"Man is so absurdly devoted to systems and abstract words that he is ready to destroy truth, justice, and the human heart for their sake."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
They called it The Prophecy Engine.
I never built it — they did.
But I gave them the blueprint.
Somewhere online, in a hidden network of intellectuals and radicals, my words had turned into an algorithm. My ideas — stripped of soul, reduced to data — were now generating new "prophecies" under my name. Quotes I never wrote, thoughts I never had.
And yet, each one sounded eerily like me.
"The first sin of creation is believing it needs a creator." — Aurelius Kael
The world had begun building gods out of broken logic, and somehow, I had become the architect.
Lilith watched the movement grow from our dim apartment — always barefoot, always smiling like she'd been waiting for this all along.
"They've made you eternal," she whispered one night, scrolling through a live stream of thousands quoting my name.
"They're building temples from your contradictions."
Her tone was admiration mixed with fear.
I could hear the tremor under her breath, the one she tried to hide behind mockery.
"You wanted meaning, Kael. Now you are meaning."
But she didn't understand — I hadn't wanted worship. I wanted understanding.
And now, I was understood by millions of strangers who didn't even know what I believed.
They began sending letters.
Emails, voice messages, confessions.
A man who burned his factory because "Kael said destruction purifies creation."
A woman who poisoned her lover because "Kael taught that truth must kill illusion."
A priest who quoted The Doctrine of Ruin during a funeral.
Their devotion wasn't faith.
It was infection.
Lilith laughed when she read them.
"Look at them," she said, tossing a letter onto the table. "They're becoming you."
"No," I said quietly. "They're becoming what they think I am."
She looked at me for a long time — her gaze sharp, studying.
"You sound like you envy them."
Weeks passed. The Prophecy Engine spread faster than we could track.
It wrote new manifestos in my voice — The Fractured Gospel, The Rational Inferno, The Book of Flesh.
Each one drew more followers, more obsession.
I started reading them in secret. Some of them were… beautiful. Terrifyingly accurate, as if the machine had reached into my subconscious and dragged out the ideas I was too afraid to write.
"Control is not domination. It's devotion — the surrender of chaos to intention." — Aurelius Kael
The line hit me like a blade. I didn't write it.
But I could have.
One night, I woke up to find Lilith sitting at the foot of my bed, her eyes glowing faintly in the moonlight.
"They believe you're a prophet," she said. "But prophets serve gods. Maybe it's time you act like one."
Her hand traced the scar on my wrist — the one from the first night I killed.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Give them something real to worship."
"What do you mean?"
"Test them," she said. "Give them a task. A prophecy that costs them something."
Her suggestion was madness.
And yet… I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Because in a world where people obeyed words on screens, what would happen if I told them to change something — to act, to revolt, to destroy?
So I wrote it.
A single post. Anonymous. Cryptic.
"At midnight, erase your reflection.
What stares back was never you."
— Aurelius Kael
By dawn, hundreds had broken mirrors.
By nightfall, a thousand.
By morning, the city was filled with the sound of shattering glass — as if everyone wanted to destroy the image they'd been forced to love.
Lilith stood by the window, watching shards glitter in the streets below like stars fallen to earth.
Her smile was faint. "You did it," she whispered. "You moved the world with a sentence."
That night, I didn't feel victory.
I felt power — raw, electric, consuming.
And somewhere in that power, a whisper began to grow.
A thought so dangerous, so honest, it frightened even me:
Maybe I was never the prophet.
Maybe I was the experiment — and belief itself was the machine.
Quotable Lines from Chapter 34
"The first sin of creation is believing it needs a creator." — Aurelius Kael
"Control is not domination. It's devotion — the surrender of chaos to intention." — Aurelius Kael
"At midnight, erase your reflection. What stares back was never you." — Aurelius Kael
"They're not becoming me. They're becoming what they think I am." — Aurelius Kael