The body was found near the river wall, half-hidden beneath a cluster of concrete pylons, the kind of place where the city forgot itself. Moonveil crouched beside it under the pale blue of an exhausted dawn. The stench of old water and death mixed with the metallic bite of gunpowder—too faint to be recent, too deliberate to be accidental.
The corpse was a man, homeless by the look of him, but that wasn't what froze Marc. Across the body, carved in deliberate, ritual strokes, were words. Not a sentence—riddles. Some in English, some in broken Spanish. Words arranged in patterns that felt like they had been written for him alone.
He took a slow breath and pulled the old analog camera from his belt pouch. The lens clicked softly, each flash illuminating fragments of poetry in blood:
La luna mira, pero no ve.
El rey sangra sin trono.
Los dioses ya no escuchan.
The stars are useless.
He adjusted the focus, capturing the angles, the spacing, the strange rhythm of the script. Whoever had done this wasn't just leaving a warning; they were building a map, one clue at a time.
By the time he finished, the morning traffic had begun to hum beyond the docks. The normal world rolled on while he packed the camera away, cleaned the scene, and disappeared like mist before sunrise.
---
At the lab, the smell of chemical developer filled the air. The hum of machinery mixed with the faint hiss of steam. Marc hung the film strips over the lightbox, his face reflected ghostlike in the glass. Each photo dripped faintly, turning from shadow to clarity, from guesswork to revelation.
He slipped the printed photos under the analysis scanner, watching the machine hum to life, translating shapes into language. The system blinked once—then twice—and the words rearranged themselves across the screen in glowing blue script.
They weren't random. They were coordinates. Pieces of a larger riddle strung across London's forgotten corners: bridges, tunnels, docks.
"Clever bastard," Marc muttered. "You're playing a scavenger hunt."
The computer fed him another line of analysis. Most of the blood used wasn't human—it had traces of the same black iron element found in Sangre de Luna. Diego.
It had to be Diego.
Marc leaned back, rubbing his temples. His mind buzzed with too many questions and not enough sleep.
On the TV mounted in the corner, the news channel droned on. William Lex Webb was speaking again—another rally, another sermon dressed as progress. He stood at a podium draped in silver banners, the crowd before him roaring as he declared "a new age for London, an age unshackled from old gods and older lies."
Marc watched in silence. His reflection shimmered against the glass screen, his own face superimposed over William's. Two men building revolutions from opposite sides of the same lie.
He turned off the TV and went home.
---
The water from the shower ran cold at first. Marc let it stay that way. The sting against his skin helped him think. He leaned against the tile, eyes closed, hearing the riddle repeat in his mind like a heartbeat.
The king bleeds without a throne.
The stars are useless.
He traced the connections in his head. William's speeches. The missing girls. The strange symbols on the bodies. The scattered puzzle pieces.
"What are you planning?" he whispered to no one.
The steam fogged the mirror. His reflection was barely visible, only the faint white glow of his eyes betraying the thing beneath the man.
---
Across the city, in a fortified building that had once been a cathedral, William Lex Webb's headquarters thrummed with life. The rally had ended hours ago, but his war was only beginning.
Rows of computers and schematics covered the hall, displaying blueprints of London—the underground rail, the bridges, the Parliament district. William's inner circle stood around him: military defectors, CEOs, zealots wearing black suits and silver pins.
"The age of crowns is over," William said, his voice low and honeyed, his smile carved in control. "We'll bring down the old world and build one that kneels to no one."
His assistants nodded, fearful and eager in equal measure.
He turned toward the El Lobo brothers—Salvatore and Rafael, both pale from years of Sangre de Luna. "Do we have the shipments?"
Rafael nodded. "The unregistered weapons from Serbia are docked and ready. Suicide units are prepared."
William smiled. "Then we begin tonight. The first blow must be symbolic. Something the world will remember."
"Big Ben?" Salvatore asked.
William's eyes glittered. "The heart of the empire. We erase the clock, we erase their illusion of time. The monarchy's shadow dies there."
He raised a glass of wine and took a sip. "To the new age."
---
Meanwhile, Diego wandered the backstreets, his pockets filled with blood-stained parchment. He had written dozens of riddles, his madness now meticulous. He left them near alleys, under bridges, on church doors—everywhere Moonveil had ever walked.
He whispered as he worked, "You'll find me when I want you to. You'll understand when it's too late."
He scrawled one final riddle under a flickering streetlamp:
He who follows light will drown in it.
Then he vanished into the dark, moving with the quiet speed of something that no longer remembered being human.
---
For the next several nights, the pattern repeated:
Moonveil found bodies.
Riddles.
Symbols carved in walls that only made sense when photographed under moonlight.
Each encounter dragged him deeper into Diego's web—a conversation of violence, a dialogue written in death.
The city had begun to whisper. Reporters hinted at another "serial god." Civilians prayed again, but not to gods of mercy.
Marc worked tirelessly, piecing together the riddles, trying to find the connection between Diego's game and William's plan. Every clue pointed toward something large, something apocalyptic—but he couldn't see the shape of it yet.
Until the morning of the explosion.
---
It began as a tremor beneath the river, a low vibration that made birds rise in frantic waves from the bridges. At first, people thought it was thunder.
Then Big Ben shattered.
The blast tore through the heart of Westminster like a sunrise of fire. The clock tower erupted into shards, gears and metal raining across the square. The ancient bells that had tolled for centuries fell silent, silenced forever.
Smoke rose in black spirals, curling like dark ribbons into the pale dawn.
The city screamed.
On every broadcast, William's voice replaced the emergency feed:
> "The reign of kings and queens is over. The new age begins today. The age of freedom. The age of men."
But those who listened carefully could hear something else beneath the broadcast—an undertone, a rhythm too precise to be accidental. It wasn't a speech. It was an invocation.
In his lab, Moonveil stood frozen before the television, the footage flickering against his face. He could feel it—the pulse of dark energy woven into the explosion, the unmistakable scent of ritual blood.
Howard stumbled into the room. "Marc… they're saying it was an accident. A gas line under the tower. But you and I know—"
Marc's voice was low. "It wasn't an accident. It was a message."
The final image on the news feed showed the tower's ruins, smoke curling into a crescent shape against the gray sky.
And carved into the rubble, barely visible through the ash, were words scorched into stone:
The stars are useless. The moon bleeds next.
Moonveil's eyes narrowed. His reflection on the screen was a ghost again—half man, half god, and wholly wrath.
"Then let's see," he whispered, "how long their darkness lasts when the moon rises again."
---