[Suzerain of Sheol]

Shealtiel gazed into the waiting darkness, unmindful of his companions. If they were to die shrieking, blood-spattering deaths this very instant, he would not look away. Would not be able to look away.

The suggestion had been there since the beginning, since the first catastrophic burst of power that had shook the island, but at such a distance, he could not have been sure. Suspicious, true. Dreadful, certainly. And... intrigued. For all the horrors incarnate in the spirits of Sheol, the sanity-melting mortal terrors they embodied... Shealtiel would be a liar to deny that, in his deeper spiritual dominions, he found more in common with such abysmal powers than with his fellow humans.

He would have to face it, would have to confront it for what it was. None of the others were equal to this. Even the abomination, Metatron's bastard who called herself Asasiah would be able to do little more than inconvenience such an entity.

It may have been the narcotic surge of the power she had lent him, but the old man felt nothing but determination as he stared into the silent, shadowed interior of the Basilica.

His voice shuddered as it escaped him, unable to rein in the godlike vitality coursing through his veins. "You remember, I trust, the Emim?" A zealot's smile spread at the word. "The souls of the damned before God invented damnation. The spirits of prophets left to rot in the colorless wastes of Gehenom, Hades, Sheol. That, Mehetabel, is what has been killing your flock. And not merely an Emim, no provincial shaman lost to name or memory. No."

He could feel black arcs of power dancing across his eyes, could hear the winds of Sheol gusting cold within him.

"Who awaits us within, my friends, is the First Slayer. Legacy of the Fallen World. Firstborn of the Father of Men."

"Cain."