EPISODE 21: March Through History
In the year 254 BCE, in Alexandria, seekers of knowledge bent the boundaries of science, faith, and the unseen. Among them was a man called Hermes Trismegistus, an alchemist, astrologer, and occult philosopher. He scoured forbidden texts, blending the wisdom of Greece and Egypt in pursuit of the mystical and the divine.
One night, while seeking to commune with the spirit of his departed mentor, Hermes read an incantation drawn from a corrupted copy of the Book of Amar. But the ritual did not call forth the intended dead. Instead, it tore open a passage to the Abyss.
Through it came three malevolent spirits, shape-shifter demons, with the ability to copy any physical form, or possess any living being. Known as the Hellions...Grak, Vor, and Druva. The demons would root themselves deep in human guises, embedding within societies, guiding kingdoms toward ruin, and binding the souls of those faithful to eternal damnation.
The Hellions come to Earth - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
The mischievous trio marched through history, leaving corpses in their wake and damning souls by the tens of thousands. Emperor Qin Shi Huang, Pope John XII, Tamerlane the Conqueror, Ferdinand I, Sultan Murad IV, Ranavalona the Mad Queen of Madagascar -- were all vessels for the Hellions.
Attila the Hun, was another of their conquests. The ruthless, violent leader of the Hunnic Empire, seen as a calculated General to his men, but his enemies knew him as something more sinister, as he butchered thousands and burned cities to the ground.
In the year 451, at the Battle of Chalons, the Roman army discovered the truth -- Attila was possessed by the Hellion, Druva. And while the Romans held Attila back, the defeat was narrow, but in fact, history hinged on it. Had Rome fallen, Druva’s growing power could have opened the gates of Hell upon Western Europe.
Even retreating, Attila was too strong for mortal hands to kill. But whispers began to reverberate to his troops, through his own camp. Roman spies infiltrated, spreading proof, that the great leader was really evil incarnate.
Druva hiding in Attila the Hun, painted in 1805 by Márton Varga - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
By 453, Attila had conquered over a hundred cities and sent half a million souls to damnation, swelling Satan’s ranks. But his reign ended not on the battlefield, but on his wedding night. Deceived into marriage, Attila was betrayed. His own men, now knowing their leader was a demon in disguise, conjured Kharos, the paladin -- who slaughtered Druva, the Hellion. Casting the wicked demon back to Purgatory.
Then, in 1191, during the Crusades, one of the two remaining Hellions, Grak, struck. King Richard’s army rode from Jaffa toward Jerusalem, planning a surprise attack on Saladin the Sultan of Egypt who held the Holy City. But as his forces rode through the desert they encountered a strange glow on the horizon. Riding towards it revealed a hostile army horde in waiting —- one that outnumbering them five to one.
In the dark the charge of the opposing troops came, but in the chaos of battle, the Crusaders realized in a horrific twist, they were fighting their own countrymen. An entire armament of soldiers, possessed, driven to kill their brethren by something evil.
A day before, while a massive army of Christian soldiers camped on the outskirts of the city of Ashdod, a strange man on camel back rode into the encampment begging for food and provisions. Speaking the King’s English and appearing to be European, he was welcomed, fed, and given shelter for the night.
It was the Hellion, Grak, in disguise. He carefully crept through the sea of soldiers, possessing each of the 5000 Crusaders. Before the sun rose the demonic army mounted their steeds, riding with Grak in the direction of the smaller army of Christian soldiers moving towards Jerusalem.
The Hellion, Grak, leading the possessed army - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
And in the sandy plains, as brother slaughtered brother, no matter how hard King Richard’s army fought, their blades could not kill or even wound the flesh of the possessed. All seemed lost.
But in a surprising turn, hearing from scouts of the strange occurrence in the Badlands, Saladin and his men rode out. Arriving on the scene, and seeing the ghastly battle for himself, the Sultan knew what kind of evil was at work. Though he could have watched his enemies decimated by the hand of their own, he knew that would be a triumph for Satan. So on bended knee, he called forth Kharos... who rode down from the heavens, and as the sun broke the horizon, the Demon Grak was slain. And the spell of the possessed was broken.
There was still one Hellion lurking somewhere in the world. A shifty fiend, Vor would hop from vessel to vessel, never staying long, just sowing enough chaos, then disappearing before any human could wise up to the dark’s plans -- evading the deadly blade of Kharos or any other force of the light.
Unbeknownst to the demon itself, it had a date with an unfathomable destiny. Keeping itself on Earth as Fate had designed, Vor waited, following an instinct it could not deny -- as one day, it would stumble upon a powerful, but dormant soul that would need to be awakened if the dark was going to move forward in enacting the first Procession.
The breadcrumbs Banerjee was following in the Abyss were scarce. While feeding off information from lost souls and wandering demons, he was confident he knew the full scope of the Satan’s plans. And instincts told him he had to locate the linchpin of the first Procession, the Eater of Souls, before the dark did...but how? The soul was somewhere in the world, walking blindly through a mortal existence, without knowledge of what it truly was.
At an impasse, Banerjee was losing faith. He knew the answer lie somewhere in the cosmos, but where? He meditated. Something he had done often during times of rest in the void, but always with Veera serving watch while he retreated inward. Alone, he needed to protect himself from roaming forces in the blackness. So he created a kind of cocoon, a protective forcefield, projected through his ever powerful magic. Inside the armor, things surrounding him in his childhood, visions of home, of love, of comfort and protection.
Deeper into his meditation, transcending the limitations of his own form, and already residing in the shapeless, he experienced Nirgua Brahman. His mind blanked, tapping into, as the Bhagavad Gita says, the formless aspect of the Absolute Truth. The imperishable, the indefinable, the unmanifested, the all-pervading, the unthinkable, the unchanging, the eternal, and the immoveable.
Banerjee deep in meditation - © 2025 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Banerjee saw past it all, as infinite forms fell away, and all that remained, was what he had so fruitlessly been searching for -- a name, date, and location...Thaer, 1945, Grünau. That is were the essence, the Eater of Souls could and would be found. Call it karmic or divine, the Universe was showing him the way.
Out of his meditation, his mind’s eye frantically reached beyond the void. It was 1944, amid the chaos of World War II, and in the depths of the night, Veera heard his uncle’s words, clear, precise, assuring.
They had a chance now, a slim one, to stop Orem from enacting a Procession. Yet with the war raging, it would be no small task. Word was sent at once to Broderick Zayne, Gérard Roux, and everyone else fighting on the side of the Light who could be spared. Their meeting point: Izmir, Turkey. The clock was ticking.
TO BE CONTINUED…