The Hypnotist: The White Lotus
Part Two Chapter 38 & Part Three Chapter 1
Previously on The Hypnotist:
Logan and the team activate the alien transport platform using pure thought, trusting Logan’s memory to guide them to Devil’s Rock. As they’re dissolved into atoms and flung through space, the sensation turns spiritual—then horrifying. Meanwhile, deep inside the mountain, Mills’ squad descends into total darkness… only to realize too late: they are the sacrifice.
Chapter 38
Inside the depths of the mountain, an ancient presence stirred. Disturbed over the presence that awakened his slumber.
The threat existed both from above and below. His brethren had yet to awaken. The twelve of them stirred in their sleep.
He sensed the change in the mountain’s vibration. Felt it shift in his bones, knowing the ancients were arriving. Their frequency was profound.
Why?
He looked up and stepped out of his pod. The room he was in housed all thirteen members of the Council of Raa. Thirteen pods circled the room. Standing vertically from the floor, the council slept to regenerate. Sleeping to prepare for a threat. Their sleeping quarters had been undisturbed for millennia, but they always knew. They always knew the threat would have a resurgence. His overlords had warned them long ago that one day it would come.
He stepped out of the living quarters into the darkness of their home. He could see acutely in the dark. The metallic scent of blood washed over him. He sniffed twice, taking in the scent, understanding the blood was not from his people. It belonged to the threat from above.
Where his people could not venture.
Wind rattled down the mountain to where he was standing, bathing his reptilian skin in the cold. He craned his neck, looking above and closed his eyes, allowing his perception to lift up the mountain to the top floor where he could feel the door had been opened.
The threat was already with them.
The time to act has come.
Part III
Chapter 1
Darkness stretched across the horizon. As far as Vlad could see, the darkness existed. The moon and mountain were gone and the lights above the mountain could no longer be seen.
No mansion either. All that existed was on the platform. The rune, the transport, Vlad and his soldiers, and of course Bastion.
His first thought was that they fucked up, and he was dead. It felt like death, cold and hollow and quiet.
No one said a word, all of them waiting.
He couldn’t even hear the hum from the island any longer and he wondered if everything had been shut down, possibly to aid in the reset Vlad was about to install in the minds of humanity, shutting down to reconfigure vibrational frequencies.
Waiting.
Nothing.
He turned to Juno. She was looking over the darkness like a child discovering a new toy, wondering how it worked. She shrugged.
“What is this?” Vlad addressed Bastion. “What happened?”
Bastion was looking around as if he were home. His eyes roaming across the darkness. His lips stretched into a tightlipped demonic grin.
“Bastion?” Vlad hollered when he locked eyes with Clitis, who immediately turned to Bastion. Juno did too.
“Creation,” he whispered before he locked eyes with Vlad. “It all begins in darkness.”
“How do we begin the ritual like this?” He looked around. “Where did everything go?”
“You didn’t really think this would be easy, did you, doctor?”
Vlad shook his head. Obviously, he wasn’t going to receive information from Bastion. He took a step forward. “I don’t get it. We inserted the rune. The rituals are supposed to begin. We did everything right.”
As if on cue, a gust of wind erupted across the platform, followed by lightning pumping across the sky. Vlad felt his stomach rumble. Pumps of blue and green electrical light flashed above them. The mountain quaked beneath their feet, shaking the platform like a magnitude ten earthquake. Vlad thought the mountain was about to crumble into the sea as he did everything he could to steady his feet when the rumble suddenly ceased.
Then the quiet returned.
The brief intermittent moment of silence was interrupted by what Vlad could only describe as a planetary shift. The sound was gargantuan, like an imploding planet colliding with a mountain of crunching steel. Vlad snapped his hands over his ears. He could feel the shifting crunch rattle in his bones when out of the darkness a swirling vortex opened as large as the moon that had been sitting center stage in their macabre. From out of the vortex arrived a black, swirling sun.
The black star of memory-a forbidden cosmic force-shined with a smooth black glint that rotated like a spiral into the center of the sun that beamed no light but the blackest pitch existing in the universe. Looking into it rendered the recipient mad for the rest of their days.
“Don’t look Juno. Don’t look directly into it.”
Juno nodded, her jaw hanging open.
Vlad could feel the energy from the sun. It arrived in waves, wrapping him in a blanket, slithering to every atom in his body. It felt like hell. Anguish and suffering.
But it was an illusion, depending on which angle you saw it from. From one angle, he saw the dark energy, but when he craned his head, he saw blood. Dark brown blood flowing in sheets from the sun.
“The sun is aligning with our intention,” said Bastion. “To do so, it must shed the blood of the past.”
Vlad could feel the blood washing over him, and it felt like ecstasy raging in his veins. Power. Control. Tasted iron on his lips, the metallic scent mixed with dying roses in his nostrils.
And that’s when the ancients arrived.
