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CURTAIN

His mother named him Faustus.

Faustus of clan Xarele… Faustus, “Lucky”… sometimes lengthened to “Lucky Lucifer,” an old nickname he’d gotten working forSpetsnaz,back when it was still a covert branch in the Soviet military.

More commonly on this world, they called him by his assumed name in Russia.

Karlov (Charles) Andrey Vasiliev.

He had been Charles Vasiliev for decades. Nearly a century.

In his own mind, however, he’d never ceased to be Faustus.

Faustus was his seer name. His real name.

It was the name his mother gave him… centuries before they took her to the camps.

Back before seers lived in fear.

Now Faustus stared out through a shimmering, deadly wall of sizzling electricity.

He had known such walls before. This particular technology came through the doorways to this world later, developed on Old Earth years after Charles left. It was a more sophisticated type of wall, perhaps, but at the end of the day, it was the same.

It was a prison wall, locking him in a cell.

Exactly like he’d experienced with humans back on Old Earth.

Exactly like he’d experienced with humans, seers, and vampires here.

Humans had him this time. In the end, it was always humans, just like it had always been back in that place of his birth. Just like they had imprisoned and enslaved his people for centuries. Things never changed. Humans never changed… even across dimensions. He’d never been able to make his niece, Miriam, or her husband, Quentin Black, see that.

They were too young.

Too young. Too stupid. Too utterly arrogant and full with their gross idealism.

The same idealism nearly wiped out his people back on Old Earth.

It would have, if others hadn’t risen against it.

Because of such fools, because of that stupidity and youth, he was here again.

Inside the walls of his own, human-made coffin.

Yet, in another keen twist of fate, it turned out it might not be humans Faustus had to fear in the end.

His own people had betrayed him, destroyed him.

They handed him over to his enemies. They humiliated him. Made him a slave.

Yet, despite all of that… they had left him alive.

This being, however, may not.

Faustus gazed into a pair of clear, cracked-crystal eyes.

He had been waiting for the creature to appear. He had known it was only a matter of time before the other came. Faustus knew him by now.