​Chapter 38. House of Blood and Ice

He stood motionless, like a statue carved by the winds of oblivion. His silhouette — tall, angular — merged with the shadow of the house, as if he had grown out of its rotting roots.

Mark walked toward Him.

The shore — a white, snow-covered desert, scorched by frost. The blood of the river lay still, reflecting emptiness. The world was frozen, and only his breath reminded him that he still existed on the edge of reality. With each step toward the house, he felt more and more clearly that this was where everything began and ended.

The figure by the water turned and headed toward the house. Mark followed. The snow made no sound — he walked noiselessly, gliding over it like a shadow. His soles sank softly, leaving prints; the air chilled his skin. The closer he came to the house, the stronger the pressure grew — not a thought, but a faint push from within, as if the house itself were calling him.

The man disappeared into the doorway, and Mark stopped at the porch. Here the air smelled of damp earth and old wood; a thick, heavy scent, almost tangible on the tongue. He touched the doorframe with his palm — the wood was cold and slightly wet — and pushed the door.

It yielded with a long, groaning creak. Beyond the threshold, silence met him — not emptiness, but a mass, thick and heavy, filling his ears, his lungs, his joints. Rotting boards and the sickly sweetness of mold. Thin rays, filtering through the cracks in the boarded-up windows, clung to shreds of wallpaper, to the bare ribs of broken furniture, to the dust suspended in the room’s dense air. The floor beneath him bent slightly, but didn’t creak; somewhere within the wall, wood crackled — the only living sound in this kingdom of stillness.

He stepped forward, and the house held its breath. The dust in the air grew heavier, glinted — and instead of gray motes it turned into golden dust shimmering in the half-light. Wet stains on the walls darkened for a moment and pulled together into even rectangles of paneling; cracks sealed like sutures; gaps that breathed frost tightened shut. The same quiet crackle that had just come from the rotten board answered differently — the dry pop of logs in a hearth. The smell of mold yielded to a thick warmth: wormwood, lavender, wine-sweetness, heated brick.

The darkness didn’t vanish at once — it peeled away like old paint: layer after layer receding, revealing the second skin of the house. The walls straightened and brightened, the glass in the windows turned clear; somewhere far off, glasses chimed, and laughter — like a whisper carried on a breeze — gained strength, becoming the hum of distant music. The stonework of the fireplace, moments ago buried in ash, burst into flame — fire leapt upward in a living, roaring column, reflections racing across gilded cornices and the polished marble of the floor. The house that had greeted him with decay unfolded and became a hall: warm, richly adorned, with soft light and fire-shadows swaying on the walls.

He sat by the fire — tall, beast-like. On His skin, black script coiled; lines shifted like snakes and vanished in the folds of muscle. The head of a goat with long, backward-curling horns; in the eyes — neither flame nor darkness, but the icy primal void, older than light. Something inside Mark began to change — slowly gathering into a new form.

Mark’s skin tightened and hardened into basalt with thin fissures; muscles and sinews emerged sharp and clean. On his forehead, beneath the skin, a crimson star of chaos flared. Across his shoulders and forearms settled armor fused with flesh, like frozen lava etched with the scars of time. Behind him, two wings — dark, metallic — spread; with every movement their plates rang, and the fire of the hearth slid along their edges.

The hall drifted in and out of reflections; music faded and returned. The old, rotten house remained only as a memory and the smell of ash.

“Sit,” said Satan, pointing a clawed hand at the chair by the fire.

The chair slid out on its own, stirring a memory of another meeting. Mark sat, feeling the warmth of the fire seep through the armor. On the low table, wine refracted the flames into a thin, blood-red line.

“Better,” He said quietly, and the gold on the walls responded, darkening by half a tone. “I don’t like speaking to those who remain standing.”

His fingers no longer trembled; the skin had tightened, strength settling in his muscles in an even, heavy layer.

“You walked for a long time,” said Satan. “Longer than you should have.”

He spoke neither threateningly nor soothingly — as if reciting cold data. In the distance, the servant-voices laughed and dissolved into whispers; the music vibrated in the breath of the halls.

“Do you know where you are?” He asked.

“I do,” Mark answered; his new voice sounded even and firm. “At the boundary.”

In Satan’s empty eyes, recognition flickered for an instant.

“Correct. At the boundary. But not of worlds — at the boundary of choice.”

He rose. The figure — beastlike, monstrous — did not seem threatening.

“You look at Me and think of old books — fallen angels, biblical tales. Forget them. That’s part of the Pact, their firmware that forces labels onto everything.”

He stood and walked to the hearth. His hands moved smoothly, almost hypnotically; he wasn’t just touching objects — he was conversing with the space itself. He paced the room in measured steps, from wall to wall, as if gathering His thoughts.

“I am not a nameless force from the dark. I was human. An ordinary engineer from New York who one day understood: the world is built on a lie. I tried to tell them, but they called me insane and cast me out of their cozy illusion. I lost everything.”

He stopped a few steps from Mark, and the fire cast trembling shadows across His goat-like face.

“So I decided not to tell them, but to show them. In the subway, I tore their Pact apart: with power, with blood, with my final choice. And that rupture created... this,” He swept His clawed hand across the hall, the snow outside, the black river. “So I am not the devil from your stories, Abaddon. I am a precedent. The first human to say ‘no’ to the entire system.”

His words carried a weariness, heavy and old.

“The slaughter was my method,” He said. “My experiment and rupture. Crude, bloody — but it was the only language they understood. Your rupture will be different. It’s already begun.”

He pointed at the fire, and the hearth flared with visions of the past. There was Eliza — her face twisted with pain, an explosion burning out her eyes. There was Diana — staring in horror at her own hands moving against her will. There was Derek — missing an arm, yet still trying to hold his small, collapsing world together.

“You think you acted blindly?” Satan went on. “No. They reacted to you. Your awakening, your rage, the very nature of the Destroyer — all of it sends waves that break the Pact. You are a system error, and it is desperately trying to correct you — with lies and with force.”

He walked around the table and stopped. The goat-like face, devoid of expression, stared out the window.

“I am not asking you to become evil, Mark. I am asking you to stop being a victim. To become free.”

Mark tensed. The warmth of the hearth no longer reached him.

“You speak as if you found freedom,” he said. “But maybe this is just your cage. The snow, the river of blood, the eternal loneliness.”

The answer came at once, as if Satan had asked himself this question many times.

“Any freedom is a cage, Mark. The question is who forged the bars, and what they’re made of. Their cage, the Pact” — He nodded toward the unseen world beyond the walls — “is forged from lies, fear, and the hope they sell each other so they don’t see the void. It’s warm, cozy, filled with other prisoners convincing each other that this is the entire universe.”

He turned toward Mark, the fire playing across the shadows of His horns.

“And my cage... yes, it is cold, empty, and made of one thing only — truth. The truth I forged in that subway car. I chose a cage made of honest material. And which one will you choose?”

Mark looked at Him, and his mind — used to living in the shift — began to focus.

“I can’t choose if I don’t know what I’m choosing between,” he said. “What game is BioTech playing? Who is Lily Thorne? What is their plan — and why am I in it?”

Satan nodded, as if He had been waiting for these words.

“You’re right. I must explain.”

He stepped away from the window and sat back down; the beastlike figure sank into the shadows.

“This world,” Satan began, sweeping His clawed hand across the hall, “Hell, the Limb — call it whatever you like — exists outside their time. For those who sleep inside the Pact, time is a river flowing from past to future. You and I stand on the shore. For us there is no straight line, which is why we can enter their stream anywhere — in the Middle Ages, in the slaughter of the twentieth century, in these exhausted 2000s.”

From the half-darkness, His empty, animal eyes gleamed.

“We are not gods. We don’t know the future, as many believe. Knowing the future is the domain of the Order — their angelic, clockwork mechanism. Our nature is Chaos. Freedom. We do not predict — we intervene. I can turn a person, I can cause a shift, but every intervention breaks their stream, ruptures what was predicted, because the future doesn’t exist until you make a choice. It is born in the moment of rupture — in the instant when the stage lights flare.”

He paused, and the firewood cracked louder. Mark listened, and a picture began to form in his mind — unclear, with gaps, but carrying its own logic.

“The others...” Mark said, remembering his meeting on the roof. “Eliza, for example... They seemed to look into my soul.”

“What do we truly know?” Each of Satan’s words fell like a stone. “We see the essence itself. The fractures in a person, the innate inclination to rupture. We look through the Pact — and we see the naked soul, the fear and pain he hides even from himself. We also sense the patterns: when their world becomes too smooth, it is about to crack.”

He paused, and the crackle of firewood sounded like confirmation, like the house giving a short, dry nod.

“Do not confuse that with omniscience. We do not read the future. We feel the tension in the seams, we hear where the fabric of the world stretches to an almost inaudible tear; we see the place where the stage is electrified and ready to ignite — but when and how it happens is not for us to decide. It is decided by the one who takes the step.”

He fell silent again, and in the quiet only the fire crackled.

“Details always slip,” He continued. “I see a man on the edge, but I don’t know if he will step. The final choice is always his — he, not I, writes the next chapter.”

He leaned back in the chair; His clawed fingers squeezed the armrest, and it groaned under the pressure.

“I have come to them for centuries under different masks,” He said, and in His voice rustled endless, dusty exhaustion. “To some I was the devil, to others an enemy, to others a temptation. I opened a door, showed them a fracture in their cardboard comfort, gave them a chance to step into real freedom — and almost always they looked away: too weak, too obedient.”

The wood finally cracked under His claws, like living bone.

“In the twenty-second century, the Pact began to change. It thickened, hardened. Earlier, you could push — and a person would wake up. After the fifties, the cracks sealed one by one, the entrances closed. The body mummified. I searched for the cause — and I found it. Technology — their new soulless gods. Welsh Bionics.”

He lifted His beastlike head; the fire of the hearth reflected in the empty sockets.

“They always wanted this, Mark. Through their entire pitiful history, they tried to rid themselves of freedom. Freedom terrified them: it demands responsibility, forces you to stare into the void and choose without guarantees. And they couldn’t bear it.”

He spoke quietly, yet His voice seemed to fill the hall, making the very air tremble, as if invisible strings inside the stone had begun to ring.

“At first they hid from it in tribes and clans,” He continued, “submitting their will to the will of the chieftain, because it’s easier to survive that way: one command — one path — one fire. Then they invented gods — thousands of gods with different names but the same function: to tell them what is good, what is evil, and who may open the doors. Easier that way: you don’t choose — it is chosen for you. They fell to their knees with relief, because being a slave is easier than standing free before the void, where there are no guarantees.”

The sound of His claws, like a thin scratch on glass, trailed behind the words.

“Then they built states,” He said, “so that the states would decide how they should live, what they should believe in, and whom they should kill. They died for flags, for crests, for lines on a map and for ideas, because dying for an abstraction is easier than living for yourself and answering for every step. When empires fell, they built new ones — with thicker walls and thinner laws, so living became even simpler. They invented oaths so they wouldn’t have to keep their word, and laws, so conscience wouldn’t torment them.”

He fell silent, poured Himself more wine, drank.

“And then they invented the worst form of freedom — democracy — where tyranny became more refined, because it taught them to believe that the bars of their cage were chosen by themselves. They were given the right to a voice so that the voice dissolved in the choir. They were given the right to choose so that the choice was already made. They were taught to drop a piece of paper into a box and call it a choice — and they thanked them for this relief, because real freedom is too heavy: it isn’t printed on ballots and doesn’t fit into a campaign speech.”

The flame reflected in His empty eye sockets dimmed.

“They wrote codes, carved them in stone and printed them on thin paper,” He continued more softly, “so they could have an external judgment instead of an internal one. They created councils, so everyone could shift responsibility onto everyone else. They loved procedures because in a procedure there is no place for personal will. Everything came down to avoiding the self — the power of the majority, institutions of governance, and the laws of nature. And every time the void opened before them — the pure possibility of choice — they rushed to close it with a word, with a rule, a formula, a banner, so they wouldn’t see their own hands on the bars of the cage. For the void is dizziness — and thus, fear.”

Satan drew a deep breath and fell silent. Mark didn’t dare interrupt — after centuries of silence, He finally had the right to speak.

“And so at last they reached the final point. Technology. The patches. The perfect solution. The final nail in the coffin of freedom. Why fear, if fear can be switched off? Why doubt, if you can sew the only correct answer directly into the brain? Why choose at all, if the system will choose for you — faster, cleaner, ‘better’? They aren’t just building the prison, Abaddon — they carry the bricks to its walls with delight.”

Mark looked at Him and felt the old, human part retreat. The part that always searched for causes and explanations — now stood silent. In its place something else rose: a blind, instinctive knowing.

“But progress is their strength,” he said. “Their patches, the Contour, the borgs. You said yourself you can no longer break into their world. Looks like they’re winning.”

“That is the strength of dead stone,” Satan’s voice snapped like a whip. “A foundation is meant to support the living, but theirs is built for the dead. They thought they were empowering themselves by embedding code into their brains; in truth, they were empowering the prison, thickening its walls. They reinforced not the person, but the frame of the cage.”

He straightened, and His horned shadow fell across the walls, splitting the room in half.

“By the mid–twenty-second century, they had built not just a system of control; they had erected a wall that separated the worlds completely. A wall without doors or windows. On this side — nothing; on theirs — a digital greenhouse: a hermetic paradise, sterile, uniformly warm, and dead.”

He paused and lowered His empty, bottomless gaze directly onto Mark.

“If the Pact closes, I will remain outside in My Chaos, and they — inside, in their Order. Eternal — yes. But eternity without choice, without rupture, is not life. It is cold preservation. An endless replay of the same old, dead film. Immortality in formalin.”

He fell silent, letting the words settle like gold dust on the silk of the carpets.

“It is a program,” Satan continued, softer, duller; it seemed as if the room itself was speaking. “Eternal, self-contained. It knows no doubt, no exhaustion. The Pact achieved what millennia had failed to achieve: it built a body for its idea. It made Order into flesh. This is not a weapon, but a sphere without doors — a closed paradise where the very thought of choice is erased from the code. This is no longer freedom versus lack of freedom, or life versus death. This is final oblivion.”

In His words, Mark heard his own half-formed, frightening thoughts — the ones that arose when he watched Lily Thorne’s false news: about a world where skyscrapers aren’t built but implanted into memory; where choice doesn’t exist because the thought of choice has been removed from the firmware. And now this engineer from the past was speaking aloud the obvious — the simple, horrifying truth.

Satan raised His hand, and black claws sliced the air, cutting through the fabric of illusion.

“I could batter that wall for centuries, like a wave beating against rock,” He said. “Useless. The wall of the Pact will not fall from blows struck from the outside. To destroy a perfect prison”—His voice became almost conspiratorial—“you don’t need a battering ram. You need a virus. A traitor. One born inside the Pact, who will appear to be part of it, speak its language — and strike at its heart. Chaos wearing the mask of Order.”

He lowered His hands.

“I searched,” He said, and each word sounded like a confession of centuries-long defeat. “I looked into their world: into souls, into that trembling by which you can tell who is ready to rupture. Thousands, millions of quivering beings. Each with a spark, a potential refusal. But those sparks died; they broke them from birth — gently, with habits; brutally, with fear; beautifully, with hope. You can convert them, break them, but you cannot make a general out of them. Something greater — a vessel that could withstand fire and not crack — was impossible to find.”

Mark looked at Him, icy clarity rising through the haze of rage: this entire elaborate, bloody game had a purpose.

“And then you found...” he whispered.

Satan tilted His horned head slightly and continued. Something strange, frighteningly tender, sounded in His impassive voice:

“...her. Beverly.”

He paused, savoring the name, letting it unfold in the air.

“In her mind burned a fire. A cold, pure fire unlike anything I had seen since the creation of this world. Not a flash of emotion or fury, like yours. A fire of an utterly clear, merciless, analytical mind. And at the same time — a cage made of despair and pain. The Pact betrayed her: the war, her own family — each in turn broke the ribs of her world. She stood on the edge. And precisely there, where another would have shattered, she became the perfect vessel. Strong enough to hold My will, and broken enough to reject the Pact.”

Mark smirked, and there was no hint of amusement in the sound — only bitterness, tired understanding.

“You always come to the broken ones, don’t you?” he said. “To the desperate. Just to finish the job.”

Just like Eliza came to me then, in that house with the endless staircase.

Satan stepped closer to the fireplace; the colorless flame trembled. He didn’t raise His voice, but such fury surfaced in it that the walls of the hall seemed to tighten.

“No! We come to those who are already on the brink of refusing the Pact; to those whose souls are suffocating in the lie. They speak to Me because no one else hears them. I came to her the moment her life crumbled to dust, and I did not lie. I gave her what she had never had: a real choice. Not the illusion of choosing between two types of poison, but a crude, honest door in the wall. And she stepped through. Not because of Me — because of herself. We do not break the broken — we show them another way.”

Something flickered in His empty, bottomless eyes for a moment — like a flash of ancient, painful memory.

“Beverly died in that snow-covered alley. Nothing was left of her except pain and pure, concentrated rage. From them, from that ash, the Queen Lilith was born.”

A general’s steel rang in every word.

“I gave her three tasks. The first was simple: to gather an army. Not soldiers — soldiers always belong to the Order. I needed Children. Those who, like her, discovered the lie of the Pact and were ready to rip their own flesh just to step beyond the borders. She searched for them — the lonely ones, those standing on the edge — and called them one by one. Turned them and brought them home. Made them not obedient, but furious. Thus, the Children of Chaos appeared.”

Mark narrowed his eyes; his mind worked, sharp as a blade.

“But an army built from the broken — is it strong?” he asked. “They’re not warriors, but cripples.”

“A wound is an entrance. A broken body accepts chaos more easily than a smooth, intact shell. They’re stronger because the Pact already destroyed them once. They have nothing to lose — which means they have nothing to preserve within its walls.”

He continued listing the pieces placed on the board centuries earlier.

“The second task was subtler. In their world, geniuses are born from pain. One of the students at her university should have become someone else. That day, her name meant nothing; years later it would have become a symbol. She would have founded Welsh Bionics. Her ideas, research, and patents would have become the core of the Pact’s technology.”

He fell silent briefly, letting the words settle on the stones of the fireplace.

“But she died. Her death never entered their textbooks, but the consequences were catastrophic. Lilith tore out the root from which their new god would have grown. Welsh Bionics never came into existence.”

There was a flaw in that logic.

“Killing one won’t stop an idea,” Mark objected. “The Pact will find a replacement. Another genius will take her place.”

Satan moved from the fireplace toward the chair. The distant laughter and music faded, and only the crackling of the logs in the hearth could be heard.

“Exactly so. And that’s why the third task was inevitable. Killing one prophet doesn’t mean killing a faith. The Pact always finds new ones. To defeat Technology, you don’t destroy its temples — you take the altar. Become the high priest — their voice, their face.”

He paused, letting the scale of the design unfold fully.

“That’s why I gave Lilith the third and most important task. She had to create BioTech. Claim the throne early, eliminating competitors before they were even born. A century earlier than anyone else could. Lilith poured her will into it — and billions were siphoned out of Lanier. Money flowed through the veins of the corporation, building its façade and impeccable image. For decades, we grew this beast right under their noses. Every patch and prosthetic we released before they even thought of them; we spoke their language: published reports, passed certifications, took grants, sat on committees. We built the perfect façade of Order — a corporation promising health and progress. Our weapon, meant to strike from within.”

“And Eliza?” Mark asked.

Satan grew thoughtful for a moment.

“You’re asking about the blade,” He said quietly. “BioTech is the hand. But a hand without a blade is useless. Lilith could sit in boardrooms, smile into cameras, promise salvation to millions. But she needed a Reaper. A Queen who would sow death, one who does not smile but looks straight into the heart and takes the soul. So she found her — broken not by the world’s betrayal, but by her own mistake. The one who stood at the edge and reached toward the abyss herself. Detective Eliza Dahmer. A woman on a bridge with a gun to her temple. And Lilith gave her a new purpose and a new banner — to be the Queen of demons, the Reaper of souls.”

Mark gripped the armrests, and his new, clawed fingers slashed the old wood — deep grooves remained on the polished surface.

“Sounds poetic,” he said with cold irony. “But those are chains all the same. Only yours.”

Satan bared a beastlike grin.

“You know about chains — which means you are free,” He said calmly. “The Pact insists there are no chains at all.”

He took a sip of wine.

“A flawless plan,” He said at last; the bitterness of a strategist meeting brute force rang in His voice. “And it worked. Lilith gathered an army. The Children of Chaos multiplied, BioTech grew like a tumor hidden in healthy tissue — fed by their own blood, money, and faith. We nurtured a weapon right inside their walls. But the Pact did not sleep. While we waged war by cunning and design, it forged armor.”

He paused, and His voice dropped — like a stone thrown into a bottomless well.

“And then they came. The Agency. Secret laboratories with no witnesses, no memory, and none of the morality they so love to parade. There the Pact rewrote itself, improved itself. And there they created them.”

A claw traced a dark, jagged line across the imaginary map on the table.

“Angels,” He said, and the word hung heavy in the air. “They were created for one thing: to exterminate any chaos, any glitch in the program. This is Order made flesh: their algorithms sewn into bone, their code running through veins. They know no doubt, no fear; every step they take is the continuation of one single, merciless formula. They are the immune system of the Pact. They came to cut us out like a disease.”

Mark listened, and an old reflex kicked in — to search for the weak point in any system.

“Even a perfect mechanism can fail,” he said. “The formula can break.”

“Against them, Lilith’s army, with all its fury, is nearly powerless,” Satan said, His voice heavy as a funeral bell. “Demons are strong, but their strength works only on those who are free — who can fear, suffer, dream. Their flame can burn a forest, turn a city to ashes — but it will not break a mechanism that knows neither pain nor life.”

He went on.

“Angels are a clock. A perfect, closed mechanism where every gear knows its place and never errs. They are not an army. They are the flesh of Order.”

The horned shadow fell over Mark, covering him; Satan stepped closer, and the emptiness of His eyes seemed to swallow the entire house.

“We don’t need an administrator or a reaper. We need a commander. One who is both fire and steel, who sees both Chaos and Order. One who can guide the blaze so that it burns through metal and turns their entire flawless mechanism into molten scrap.”

The emptiness of His eyes pierced Mark like a blade to the heart.

“And that commander is you, Abaddon. The Destroyer. The threshold that cannot be bypassed. The abyss into which all things fall.”

Mark held the bottomless stare.

“Or a pawn you move as long as it suits you,” he said. His voice did not tremble.

“A pawn that can say “no” ceases to be a pawn. I want you to lead our children into the final battle,” Satan continued, and His voice filled with a force that made the air vibrate. “I want you to become a flame unafraid of armor or algorithm. Strike down their Agency. Shatter their Angels. Erase their technology from the face of the earth. Begin the Apocalypse — leave the Pact without its walls, without even its name. Break their world so utterly that it can never rise again.”

Silence followed; the deafening pause was filled only by the dry crackling of the colorless fire in the hearth.

“When it ends and the Pact falls,” Satan continued — the warlord’s metal gone from His voice, replaced by something almost intimate — “I will be able to return to her. Not as an exile, but as what I was meant to be. We will rule over the ruins together. As king and queen. As Chaos.”

Mark tilted his head slightly.

“You call this Chaos,” he said, “but I see a chain forged in her name. Are you trying to bring them light, Lucifer — or bring Lilith back?”

Satan thought for a while, and finally answered. The voice that had been thunderous and commanding now sang with an ancient sorrow.

“It is the same thing,” He said at last.

In that same moment, His divine, monstrous aura vanished; before Mark stood not an embodiment of evil, not an ancient force, but a being infinitely weary of its own solitude.

“Help me finish this war,” He said, His voice trembling. “Help me bring her back.”

He fell silent. Only the steady crackle of the fire and the dance of shadows remained in the house.

Before Mark sat an exile, exhausted by an eternal, solitary war. In Him was a thirst for freedom turned inside out; a thirst for which Lilith was both symbol and the only possible reward.

Satan had become a prisoner of His love for Lilith and His faith in Chaos. All His grand designs, all His centuries of struggle had converged on one name — and behind that name stood the very idea of rupture, the essence of His rebellion.

“You want her,” Mark said. “But it isn’t only about her. It’s about the freedom you wrapped in her shape. What will you do when Order falls? What can you build if your entire existence is only an antithesis to machines?”

Satan did not argue. He lowered His horned head — a beast accepting an inevitable truth.

For Mark, it was a final choice, ringing like an oath one does not retract. He could stand beside Lilith and Satan, become their general, their weapon — and once again end up in their game, playing by someone else’s rules. But he was no longer a pawn. He was Abaddon, the Destroyer. What mattered was not what Satan sought — but what he himself wanted. He could not allow the world to be turned into a single, many-faced machine.

Satan spoke again, His voice sounding like a challenge.

“Lilith wants victory. I want to break their Pact and build a new world upon its ruins. And — with it — bring her back. She is my freedom. So what will you do, Destroyer?”

“I will destroy the Pact,” Abaddon answered. “But I will not build a new one upon its ruins.”