Unknown One at the Bottom of the Deep

Perched on a great armored horse beside the skeletal knight she takes for Death, Luca watches him command the small being to fight. Warned that the living have no place among the burial grounds, the Skull Knight advances anyway; the being whips out its tentacles, and he shears their tips with an effortless stroke. It vaults over him, catches his blade across its underside, then aims its landing at Luca, seizes her in insectoid legs, and bounds away. Rather than chase a wounded quarry that cannot travel far, the knight studies the shape it has taken.

Luca wakes in a candlelit cave dominated by a towering cross fashioned after the hawk emblem of the Holy See, but built from human skin and bone. The being, seated at its base, explains that the grim monument is made from the remains of priests. Asked who it is, it answers with its history.

The creature had no name. Born hideously deformed, it once dwelt in the tower's shadow, barred from daylight because Albion's people stoned it on sight. It hollowed a pit at the base of the hill and sat motionless within, digging deeper each night to hide further from humanity, and there it uncovered a small egg-shaped object. When the townsfolk began casting corpses into the pit to make it a mass grave, the being was buried alive; as its senses faded, five angels appeared and offered a single wish in return for whatever it held dear. Trading away the bleak world as it stood, it asked to become the one who would birth a perfect world, and so took the form of an oversized Beherit balanced on four thin legs.

This Conviction Arc chapter appeared in Young Animal issue 7 on March 24, 2000. It delivers the origin of the Egg of the Perfect World, tying its transformation to a Beherit and the God Hand's bargain, and deepens the mystery of the Skull Knight through Luca's eyes. Luca, the Skull Knight, and the egg-shaped being are the only figures present.