Utkin's Revenge

23 August 2023, Tver Oblast, near Moscow. The flaming wreckage of a crashed jet illuminates the empty field where eight and a half human beings lost their lives to a chaotic maelstrom of hatred, betrayal and revenge. Even the cackling flames seem to deride the victims, eager to leave nothing of the dead to history but the ashes of their villainy. Then, a steel panel creaks. A burnt-out section of the plane collapses in a roaring burst of flames. The shape of a man rises from the furnace, but whatever had been human about him has been consumed by the fire. There is no howl of pain, no scream of revenge, as the demonic silhouette examines what remains of the charred and dismembered corpses that the inferno hasn't yet managed to erase from existence. Not long ago, he was known as Dimitri Utkin, the notorious war criminal, co-founder and black heart of the once-infamous Wagner PMC. His body was a cage of pain, held together by tattoos of the most accursed symbols known to history, and the weakness of mortal flesh. In his boundless agony and hatred, he was frightening and despised, but still a man - or so we believed. Now, the skin and blood of human fallibility have sizzled off, and what remains of him had never truly mixed with the human flesh: a ribcage filled with burning embers, steely bones moved by blackened muscle, and a terrifying countenance unburdened by human emotions, be they kindness or wrath. There is no name for this dark presence, nothing to learn from it, and nothing to argue with it. It is as alien, as antithetical to you and me as we are to it. But from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to those of the Mayan priest-kings, its arrival has been prophesied, a terrible blackness whose name is the same in any record of its myth, a dreadful utterance without any known translation: UTKIN.