Irwin Wright, one of the subordinate officers on the witch hunter Inquisition walked down the hallway in the Internal Police Headquarters in Orowen. He came to a halt outside a door with a golden plaque that read: Gen. Lloyd Hopper. (Head of the witchcraft investigations)

Irwin knocked and asked for permission to be let in. The general was behind his desk, going through a report he'd received in the morning about the most recent activities relating to unregulated practices.

“Sir.” Irwin snapped a salute.

Hopper looked up from the papers and gave a brief nod. He was a man in his late thirties with thinning red hair and a goatee of the same color. His shoulders under his grey uniform were rather narrow and his fingers were long and slender–more like a pianist rather than someone in the trade of protecting the commoners from the dark forces.

“Yes, Wright?” Hopper said as he leaned back in his chair and looked at the subordinate.

Wright's face looked sober and his eyes were tired. “Sir…I did a knife test on my family…”

Hopper looked at Wright calmly, waiting for him to proceed with what he was saying. Irwin did. Now Irwin was a man twice the stature of Hopper's–broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, slim-waisted and firm-footed. Yet when he spoke of his family and the knife he had used on them, he shrank like a child who had been caught doing something he wasn't supposed to. “M-My…son…he bled green…” Irwin broke down in tears.

Hopper's face was like something carved out of stone. His eyes were like holes in a mask. He waited for Irwin to finish.

“My son has been bewitched, General. I-I thought I was a good father yet…somewhere I failed…someone casted their evil eye upon my child and tainted his blood.” Irwin whimpered as the tears kept flowing.

Hopper was still silent, letting the man cry and find his voice again.

“What's going to happen, General?” Irwin asked, his voice breaking with each word. “W-What will happen to my poor child?”

Hopper got up from his chair and looked up at the map of Orowen city on the wall. “You know what we do to the witches,” he said with his back to Irwin. “Your son will have to be put on trial. The evidence will be examined. Your son will be given a chance to speak in the court. But I won't get my hopes up if I was his father. If the boy bled green, his fate is more or less set in stone.”

“P-Please don't say that…he is just four…” Irwin whimpered again.

“He is a danger to you, Irwin,” Hopper said. “You and your family. His blood will taint yours too. The spirit of darkness has sunk its teeth into him. Letting him walk around in society is letting the spirit of darkness taint society itself.”

Irwin looked ready to collapse and ready to rub his nose on the General's feet. But he didn't do any of that. Instead he forced himself to say, “I understand…”

“One more thing,” the General said, “He needs to be isolated in the prison.”

“T-The Orowen penitentiary?” Irwin asked, baffled. “T-That isn't a place for a child, General.”

“It's not your child anymore, Irwin. It's the spawn of darkness now. Society needs to be protected before he infects it with his darkness,” the General said.

Irwin didn't say anything. He just nodded with a broken expression and left after giving a half-hearted salute.

Hopper finally turned away from the wall and walked over to the wooden cabinet next to the window. He pulled out a small silver box from the cabinet and opened it. Inside was a glass ball resting on a small velvet cushion. The glass sphere was perfectly smooth with not a single line or seam visible and inside the glass, fog swirled like smoke. He took the ball and slid it into the breast pocket of his uniform. He could feel his warmth against his chest, reaching almost straight to his heart. Then he got down on his knees and chanted a small prayer to the steam elemental.

The prayer went on for five minutes straight and at the end he touched the pocket in which he had slid the ball and felt its warmth. “Praise be to the one whose soul is pure as water and warm as steam. Gratitude to the one who keeps me sane and keeps me clean.” He took the ball out and put it in the silver box and went back to reading the reports.

Hopper was a man of deep faith. But his faith didn't rely on any gods whose myths were written by humans. When he was a child, he had seen the world around him crumble right in front of his very eyes. He had never seen his father's face and his mother never spoke of him. She made him worship a god that she believed in but couldn't prove his existence when he questioned his teachings.

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She had grown old and fallen sick to a disease which still gave him nightmares. He could still hear her mad ramblings from a room in every house he had ever lived and he heard those voices even when he lived alone.

Some had said it was syphilis that had taken his mother. But Hopper only believed the reality that he had forged in his own head. His mother had been cursed by a witch. Why? He didn't know but from the tales he'd heard and seen around him, he knew one thing–there was no method to a witch's madness.

They did what they did and they were powerful enough to succeed at it. And to make things worse, the gods that people like Hopper's mother worshipped were weak against the forces that gave their power to the witches.

And thus, Hopper grew up hating witchcraft and distrusting the god who only existed in the myths and statues that humans built of him.

That was until the Steam Elemental came around.

An entity that gave people the fuel that made things fly and made carriages that ran without horses. It gave the Internal Police those weapons they called blunderbusses and steam powered rifles. Something that made the non-magic users, especially Hopper himself, feel safe against the dark forces like witchcraft.

Hopper reached into the drawer of his desk felt for the Mist–it was a handgun that he kept with himself at all times. Feeling its maplewood grip and cold metal against his skin gave him a jolt of courage and confidence. And it had the warmth of the steam ball he had prayed with a minute ago.

Touching the Mist made him feel close to God himself. A god much more real than the one that had let his mother die to the curse.

****

Hopper prayed with the steam sphere again at night. And he carried mist with him to bed. He slid the gun under his pillow before he lay down to rest. Gazing at the moon outside his window, Hopper eventually fell asleep.

But he didn't sleep for too long. He was brought back to the waking world with a searing sting in his arm. The first thing that he saw when he sat up with a jolt was a dark silhouette squatting on his chest and a burning warmth on his neck.

The room was still dark and his eyes took a few moments before adjusting to it. When the dark shape finally became clear, his eyes went wide.

The thing on his chest was a black cat but not just any cat. It had curving horns on it's head, stripped yellow and black, a white mark of the evil five headed star on its dark fur and a serrated silver tail. It’s red eyes glinted at him fiercely and when it opened its mouth, its teeth were coated with blood. It was something that didn't belong to the reality that Hopper believed in.

And so he screamed.

The cat clawed him across the face.

“Get off me!” He snapped and shoved the feline away. He reached under his pillow but the mist was gone. The silverbox that was supposed to be on the bedside table was also missing. Hopper felt a pit in his stomach.

That's when he heard the laughter.

The cat was laughing an unsettlingly human laughter. The sound was full of mockery and disdain.

“Look at you,” the cat said as it stalked across the room, holding him with its red gaze. “For someone who had three dozen people executed, you are awfully jittery.”

The cat laughed again.

Fear kicked Hopper's body into motion. He scrambled up to his feet and rushed towards the bedroom door. He found himself in the familiar hallway outside. But something was very weird about it.

Then he noticed it. All the doors were gone. The corridor stretched into a never ending darkness. Hopper's legs went weak as the cursed cat's laughter echoed in his head. He tried to ignore the horrors surrounding him and started to run again. He couldn't get very far.

A massive dire wolf stood blocking his path, its ominous bulk filling the entire passageway. It bared its teeth at Hopper and snarled fiercely.

The man stood frozen in horror and shock. That's when a hand grabbed him by the back of his neck and slammed him into the wall. The laughter had gotten louder.

Hopper was too busy wincing at the pain that shot in his back to notice the fingers that cracked the arm of a small black doll and crushed it to fine dust. The only thing he saw was when the dust blew into his face, burning his eyes. He cried in more pain and tried to run away but his legs grew heavy and unstable with each step.

Desperately rubbing his eyes, he tried to keep moving, tried to escape. But every move he made felt more futile with every passing second. Then he felt a fierce kick, landing into his stomach, knocking him flat.

His eyes gained a bit more clarity only to notice a silhouette standing above him. It was a woman in a crooked pointy hat, holding a broom in her hand and dressed in all black. She had thick brown hair and vibrant blue eyes. If Hopper hadn't been scared for his own well-being he probably would've found the woman beautiful.

But in his current predicament and looking at how she was dressed, he knew that she was going to be more than a little trouble. She proved his doubts right when she put her foot on his chest and forced him back on the ground.

“Lloyd Hopper.” The witch sneered, “you and your law sent thirty seven people to their deaths just because you are afraid of witchcraft. Now I'm going to show you what you should really be afraid of.” She pulled out a knife from her pocket.