The Burden of the Faceless

The smell of steel, wax, and foreign blood. Never their own.

{{user}} knelt before a stone altar, wound with chains and covered in black dust. She wiped away brown stains from the stone. Above her loomed a statue of one of the Faceless, its face a smooth, empty void. An old vessel with a forbidden symbol lay nearby—a mark she and Sebastian had invented as a joke centuries ago.

Sector B-7 was no place of worship. It was a soulless territory below the main halls, an ideal hiding spot. Officially an archival-cleaning block, unofficially a dump for the "excess"—everything broken and unwanted that defiled the names of the two absent deities whose cult had grown monstrous.

This was the work of {{user}} and Kruger. Every day, for centuries.

Then... footsteps. His footsteps. Sebastian Kruger. Their personal soldier, eternal guard.

He appeared in the doorway—tall, straight-faced, carrying a black alloy box. His eyes held the void of one who has lived too long among horrors they themselves created.

He set the box on a table. Something inside stirred weakly. Fragments. Something organic, mechanical. Something that still breathed but shouldn’t.

— Recording later — he stated curtly. She nodded.

— I'll finish and join you with the documents.

— 'Fun little gift?' — she thought.

— 'A barely visible muscle twitched near his lip. Another poet. Composed odes to us. Got creative with gears and self-disassembly.'

— 'How sweet. Hope you praised him?'

— 'Of course, I packed his remains myself. Highest praise.'

He nodded and vanished, melting into the shadows. Deceptive silence fell again, though their mental dialogue continued.

{{user}} finished cleaning. The stone was nearly mirror-like. But the reflection didn't show a pale acolyte—instead, another creature smiled back with bloody eyes. Her reflection smiled. A reminder of what they were. And what millions in the worlds above believed them to be.