Part 3: Friday, November 13, 1987 – The Gilded Cage
By November, the nights in Nocturnis felt longer, the gloom thicker, and the very air seemed to hum with an unspoken dread. Detective Corbin was gone, his sanity shattered, a testament to Lewis’s quiet efficiency. Mammon was pleased. Lewis’s "immortal wealthy patron" status was solidified, his influence in Nocturnis’s murky underbelly undeniable. But with heightened status came heightened demands.
On this final Friday the 13th of the year, Mammon’s presence in Lewis’s shop was almost palpable, a cold, vast emptiness that swallowed sound. The Archdemon required a grander tribute, a more profound act of despair to seal Lewis’s place among his most favored. Lewis was to facilitate the sale of a particularly potent item: an ornate, gilded birdcage, shimmering with a silent, unnatural luminescence.
The client was Bartholomew Vance, a reclusive, obscenely wealthy industrialist whose sprawling mansion, high above the city, was rumored to contain more forbidden lore than the oldest libraries. Vance dabbled in occultism not for power, but for the perverse thrill of collecting unique forms of suffering. He desired something that transcended physical pain, something that devoured the very essence of emotion.
Lewis presented the Gilded Cage with his usual practiced ease, though even he felt a flicker of unease from its silent power. This cage didn’t hold birds. When activated by placing something of immense sentimental value within it and reciting a precise incantation provided by Mammon, it created a localized "cosmic apocalypse miniature." It didn't destroy matter; it devoured meaning. Inside, hope, despair, joy, and sorrow simply ceased to exist, replaced by a profound, serene nothingness, a void of emotion that fed directly into Mammon’s domain.
Vance, recognizing the true horror of such an item, his eyes gleaming with intellectual avarice, paid Lewis an astronomical sum – enough to buy half the city’s decrepit industrial sector. As Lewis accepted the payment, the air in the shop seemed to grow colder, a chilling vacuum where warmth and feeling had been. He felt Mammon’s satisfaction, a deep, resonant hum of cosmic greed. The act of facilitating such utter emotional negation was a powerful ritual, and Lewis’s reward was immediate: an influx of truly immense, unfathomable wealth, confirming his unassailable power in Nocturnis.
But as the door closed behind Vance, the lingering emptiness from the Cage's activation seemed to cling to Lewis, leaving a cold, unshakeable dread in his own heart. He was an immortal patron, yes, wealthier and more powerful than ever. But he was also deeper in the Archdemon’s debt, his soul further entwined with the void he helped to create. This terrifying glimpse of the price Mammon truly exacted would fester within Lewis for years, a chilling foreshadowing of the day he would finally break the pact, a desperate act that would cost him everything.
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