Kraków, 1874. Evening.

The gaslamps flickered low against the velvet dusk, casting long gold ribbons down Świętej Anny Street. Carriages rattled past shuttered cafés. The bells of Wawel Cathedral echoed in the distance, gentle and ceremonial. Kraków was calm tonight – civilised, almost holy in its hush.

Inside the Dabrowski residence, a child coughed.

The sound was wet, ragged, but controlled. The boy sat upright on a velvet examination chair, swaddled in wool, his cheeks flushed red with fever. Beside him, his mother clutched a rosary so tightly the beads bit into her fingers.

Dr. Tomas Dabrowski smiled gently. Elegant in his dark coat and silver cufflinks, he moved with the slow grace of a man who had nothing to prove. He pressed a brass stethoscope to the child's chest, listening with unhurried care.

"Lungs are clearing," he said softly. "The tincture has worked. Another two nights, and he'll sleep without pain."

The mother exhaled sharply, tears springing unbidden to her eyes. "Thank you. God bless you."

Tomas offered a modest nod. "God plays no part. Just chemistry and diligence."

He rose, gliding toward his desk – an ornate mahogany piece cluttered with medical texts and anatomical sketches, each page delicately inked by his own hand. Muscles, bones, nerves. Human elegance, mapped in ink. A gold fountain pen glinted as he scribbled a note in his ledger. "Case 183: Pneumonia. Responding. Survival likely."

A knock at the front drew his attention.

"Gregor will see you out," Tomas said without turning. "I have another patient. A private referral."

The mother whispered more blessings as she ushered her son away. The door shut behind them. Silence fell.

The smile faded from Tomas's face.

He extinguished one lamp, then another. The hall darkened. Down the marble corridor, past the parlour and behind the wine cabinet, a narrow wooden door stood waiting. He unlocked it with a silver key from his watch chain and descended.

Stone steps spiraled downward into shadow. The air grew damp, touched with mildew and old copper. A flick of the switch lit the gasline. Blue flame hissed to life.

The basement room was long and narrow, low-ceilinged. It had once stored wine. Now it held other things.

At the centre, strapped to a wooden operating table, lay a man.

He was shirtless, unwashed, his ribs visible through pale skin. A beggar from the square. His wrists and ankles were bound with leather straps. His mouth was gagged, but a line of drool ran from the corner of his lips to his shoulder.

Tomas approached quietly, almost reverently. His boots clicked softly on the flagstones.

He opened a black case and removed a scalpel. Clean. Sharp. Recently honed.

He didn't speak at first. Just looked down at the man. His face changed as he stared— something subtle peeling away. The softness vanished. The performative empathy. What was left was... hunger. But not lust. Not even hatred.

Curiosity.

He leaned down, lifted the man's thigh, and made a single, slow incision along the inner muscle. Just deep enough to part the skin. Blood welled instantly.

The man stirred, groaned behind the gag.

Tomas tilted his head, watching how the body reacted.

Then he reached for a small leather notebook. Flipped to a marked page.

"Subject #29. Responsive to incision. No twitching at the hip joint."

He dipped the pen in blood.

The man's eyes fluttered. He tried to speak. Muffled panic. Muscles straining.

Tomas frowned, disappointed. "No thrashing. No noise. That's better."

He reached forward, and with precise calm, pinched the man's nostrils shut. Pressed his palm down hard over the mouth.

The man struggled. Kicked weakly.

But Tomas was patient. He watched the convulsions without emotion, like studying a dying insect. When the body fell still, he released the grip.

He checked the pulse. Then resumed his notes.

"Expired. Insufficient anaesthesia. Next subject must be restrained more fully."

A fresh page. More diagrams.

And beneath the table, unseen in the far corner of the basement – something moved.

A flicker. A breathless shadow. Watching. Trembling.

Waiting to learn.

…………………

Kraków, 1875. Midnight.

The streets were silent, but not asleep.

Kraków's old quarter breathed in whispers – the soft creak of shutters, the click of heels on cobblestone, the rustle of rats behind refuse. Mist curled along the gutters like a slow, watching thing. Above, the gaslamps guttered weakly, barely holding back the dark.

Dr. Tomas Dabrowski walked alone.

His cane tapped gently with each step, not from need but performance. A gentleman's touch. The collar of his coat was turned against the wind. His gloves were spotless. The sharp scent of iodine still clung to his cuffs.

He had taken the long way home tonight. Not from fear – he didn't believe in punishment. Only in routine. In order. And in the thrill that bloomed just behind the eyes when the city was quiet and his hands were clean.

He rounded the last corner toward his estate – then stopped.

The wrought-iron gate stood open.

No lanterns burned. The hedges were trampled. And the door to the servant's quarters hung ajar on splintered hinges.

Tomas's brow furrowed. Not with fear. With irritation.

He stepped inside.

The marble foyer was dark. His footsteps echoed against the high ceiling. There was a smear of something down the wallpaper – mud, or blood. The grandfather clock had stopped ticking. Silence clung to the house like mould.

Then a voice broke it.

Low. Hoarse. Cracked by grief.

"Do you remember the alleys near Kościuszko Square?"

Tomas turned.

A man stood in the parlour doorway, swaying on his feet.

He was barefoot. Blood soaked his shirt. One eye was swollen shut. In one hand, he held a child's boot – small, leather, stained dark at the toe.

He tossed it at Tomas's feet. It landed with a soft, wet thud.

"That was my son," the man said.

Tomas didn't speak. His eyes tracked the man's injuries, the tremor in his stance. Calculating.

"He disappeared two weeks ago. You remember, don't you?" The man's voice was shaking now. "You came to our door once. Said you were handing out medicine."

Tomas's expression didn't change. His hands slid to his sides, calm and slow. "You need help. Grief makes men see monsters in the dark."

The man moved fast.

Not graceful. Not trained. Just furious.

A shovel swung from behind the doorframe, and the world cracked sideways.

Tomas collapsed against the banister. Blood burst from his temple. He gasped once before another blow came – this time to the ribs. Then another. And another.

The world dissolved into stars.

…Light returned in pieces.

Stone. Wetness. Rope.

Tomas's head throbbed. His mouth was stuffed with rags, soaked in copper. His vision blurred, then cleared just enough to make sense of the shadow looming over him.

They were in the garden shed.

Or what was left of it.

Tools were strewn across the soil-stained floor. A lantern burned dim in the corner, casting the man's silhouette in flickering pieces.

Tomas couldn't speak.

But he could feel the bindings at his wrists. His ankles. The pressure of wood beneath his back.

The man knelt beside him, holding something in both hands.

An axe.

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Old. Splintered. But the edge had been sharpened.

"You don't get a trial," the man whispered.

"You don't get confession or absolution. You don't deserve God's mercy."

"You deserve pain."

The axe came down.

Tomas screamed behind the gag, but the sound didn't leave the walls.

His right leg snapped at the thigh. Bone and sinew torn wide. Blood sprayed in an arc across the wall.

Another swing. The left leg.

The pain was a white-hot tunnel.

Then came the arm.

Tomas thrashed. Convulsed. But the ropes held.

The man didn't stop until the pieces were off.

He sobbed through it. Not for mercy. For his son. For every child who never came home. For the city that called Tomas a healer and never saw the rot beneath the gloves.

And when it was over – when the floor was slick with arterial steam – he left.

Left Tomas to die in the dark with his limbs beside him like discarded meat.

But Tomas didn't die.

Somewhere in the hours that followed – between convulsion and stillness – he woke.

Barely.

One eye open. Lips trembling. Still gagged.

Still alive.

He dragged himself an inch. Then another.

The trail he left behind was black and thick, marked by streaks where he pulled what was left of his body through the shed and into the rain.

Eventually – miraculously – he reached the rear servants' entrance.

He pushed the door open with his forehead and collapsed inside.

He lay there for hours. Days. No one came. No one helped.

But he didn't stop.

He found a mirror.

Somehow, he propped himself up against it. Blood pooling around his waist. His own face stared back at him – white as chalk, eyes hollow, mouth half open like a corpse already beginning to rot.

He spat out the gag.

"You still breathe," he croaked.

His tongue was cracked. His pulse a whisper.

"Good."

Then – slowly – he reached for his bag with the one arm he had left.

He found the needle. The thread.

He began to stitch the stump.

Not because he wanted to live.

But because he refused to die.

…………………

Kraków. Months Later. The Ruins of Dabrowski Manor.

Time had collapsed into flies.

They clung to the moulding bread, to the blood-stained linens, to the surgeon himself— once a man of science and reputation, now a heap of rotting silk and stitched stumps, hunched in the ruins of his own estate.

The manor had been condemned weeks ago.

Neighbours whispered about screams in the night. Some claimed they saw a limbless man crawling behind broken windows. But no one came. The doctor's money had bought silence. His absence bought relief.

Inside, the air stank of decay.

Rotting plaster peeled from the walls. The once-grand study – lined with books and preserved anatomical curiosities – had collapsed inward. A beam sagged across the floor. Dust coated the spines of his journals like ash on graves.

Dr. Tomas Dabrowski dragged himself through it all.

He used his teeth to turn pages now. His single arm, stitched from shoulder to wrist in crude black thread, trembled with every motion. He pushed himself inch by inch, belly scraping against torn rugs and shattered porcelain.

The books he reached for weren't medical anymore.

They were older. Rougher. Bound in flaking leather and scrawled ink. Marginalia crowded the pages – occult symbols, fragmented Latin, charcoal-drawn sigils shaped like screaming mouths.

On the wall beside him, one line had been written in blood – again and again, until it had soaked through the paper and bled into the plaster:

"The soul must hunger. The body must bleed."

Tomas stared at it, hollow-eyed.

His lips cracked as he whispered, "What use is a scalpel to a man with no hands?"

He reached for his instrument case anyway.

It clattered open – empty, useless, long since stripped by looters or rats. Only a rusting bone saw remained, too dull for surgery and too heavy to lift.

Tomas dragged it toward himself with his teeth.

He screamed. Not in pain.

In rage.

He slammed his stump against the bookcase, again and again, until bone split again beneath the half-healed stitches. He left red arcs across the books. His breath rasped like a dying animal.

"I was a master of the body!" he roared. "The god of incisions, the king of stitching, the hand of life and death—"

The room didn't echo.

Instead, it whispered.

Soft. Slithering. Not a voice, not quite. A sound shaped like a question, formed not from breath but from hunger.

"…I could… give you more."

Tomas froze.

The gaslamp flickered.

Shadows shifted where they shouldn't have. Something moved along the corners of the ceiling – not walked, not crawled – coiled. A wet glisten slithered across the chandelier, invisible to the eye but loud in the bones.

Another whisper:

"…You want to be whole. I want to see. To learn."

A shape unfolded from the darkness.

It wasn't a demon in any classical sense. No horns. No wings.

It was long. Eel-like. Translucent, like peeled skin stretched thin over fluid nerves. Dozens of eyes blinked out of sequence along its underside, and where its mouth should be, there was only a trembling membrane that quivered with shame.

Tomas didn't scream.

He smiled.

Crooked. Bloody. Eyes gleaming like glass about to crack.

"Well," he rasped. "You're not much to look at."

The thing recoiled slightly, as if wounded.

But Tomas laughed. A dry, bone-hollow sound. "Doesn't matter."

He slumped forward, the last of his strength bleeding into the rug.

"If you can crawl from the dark to find me… then you can help me rise again."

The demon trembled. Its voice quivered like wet thread.

"…I can grow what's missing. I can replace what was taken."

Tomas's grin widened. He pressed his forehead against the floor. His blood soaked the wood. His one remaining eye gleamed like fire on alcohol.

"Then take what's left of me," he hissed.

"But make me whole."

And from the shadows, Belphegor answered.

With a kiss shaped like rot.

With power shaped like disease.

With a Contract written in nerve and need.

…………………

Dabrowski's Ruined Estate. The Ritual Cellar.

The room was never meant to exist.

Beneath the crumbling foundation of the Dabrowski estate, behind a sealed coal chute and past a wall Tomas had once bricked shut with surgical precision, lay his private chamber. Not for patients. Not for study. For need.

The stairs down were black with mould. The air had a taste – iron and mildew, with the undercurrent of something wetly alive.

Candlelight quivered from surgical sconces mounted on blood-rusted rods. Leather restraints hung from ceiling beams. The metal table in the centre of the room still bore scratch marks from past "subjects" – some deep enough to split steel.

But tonight, the only blood belonged to Tomas.

He lay sprawled against the base of the altar. One arm missing. Both legs still cauterised. His ribs visible beneath a torn surgeon's coat, moving too fast with each wheeze.

Yet his eyes glowed.

Not with fever.

With purpose.

In the centre of the ritual circle – a crude scrawl of salt, ash, and dried blood – waited a pit no wider than a skull. It had not been dug. It had appeared. Black and pulsing, as though the earth had bruised.

Beside it lay Tomas's preserved severed arm, wrapped in gauze and wax paper.

He whispered to it. "You were a good hand," he croaked, dragging himself to the edge of the circle. "Precise. Steady. Let's see what comes next."

With his teeth and remaining hand, he unwrapped the limb.

The skin was discoloured. Nails grey. Stitches fraying where he'd once tried to reattach it.

Tomas kissed it once, then shoved it into the pit.

The room went still.

Then the whisper returned.

Slithering. From every direction. From inside the walls. The ceiling. The bone saws.

"Blood offered. Flesh returned."

"Speak the words."

Tomas's eyes rolled back for a moment. He coughed up bile and something darker. Then he forced the Latin through cracked lips:

"Sanguinem do. Corpus redo. Animam… imperfectam." I give blood. Restore the body. The soul… is already broken.

From the black pit, steam rose.

No— not steam. Breath.

And out of that breath came Belphegor.

His form coiled upward like a boneless centipede made of translucent skin and bloated nerve clusters. Mouths blinked open, not to speak but to taste.

He hovered above Tomas, quivering.

"The terms," he hissed.

"You walk again. You cut again. You bleed others… and I bleed with you."

Tomas stared up at him. Grinning.

"Done."

The air twisted. Something broke open that wasn't air or light or bone.

And then—

Pain.

It didn't build. It erupted.

Tomas screamed. Not in fear. Not even in agony. In ecstasy.

From the stumps of his legs and shoulder, growths began to spill out – tumorous bulges of meat, twisting with wrong angles, bubbling with wet slaps as bones cracked and nerves realigned.

One leg sprouted backward first. Then re-formed. Muscle braided itself around femurs with impossible speed. Flesh sloughed and replaced itself. Veins stitched themselves from one end to the other like a spider web drawn in blood.

He screamed again – laughing halfway through it.

Fingers burst from his shoulder in a blossom of gore, wriggling like eels before straightening into perfect symmetry.

He stood.

He stood!

Dr. Tomas Dabrowski rose to his full height – taller now. Leaner. Flesh reborn and tingling like static under silk.

He trembled. He laughed – a great, choked, bark of disbelief. Then he began to cry.

The tears weren't soft.

They were guttural. Animal. Torn from somewhere deeper than the soul.

He lifted his arm, flexed the fingers. Turned it. Twisted it. Then – without hesitation – drove a scalpel into his palm.

Blood ran. Skin split.

Seconds later, it closed.

He did it again.

A deeper cut. A slice across the wrist.

Closed. Again.

Then again. And again. Until blood covered his sleeve and the floor beneath him. His grin split wider than it should've.

From the shadows, Belphegor watched.

He didn't speak.

But his mouths quivered.

His eyes – dozens of them – dilated.

Fascinated. Aroused. Devoted.

He had never seen a creature like Tomas.

Never seen a man so willing to undo himself again and again just for the pleasure of becoming.

And in that moment, the pact was more than a Contract.

It was a union.

One flesh. One hunger. One glorious, self-sustaining ritual of ruin.

And neither of them would ever be alone again.

…………………

Kraków, 1877. The Hidden Operating Theatre.

It smelled like antiseptic and rot.

Not the sweet, natural decay of the dead, but the raw stink of flesh that had been cut too many times and refused to die. Meat forced to grow, then ripped back open. Again. And again.

The hidden theatre was beneath the ruins of Tomas's estate – newly rebuilt with money stolen from families who'd never found their children. His patients never left. Most couldn't walk. Some no longer had mouths.

Gaslamps flickered over a room shaped like a chapel and wired like a butcher's dream. Chains hung from rusted pulleys. Blood trays lined the walls. The tiled floor, once white, was now permanently pink. There were no beds – only tables.

Seven of them.

Each held a "patient."

One was missing both arms, with stumps swollen from repeated regrowth. Another had legs that hadn't healed properly – twisted backward, deliberately.

They didn't speak anymore. Most couldn't. Tongues removed. Teeth shattered.

Except one.

A young man. Maybe seventeen. Pale, feverish. One hand regrown. The other arm— gone.

He looked up as Tomas leaned over him.

Tomas's coat was white. Still clean. His gloves were smooth as silk.

His smile was gentle.

"Don't look away. I need your attention."

The boy gasped. "Please. You're not… you're not human…"

Tomas paused, then tilted his head like he'd been asked a riddle.

"I never claimed to be."

He slid the scalpel in just above the clavicle.

No reaction. The boy had stopped screaming a day ago.

Tomas made another note in his ledger. "Subject #91. Neural response negligible. Regrowth complete in left digits. Vascular flow unobstructed. Soul reaction…" He paused, as if tasting the air. "Tepid."

In the dark corners of the room, the walls breathed.

A whisper slid out like a lover's sigh.

"You're perfect."

Tomas didn't look up. He smiled at the sound.

"You always say that."

"You make pain into art," the whisper said. It slithered through the pipes, the saw blades, the drip of pooled blood beneath the floorboards.

Tomas turned to his mirror.

It stood at the far end of the room, floor to ceiling, brass-framed. Its glass was cloudy – always cloudy – but he saw enough.

He straightened his coat. Adjusted the buttons.

Admired the symmetry of his regenerated arms. The lean precision of his shoulders.

He smiled at himself.

"I think," he said softly, "we've surpassed the body."

The whisper curled tighter.

"You don't need me anymore," it said.

Tomas blinked. "Pardon?"

"You don't need to whisper. Or ask. Or beg."

"You need to be worshipped."

Tomas's breath caught – but only for a second. Then he laughed. "And what? You want to be my disciple?"

The voice trembled.

"No."

From the corner of the room, something moved.

A slither. A ripple through air like heat off burning skin.

Then Belphegor revealed himself.

He crawled from the shadows – not upright, not proud, but low, dragging his flesh like an eel made of fat and mouths and weeping eyelets. Every inch of him twitched with longing.

Tomas backed away.

"Stop. That wasn't part of the deal."

Belphegor didn't stop.

"Your soul is ripe now," he whispered, so gently it almost sounded kind.

Dozens of mouths opened along his side.

"And you're more beautiful than I ever imagined."

Tomas stepped back into his mirror.

His scalpel slipped from his fingers.

Then he screamed.

Not like the boy. Not like the others.

He screamed like a man being peeled apart from the inside. Not torn— unravelled.

His limbs stretched. Bent. Twisted. His reflection warped in the mirror, rippling like a held breath.

And then—

Silence.

Just a mirror.

And in it—

A man stood. Clean. Elegant. Perfectly still.

But the smile didn't belong.

It was too wide. Too smooth. Too content.

The man tilted his head and blinked once. Slowly. As if learning how.

Then he spoke, trying out the voice:

"…Doctor Tomas Dabrowski."

He laughed.

No— Belphegor laughed.

Behind him, the patients stirred in their chains.

They felt it. Even with broken minds and butchered nerves—

Their doctor was gone.

And something worse had taken his place.

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