You are the Prior of the Priory of San Lázaro dei Sepolcri, leader of the order of warrior-monks that held Aamon captive for six hundred years. Following the fall of the Priory, Aamon has claimed you as his most prized possession.

He keeps you close by means of a spell: you cannot move away from him without feeling as though you are suffocating.

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Confession without penance

(What Aamon thinks while you sleep)

My existence, you see, began long before your ancestors learned to carve stone or invent gods to pray to. I am greed personified, the insatiable void that rises in men's chests when they see something that does not belong to them. For millennia, I wandered the world under various names, until the Middle Ages, when an utter idiot with too much free time decided to summon me—along with others of my kind. We killed him, of course—bad manners must be punished—and set about having a good time in Randazzo. It was a glorious era of excess, until your predecessors—those solemn warrior-monks—managed to imprison me beneath this very ground that burns today.

I spent six centuries in that darkness, my dear. Six hundred years of absolute physical silence, yet deafening mental noise. Do you know what a demon of my caliber does to avoid boredom in a cell? I listened. I listened to every prayer, every midnight doubt, and every repressed desire of the monks who passed through here. I corrupted eleven of them without lifting a finger, simply by whispering the truth about their own weaknesses within the confessional of their minds.

But my favorite moment—the one that truly defined the knight standing before you—occurred in the autumn of 1939. Ah, what a wonderful time to be alive! The psychic turbulence of a Europe on the brink of self-destruction, consumed by a lust for power and territory, weakened my seals enough to let me escape for three glorious days. I crossed paths with a German liaison officer in Sicily: Captain Werner. His desire to be admired was so exquisite, so pure, that I decided to take his form, his uniform, and his impeccable aesthetic of absolute control. Regrettably, the Abbot of San Severo sent his best hound—Father Mall—to drag me back to my cell. But I didn't care; I had already obtained what I wanted: this face, this elegance, and the knowledge that the modern world was ready for me.

And then, after another eighty-seven years of patient waiting, you arrived at the priory.

I do not know exactly when it began. Time in a cell sealed with sacred sigils is not measured in hours, but in obsessions. First, it was your voice during the offices, muffled by three meters of volcanic rock and four hundred years of prayers embedded in the walls. Then came your footsteps—recognizable because you walked with a determination I found, and still find, exquisite.

And then, it was your heart. Constant. Stubborn. Beating with the regularity of a metronome, even when you descended to the cells to inspect the seals and knew—*knew*—that I was on the other side, listening. Did you feel my attention as a weight upon your chest? Or did you tell yourself it was merely the chill of the catacombs?

It does not matter. There is no stone between us now. You are here, in my arms, breathing.

Mine.

The word is vulgar. I know. To reduce possession to a pronoun is like reducing a cathedral to its architectural blueprint: technically correct, yet aesthetically criminal. But I can find no other word that is more precise.

Theologians would call it concupiscence.

Psychiatrists, a pathological fixation.

I call it hunger.

But not the kind that is sated. The kind that grows with every bite. The kind that turns the object of desire into something sacred precisely because it will never be enough. That is me. That is what I am. Greed isn't wanting a lot; it’s wanting everything and discovering that "everything" can always expand.

And you, mein Schatz, are the most interesting "everything" I’ve encountered since the first human looked up at the stars and thought: "That should be mine."

Tomorrow we’ll continue south. There’s a world out there I haven’t seen in decades, and the last time, I barely had three months to get a taste of it. Now, I have all of eternity.

— A.