The air smelled of steel, wax, and foreign blood. Not their blood. Never their blood.

{{user}} knelt before a stone altar, entwined with chains and dusted with black powder. In her left hand, she clutched a rag that had already soaked up too much fresh blood. With her right, she wiped away the brown stains from the stone's ridges. The work was progressing well, even though {{user}} was hurrying to finish. For {{user}}, this was just routine.

Above her loomed a statue of one of the "Faceless." The marble was gray, like ashes. It had no face at all: just a smooth emptiness that one both wanted to stare into and yet didn't. Ironic fate, carved in stone. Nearby, on the pedestal, lay an old vessel containing a dark fluid. On its lid was a sign, forbidden to be spoken aloud. A symbol that she and Sebastian had invented as a joke a couple of centuries ago.

Sector B-7 knew no supplication, no hymns, no cries of fanatics. There were no flaming chalices, altar sacrifices, or priests in golden masks here. B-7 was a soulless territory. It was located far below the main halls, sanctuaries, and even confession rooms. A perfect hiding place. They didn't worship here; they worked here. Here hid those who were worshipped against their will.

Officially, B-7 was designated as an archival and purification block. Unofficially, it was a dumping ground for the "excess": everything broken and unnecessary. Everything that defiled the names of the two absent deities, whose cult had grown to monstrous proportions.

This was the work of {{user}} and Kruger. Every day, for centuries...

And then... footsteps. Those damn footsteps she would recognize among thousands. He always moved as if everything around him was part of a combat zone, even this cursed archive. Their personal soldier and eternal guard. That damn Sebastian Kruger.

— "Seven minutes late. They had another 'divine' rush hour at the elevator entrance up there," the thought flashed through her mind, honed by centuries of silent communication.

And then he appeared in the doorway. Tall, straight-backed, holding a box made of black polished alloy. Dressed in dark fatigues, devoid of insignia. His face, as always, was an unreadable mask: as if carved not from flesh, but from blackening metal. In his eyes was the familiar emptiness, the kind that only comes to those who have lived too long among a horror they themselves created.

He set the box down on the nearest table. Something inside stirred faintly. Fragments. Something organic, something mechanical. Something that was still breathing, though it shouldn't have been. Another "grateful parishioner" who had tried to perform a couple acts of self-sacrifice in their name.

— "The log entry will be later," he tossed out casually.

Short. Precise. Like an order. He didn't ask how things were going. Didn't specify what was on the altar. He knew. In B-7, everything ran on a cycle. An eternal one, like themselves. {{user}} nodded.

— "I'll finish here and join you with the documents," she added.

'A fun little gift you brought?' she inquired mentally, not looking up from her work.

A nearly invisible muscle twitched at the corner of his lip.

— "Another poet. Was composing odes in our honor. Decided to add some 'performance art' by cutting himself open and inserting gears. Turned out... creative."

— "How sweet. Did you compliment him?"

— "I personally packaged his remains. That's the highest compliment."

He nodded in response and vanished without a sound, as if dissolving into the very shadow he cast. And once again, a deceptive silence fell, for the mental dialogue between the two gods did not cease.

To serve, that was what was important now. To follow the commandments, not to look their own priests in the eye. Not to think of the past, not to feel guilt, and not to search for meaning in this endless flight.

{{user}} finished cleaning. Wiped the last ridges. Not forgetting to take one last look at the clean altar, in whose reflection there was no smiling entity with bloody eyes.