Prelude: I began this project after a marathon session of Diablo 2 (yes, seven years after launch), and below is the comment that sparked the entire idea. It’s been a while since I’ve tried the end of the world, and my friends want me to break my sci-fi mold.

Of course, I have to mention that I’m in no way connected with the Occult, especially considering I don’t even believe in a Hell. And, per usual, my stuff is rated M for Realistic. Expect cursing, swords, and the stuff swords go with.

Ye be warned.

Sub-subnote: FicPress had issues with the annotations I typically use for Instant-message style dialog, so the presence of a "" should be taken as a message.

Man, I wish our world was overrun by demons. Then we could go out and kill things and it would be moral, feel-good smiting.. And besides, look at all the gold they drop!

01- Marks

By the end of March, the snow had become a nuisance. He never quite understood how it lost all its beauty over the months. In November, the first snow was magical, fantastic, and wondrous to look at, but as the weeks passed, the snow began to mingle with the salt and dirt, taking on an ugly, crusty countenance that was further degraded by the months of bitter valley cold and constantly being in the way. It suffered additional slight from anger by proxy, by way of its cousin, black ice, which was forever underfoot and led to many sore backs and legs for those who managed not to fall, and skinned hands, bruised knees, and aching buttocks for those not so lucky.

And as the fresh snow fell on March 16, he was losing his temper. Walking under the flakes with his breath steaming furiously around his freckled, stubble-crusted face, he grumbled passionately against the cursed precipitation. He no longer liked this snow; there were too many things already on his mind for him to have to worry about the snow as well. Stupid snow. He couldn’t bike in the snow, and this campus was much too large to walk anywhere in any semblance of good timing. Furthermore, he was really starting to hate winter. He longed for the days when he could step out into the night air and not feel his cheeks and nose begin to freeze almost immediately.

So he walked down the sidewalk, watching for patches of black ice that hid under the thin fresh snow, striding between two knee-high blocks of snow-ice that had accumulated. In his ears were furious guitar chords about failed relationships (though he usually didn’t listen to what the singers were talking about. The curious mix of classic guitar and electronic instrumentals caught his interest, and he was willing to put up with some whining for it). The campus was relatively deserted on a late Tuesday night, and every now and then, a car drove down the road beside him, but on the most part it was silent. He only heard the gentle howl of the wind around him.

As he started to pass out of the science quarter, he saw a singular flash of motion, the only thing he’d seen so far that wasn’t a car or a bit of litter that had escaped the icy tomb. He looked up, offering some of his face to the cold for a moment as he wondered what it was.

It was a tiny little thing, and at first he thought it was a dog, but it was walking on two legs, so his next thought went to “monkey.”

A monkey? Up here? In the middle of winter? That didn’t seem right. He looked at it again, and this time, it paused long enough in the streetlight for him to get a good look.

Well, besides from the tail, it might have been a very small person. His next thought snapped to “cosplaying child.” Only that was a really detailed costume, complete with snout and the little beard thing. Halloween was a long way away, but he’d seen much stranger things on campus.

That was, until it looked at him. Black eyes scanned the area and saw him, and for the longest second of his life, he felt like he’d been stabbed in the chest with an icicle of frozen nitrogen. His entire body seemed to bend inward and he sucked in a cold breath, his steps faltering as he had to steady himself.

When he opened his eyes, the imp thing was gone. It occurred to him that maybe that was exactly what he had seen, an imp. But he quickly rationalized that. There weren’t any imps. Not real ones. He was relatively certain that whatever he had seen would be explained by the newspapers or his friends later on.

Sucking in his breath, he curled himself in against the cold and continued to trudge home.

It seemed like he had hardly rested before it was time to get back up and go to class. He showered and dressed, and just before heading out, he glanced out his window.

The weather was mocking him, officially. He knew this because the snow had turned to rain, and the entire world had become a tremendous pile of slush. It was probably no warmer outside because of the wind, but now he had the insidious, all-infecting nature of water to deal with.

With a groan, he found his worn but preciously-waterproof logging boots and the most waterproof jacket he could find before setting out.

It was worse than he thought. The rain was just a little too cold for its own good, and it was now sleeting with relentless fury. Worse, the icy mess was interfering with the local drainage system, for there were tremendous lakes of slushy water everywhere.

Thankfully, the roads were mostly clear, and at 8:30 in the morning, there weren’t too many cars about either. He abandoned the sidewalks with a splash and set out along the road, avoiding the flooded gutters and headed back toward the science quad.

As he passed the particular spot where the imp had crossed the road, he thought briefly about last night’s encounter. The memory was quickly interrupted when his right foot found a pothole and the water level lifted above his boot’s high top and started to sneak down inside. With a squawk, he jerked himself back out of it, seeing water slough off his jean leg and feeling a little frigid water sneaking inside. He shook his leg, trying to shake some of the water off before it soaked in. The most he got from it was a curious and pitying look from a girl trying to make her way along the sidewalk.

He grumbled to himself, internally cursing the weather and hopping an ice bank so that a bus could pass down the road before he hopped back out and kept going.

He arrived at the science quad shortly afterward, finding himself at a strange sight. The front court was completely overrun by police officers. He looked to the glassy front lobby of Horton Hall, noticing that every pane of glass there was to break was smashed into a billion brilliant shards.

“Huh.” He approached the tape line, looking at the mess. One of the officers noticed him as she shook water off of her hat, locking eyes with him before she came over.

“It’s a total mess. Riots are one thing, but this is vandalism with a purpose.”

“Well it wasn’t that way when I came through here at one-forty this morning.”

“Hmm.”

“They really had it out for windows, huh?”

“They broke everything they could find. Displays, vending machines, lights, seats. Some signs of fire, but get this. There’s a giant pentagram burned into the floor.”

The imp. “Burned?”

“You’d think spray paint was enough.”

“That is really weird.” He frowned, then shook his head to get some of the water out of her face. “You might not believe me, but I swear I saw some guy in an imp costume, last night. Or it might have actually been an imp. It was really convincing.”

“An imp?”

“Yeah.” He panicked briefly at her tired expression, quickly formulating a more plausible idea. “Maybe there’s some new occult gang running around.”

“God, I hope not. I don’t want so see any more of this.”

“So is the building closed?”

“You can get in through the west or east fire exits. Just the lobby was hit.”

“Right.” He was a little disappointed. It would be nice to go back and get some more sleep, but what else could he expect. They hated to cancel classes, even if some kids trashed one of the buildings.

Still, he couldn’t help but think about that imp. What, were gremlins attacking now? There were tons of messed up people in the world, and he couldn’t find it that hard to believe that the damage was done by a heap of disaffected teenagers.

Just the imp. That didn’t make sense.

He entered the building through the opened fire exit and climbed the stairs, passing by a small, taped-off spot on the second highest landing. In the corner was one of the inverted pentagrams, and like the cop had mentioned, it was burned into the cinder blocks. He looked a little closer, at all the carbon scouring that surrounded the design. The pattern really was burned into the brick, about an inch or two.

He was not unfamiliar with the tools that might be able to make such an attack. As a senior student at the art department’s steelworks, he had grown acquainted with all manner of thermal tools, welders and cutters and forges, which could be used to do such a thing. However, he wasn’t aware that any of the cutters could have had this much of an impact on ceramic. Not even the plasma cutter.

“Yeah, that’s not right.”

“Do you know how they did it?” a soft female voice asked.

He glanced over his shoulder, recognizing one of the girls from his Physics 210 course, who was doubtless on her way there as well. He had noticed her the first day, because of her very distinctive red hair. She was the type of girl that most boys would be hunting after at a moment’s chance, the slim and cute sort. At present, she was standing with a hand on her hip, messenger bag slung low on her other hip, looking past him at the design with scrutinizing hazel eyes.

He looked back at the design. “No idea. I can’t think of any tool that would do that, short of a thermal lance, maybe?”

She crossed her arms and leaned in. “Wow, it’s really in there. That’ll suck to fix. I wonder what their problem was.”

“It’s a school,” he grinned. “Do they need a problem?”

She laughed, which immediately made him feel better. It made him think quickly to his psychology classes. Attractive people had a very particular way about them, which snagged the feelings of strangers around them. Try as he might, he found himself victim to that rule.

But unlike almost every other man at this school, his second reaction was defeat. There was no way. She was completely out of his league, and he knew it. Not that he was a dork or anything…

Okay, he was a dork. Art sculpture student. Built computers for fun. Need he say more? He would guess that she was into the strong, overconfident jocks that populated the frat houses the next street over, the ones that knew how to party hardcore.

Yet, she wasn’t running away screaming yet.

He watched her reach across the tape and run her finger along the scoured edges, then pull her hand away and look at her finger. The carbon scouring had grabbed onto her finger, turning it black. She rubbed it with her thumb for a moment before discretely cleaning both of them off on the hem of her shirt, looking around as if to make sure no one saw her perform this unholy act. When she caught his eyes, she merely shrugged.

“Soot.”

“Something like that.”

As if guided by some external suggestion, they both began to ascend the stairs, giving lingering looks at the design before they entered the fourth-floor hallway and headed to class.

“Sucks that they didn’t cancel class, though,” she mentioned off-hand. “I could have used the sleep.”

“I second that.”

They turned the corner and entered the classroom. He took his usual spot, second to last row, where his attention to this laptop was less suspect. He was a little surprised when she casually set down only a seat away from him, before he realized that this was probably pretty normal. It was an open seat, and it wasn’t like she was actively avoiding him. She folded her legs in the seat and pulled her MacBook out of its stretchy cushion sleeve, propping it on her knees and setting to work.

He decided that, maybe if he had some iota of a chance, he’d easily blow it by being too focused on her, and turned back to his own computer. The far less stylish PC did its boot up routine and he began to work away on it, accessing the open wireless network and pouring himself into the internet pipelines.

Class began. Today, they were continuing the lecture on magnetism. In turn, he was checking his email. A small torrent of spam mail awaited his executive decision, granting him a moment of amusement as he looked at the garbled senders names and offered half a glance to the unattractive subject lines before deleting the lot of them. In his student mail, he noticed a message from the chief of security, notifying the students about “the grand vandalism of the Horton Hall lobby.”

He glanced at the notes for a moment, then continued to glance through a few web-comics.

“Psst.” The slight noise caught his left ear. He glanced over, finding the unnamed redhead was looking at him.

With a graceful brush of her hand, she turned her laptop toward him. On the screen was a cover story.

“Mass vandalism!” The photograph showed the pentagram branded into the floor of Grand Central Terminal.

He frowned, then quickly entered the search into his own browser. When he glanced back at her, she gave a worried shrug, then started to type rapidly.

Grand Central. Wall Street. Boston’s State Building. Moscow’s Red Square. The list horrifyingly continued. He swallowed uneasily as he looked into the apparently worldwide phenomenon. According to the article, the CIA claimed this was the work of a new themed terrorist cell, and that national security had been ramped up to high-strength in preparation for what might be an imminent attack. And, of course, assured everyone else to continue living their lives normally.

After 9/11, he wasn’t sure if that was an American possibility.

A messenger window popped up on him. He frowned, finding that he did not recognize the sender’s name. “EchoCompany616.”

That has to be related."

He gave a glance to his left. She smiled coyly before she started to type again.

Every major city, but my friend in Framingham said that they got the mall too."

He found his fingertips trembling a little as he entered a response. Large and small scale. We probably should be taking this more seriously."

They’re fucking everywhere."

He bit down on the tip of his tongue as he continued to explore the research.

Obviously, our inverted pentagram was a symbol of the occult, and every researcher and professor with three cents to offer had wormed out of the woodwork. There had been plenty of Satanic cults in the history of mankind, only this was strangely much more widespread than most, not to mention its appearance from nothing. There had never been any hint of activity before this morning, either, which was even more perturbing. No one had any idea how large this cult was, or whether they had any future plans.

His messenger grew steadily more frantic as his brother, uncle, and several friends all began to find their own piece of the occult.

Then he was dramatically yanked out by a commanding voice.

“Mr. McMahon, how bad is it?”

He looked up, seeing his professor had stopped. He glanced around, and the students that were awake were looking at him. The others were waking up quickly, wondering what had disturbed the flow of class.

“You looked very perturbed and focused on that computer,” his professor elaborated. “I was wondering how bad this vandalism is.”

“It’s… well, incredibly widespread.”

He leaned on his table.

“Every major city, not to mention towns all over the place. Towns with enough population, or ones far enough away from the cities.”

“Like someone’s trying to send us a message,” the girl mentioned quietly, biting at the pendant of her necklace. “And making sure everyone gets it.”

“Has anyone been hurt?”

“No,” he shook his head. “But no one saw or heard the destruction happen. Even in the cities.”

The professor was quiet for a moment. “It is quite worrying.” Another pause. “Very well. Everyone get out a piece of paper. Let’s get the question of the day over with.” He pointed toward their corner. “Tom, you and Miss Baker had better have more information by the time we’re done. Keep those keys clicking.”

He felt a sharp spike of adrenaline. Avoiding the question of the day was an interesting feat, but he was more startled by the command. He wasn’t sure whether he was making fun of them or not, but he decided with a shrug to go back to work.

Lucky break."

He smiled, and kept searching.

Google provided some new finds, but the one that really caught his attention was an absence of a find. There was really nothing on any blog or website related to the disaster. He barreled through different keywords, operators, and looked through each search to the eighth or ninth page, thinking that maybe one was buried somewhere.

He mentioned that to her. No fanclubs.” He waited a second before he took the plunge. I think I saw an imp last night. Like, as far-fetched as it is, we might be dealing with something more than terrorists.”

A pause. He glanced at her and she was merely looking at her screen. Then her fingers hopped on the keys and his answer came back.

That’s no good."

Did she really believe him? He frowned and decided that he might as well ask.

I know that’s a bit hard to believe."

You’d be surprised."

She did believe him. He gave her another glance and she looked back, offered a brief smile, and nodded.

He grew more anxious as he continued to search. With no alternate explanation, with no feasible scapegoat, the only cause his mind could formulate was that this was not the cause by mortal folk. And, needless to say, that was more than he could really stomach.

The class finished calculating the size of a magnetic field, and the classroom was filled by the rustling of paper. He looked at his friend, who looked nervously back, her pendant still clipped anxiously in her teeth.

“Any news, you two?”

A dreadful pause hung between them as he looked at his screen, then back up at her. Her shoulders swelled with motivated breath and he felt a little better that she seemed to be taking the first step.

“No one’s fessing up to it. I don’t really know what to think. The CIA isn’t being very helpful.”

He decided to add a small comment, if just for presence’s sake. “They seem to have everything under control, or at least that’s what they say. They might be keeping everything quiet for now, but there’s really no way to tell.”

“Well, everyone should keep themselves alert, and report anything suspicious to the police. Let’s just hope this is someone’s idea of a really funny joke.”

Bags shuffled as people put away their notebooks. He lingered for a moment before shutting down his laptop and sealing it away again, soon joining the tail end of the crowd heading out.

A few of them had stopped to look at the mark in the hallway. The redhead leaned against the railing, looking curiously cool about the unknown attack. He lingered too, and after the rest of the group had left, it was just them.

“So what do you think?” she said quietly. “Are we under attack by Hell?”

“God, I hope not.” He leaned in and gave the marking another poke.

“I’ve been trying to think of what could have made that.”

“I don’t know. I’m going to head to the steelworks now and see if I can do the same thing.”

“The steelworks?”

“The art steelworks. Armstrong oh-six.”

“I didn’t know they had one.”

He smiled. “Metal sculpture students. I’m a sculpture focus.”

“An art student? I would have never guessed. You don’t seem the artsy type.”

“Did you think I was an engineer?”

“Yes. But hey, that’s what I get for judging too quick.”

“What are you?”

“Pre-vet.”

“See, that I would have never guessed.”

“No?”

“Not that I can’t see it.”

She grinned. “I get the ‘oh yeah!’ moment a lot when I tell people. Apparently it makes sense.”

They paused at the entrance to wrap themselves tightly in their winter clothes before they set out into the sleet and puddles.

“I’ll see you around.”

“Yep.”