After the final of the six sacrifices, I squeeze two drops in each eye, just beneath the eyelid, and I close them once, to let the Veil enter my bloodstream by way of my vision.
I open my eyes again. Their moist orbs burning with the acid of the Veil. I see the world turn to a foggy whiteness. Coming through its milky domain, a young man. He is roughly my age and resembles me so much it is like looking into a mirror.
I go to embrace my brother.
He whispers words that I can barely understand.
“What?” I ask.
He opens his mouth, which is filled with small worms and beetles crawling over his teeth, swarming up from his throat. They fly out from him, into the whiteness surrounding us, and they come toward me. I accept them, and through them I understand what he has wanted to let me know across the years between life and death.
The knowledge fills me with dread, for it was I myself who was destined to find the devil and his henchman. I was marked even as a child.
My father had not murdered my brother, nor had my mother.
“Carry me to the water, look, and know the truth,” the voice had told me as a child when I’d first dug up my brother’s grave.
When I had looked into the water, I had seen my own reflection. That was what I had been meant to see. To know the truth.
It was I, even as a baby, who had turned in our blanket, using some implement unknown to me, some small sharp tool left by my father nearby, that I had used to break open my twin’s skull, and steal his life. To leak his brains onto my shoulder even as I held him, struggling, in our birth-cradle.
My first human sacrifice to the gods of the Veil. They were there then, somehow, watching me. Watchers. Guiding my hand.
The mystery that has dogged my steps is answered. The reason my father despised me and my mother prayed for my soul.
The mystery is no longer mystery. It is known to me. And understood.
I have seen the face of Baphomet, and it is the same face that I saw in the river when I was a boy. Carry me to the water, look, and know the truth.
I am Cain, himself. I am the very Beast.
I am the Monster. I am now the Necromancer himself.
A ystyrio, cofied.
Let him who reflects, remember.