[From the private journals of Damian Carthros.]

  There is something in my skull. I cannot describe the looks of it. But do you want to know what it sounds like?

  Imagine a cathedral at midnight where a thousand voices sing without conductor or shared hymn. A child's lullaby tangled with a widow's wailing. Desperate prayers to deaf gods layered over curses in tongues that predate human speech.

  Before Azrathel, I was a musician. I understood how dissonance begged for resolution, how silence between notes held more meaning than sound.

  I was sixteen and bleeding in an alley when the shadow spoke. My half-brother's work; three wounds, deep enough to kill but shallow enough to ensure I understood. I was counting my fading heartbeat when something vast wrapped itself around my consciousness.

  "Live," the Demon Prince said, and his voice was sensation; drowning in ink, swallowed by darkness with weight and hunger. "Live, and we will make this world tremble with an orchestral requiem for longing."

  I took his hand because the alternative was dying in garbage while rats waited.

  Azrathel is not like other demons.

  Malgrin, bound to Yozi, seems benevolent by comparison; a creature that takes pieces but leaves the core intact. There is negotiation. Transaction.

  Azrathel does not negotiate. Azrathel keeps everything and I get to witness.

  Every person I have killed in the last nineteen years is still with me. I don't feel guilt, as their fate is not worse than mine. They are here; bound like charms on a bracelet made of screaming meat. Their souls do not pass on. They persist, fully aware, fully capable of expressing their horror.

  My mother was the first. Fever took her when I was seventeen. I did not understand what Azrathel was doing until I heard her voice join the chorus; confused, then frightened, then screaming my name as she realized where she was.

  She screams my name still. I hoped she would forget my name after eighteen years.

  There must be at least thousands now that have joined the choir...all aware, awake and suffering.

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  And Azrathel savors every single one.

  The wine helps. The drugs help more. But mostly I drift, because drifting is easier than fighting.

  Some mornings I wake and do not know which of us is in control. Some nights my hands do things I do not remember.

  I look in mirrors less than I used to.

  When the eyes are silver, I am still Damian.

  When they are red, Azrathel has surfaced.

  The red comes more often now.

  He is not merely feeding on me. He is replacing me. One day Damian Carthros will cease to exist; not through death but dissolution, absorbed into something infinitely more patient.

  The thought should terrify me. It does not.

  That is how I know I am already dying.

  Then Yozi walked into my study.

  He negotiated like he was buying fruit. Terms and contingencies and exit strategies. The cold precision of someone who believed he could outsmart the cost.

  I saw myself at sixteen; standing before a shadow, agreeing to terms I did not understand. The same desperate, youthful intelligence. The same certainty he could touch darkness without being consumed.

  I wanted to warn him.

  Instead I smiled and shook his hand.

  If Yozi can touch the void and walk away intact, perhaps there is hope.

  If he fails, at least the screaming will finally stop.

  One more thing.

  Azrathel has plans.

  I catch fragments; impulses that are not my own, satisfaction unconnected to anything I have chosen.

  He watches Yozi through my eyes with attention beyond curiosity. Studies him. Considers him the way a collector considers a desirable artifact.

  I think Azrathel sees something in Yozi that he wants.

  I think when this is over, Azrathel will make his move. Will reveal ambitions that dwarf the conspiracies of immortal cultists.

  I will not be here to see it. By then, Damian will be just another voice in the choir.

  But Yozi will be here. And gods help him, he is not ready.

  [The remaining pages contain musical notation that should be impossible to be played by humans. What you just read were the last words in Damian Carthros' Journal.]