No, not literally. They just wore fishy hats.

Pothos had sent one of his boys for me early in the afternoon, and it was only the combined effort of his piteous look, and an urging from a faint but relentless chime somewhere beyond my hearing that coaxed me into attending. I had hoped to learn something of the Dagons from Pothos before being inducted as a servitor. Instead I learned something about Pothos, and, of course, Lord V, who I had become increasingly preoccupied with. It seems odd to me now, looking back, that my initial curiosities were focused on the magnacity itself, and not its ruler. That all changed after my first dinner with Pothos, however. As I had with Belial, I absorbed engramic seepage from V. But it felt much different with V. There was no fog. Perhaps because he was full human. Or perhaps it was because we came from the same human. But then, of whose stock was Belial's? Neophilus is the oak. Am I Neophilus?

Monanet, Battle Mistress Prime of the Valkyr, stopped me on the darkened catwalk overlooking the Monast Favri, sanctum of the Dagon brotherhood. Its riven dome was patched together with harshly wrought iron, and about the central building was heaped an accretion of others from starkly differing eras. Water was piped in from a vast purification plant that I had not yet located, and split into a trio of rivers that wrapped around and pierced through the complex. The Dagons had fashioned small boats of various scrap materials, with oars and outboard rudders, as well as mock sails sewn rigidly into the poise of bearing wind. I noticed a gorgon eying me when Monanet approached. She'd traded her scant armor for a warm hooded cloak over trousers and a tunic. Myself, I was robed in grey.

"You're no shadow," she said. I inclined my head towards the dome of the Dagons, peering through a crack in their patchwork at the cloister I was to be guarding.

"Why do they need guards?" I asked.

"It's a holy place, and holy places hide both secrets and treasures."

I shook my head. "But why me? I'm new here. My loyalties could lie anywhere." By the gate I saw two guards with strangely large helms. I'd naturally tried to scout the place before now, and was chastised inside that sacred place I've been by grace allowed to travel through. I learned I could get very close to the sanctum, but no closer than the first bank of the three rivers.

"You're not listening," she said. "That's exactly why you're to be a guard."

"Is that why you wanted to meet with me in secret?" I asked.

She shook her head. "I'm here on His behalf, though He does not know it.

Tall, lithe and just a shade brighter than onyx, Monanet was beautiful. In her flat, soft soled sneaking shoes, she stood almost brow to brow with me. Her green eyes stabbed through the dark.

"Well, I'll be unreachable soon. May as well say what you came to say."

She smirked. "You'll never be unreachable here."

I looked at the gorgon. "I suppose not."

"But neither will He be to you. Remember that."

"Does He have some vulnerability that I don't know about?"

"Yes. Ahz has been at the disposal of the magistrate of Millions' Hamlet. He'll be returning soon."

"Millions' Hamlet?" I was unaware of any remaining cities but Thirty-Third Day on the southern island.

"Ahz reclaimed it from Jadus."

I nodded. "Thieves' Gate."

"Millions' Hamlet."

"If you say so. Are we done?"

She stepped close and forced eye contact. "Do you love Him? Do you love life? Do you love our world?"

"No!" I said with a hearty guffaw.

She turned to leave with a scoff, but then turned back. Her movements were angry, but perfectly controlled. I hoped then to have a chance to fight with her.

"We speak old words here, reminded to us every seventy-two years, that the Kingdom of the Sun will be taken from the Devils before the call of the clarion, when the avatar of Our Lord arrives and has been given His blessing. Ahz loves Our Lord, so be wary of him. You've been above, Aeon, so you've seen the pillars buckling. There can be no mistaking the timing of your arrival. Beware the love of Ahz, or Our Lord's blessing will be withheld from you, and our great city will be destroyed by the falling of its own roof. Your flesh is real, and you came from another place. You are no shadow, no mere Eidolon. You are Lord V's avatar."

That poor girl. I shook my head. "Your soldiers give each other names, yes?"

She nodded.

"You've heard the name of Turk?"

"The Devils called him Batu. Our Lord called him brother, once."

"He was more like a father to me."

I remember her green eyes widening at that revelation. "You served against the Devils?"

I nodded. "And I was known up there by a name other than Victor."

"A soldier's name."

"Yes."

"What is your soldier's name?"

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I slipped between worlds ever so gently, allowing my material form to flutter through waves of darkness. "The White Shadow."

She backed away from me slowly, showing a war between disappointment and disbelief in her eyes. Before fading into the curtain-like shadows cast by the superstructure of the monastery, she shook her head, then defiantly bowed.

I descended a short time after had gone, traversing that space the gorgon's vision could not. I emerged from my usual haunt, the darkest space I could find. I wore the grey robes of a hopeful, and carried my spear, as I would wield no other weapon, having learned something of the lock the key would open.

The Monast Favri is an imposing structure. Picture an egg of mammoth proportions, once with gilded bars clutching its royal violet dome like a strong hand, now a blasted ruin made mostly whole again, but scarred in remembrance of what spiritual decadence incurred. Its gate was made of the same tortured scrap that bandaged its old wounds, and beyond I was lead into an antechamber filled with statues of weeping sinners. As I passed beneath the bent knees of one, drowned in its crooked shadow, I felt Kendra's arms clinging to my waist. I was leaving her alone in a cold room with no light, having decided not to close my eyes after all.

The guards did indeed have large helms, almost to kolbenturnier dimensions, with four eyeless vents draped across each brow. I said nothing, as V instructed me, standing between those two guards directly, feeling unnerved by their stillness. A low dirge rang in the space between them, somehow muffled to my ears but not to my extremities, and the gate opened. I was then guided by a quartet of robed initiates through the cloister that was soon to become my whole world, through a series of doorless rooms where penitant ones wept, then past a hall for what they dubbed 'redemption', where basins were filled with blood flung by flagella. The 'redeemed' looked at me as I walked by, and I was as confused by their expressions as they apparently were by me. One very old man followed me with his face until I passed through the doors cut into the floor, wincing every time an acolyte's whip bit into his back, but never loosening his ocular grip on my naked eyes. I paused at the doors, returning the man's stare, but nothing in it spoke to me, so I turned and followed my new brothers.

The halls and chambers we descended through crossed over greater spans of time than those I trod in the city below Clarion (I now know the truth of the place, and that I was taken ahead by the infant titans to the proper place for that name to receive my reward). There were floors beneath floors, some interconnected, some so different and thoroughly separated by architecture they seemed worlds apart. There was an open arena filled with orange light, its floor subsumed in boiling water that gurgled over red hot heating pipes. Those on the bleachers read from scrolls, and as we departed I heard the exhalation of some vast mechanism, followed by the screeching of those seated lowest after the water level rose.

Below all this was a dark chamber with a golden triangle of light on the far wall, and I was reminded of the strange doorway where I entered the domain of Lord V. I was then blindfolded, and I will not bore you with a full account of the sights and sounds I heard afterward. I knew little of them, anyways, as I seemed to be transported in some sort of car. My sight was hampered as well, causing me to question what materials my blindfold was made of. What I could see when enkindling my eyes was a sort of moving Guernica, and I believe I was shown this by a watchman intent on dissuading me from surpassing their security measures. I can't prove this, but I believe that V employed more than just the stationary gorgons.

Then a question popped into my head, so I asked it. "Why do you all call him Lord V, and not Lord Victor?".

"Because of the time he spent with us," said an old, kindly voice. I felt my eyes uncovered and my body still. Where I was taken was no place on this tortured world. It was a place so rich the very sky was the color of gold ingots, and I found the intense saturation of the color sickening. And yet, somehow, it served to make the soft, cyan light of Eliezer Leogan's aura seem welcome, needed even, like a cool stream of water in a scorched land. In Elvedon, I saw such places; deserts of heat rather than cold, ancient branched trees turned to tinder, and burning steppes where life was starved of water.

We stood on a tower surrounded by a parliament of massive rooks. Far below the gold was turned to orange and eventually red. Above us was a haze of dead grey.

"We are exactly where all of us desire to be," said Eliezer. He grew as he spoke, until I was cupped within his hands.

"We are not in Elvedon."

He smiled. "Of course we aren't. What business have the living inside a tomb?". His breath was sweet.

"I would see where we truly are."

And he was again the size of a man, smallish in stature and slightly bent. His eyes were pregnant with conflicting sentiments. He seemed to be fastening a robe, and I reflected on the strangeness of these dreamlike states we often slip through without realizing, so as to observe that we were unaware of a thing in front of us until it changed, not knowing what it had just changed from. It is my firm conviction that every conscious entity is categorically insane. And so this mad man, now clothed in a cream colored robe with pharisaic golden fringe, who until just then had been wearing something else, perhaps an ethereal garb of light, stepped to the side gestured with a raised left arm. Before me was a long path that plunged into a distance not accounted for by the size of the tower's roof.

"At the end of that path?"

"You will sit upon a throne."

I squinted, and he sensed my hostility.

"A throne of true power, granting any who would sit upon it the greatest of kingships."

Dust clouds gathered in the vast empty to hide the light of stars; my eyes were slits.

"This is the Tower of Longing. Name the chair what you wish when you sit on it. You will be the greatest of monarchs then, having rule over the most fortified of realms; your own heart."

I did not know we stood upon a clock tower, so I found the ringing strange and ignored it, until I saw that Eleazer didn't notice it at all. Then I turned and dove off the edge, and awoke in a basin of shallow water.

"It is less congealed than you remember from your infancy, assuming you do remember your infancy."

I was naked, but not for long. Sentinels covered me with rags until the fluid left my skin, then I stood and put on the robe of my new office.

"You will be given maille to wear beneath it when you take your vows," said Eleazer. He was still beneath his rags.

I strode to the wall, looking through its semi translucent membrane into the labratorium below. Across from me was a gallery, filled with sycophantic courtesans who pretended to feel exactly the same emotions over the demonstration as Lord V, whom they clustered around like ants do sugar. The subject was being revived, and when she saw her splayed open body and the tubes connecting her to various wombs held up by the viscous solution that was her new world, she did not scream and flail as the last three had, and there was an applause.

I remember the strangeness of my memories returning, even being told that when I became conscious of the simulacrum, I would have no knowledge of ever having existed outside it.

The following day I walked the path, but when I saw the throne a high wall rose beneath it, carrying it far from me. I emerged from the stupor again and dried under the rags, then again put on my robe, though this time I was handed an arming doublet first.

I had sworn my vows with the movement of my feet and the stillness of my heart. Row after row of Dagons honored me in the courtyard, bowing their heads in their absurd fish-bodied uniforms with those open mouthed hats. There were no titles among their ranks. Hierarchy was simply stated and remembered, so I was designated by my office only upon receiving it, and called Victor, Thirty-Ninth Servitor, Cloister Guard of Monast Favri.

"The Batch expelled you into the wasteland," said Eleazer, fastening my breastplate to my arming doublet and buckling my vambraces, "then hurled all manner of missiles at you," on his knees, he buckled my fauld and tied my greaves, then stood and clasped my epaulettes and gorget, "and tried to hurl you into the sea," he held my shroud up, having accepted that I would wear no other helm, but I held his wrists, then took it from him and donned it myself, "and burn you with the breath of Devils. But you marched on, and have come at last into the soldier's rest. Will you guard the cloister of our haven, and so guard our traditions and the lives of those they serve?".

I shrugged. "Sure."