The corridors passed in a blur, my feet pounding out a constant rhythmic thud in my heavy boots as I ran. Fear gripped my chest tight and I paid little attention to where I was going wanting only to get as far away from the noise of crumbling rocks and cries of fury as I could.My reaction once Lucifer had told me the whole story might have been a little excessive, I might not have had the power to take all four of the Faces down, but I could cause one hell of a distraction when I needed to.

Lucifer's little talk had changed my mind about everything, changed my desire.I was no longer so accepting of my fate as I thought was, death might be coming for me hot on my heels but now I had to hold it off for as long as I could. The fate of the world could still be changed and I couldn't give up, not while that was still even the smallest of possibilities.

As it turned out that whole apocalypse deal wasn't so much just a potential threat, not any longer, and even more prudent it was my blood that was the key to total undoing. Apparently it had been their theory for a long time, an ambition they'd never quite been able to set in motion until I came along. There had been so many little manipulations throughout my life where Lucifer and his gang had steered me in the way they wanted me to head - until more recently they'd been small and unassuming so that I'd never even noticed anything happening and even when I grew suspicious I could never have guessed at the truth until I had it all spelled out right in front of my eyes.

I'd been created to be a tool, he key to the complete destruction of life as we knew it, and not just in Hell but on Earth and above as well.Even Heaven wouldn't be safe from the power that they were building.I couldn't just let them have it, could I?

Snippets of the very one sided conversation with Lucifer rolled over and over in my head as my feet ate up the corridor, and even as the words sank in a little further I couldn't quite comprehend the whole truth of what I'd learned. They really were planning to bring about the apocalypse. The prophecy, my own power and transformation into the Revelator, it was all in essence an elaborate farce, a way to get me to do exactly what they wanted while believing the whole time that I was working to stop them. We'd all been pawns in their plan and we'd played right into their clawed and twisted hands.

The Revelator didn't preach the truth to the masses in order to save the world, it revealed to them their own impending doom. It had all been written before - not quite in the same manner but I could see where the inspiration had come from - even humans knew of this scenario.How had I not managed to figure it out before?

My new - and borrowed, that was something else they managed to reveal tome - would be used to spread the truth of their plans to all of Hell,and it would be the real truth, not some variation of it I managed to concoct myself. Now that Lucifer had revealed their plans to me I would be unable to make them see anything else. My own stubbornness had effectively backed me into a corner, yet another thing I'm pretty sure Lucifer had already foreseen.

They planned to have all of Hell come together, united under a common goal to see the ultimate destruction of the world, and the reign of the demons truly begin. The four Faces banding the four separate factions of Hell together to unlock the door and release the apocalypse on the world, and my blood would be the key. My blood?

My mind wandered restlessly as my pace began to slow, the aching in my muscles telling that I'd already spent my burst of adrenaline and was running on empty. Something still bothered me about that explanation,and as ever I got the feeling that Lucifer had not been telling me the whole story – carefully omitting select bits of key information on purpose just to mess with me. Some might have called me paranoid but over the time I'd spent in Hell I'd come to understand my father far better than I ever really wanted to, and this was exactly the sort of thing he would do.

My blood was the key. Jesse had been their first experiment to create a demon from someone with pure human blood. Not a demon born with human blood inside of them like Lucifer's Hybrid creations had been, but a true transformation from an already living human into a demon, like infecting them with a disease.

We'd make a few light-hearted jokes about demonism spreading like the vampirism or zombieism that was so prevalent in modern popular culture with the humans. We'd joked, but we'd also seen it happen and that was exactly how it had worked. My blood and a little magical incantation and Jesse was no longer the human he had started out life as. And my blood had been the key to that change.

That one thought kept turning over and over in my mind. It had been my blood that had changed him, but what had been most important about that ritual was that it had been my Hybrid blood. The combination of my father – Lucifer lord of Hell – and my mother – human, pure,innocent and sainted. I was created from a combination of perfect good and perfect evil and it was that which had been the true key to their to their plan. But that wasn't my blood any more. Frank had ripped my throat out, I'd bled out on the floor of the Shadow Cells, there was no more blood.

My feet stopped abruptly and I stumbled slightly from the momentum still carrying my body forwards. There was no more blood for them to have,they weren't after my blood at all. So how exactly did they plan on spreading their demonic seed across the Earth? Besides even if there was more blood left, my one lone body couldn't possibly hold enough blood to bring about the apocalypse. So what was the greater part of the plan that I'd missed out on?

They'd sent me running for my life when really they'd already taken it, and it sure as hell explained whey no one had been following me so far.My little stunt caving in the entrance to the throne room had met with suspiciously little opposition and even so it wouldn't have held them back for long they were more powerful than me by miles, someone should have been hot on my heels by now...unless they had no need to come after me.

"I'm such a fucking idiot!" I cursed to myself, leaning my back against the dusty stone wall and feeling a great pit of empty black despair opening up beneath my feet. Where the Hell was I supposed to go from here?

It didn't take me too long to figure it out. Really there was only one place left that I could go now. No one was after me, I was essentially useless to everyone now. But there was still one thing I could possibly do. I could try and find Malick, maybe catch up with Frank, Jesse and Lucas somewhere along the way. The worst thing I could do was give up. If the apocalypse was really coming, and I couldn't do anything to stop it, maybe I could at least stop Patrick's death at the hands of the twisted old Cleric.

It might be a redundant task if the whole human race was ultimately doomed, but at least I might win back some points with Jesse. Redeem myself slightly for this whole messed up affair before we all bough tit.

I picked up my pace once again and ran some more, headed with a little more sense of a destination this time. I figured there was no better place to start looking than Malick's office. That place was his own little sanctuary, his personal corner of Hell over which he held total control. If he'd taken Patrick anywhere it would be there.

Now that I knew no one was following me I ran with a little more ease,although my pace was still quick and urgent I just didn't have that whole tiger on my tail feeling that made the whole effort of moving feel ten times more frantic and difficult. So long as I didn't run into any Berserkers, or find myself facing Malick's swarm of Furies on my own I might just be able to call this one task a win. A small one perhaps, but given my current record I would take what I could get.