The streets seethed with corruption. 

Sethan had ventured to a thousand different cities before he'd been trapped in the implacable darkness of the Realm. He had walked the cobbled streets of London before the Great Fire, had watched the gladiators rip each other to pieces in Rome, had seen the sun set on the white bricks of the Tower of Babel.

In comparison to those ancient metropolises, Verweald was a gauche hell propped upon pillars of sand. Given time, it would erode and be naught but ruins brimming with decay. 

For now, the Sin of Wrath was forced to rove the hedonistic cesspool. He had done so in Envy's shadow for the first few weeks, cowering at every sound and every flash of light. The stimulation had been mind-shattering for Sethan and had reduced him to a drooling, insentient wreck. 

He had grown accustomed to the noise and the chaos and the ugly, ponderous smells. He could feign normality, if prevailed upon. His hands twitched with the urge to claw through his own flesh and bones in a desperate bid to rid himself of the noise inside his head—but Sethan could mirror those around him. He could be normal. 

The Sin was disappointed in how "normality" had progressed during his imprisonment. It was normal for the humans to subsist beneath clouds of their own acrid filth. It was normal for them to walk places with their heads hung above their little devices and never share a word to those around them. Twice Sethan snaked the wallets from passersby's pockets and twice they never noticed a thing.

Sethan walked with the others on the sidewalks, studying their mannerisms, their gaits, their voices and words. Occasionally he'd allow the sweet, sickly air to permeate his body with the disgusting essence of this place. The Sin of Wrath could taste the oil and sweat and blood that comprised the very asphalt of this concrete jungle. 

Unclean. All of it is unclean.

He followed the crowd at a sedate pace, resisting the urge to snap and snarl at those who brushed against his body. The Sin was dressed in black slacks and an overlarge blazer with leather patches on the elbows. The blazer hung loosely upon his starved, rounded shoulders, the cuffs falling nearly to his knuckles. The ensemble was cumbersome and overlarge, but it allowed the Sin to blend in with his new environment.

Exhaling, Sethan walked from the street and took the path paved across the campus lawn. The crowds thinned, then disappeared. 

The University of California, Verweald, was one of the state's smallest but no less prestigious universities. Situated in the city's southern borders, UCV was a cramped campus not far from the dark, churning waters of the Pacific. It attracted many people from various demographics and walks of life, including the typical collegiate men in their tweed and alternative punk rockers with piercings and strange hair colors. Sethan's sallow skin and blazing red eyes weren't quite so conspicuous here. 

The Sin of Wrath's current host was a student residing in the college's dorms. Sethan couldn't recall the boy's name, only that he was a blithering, overanxious sod desperate enough to sell his soul to a demon to pass his exams.

The humans sell their souls for so little, the creature thought as he walked. The evening air was crisp with the trappings of an autumn breeze rifling through the under-watered trees and grass. They believe in nothing. They once cowered when I appeared, now they laugh and scoff at the idea of demons haunting their world.

Unclean.

It mattered little. The contract was already complete. The boy wanted to pass his class, and so Sethan had eliminated the need for the exam by eliminating the class's instructor. The Sin found such a cheap method distasteful, but he was starving. He had already torn through several hosts since his return and the greedy boy wouldn't prove the exception. 

Sethan tipped his face to the evening sky, savoring the light caress of the air despite its ugly, greasy texture. It calmed his savagery, quailed the hunger of the beast lurking inside his malleable flesh. For a time, Wrath's mind was clear and untouched by the insouciant white noise of his madness. 

He knew he was mad. There were those who would argue that, by acknowledging his own insanity, Sethan wasn't mad—but the Sin of Wrath knew better. He could remember sanity. It waned with every passing day, an uncertain mirage upon a distant horizon he could never return to. 

There'd been a time when Sethan hadn't felt this rage, hadn't felt this need to rip others to pieces and scream himself hoarse. That was before. Before his imprisonment. Before Sethan heard him, heard his words seep through the Dream like bubbling poison.

Sethan stopped walking and began to quiver. His frame shook with the tremors as a low keening note rose from his middle and echoed through his chest.

A world in my image. A thought let go. Forgotten. Forgotten. This existence, forgotten.

"No!" Sethan howled, clutching his skull as the words resounded inside his mind. He stumbled through a row of bushes to the nearest building and slammed his head into the stucco. The rough texture abraded his flesh. "Not yet! No!" 

Again Sethan struck the wall. Blood pattered from his forehead to the dirt below. The crimson rivulets painted his face and the Sin caught their trails with his tongue, holding the bitter, metallic taste in his mouth. It did nothing to calm his rising bloodlust—indeed, it only exacerbated the urge—but the voice was quieted. For now. 

Sethan would have wept with relief if he hadn't been so exhausted and hungry.

A rustling in the agapanthus hiding the Sin drew Sethan's gaze. A woman parted the foliage, nearly tripping on the roots raised from the hard earth. Her eyes were wide—but not with terror. The woman plainly stared at Sethan, at the blood on his face, as her hands rose and shook with the need to touch him.

Her skin was naturally dark, but it was ashen from lack of sunlight and nutrition. She was dressed like a college student, but the clothes were dated and speckled with old, dried blood. Blue veins marbled her temples and her chapped lower lip was riddled with healed scars.

"What is it, my Child?" Sethan addressed the vampire as his blood dripped from the sharp angle of his jaw.

The vampire wordlessly stared at the accumulating drips, her hunger plain. 

"Oh?" the Sin sneered, swiping his hand over his injury. He hadn't expected to find one of his Night Children in such a place, but he could certainly make use of her. "Have you come for a taste from the source, little one?" 

He extended his bloody hand toward her and the woman reached, a famished groan escaping her as she touched Sethan. He jerked away at the last moment, denying the creature her prize. The vampire wailed and leapt at him, her monstrous teeth bared, but with a single well-timed swat, the Sin threw the vampire aside.

"You will have a taste if you do as I say," he told the woman, picking his way through the bushes to return to the walkway. Her yellowed eyes wavered with uncertainty, lingering on the ruined wall. The blood had dried and was sullied by dirt. Unpalatable.

Unclean. Unclean.  

The vampire crept backward in a bid to ease away from Wrath. Like Sethan's self-inflicted blow the head, her fall had cleared some of the hunger from her eyes, and now the woman was confused as to what she was doing. She didn't know what had drawn her here. Her eyes snapped to the wall again, then to the Sin's face. Sethan was certain she didn't recognize what he was. She was too young. Too foolish.

"W-who—? What did I—?" 

Sethan smirked. He knew his Children were drawn to him like moths to light. He had designed them to be so.

Using her unnatural speed, the creature rolled and darted between the agapanthus, ripping the wilted flowers free of the bush in her haste. The vampire was only a few feet away before Sethan extended his will. His red eyes tapered as he uttered a single command using nothing more than his thoughts.

Do as I bid.

The force of the Sin's will flowed through his veins and rose within the fleeing vampire. The Call, as the Children of Wrath referred to it, spoke to the strains of Sethan's blood flowing through the night creature. His wants and desires, his needs, were all impressed upon his Children, and wordlessly his will claimed their own.

The vampire came to an abrupt halt, her torn sneakers screeching on the weathered concrete. Hesitant, she turned on the spot to face Sethan as a listless torpor infused her gangly limbs. Her eyes, once a warm brown, were consumed with twisted red shadows and bulging veins funneling tainted blood to her brain.

Her will and mind had vanished beneath his. This, too, Sethan knew because he had designed it to be so. It was his fail-safe, his way of always controlling that which had brought forth into this ugly, unclean world.

Sethan pointed toward the administration center adjoining the registrar office.

The woman genuflected, collapsing into a loose-limbed pile on the leaf strewn ground. "Yes, my Father."

With a single, rattling breath, the vampire shot off like a westward wind. The Sin watched on with indifference as the night creature screeched and flung herself into one of the building's lower windows. The thick panes broke, the loud smash of breaking glass echoing over the vacant, moonlit grounds. The vampire's wild ululations were muffled—but new screams arose as the creature attacked her prey.

Sethan waited, the wind stirring the hem of his blazer. Minutes passed as the sounds continued.

Soon they came running. Security guards wearing heavy utility belts came from various ends of the campus, charging across the windswept lawns with their radios dialed in to the crackling screams. None of them paid any mind to Sethan.

When the humans started to trickle out of the registrar, alerted and terrified by the sounds, Sethan moved. He calmly walked past those chattering, weak-willed humans with their binders and office material clutched in their hands like shields. They were so intent on the vampire, they never spotted the real monster quietly slipping among their ranks.

Once inside the abandoned office, Sethan didn't hesitate to hop over the main counter. He could plainly hear the wet slap of flesh being torn in the adjoined building and the solid, heavy thuds of campus police being tossed like ragdolls. Their guns went off in a series of deafening pops. The vampire screamed.

Sethan didn't have long.

Not long. Not long. This world...forgotten. To be forgotten.

The voice—his voice—was returning, soughing its message in the channels and dales of the ancient creature's mind.

The words of the Dream-Eater steadily eroded what remained of Wrath's mind.

Behind the counter was a door. The Sin popped through it, busting the latch in his mounting delirium. There was a bespectacled young man, an intern, seated in semidarkness behind one of the desks in the annex, headphones situated over his ears as he finished entering the day's final logs in the computer.

His bored gaze drifted over Sethan before returning to the monitor. The man froze and did a double-take, his ruddy face losing its bright complexion.

"What's going on?!" he shouted over the clash of his own music. The young man went to leave his rolling chair—but the Sin of Wrath was already upon him, his wasted fingers lifting the intern by the throat. The chair toppled, its plastic wheels spinning.

Without so much as an iota of thought, Sethan broke the nameless youth's neck and flung him aside. The young man hit a wall, toppling a water cooler and a plastic fig tree. He sunk to the dingy carpeting and didn't rise.

Sethan bent over the active station's keyboard, already pecking at the grubby, worn keys. The Sin had been baffled by such technologies when he had first been released—but Balthazar had made it an explicit point to explain the necessities of such knowledge in Terrestria's new society. These little boxes and their wires brimming with humming electricity were the world to these rotten, scurrying neophytes.

Unclean. Unclean. UNCLEAN—!

Sethan snarled as the records he sought loaded. The conflict in the administration center was building in fervor. Cruisers had driven right up to the doors, ripping crooked lines in the grass, their oscillating lights spiraling through the door Sethan had left open. There were shouts and commands and a bang of weapons being discharged. 

The monitor's white glow bathed Sethan's twitching face as the stored student record he sought filled the screen. The image of a black-haired woman was reflected on the glassy surface of his bloody eyes.

"Saryt Gaspard," the Sin of Wrath hissed as he studied the countenance of the woman he'd been unleashed to hunt. The ID photo was several years out of date—but it was not what Sethan sought. His gaze snapped to the listed information. Below her name and pertinent information was a section holding contact information. 

Below that was the name and number of an emergency contact. Luc Gaspard.

Sethan softly laughed as he traced a finger over Sara's image, painting half of her face in his dark blood. Next door came the final bellow of another gun being shot. The vampire's yowls were abruptly cut short. Sethan laughter died in his throat as one of his Children was cut down.

He memorized the information, then threw his fist through the screen. The Sin of Wrath released a high, terrifying shriek that shattered the windows and monitors of the computers surrounding him, pouring shards of glass upon the floor, ruining the technology the humans had taken so many years to perfect and covet.

Before the police could think to investigate the unearthly noise, Sethan was gone.