow pointing down the road to the right reading, “Hellsing Manor”. The rider steps forward and looks down both roads not knowing which way to go, the cries for help had stopped completely, “Could he be.” He says to himself as he puts one hand to the ground and his nose in the air, flaring, sniffing like a wolf on the hunt. He pauses suddenly, his nostrils stop flaring as he brings them down to the ground as if to breathe in the wet, muddy sand. He snaps his eyes open, now raging red instead of blue having picked up the scent of rotting flesh lingering in the cold air, the scent of unearthly and evil creatures, surely the cause of the boy’s distress. The rider then looks forward to find a misty, luminous red trail leading down the road to the left, towards the Blessed Mine. With haste, he flips backwards off the ground and lands perfectly on the saddle of his horse, and races down the left road now following his nose instead of his ears. The luminous trail gets wider as the scent gets stronger, “I’m almost there, hold on boy! Please.” He speeds through the meadow almost not visible to the eye with a black shadowing trail with glimmers of silver being all that could be seen. The flowers on the meadow were ripped from the ground with their roots, and their petals from the stem as he passed them by as if a hurricane raged on his back.

Like an enraged ghost he passed through the meadow, eyes as crimson as rubies, still not blinking, still not wavering. He finally makes his way out of the meadow and onto a wider road for carriages and larger traffic judging by the wheel and horse tracks in the ground. Now closer than ever to the source of the scent, his nose starts flaring as his canine teeth enlarge as if to escape his mouth and a short but loud growl escapes him. The rider continues down the road leading to the Blessed Mine and to his relief and horror he hears the boy’s cries once again, “Help, me! Please! Somebody, anybody. Monster!” Though he was alive, they were now cries with deep pain in them, a pain that would have made most men cry for death’s release than cry for help. He sees a cloud of red mist a few hundred metres ahead on the side of the road next to an old log cabin withered by time. From such a great distance the rider could clearly see movement within the mist, with the cries of the boy along with terrifying screeches and growls coming from the mist. The rider had found who or what he was looking for.

The crimson mist trail disappeared into the air, the cloud also dispersed, blown away in the wind revealing a truly gut wrenching sight. A group of vile looking creatures, crouched and jumping around, gathered and surrounding something the rider couldn’t really get a clear view of. Their screeches echoed through the darkness, their savage growls rumbled through the trees. As the rider got closer and closer he knew exactly what they were, “Ragers!” he whispers to himself as a deep breath leaves his body and his crimson eyes grow ever so wider filling his dark hood with a red aura easily visible in the darkness of the night. His teeth uncontrollably grind against each other as if they were those of a wild dog, mad with hunger. With his eyes he sees the creatures, though still far from him he sees them as if they were right in front of his face. He smells their putrid flesh as if standing right next to them, and hears their monstrous wails as if being whispered into his ear.

They had smooth, dark grey skin almost invisible in the darkness to the human eye, with spikes running down their spine which seemed to keep them in a crouched position. These were the Rager Vampires. They are the final stage in vampire mutation. These extremely dangerous creatures where once human until infected by the vampire curse that plagued the many villages of Transylvania. The Rager starts out as a human vampire, but as they live and lurk in dark dungeons and caves, and are forgotten by time, their bodies begin to transform and adapt to survive in these daunting conditions. They gain three long claws on each hand, sharp fangs and their eye sight is stripped from them. The rager depend solely on their significantly enhanced and sensitive hearing for hunting and navigation.

As he drew closer to them, they heard the thundering sounds of his horse racing down the road towards them. The ragers disperse from the group and turn their attention towards the horse and its rider. On doing so the ragers expose the source of the desperate cries for help. The ragers gather in the middle of the road leaving a young boy on the brink of death, bleeding on the ground in front of the cabin with one arm clenching his neck and his other arm stretched in front of him as if trying to catch the stars in the night sky. He breathes deeply, every breath a battle for him as he lies there with an open chest and wearing a crimson shirt you would never have believed to have been white earlier that afternoon.

The rider smells the blood of the boy in the air and it infuriates him, it fills his heart with anger and hatred, for the spilling of human blood was what he lived to prevent. He lets out a loud roar, freezing the blood of the ragers, stopping them in their tracks. They look ahead at the rider coming towards them, eyes wide open filled with nothing but the look of hunger and the lust for death as they look on to their target, blood dripping down their chins and off their exposed fangs, tongues licking their faces in their entirety, and the hisses, the hisses of a thousand serpents escaped from their tongues as they spread their arms revealing their long sharp claws, reflecting the moonlight off their edges like freshly forged steel.

“Van Hellsing!” They screech in unison with monstrous voices, like men shouting with vice gripping their throats. “Hmph, only six of you!? You shall all perish this night, back to the depths of man’s darkest nightmares you shall return by my hand, you vermin!” He shouts in a thundering voice, a voice not of his human self, a beastly voice, like if a wolf could utter words of rage.

Van Hellsing with his blood afire and his heart as true as his words puts both feet onto the horse’s saddle, and with the horse galloping as fast as it possibly can he stands on the horse’s back, nerves as calm as a sunny ocean morning. His eyes don’t waver from the vile creatures that await him now just fifty meters ahead, clawing at the ground sending sparks flying into the air, copious amounts of blood and thick, almost white saliva flying from their snarling mouths, their mucus secreting bodies glistening from the moonlight and the lit torches hanging on the cabin door posts. Van Hellsing sees them clearly, he poises to jump and whistles for his horse to stop. The horse stops immediately and with a huge jump, Van Hellsing goes soaring through the air towards the ragers, their pitch black eyes following him as he comes flying at them. “You’re mine!” he shouts with his beastly voice. “Come you bastard!” the ragers shout and screech once again in unison.

During the few seconds of him soaring through the air, Van pulls his crossbow from his back, as composed as ever he looks down the aiming sights and into the crowd of ragers just ahead and slightly below him. His focus, matched only by his lust for the abolishment of this evil scourge. Time seems to freeze between those few seconds from when he looks down the sight of the weapon, to when he pulls the trigger, letting loose a thirty centimeter silver bolt at the group of ragers. The bolt had engravings on it, holy prayers in the ancient language, Latin, were carved into the bolts to ensure the successful exorcism and/or abolishment of evil creatures and spirits. The bolt soared through the air and found its mark, descending right into the soulless eye of one of ragers with so much force it pins the creatures head to the ground. The others look on as their brother screeches in pain, a sound that makes the windows of the cabin crack and the flames of the torches flicker as if in a strong wind. The rager desperately claws at its own head and tries pulling the bolt out of its eye as the flesh on its head and body dissolves slowly into a putrid smelling liquid, like rotting meat in the sewer. It leaves nothing but dry, bare bones crumbling to dust in the wind. The liquid seeps into the cracks in the stone ground changing the color of the rocks and soil from brown to a pale green. Before the rest could look back up at Van Hellsing, he lands right in the middle of the remaining ragers on both feet into a combat roll causing a massive fracture of the stone pavement and finally he skids for a few meters on his right knee before coming to a complete stop with his arms spread out to the sides, cross bow in his right hand and a huge double edged great sword in the other. Van Hellsing looks back over his shoulder to find four ragers in the air, flying in twisted positions, going in all directions, floating away slowly as if time itself had slowed down. The fifth rager was still on the ground, it turns around slowly with its eyes wide open and an expression of shock in its face as its eyes meet Van Hellsing’s. “Damn you. Priest!” it says with a low weak voice as it slowly splits apart in two, having been cleaved perfectly in twine. Its body halves hit the floor, blood and insides spill out onto the ground in a crimson mass before too dissolving into the ground.

Van Hellsing looks down the length of his great blade, coated in thick clotted blood, almost black in color, dripping slowly off the sword’s diamond sharp edges. “Is this it, is this all you have to offer!? You vile scourge!” he taunts them in his beastly voice with a monstrous smile on his face, his teeth exposed, all looking as sharp as razors, like wolf fangs made of glistening silver. The remaining ragers flew through the air with one being stopped by crashing into a nearby tree. Before it could drop down and hit the ground, two silver daggers pin its arms to the tree trunk weakening but not killing it. It looks up with a pain filled screech to see Van Hellsing’s terrifyingly violent smile, with silver throwing knives between his fingers. The other two creatures violently hit the side of the cabin walls and dropping to the hard ground. As they attempt to get back their bearings and get on their feet, four daggers soar through the air seeming as fast as bullets reflecting the light of the torch flames burning close by. All four knives find their mark with two piercing each of the ragers’ hearts and pinning them against the side of the log cabin. They let out blood curdling screeches and dissolve simultaneously covering a small part of the cabin with their toxic remains. The vile liquid eats through the log walls of the cabin like acid, until finally making them catch fire, setting the cabin ablaze as if it were doused in oil. The last rager lands on the ground and tumbles for a few meters until coming to a stop and jumping straight up to its feet to find its brothers slaughtered by a single man standing in front of a great blazing fire. A shadow with a shining animalistic smile reflecting the gold of the flames and illuminating blood red eyes that fills its heart with fear and dread, standing in front of the roaring fires of the hell that it was about to be banished to. “Bastard!” it snarls, with blood dripping from its battered face due to the impact with the hard ground. Poised to attack, it runs and leaps towards Hellsing, its arms spread out with its claws ready to carve Hellsing into shreds. “Now you shall perish, you Christian dog!” The rager shouts with its monstrous voice as it flies through the air. Its eyes abruptly snap open with their anger, hatred and fear quickly changing to eyes of shock and pain as its arms fall off, separating from its body and flying in different directions. The rest of the rager’s mutilated body continues towards Hellsing as he stretches out his freakishly huge arm and catches the rager by its neck, and begins to squeeze. His arm expands and almost tears the sleeve of his leather and silver armored jacket with long nails penetrating the ends of his leather glove. He holds the rager off its feet, still wearing the same feral smile on his face, he says with a calm voice, “Thou shall feed the soul of one’s beast with the scourge that curses the lands of our lord God, or suffer the beast’s wrath on one’s own soul, Amen”. He looks straight into the rager’s dead eyes, and stretches out his other hand and into it flies a silver disk with a serrated edge as sharp as a razor bearing the Black Church’s symbol in the center and covered with the same black, clotted blood that that covered his great sword. He turns and lifts the rager into the path of yet another one of the serrated disks he had thrown, as if using a shield. The shuriken plunges deep into the ragers back, animalistic claws slicing the flesh on its face as it screeches in agony. “Simply put. You’re dog food!” he shouts now in his beastly voice as his mouth opens wider than any human can manage. Hellsing bites into the face of the rager, tearing through flesh and crunching the bones of its skull. The rager’s legs kicking, its body squirming as Van Hellsing’s silver fangs shred its head, violently ripping off pieces of its skull, chunk by bloody chunk, slowly and agonizingly decapitating the rager. Its legs stop kicking and the now headless body drops to the ground onto its knees and like an erupting volcano, it sprays black blood into the air in all directions making Van Hellsing look like a worker on an oil rig. The bright crimson in his eyes starts to dim, his teeth turn from their animalistic, silver state back to looking normal and white, though his smile remains. Van Hellsing then looks straight up into the dark, menacing sky and takes in a deep breath through his nose, pulling the flames towards him. He exhales slowly through his mouth as the flames push away, and the blood that covered him head to toe simmers on his face and armor before flying off him, blown away like ashes in the wind. Van Hellsing slowly brings his head back down and snaps his eyes open, now back to looking like his human eyes, back to looking as blue as sapphires. He looks over to the last of the ragers he had pinned to the tree earlier on, helpless and painfully squirming against the trunk of the rough, barked tree. A trail of black blood flowed from the wrists of the rager until collecting in a puddle about five meters in front of it. Van Hellsing turns his full attention to this rager, his smile fades from his lips as he begins a slow steady walk towards the rager. He stares at it without blinking as he gets closer and closer, blue eyes meeting the black of the rager’s eyes, staring into the abyss that is its soul. As he walks he begins a prayer.

“Ye of retched flesh, a dark void without a soul, who walketh amongst the living to quench thy lust for death and suffering, shall be banished to the firing pits of hell that thou hath escaped, for by the flames you were caged, and by the flames you shall return…” he says to the rager in a calm voice, as he stops at the puddle of rager blood on the ground and looks down at it, seeing a perfect reflection of himself with the full moon lurking in the background, as if peeking over his shoulder. His sapphire blue eyes gleam in its light, staring at the moon as if admiring a lover. “Curse you, vile priest!” the rager shouts in a weak, stammering voice with its head hanging low though staring back into the eyes of Van Hellsing. Hellsing then raises his right hand to his face as the leather gloves start stretching and expanding until finally a beastly claw bursts out of the glove. The claw having pitch black fur with large veins visible under the skin, long muscular fingers holding diamond hard, and razor sharp silver claws glistening in the moonlight. “Amen.” He whispers as he bends over and strikes a rock in the ground next to the puddle, sending sparks flying into the air and igniting the rager blood. Like oil, the blood burns and carries the flame towards the source of the blood trail as the gold and blue of the fire reflects in the rager’s eyes, watching the coming of its own doom. “Sssckrrreeeeeeeeeeeeaaaah!” it screeches as the flames reach its feet and legs, igniting its entire body, setting it ablaze and burning it in bright orcish green flames. The smell of roasted sewerage meat fills the air as Van Hellsing looks on, never blinking as the flesh of the rager darkens as it’s scorched by fire and its screeches get louder and louder. Its eye balls soon explode in their sockets as the flesh begins to melt off the rager’s bones, while its lower jaw drops to the ground, smoothened and charred by the flames, stopping the rager’s painful screeches. The rager burns until all that remains as proof of its existence is a charred, jawless skeleton with teeth like a piranha pinned to an old tree, which soon blows away like ash in the wind as its screech echoes and fades away, silenced for eternity.

Van Hellsing looks to the sky and releases a quiet sigh. As he looks back down, he turns to the burning cabin as his eyes widen with shock and disbelief. He inflames his nostrils and takes a few sniffs of the air. A sudden draft of wind carries smoke towards Van Hellsing, filling his lungs with thick black smoke and a scent that brings him down to his knees with his eyes wet with tears of guilt and despair. While on his knees he fills his hands with sand from the ground and looks down at them as the sand slips between his fingers, falling back onto the ground like sand through an hour glass. Looking like gold dust in the light of the flames close by, the sand escapes Van Hellsing’s palms as his eyes no longer able to hold back his despair, release the tears from behind them, flowing down his face and dropping into the sand in his palms making it look like he was holding a dessert oasis.

“Forgive me, for I have failed you.” He says in a humbled voice as he looks up from his hands and into the raging flames consuming the log cabin, with the blazing inferno roaring heat onto his face drying the tears running down to his chin and lighting up the night sky filling it with a thick cloud of black smoke rising ever so higher with each passing second. The crackling of the flames echoes in the silent night with the smell of burning oak and pine filling the cold air, along with the cause of Van Hellsing’s despair, picked up by his enhanced senses of smell and hearing. The smell of scorched, burning flesh enters his lungs, and the sound of its sizzling echoes in his ears as he lets out a loud roar of his own, shouting at the raging flames. His roar ends with a howl, a howl like that of a great dire wolf at the struck of midnight in the presence of a mesmerizing full moon, while grinding his teeth and now clenching the soil in his hands as hard as he could, as if to grind it even finer than it already was. “Forgive me!” he cries out into the flames once more.

A soft voice reaches his ears, “Though I walk through the valley,” it says in a suffering voice, as if from one drowning, drowning at peace. Van Hellsing looks to the source of the voice to find the young boy he’d almost forgotten about, whose cries had lead him to this cabin on the side of the woodland road now lighting up the dark wood like a giant bonfire. Van Hellsing lets out a loud sigh of relief and jumps up from his knees and begins to run to the boy’s side, “Hold on child, I’m here!” he yells as he leaves a trail of dust behind him, with every step he takes leaving a mark on the stone ground, fracturing under his boot like an earthquake leaving its mark in one’s mind. The suffering boy continues, “of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil,” in a choking voice, the words struggling to leave him as he bleeds to death, lying on his back with his head turned to the side staring right into the flames consuming what was once his home. The boy’s eyes, as red as the blood flowing from his neck, release tears that flow straight into the ground with his arm stretched out towards the inferno as if reaching for a loved one’s hand. “For you are with me,” he whispers with blood dripping from his mouth and nose, choking on his words as he drowns in his own blood. His arm drops and grabs onto the ground removing a handful of sand, clenching it tightly in his blood soaked palm, struggling to breath, struggling to stay alive.

Van Hellsing arrives leaving a long skid mark on the dusty roadside, and finally stops beside the boy. He looks down at him with tears leaving his eyes, he drops to his knees once again, cradling the boy’s head and resting it on his lap. He holds the boy’s hand firmly, and in a soft voice, “I’m here, I’m here.” He says to him. The boy looks up at Van Hellsing and manages a smile, staring at the insignia on Van Hellsing’s chest, the insignia of the Hellsing family, glowing as the flames reflect their light off the smoothness of its silver. He then looks up at his would be rescuer, deep into his blue eyes as he utters a single word, “Amen.” He says in a fading voice as his eyes slowly close and the hand clenching the sand opens, letting the sand fall out between his fingers with some of it blowing off his hand, into the current of the wind.

The boy lay dying in the arms of a stranger, under the night sky made ominous only by the great fire raging in the darkness of the woods. Van Hellsing looked down at the boy with a look of shock on his face having never had expected such a young child to embrace death with such courage and peace, despite the horrific events that had just occurred. Hellsing’s ear twitched as his eyes turned from shock to relief, having heard the boy’s weak heart, slowly beating in his chest. “I shall not fail you!” he shouts as he stands up with the boy in his arms and whistles for his horse, which is just arriving at the scene of the m******e. In one swift and effortless motion, he jumps upwards about seven feet into the air and lands perfectly on the horse’s saddle as it passes under him having barely slowed down. The horse ignores the blazing inferno as it speeds through clouds of thick black smoke blending in with its dark coat making it look as if it were a creature straight out of hell.

The horse gallops away from the choking scene so fast that it leaves a trail of black smoke in its wake, as if it were a dark aurora escaping from the beast’s tail as it carries them back the same way Van Hellsing had come, until yet again arriving at the forked road at the end of the meadow. This time going down the road to the right with the pointed road sign reading “Hellsing Manor.” With haste, Van Hellsing speeds down the road leading him into the Dark Wood, riding as if it were midday with the sun overhead and maneuvering around the thick woodland trees and shrubbery with ease. His eyes glowing blue like fireflies in the pitch blackness flying through the air, the only part of him that is visible. The silence of the darkness is broken by the thundering sound of the horse’s gallop and the clangor caused by the steering chains repeatedly hitting against its silver armor plating, sending flocks of crows flying out of the high tree canopies and into the night sky almost eclipsing the moon and filling the night air with their songs of death.

As they approach the tree line at the edge of the wood, Van Hellsing looks down at the boy with his eyes shining a luminous blue light on the dying child, like lanterns making his now blood soaked shirt look purple. “Hold on, we’re almost there.” He whispers urgently to the boy as they enter an open field of lush, green grass with a stone pavement leading all the way across the field to a humungous barred gate made of black steel with silver spikes on the top of it and a large letter ‘H’ also made of silver, welded on the center of the gate. The Hellsing Manor gate stood between stone walls standing twenty-five feet high and seven feet in thickness, held together by molten silver instead of mortar forming a rampart wide enough to be manned by a small armada.

In the fields between the tree line and the wall, along the sides of the stone road, stood thin towering pillars made of the same black steel and being the size of two grown men with a brazier at the top end of each of them. Van Hellsing continues down the path, his horse fracturing the stone beneath its hooves as the braziers ignite and burn in a blue flame when he passes them, illuminating the entire field as if it were day time with the blue of the flames being captured by the silver of his armor. The fractures in the stone heal as soon as the horse lifts its legs from the ground and once again making the stone path look as smooth as polished marble, reflecting the midnight moon lurking in the darkness of the night sky above. The gates made of black steel slowly start to open as Van Hellsing approaches them, with the sound of a war horn being blown as their only welcome. The bone chilling sound of the horn shook the leaves and pinecones from the nearby trees and rattled the bars of the gate, while the ground itself shook lightly as if it were the arrival of the arch angel himself. Van Hellsing sped through the manor’s gates before they could fully open and entered the courtyard of the great Hellsing Manor that now stood in front of him.

His horse slows down as it approaches the entrance to the manor, a large wooden door with the same silver letter “H” welded onto its face. Van Hellsing dismounts the stead with care and haste, considering the boy in his arms fighting for his life. Hellsing runs towards the door of the manor and again leaping into the air, and soaring over the stair case that leads up to the entrance, landing right in front of the door which opens on its own as the braziers hanging on the door posts ignite and burn in a blue flame. As he enters the manor his footsteps echo through its empty halls as his boots meet the elegant black marble floors. A crystal chandelier hung over the entrance of a long hallway leading to an ancient looking door at the end of it. The door was unlike any other in the manor and made of wood, black wood and decorated with silver metal work with a silver wolf’s head welded on to the center of it were the door knocker would usually be. Against the walls of the hallway stood several sets knight armor made of polished silver and helms in the shape of wolf heads, with great swords in the hands of each knight pointed downwards towards the dark floor. Between each knight stood much shorter black steel braziers which ignite as Van Hellsing storms down the hallway towards the mysterious door at the end of it.

Van Hellsing stops running and begins to skid on the smooth marble floor as he nears the door, which does not open as he approaches but begins to ripple like a pond in the rain as he effortlessly goes right through it, as if he were an ethereal entity walking through a solid wall. Finally he comes to a stop on the other side of the door, finding himself in what appears to be the inside of a dark and wet cavern, as if he was not just in a luxurious mansion in the woods. He looks back at the door and sees the marble floored hallway, the silver knight armors against the walls and the crystal chandelier catching the light of the burning braziers, all rippling against the cavern wall like a giant water painting.

Van Hellsing looks back ahead into the dark cave and continues moving forward with sounds of screeching bats and water flowing from the cracks on the roof dripping into small puddles, echoing through the tunnels of the cavern. He walks a couple of feet forward until a dim light begins to shine at what seems to be the end of the tunnel. He gets closer to the light, with every step he takes covering his boots with thick mud from the wet tunnel floor. The light seemed to be reflecting from a nearby water source making the light ripple against the cave walls. Van Hellsing runs towards the light, his ear twitching once more as he listens to the heart of the dying boy take its last slow beat, “We’re almost there, Hold on!” he shouts at the child as he reaches the light and enters another cave shaft lit by burning candles on an iron chandelier hanging from the cavern roof. The candles were made of black wax and burned in a blue fire similar to the flames burning in braziers in the hall way and the fields outside, with the chandelier hanging above a large pool of water in the ground reflecting its light like the sea reflecting the sky.

The pool of water looked like a pool of icy flames lighting up the entire shaft, and covering its floor with snow and its roof with icicles as sharp as canine teeth and as hard as diamonds. Van Hellsing’s breath froze in the air as he rushed into the mysterious water standing waist deep in it with the boy in his arms, as still as a rock and skin as cold as ice. He gently lets go of the boy and watches his body floating face up in the water before removing a knife from the sheath on his thigh and raising it into the air, chanting in Latin as he slowly begins to lower the blade slowly towards the boy. Beside the pool of water stood a stone statue of a dire wolf with eyes made of blue sapphire gems, howling up at the chandelier which begins to burn brighter as Van Hellsing chants the Latin prayer. The chandelier changes from burning normally to sending roaring flames from the candles which don’t melt as the fire begins to burn like the flames of a furnace.

The sapphire eyes of the stone dire wolf begin to glow and shine like two north stars in the dark night sky, making the water bubble as if it were boiling, before igniting the surface of the water with blue flames with Hellsing standing in the middle of the pool waist deep inside and not minding the burning water. Van Hellsing brings down the blade onto his own hand and cuts deep into his palm allowing his blood to drip into the bubbling water, all the while chanting his prayer with his eyes as blue as the flames raging above and below him. He then takes the boy’s hand and cuts it as well, holding it with his own bleeding hand. ‘On this day, I take my soul and make it one with Thee, Amen!’ He shouts as the cavern echoes his words, the stone wolf returns to its slumber and the flames on the candles burn calmly once more. The boy sinks into the water, while Van Hellsing collapses into its depths face up, unconscious.

The darkness swallowed all hope and embraced the silence in the shadows of the cave, a silence broken by the wales of hundreds of souls floating within the burning water, and the cave once again falls into silence and black.