Chapter 6: The Scarlet Sisters

How dark it was in that Chamber of Contemplation. Barely could one discern, by the light of a feeble candle atop a human skull, placed directly on the table, the hourglass, the bread, the water, the sulfur, the salt, and the mercury. The flickering light illuminated the image of a rooster depicted on one of the walls of this cramped chamber, while on the opposite side was inscribed « V.I.T.R.I.O.L. ». Lost in my reveries, my attention focused on the undulating glow of the incandescent luminary, I saw this waking dream through the flames. Knights in armor, guided by a woman, fighting for the preservation of some precious object, then perishing, all massacred by the soldiers of some monarch.

The silhouette, the face, the posture of the woman seemed familiar to me. I had seen her many times in the recurring dreams I had had lately.

Suddenly realizing where I was and what I, Katerina, had come to do, I quickly regained my composure.

I had come to Prague in this month of May 1787 to infiltrate, on behalf of our Congregation, the lodges of those who « work from noon till midnight between columns B and J. »

Our Congregation was a secular Order of Witches who worshiped Hecate and had sworn to contribute to the downfall of Man in order to establish Chaos above Order.

As far back as I could remember, I had known only the prerogatives of the Congregation during my childhood and youth. A young orphan, born into a noble but poor family in the kingdom of Bohemia, I had been taken in by the Scarlet Sisters, who, devoted to the cause of their High Priestess Lilith, whose age and appearance defied the centuries she had traversed, had entrusted me to her care.

Lilith hated the order imposed by man on Nature. Above all, she hated men in general, and all institutions from which women were excluded.

Lilith possessed colossal powers. She had the ability to move any being or object she visualized by will alone, could know the hidden secrets of the past and the future, could compel certain demons of the Abyss to obey her commands, could materialize her desires in the physical world or in the ether, and could take control of any being in this world, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral.

In the past, she had contributed to the creation of the Golem in Prague, and at other times, with the help of famous Enchanters, she had instilled the essence of Black Magic into Prague society.

Lilith was of enchanting beauty that charmed anyone who met her, men, women, and animals alike. Her fiery hair shone with a fiery light in the darkness, and her deep eyes of green tinged with brown pierced the heart and soul of anyone who crossed her path.

Her powers were at their peak during the new Moon Sabbaths, and it was during these ceremonies that she harvested the Prana of the beings offered to her in sacrifice by her followers.

Lilith tolerated no contradiction, tolerated no other authority but her own. The prerequisite for being integrated into the congregation was to have the Ruby Seal of Fire engraved in one’s flesh. To be red-haired (sometimes certain red-haired men were tolerated as personal slaves), to have an impetuous temperament, and great aptitude in mastering the Dark Arts.

A few called and very few chosen succeeded in joining the Congregation. I was one of them. Those who failed had the privilege of being offered to her as a sacrifice.

During my education, Lilith constantly put me to the test, so that I would toughen up and develop my own powers without mental barriers or ethical constraints. For her, only the strongest survived in this world.

Although she never directly participated in my lessons, Lilith watched all my progress with a keen eye and placed great hopes in me. I was to be the instrument of her will through which the apocalypse of men was to come.

Lilith had powerful enemies. The Emperor first, who had sworn to burn her alive. Then the congregation of the Necromancers, an ancient rival faction. And finally, the new Masonic offspring, who, working for the glory and advancement of Man, irritated her to the highest degree.

The Emperor, or rather the successive Emperors, had never been able to lay hands on her, due to her gifts and her singularly enchanting aura. To her and her soldiers, they were thus not a serious threat, and she even neglected the most elementary precautions to avoid being noticed by the profane world.

It was different with the Congregation of the Necromancers.

The men of this Congregation also had exceptional gifts of materialization, invocation, teleportation, and projection into all planes of consciousness and existence.

They lived secluded in underground palaces and also needed to collect the Prana of lesser beings to maintain their powers and existence. Thus, during sacrificial ceremonies, they practiced on innocent young women whose will had been annihilated by the use of drugs, barbaric acts mixing sexual depravity, torture, and soul collection.

For ages, they had fought the Sisters in bloody confrontations from which no winner or loser emerged.

In order to definitively achieve final victory, one or the other of the rival factions, of equivalent power, had to obtain more powers.

The Necromancers and the Sisters coveted an ancient source of occult knowledge, the Book of the Abyss, a compilation of invocations of demons and entities from the depths of Chaos whose powers surpassed those of the goddess Hecate. They were the Primordials, those engendered at the dawn of time.

They had originally ruled as absolute masters in another plane of existence and, when they had attempted to penetrate into ours countless eons ago, they had been thwarted in their desire for conquest and had been expelled and forever imprisoned in the depths of Chaos.

Some Necromancers had, in the past, succeeded in summoning a minor entity of Chaos, trying to control it in order to use its vast powers to their advantage. At that distant time, the Book of the Abyss was only an incomplete fragment of a collection of spells, and if it was possible to summon demons, no mention was made of the means to be employed to conjure them. Launching, avid and blinded by their thirst for power, into the ritual of the Great Evocation, the Necromancers had materialized a minor entity of the Shadow, without any protection or conjuration sigil, believing themselves so powerful that they could not be dominated by such a creature. Yet that’s exactly what happened.

The entity took control of the weakest Necromancer and, turning him into a bloodthirsty creature, almost decimated all the members of their Congregation. It had to be exterminated using formidable weapons and powerful spells, which forced the entity to retreat into the Chaos. Closing the breach between the Worlds opened by the invocation, the Necromancers banned the use of this invocation and hid the Book so that no being could use it again under these conditions, without a magical protection shield available.

Eons passed, and the memory of the Book became more present in the minds of the Necromancers’ Congregation. There was a rumor circulating that the Book they held was incomplete, and that the other part, dealing with the conjuration of the summoned entities, was held by the Scarlet Congregation.

Thus, possessing the complete Book meant seizing the other half held by rival factions, invocations among the Necromancers, conjuration among the Scarlet Sisters.

That is why these two factions had been in conflict for ages; in order to collect the other half of the Book. And rather than forming an alliance, they preferred to forcibly seize what the other held, in order to retain the full power provided by the Book.

So I had gone to Prague to infiltrate the ranks of a Masonic society, knowing in advance that it harbored a member of the Necromancer Congregation, a certain Ethen.

My mission was to seduce this Necromancer, to enchant him so that he would lead me directly to the Book. To do this, I could use all means at my disposal: enchantment, red magic (sexual), corruption, prevarication, etc…

Prague was the ideal city for Magicians of all orders. Since Emperor Rudolph II had brought to his court John Dee, the astrologer of Queen Elizabeth, and Edward Kelly, his medium, the city had experienced an unprecedented spiritual boom and had become the international capital of esotericism.

Dr. Faust had worked there and his home had the gloomy reputation of being haunted by the Devil himself. Nonsense! The Scarlet Sisters had acquired it, and had transformed it into Headquarters in order to intrigue within the city itself.

Seeking by all means to find the fragment of the Book hidden by the Necromancers, the Sisters infiltrated all levels of Society in order to forge fertile alliances and use their networks for their own ends.

The Sisters had dispatched numerous spies and henchmen to explore the institutional monuments of the city such as the Jewish Cemetery, the Astronomical Clock Tower, the Charles Bridge, and the Emperor’s Castle. They had turned every nook, every hiding place, every wall of these monuments, without success.

Angered by these repeated failures, Lilith had decided to change strategy, and had entrusted me with this mission to the Masonic Necromancer.

Before setting out to infiltrate the « discreet » society, the Scarlet Sisters and I had gathered to perform the Grand Ritual of Red Magic, namely to cast a love enchantment spell on the targeted Necromancer.

Under a Blood-Red Moon, we had all together prayed to Hecate, in order to concentrate our powers and crystallize our will on our target. In order to seal the pact between Hecate and myself, aimed at making me irresistible to my target, we had sacrificed some young virgins and had practiced among ourselves and our slave-men rituals of sexual magic in which blood and semen were mixed and consumed to invigorate our vital energies.

At the end of this ceremony, I had been sent to Prague and thanks to our vast network of accomplices, had been able to approach the Masonic Brothers and join their society.

The Initiation went smoothly. I managed to easily conceal my true intentions and pass the tests, and when I was presented with the mirror that was supposed to show me my fiercest enemy, that is to say myself, I had great difficulty in hiding my amusement, for my true enemy, the Necromancer, himself held the mirror in his hands!

I thus joined the Lodge, and during the first Meetings, I had to keep silent, which did not prevent me from approaching, during the Banquets, my target and beginning to seduce him.

After some exchanges, I managed to arouse his interest, and we began to see each other outside of the Meetings.

I informed the Sisters of each of my progress, and we stood ready to deal him the fatal blow as soon as the opportune moment arrived.

The more time passed, the more I exchanged with him, the more his personality intrigued me, and the more I felt drawn to him. As we exchanged, a strange chemistry arose within me, and it became increasingly difficult for me to conceal my true intentions from him. Something about him intrigued me. Something about him seemed to echo my being, and when I was in his presence, time had no hold over my reason.

I truly felt as though I was facing my own reflection, so similar were his thoughts and feelings to mine, appearing to me then as my true Twin Flame.

I had never experienced such emotions, and this Necromancer, Ethen, over the hours spent with him, had almost succeeded in making me forget my primary mission.

This change in attitude was soon noticed by the Sisters, and they decided to precipitate the Necromancer into the trap we had set for him sooner than planned, so that I would not betray myself by some ill-considered act or word, and thus betray the Congregation.

Under the favor of a full Moon, I proposed to the Necromancer to join me at the Sisters’ Domain, indicating to him that I had a revelation to make to him.

Of course, it was a trap, and to my surprise, I had some reservations about using such artifice against him.

When he arrived at the Castle, I was alone to greet him. The Sisters had concealed themselves in the surrounding forests, and the stratagem consisted of leading him to the place of the Great Question after having enchanted him and drugged him if necessary.

The Sisters had carte blanche from Lilith, busy with some other important tasks and not available at that precise moment, to obtain by force and cunning all the necessary information for the collection of the Book.

When he arrived at the Castle, he showed a real interest in the building and wanted to learn more about my own history. He questioned me about my origins, and I told him that I had been taken in by a community of devoted women who were involved in spirituality.

Eager to learn more, he questioned me about our archives, and I had to lead him to the Library where he perused the various works that our Order had collected for ages.

When he finished, a strange gleam filled his eyes, as if he had understood my true intentions.

I pretended to show him other curiosities outside, to lead him directly to the Altar of Sacrifice. There the Scarlet Sisters awaited him to question him.

We crossed the dark halls, left the castle, and entered the forest, and after many detours, we reached the place of his ordeal.

When he arrived, the Sisters rushed upon him and encircled him. He must have been prepared for such trickery because he remained impassive and slowly turned his head in my direction.

Then, staring me up and down, he fixed his eyes on me and opened his arms.

I understood then that he was about to cast a spell upon me.

The air around me began to blow like a hurricane. Clouds of dark mist darkened my vision, and while I saw the Sisters suffocate for lack of breathable air, I was caught in an energetic whirlwind that paralyzed me. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hypnotic gaze, and his will controlled all my actions.

I realized then, too late, that this Necromancer, Ethen, had deceived me. He too had been tasked by his own to approach me, seduce me, and lead him directly to our lair, so that he could seize our most precious possessions, the Book foremost among them. He was indeed a false Twin Flame, whose dark intentions had just come to light: to use me, plunder us, and destroy us.

He had almost succeeded when I managed to turn away from his paralyzing gaze. I gathered all my strength and in one last surge of energy, I lunged towards him, a sacrificial dagger in hand.

Surprised by this maneuver, he stepped aside and struck the altar nearby, falling to the ground. In my momentum, I stumbled and fell upon him, plunging the dagger deep into his heart. And as I saw him agonize, far from providing the satisfaction expected from his death, I then felt an absolute emptiness engulf me.

The connection I had perceived with him was nothing but an illusion of my mind. He had made me experience new emotions that had captivated me and falsely convinced me of the nature of his thoughts and actions. And above all, I had believed myself much stronger than him. We, the Sisters of the Scarlet Congregation, had thought ourselves far superior to the Necromancers. Fatal mistake! The subterfuge he had shown had decimated the Congregation, and only Lilith the Eternal remained of the Scarlet Sisters, strangely absent from this sacrificial ceremony!

Projecting my being into the depths of possible futures, I came to the conclusion that my entire existence had been a succession of dark manipulations. It filled me with horror and chilled my blood. In one final movement of despair, I turned the dagger against myself and pierced my own heart. This life here below had lost all interest, all justification, and it must end now.

My agony was brief. As I took my last breath, I still had the vision of that noble blonde woman in armor leading her companions to death, then that vision turned into a distorted perception of the aura and power of the Sisters, which, from Scarlet, darkened, reflecting the heinous stratagems they had always deployed towards me, which had led me to despair and ultimately to my downfall.

This final vision was soon supplanted by the entrance of my soul into the black and unfathomable night of death.

To be continued here: Chapter 7