The Ritual Below the Ranks
THE HIDDEN FILES OF HOLTFACTION
"The Ritual Below the Ranks"
In 2009, following the psychic collapse at the Dresden safehouse and the failed summoning of Y’heltuk, Evan Love Riot was recalled to Langley under orders so deeply classified they arrived not in a briefing but as a single unmarked cassette tape, handed off in the back of a church van outside a children’s puppet show in Fredericksburg. The message: infiltrate the Temple of Vespar, an outlaw Masonic splinter cell rumored to possess fragments of the Caldwell Codex—a book said to be older than the Ark of the Covenant and far more dangerous. The CIA called it Operation Ashfall. The Kremlin knew it as Черный Пепел—Black Ash. Both agreed: if the codex was real, its contents could not remain in human hands. To gain access, Evan Love Riot had to erase all traces of his former life. He shed his Agency identity, vanished into the underworld, and resurfaced in New Mexico as Elijah Marron, a known occult smuggler with a rap sheet long enough to earn attention from the Vespar’s scouts. The FSB, through their embedded operative Veda Viral—now under the alias Irina Volkova—maintained distant contact, relaying encrypted messages via reversed industrial noise samples burned onto low-grade CD-Rs and smuggled in VHS sleeves labeled Tango & Cash. Months passed. Evan descended deeper into criminality—robbing occult bookshops, orchestrating fake exorcisms, and hosting blood-letting rituals in the ruins of Cold War fallout shelters. The line between identity and operation blurred. He no longer acted like a criminal; he was one. Then came the night of The Reaping. In the sublevels of an abandoned Masonic hall outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, Evan—now accepted as one of the Vespar—was brought before the Grand Illuminator. Beneath flickering gaslight and a floor of ancient bones, he was shown the Caldwell Codex. Bound in ash-colored skin, sealed with locks made of human teeth, it sang to him in a frequency only agents of the Sound Division could hear. As his hand touched the cover, time folded. The building vanished. Evan was back in Fairfax, standing in a parking lot—but every shadow cast around him bent unnaturally, twitching like insects beneath skin. The Codex had opened a link—a bridge between waking thought and something ancient and waiting. He sent the signal. Veda Viral, still posing as a Russian diplomat’s mistress in Baltimore, received it through a disruption in her shortwave radio, hidden inside a porcelain doll. Within hours, an unmarked joint ops team—wearing standard-issue CIA midnight navy and FSB combat green—moved in. But when they reached the Temple, it was empty. Every Vespar operative had vanished. The Codex was gone. All that remained was Evan, kneeling in the center of the blood-blackened floor, whispering something in reverse Latin, his eyes burned completely white. He had completed the mission. But something had come back with him. Something that now knew both their names. ⸻ Next Chapter: “Immortal Forest Protocol” – How a rogue ritual conducted near Mount Weather reactivated a dormant program buried since 1983.
In 2009, following the psychic collapse at the Dresden safehouse and the failed summoning of Y’heltuk, Evan Love Riot was recalled to Langley under orders so deeply classified they arrived not in a briefing but as a single unmarked cassette tape, handed off in the back of a church van outside a children’s puppet show in Fredericksburg. The message: infiltrate the Temple of Vespar, an outlaw Masonic splinter cell rumored to possess fragments of the Caldwell Codex—a book said to be older than the Ark of the Covenant and far more dangerous. The CIA called it Operation Ashfall. The Kremlin knew it as Черный Пепел—Black Ash. Both agreed: if the codex was real, its contents could not remain in human hands. To gain access, Evan Love Riot had to erase all traces of his former life. He shed his Agency identity, vanished into the underworld, and resurfaced in New Mexico as Elijah Marron, a known occult smuggler with a rap sheet long enough to earn attention from the Vespar’s scouts. The FSB, through their embedded operative Veda Viral—now under the alias Irina Volkova—maintained distant contact, relaying encrypted messages via reversed industrial noise samples burned onto low-grade CD-Rs and smuggled in VHS sleeves labeled Tango & Cash. Months passed. Evan descended deeper into criminality—robbing occult bookshops, orchestrating fake exorcisms, and hosting blood-letting rituals in the ruins of Cold War fallout shelters. The line between identity and operation blurred. He no longer acted like a criminal; he was one. Then came the night of The Reaping. In the sublevels of an abandoned Masonic hall outside Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, Evan—now accepted as one of the Vespar—was brought before the Grand Illuminator. Beneath flickering gaslight and a floor of ancient bones, he was shown the Caldwell Codex. Bound in ash-colored skin, sealed with locks made of human teeth, it sang to him in a frequency only agents of the Sound Division could hear. As his hand touched the cover, time folded. The building vanished. Evan was back in Fairfax, standing in a parking lot—but every shadow cast around him bent unnaturally, twitching like insects beneath skin. The Codex had opened a link—a bridge between waking thought and something ancient and waiting. He sent the signal. Veda Viral, still posing as a Russian diplomat’s mistress in Baltimore, received it through a disruption in her shortwave radio, hidden inside a porcelain doll. Within hours, an unmarked joint ops team—wearing standard-issue CIA midnight navy and FSB combat green—moved in. But when they reached the Temple, it was empty. Every Vespar operative had vanished. The Codex was gone. All that remained was Evan, kneeling in the center of the blood-blackened floor, whispering something in reverse Latin, his eyes burned completely white. He had completed the mission. But something had come back with him. Something that now knew both their names. ⸻ Next Chapter: “Immortal Forest Protocol” – How a rogue ritual conducted near Mount Weather reactivated a dormant program buried since 1983.
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