You see an eerie basement staircase bottoming out into an abyss. The scene is quiet as a tomb for a moment. And then a child’s pained scream is heard, reverberating up the stairs and rising in ear splitting pitch until….until….

Samael Dyson’s eyes snap open. He rolls over in bed where the platter of cocaine is laying on the bedside table. He snaps up the straw, plants one end in his nose and one end in the snow and draws in a deep inhale. His eyes go wide for a moment, and he grumbles something before swinging his legs over the side of the bed and standing erect. Sam flicks the straw onto the floor and strides to his hotel room door, where a notice is posted on a sticky note.

wEnT tO GET ContInEntAL breAkfAST!!! LoVe You MaStER! -INSIGNIFICANTS

“Fuckers.” Sam growls, ripping the note off the door. He opens it and strides the hall to the room across the way. The door there opens without a keycard, just as he requested. He had purchased access to the entire floor. Best to keep prying eyes and ears at bay. Sam wastes no time heading to the bathroom where Madison Dyson is chained to the toilet. She’s in her usual semi-conscious state, with eyes half lidded and jaw slack and proliferating drool.

“DRUG INSIGNIFICANT!” Sam hollers, but there is no response. Scowling, he turns his attention to the dirty used syringe on the counter and the vial of a milky amorphous substance. “Fine. I’ll do it my fucking self!” he announces to no one at all. He jams the syringe in the vial and pulls out a full quantity of the drug therein before taking hold of Madison’s hair and wrenching her head to the side to expose the nape of her neck.

What transpires is a blur of frantic motion. And all Sam really knows is that when its over, the syringe has been buried into his own neck. Sam pulls it out on reflex, but he can already feel the slow burn of the drug as it escapes into his veins.

“Wha….wha….”

Madison rises, the handcuff that should have been binding her to the toilet hanging loosely at her side. She suddenly appears vibrant. Challenging. Her lips curl up into a cruel smirk as Sam backs away from her.

“Fun fact asshole. The goon you had pumping me full of drugs was one of the ones who died on Warfare. Too bad you never really kept track.” Her eyes brim with tears, an odd counterpoint to the sardonic hateful expression on the bottom half of her face. “Fuck you, Samael. Fuck you forever.” Madison moves to pass him, and Sam reaches out to intercept her, grabbing her arm even as his own vision blurs and starts to betray him. Madison drags her embattered fingernails down Samael’s arm, running them over the tangle of burns and scar tissue that now live there. Sam screams as the wounds are reopened, and flails out of the bathroom. Madison adds insult to injury by pushing him to the floor, from which he suddenly cannot get up.

“Fucking finally!” Madison breathes, letting out a relieved and exhausted pant of success. She wipes away the tears of joy and plunges out of the room into the hall.

“INSUFFNIGANTS!” Sam butchers the word as his mouth goes numb. He tries to stand up again and fails, collapsing against the wall and sliding down it. Down, down, down it. Down INTO the carpet, that has inexplicably transformed from a solid into a liquid, lapping at his face as his paralyzed body tries to stay above the waves. But ultimately he is consumed. Samael Dyson looks up as the waters take him, up at the overhead light of his hotel room filtered through the surface tension of the water. In short order his lungs are taxed and burning, and just as he succumbs and his mouth opens to accept the glut of liquid into his body and drown….

….he is expunged. Falling through a ceiling and onto solid floor again. Sam gets up and realizes he’s dry. He looks up above him and sees only ceiling. But it’s what’s before him that makes his blood run cold.


The stairs yawn open into darkness, and he senses their familiarity almost instantly, even buried as they are deep within the recesses of almost two entire decades of memories. His heart hammers, and his lips twist up into a nervous smile.

“The fuckin’ drugs….gotta be the fuckin’ drugs….” He turns away from the stairs, and though he’s certain that there must be a door there, he finds only a bare cement wall. And thus he’s forced to confront the stairs again. The growing fear is as visceral as it is primordial, as a haunting core memory is unlocked and sicced on his nervous system like a ravenous dog on a bone. Sam shudders despite himself, barely able to find his voice to speak again. “Hello? HELLO!” His voice echoes down the stairs, growing quieter with each iteration.

And then he is answered.

“Hello!” A woman’s voice emerges from the darkness at the base of the stairs.

“Who’s there?!”

“Oh come on. You know me.”

The voice IS familiar. But also impossible.

“Oh, fuck off! INSIGNIFICANTS! INSIGNIFICANTS!” Sam barks.

But there is, of course, no answer from his minions. What there is however is the sound of someone taking a step onto the bottom of the staircase. The step is unsteady, but followed by another, and then another. Sam backs up against the cement wall, eyes growing wide as something horrible and uncanny passes through the inky blackness and up the stairs.

Clutch Cassidy.

Clutch’s body is twisted and dead. One foot is screwed on backwards, barely clinging on to ligaments and bone. Her neck is bent and broken, with bone threatening to punch through the taut flesh. Blood runs freely from her nose and mouth, intermixing with running mascara from the shores of her pallid lifeless eyes.

“You’re dead! You’re fucking dead!”

“I am?!” Clutch laughs.

The corpse approaches Sam, and Sam wilts against the wall until Clutch is standing over him.

“Oh, I am aren’t I. But you already knew that.”

“You’re not real!”

“I’m real enough.” She sighs. “You know where you are.”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” He claps his hands over his ears.

Clutch’s body continues, undaunted. “It’s where you got the idea for how to murder me. Whether you realized it at the time or not.”

“GO AWAY!”

“Awww. You sound like a bleating child. Though I suppose that’s not far off from the reality of your situation.” Clutch pauses, her lips turning up into a bleeding gash of a smile. “Why did you come to the XWF, Sam? Why did you even bother?”

With a sudden furious expression, Sam rises to his feet and comes face to face with Clutch. He rears back a fist and plunges it into her face, but catches only thin air as his hand carves through her spectral visage harmlessly. Sam nearly stumbles down the stairs, barely catching himself before taking a tumble.

Clutch reappears behind him on the landing. “Careful big boy. You almost ended up like me.”

Sam wheels around to face her again. “What do you want?! Revenge? To torture me? Have at it you undead useless whore! You’re nothing more than some drug induced hallucination anyway!”

“I don’t want revenge. But you might see this as torture. The remembering. You recognize this place. I know you do. It’s so central to who you are. WHAT you are. In fact it’s so central to your very being that you reenacted it when you murdered me. Don’t you see, Sam? You were BIRTHED here.” Suddenly, Clutch makes a foul retching sound, and her broken neck heaves for the effort of it. “Oh, excuse me, something stuck in my throat.” Clutch opens her mouth wide, wider, and wider yet, until it looks positively inhuman. She reaches deep inside of it then, almost to the back of her throat, and pulls out a blood stained rolled up piece of paper. Her mouth slams shut and reverts to its normal form.

“What the hell is that?!”

“You’ll recognize this too.” She unfurls the soiled document, and you can see the words “Cease and Desist” emblazoned across the top of it. Handing it to Sam, he snatches it out of her hands and his eyes squint as he tries to read it. “You got that last week, didn’t you?”

Sam scowls, but there’s a semblance of hurt there too. He tamps it down and throws the paper down the stairs and into the abyss. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. It’s the legal paperwork your father sent you, declaring the Flaming Thumper Heart Punch and the Rollerwhores to be his copyrights. You know, Sam, the father you VENERATE? The man whose very idea you seem to WORSHIP? He threatened to sue you, Sam.”

“That wasn’t from him! It was from some stupid fucking attorney who probably sent it without telling him!”

“If that’s what you need to believe.”

“It’s the truth!”

“When’s the last time you actually saw your father, Sam?”

Sam’s eyes go downcast. He doesn’t speak. But the silence is quickly interrupted by an excited gasp from Clutch.

“Oh, looks like we’re ready to begin!”

“Begin what?” Sam replies irritably. He looks up just in time to see a door iris open from what was just before pure cement wall. “....the fuck?” Sam hurries to the door, but is stopped short when it’s pushed all the way open. And on the other side, a blond haired toddler stands precariously. Behind him is the sound of fervent revelry, loud music, laughing, but visually everything behind the toddler is a blur. Slowly, the toddler starts to walk forward on ungainly legs, content in its naivete that nothing bad will happen. But Sam knows better. He knows how this plays out. “Hey, stop!” he barks at the toddler, bending low to grab the child’s arm. But just as with his punch to Clutch, his grip passes harmlessly through the spectre of the little boy.

“Your birth, Sam.” Clutch intones with a touch of wry awe.

“No! No,no,no,no,no!” Sam’s voice starts to grow high pitched and plaintive. A bead of sweat pushes out on his scalp, followed in turn by many more fellows. “STOP, DAMN IT! FUCKING STOP!” He grabs for the child again. Nothing.

The toddler stops at the top of the stairs, seemingly surveying the darkness below him. But the pull of that vast unknown is too strong. The toddler takes a step downwards….

….and almost immediately slips on a patch of dirt. The little boy tumbles down the stairs, a shrieking cacophony of pain and fear.

“NOOOOOOO!”

The tiny body hits the floor at the base of the stairs with a terrible finality; the sound of bone impacting on cement. The sound of a limb breaking like a dry twig. And then, a spotlight appears on the child down below. Blood is inching away from the base of his skull like a perverse halo. His left arm is bent at an unnatural angle. Sam moans piteously at the sight of it. The child starts shrieking in agony. Sam’s bottom lip starts to quiver, but again he is uncharacteristically silent.

“How long were you left on that cold cement floor, Sam? How long?”

Sam ignores Clutch and looks back up at the open door. Waiting and praying for someone to come help. Just like he did those decades ago. But there wouldn’t be anyone coming. Not for hours. Not until…

“Oh what the hell?!”

Madison Dyson appears in the doorway, alongside a darker, more obscured figure just behind her. Madison is dressed for a party, wearing a kitsch leather catsuit with a Nazi officer’s cap atop her head. She sneers at the sight of the boy at the base of the stairs. “God fucking DAMN IT! Child protection is gonna be all over my ass now! Matthew we can’t take him to the hospital!”

The dark blurry figure just behind Madison responds in a distorted voice. “I’ve got someone who can fix him up.”

The boy has naturally continued screaming and Madison winces in annoyance. “SHUT UP ALREADY! You wanna scream and carry on when this was your own fucking fault?! Go for it you little piss and shit factory! Ugh! I don’t have time for this right now. Just fucking….fucking calm down! I’ll be back in a little bit. Maybe.”

Madison shuts the door. Samael reels around, looking down the stairs at the broken little boy. “Fucking cunt! THAT FUCKING CUNT!” He howls, bashing his fist against the wall. “I bet you have something to…” Sam looks about, but Clutch has vanished. “Where did….?”

And then, something else catches his eye. Movement at the base of the stairs next to the broken child.

Suddenly, Kieran King is there, looking down at the pathetic tiny mess of humanity. Sam’s face twists in an abrupt and vicious rage.

“KIERAN! TOUCH HIM AND I WILL TURN YOUR ASSHOLE INSIDE OUT!” Samael starts down the stairs, but doesn’t make it far. What starts out as an ominous whistle soon evolves into a powerful gale of wind blowing up the stairs! So powerful is it that it stops Sam in his tracks, pressing his clothes up to his body like a second skin and plastering his flesh against his skull. Sam howls vengefully as he tries to fight back against the mighty winds!

“Seriously Kieran, you ever seen a total rectal prolapse?! That’s just the start of what I’ll do to you, you weak kneed diet coke of wrestling villainy! Bitch, where you stop is where I start. Those lines you refuse to cross? I don’t even see them! Oh you cheeky heel you, with those fertive low blows and egomaniacal just right for the merch table catchphrases! Wandering about in Fantasia or what the fuck ever like some virgin pissant who can’t cope with reality.

Well reality is HERE motherfucker! The man who survived the heat and the flames is HERE! HELL BROUGHT ME TO YOU, YOU INSUFFERABLE COCK! AND NOW I’M GOING TO EAT YOU ALIVE!

And why….WHY? BECAUSE I WANT WHAT YOU HAVE! I NEED WHAT YOU HAVE! I…..I……GRRRAAAAHHHHH!”

He almost takes a step forward before being pushed back.

“I NEED IT KIERAN! The title, the accolades, the tournament! They have to be mine! Because otherwise….otherwise….” He pauses, swallowing deep. “Otherwise I’m just a broken toddler.” He whispers the sentence like a secret, his face an impassive soul searching mask. But then, he rages again, fighting back against the winds once more.

“NO! FUCK NO! FUCK THAT! AND FUCK YOU MOST OF ALL! Fuck you and that ego you call a personality! That ego that makes you a stupid clod that FAILED at War Games. Did it even occur to you to try to broker a deal with Kris, to offer him a championship match in exchange for helping you win War Games? No, of course it didn’t! Because you’re a fucking with all the sense and preplanning of a brain damaged sow! And you know how else I know you’re a fucking ? That stupid look on your face when Kris pinned Dickie! The shock! The anger! The betrayal! But you’d have to have been a literal toddler not to see it coming! Christ, you are so stupid, Kieran! Your immense ego makes you so fucking stupid! And that’s why you’re going to lose this match! Because you’re going to roll up in this motherfucker content in the knowledge that you are the “best wrestler in the universe” and that’s all you need to win!

But it’s not, Kieran! It’s not! You know why?

BECAUSE GRAVES AND I ARE GONNA RATFUCK YOU!

Two guys who make your “badguy bonafides” look like Mister fucking Rogers are going to rape and pillage you until you DIE! Because there is no goddamn way we went through that hell of a match together just to both lose to the likes of YOU!

Sam is finally able to take a few furtive steps, fighting against the winds.

I don’t give a fuck how many accomplishments you have, or how good of a wrestler you are, there is no goddamn way you are withstanding me and Gravy together! And see, you THINK you’re gonna be ready for this. You THINK you got this shit on lock down. But do you? Graves and I are some of the most innovatively violent men in this business! And we’re both shit house possum crazy when it comes to hurting people. But you? You’re a lot of things but crazy ain’t one of ‘em. You lack the vision. You lack the innovation. And most importantly, YOU DON’T SEE THAT AT ALL.

Your immense ego DEMANDS that you not see your own weaknesses. But we see them, Kieran. Oh yesssss. We see them. Your tells. Your breaking points. The fact that you can’t name 37 ways to mutilate a human scrotum off the top of your head!

You’re just so blase. So normal! Your brain is locked….FROZEN! You’re nothing more than superego on steroids, oblivious to everything but your own designs. And your winnings? Nothing more than chaff filling an ever widening hole the size of that ego. But that hole will never be filled, will it? And deep down, I think you know that. And that’s the true tragedy of Kieran King. A man whose utmost banal self absorption can never be quelled, can never be filled!

So what is it you’re fighting for, Kieran? A thirst that can never be quenched? A hunger that can never be sated? Goddamn you are one sad motherfucker, Kieran! One sad motherfucker fighting one battle after another in search of a state of zen that it is impossible for you to reach!

That’s why he fears Alias so much, of course. Because Alias represents everything Kieran is not!

Ohhhh….but thats a tale for another time. Because there is another…..my partner in crime. Michael Graves!

As if on cue, the spectre of Michael Graves steps into the spotlight next to Sam’s injured younger self.

MIKEYYYYY! BABBBYYYYYY! I knew you wouldn’t desert me. Just like I know you won’t desert me on Warfare.

Gripping hold of the railing, Sam pulls himself halfway down the stairs.

Let’s face facts. You might be a crusty old pervert who can’t even make it past a guy like me who can barely wrestle, but we still NEED EACH OTHER. I mean, are you seriously gonna tell me you suffered heat blisters on your asshole only to get pinned by Kieran King?!

Gravy, I know its hard buddy, but I’m gonna need you to make the smart choice here. You and I need to team up to eliminate King! It’s the only thing that makes sense! Put aside your ego for a moment and recognize that Kieran can probably run circles around both of us wrestling wise. I’m as green as they come and you’re a decrepit old man second only to Scoops and Centurion. We need to ally ourselves if Kieran is to die! And I think even your monkey brain can see the logic in that!

Of course, after Kieran is eliminated, all bets are off. Oh I know you want the Universal Championship too and like me you have a boatload of trauma that motivates you. And shit, we can play the trauma olympics and measure our “sadness dicks” all fucking day if we want, but the cold hard fact is that this is your last chance at true greatness.

Sam roars as he fights back against the winds, pulling and straining and coming to within two thirds of the way down the steps.

HOOOO YEAH! Fuck you heavyhanded wind symbolism! What was I saying? Oh yes, of course! GRAVY! Now Gravy a lot of people would argue this being your last run would be a point in your favor. And it would be, if you realized this was your last chance. But honestly, I think you’re too dumb to truly accept this is it for you. I think you believe you got more mileage in the tank than you really do. But I saw it. All up close and personal like.

The pain in your eyes.

The creak in your joints.

The molasses in your movements.

Now don’t get me wrong, neither of us were at our best in that match! But you?

You should have been able to fuck me hard and dry!

You have YEARS of experience on me. You’re a hardcore LEGEND! If anything should have been a gimme it should have been Michael Graves over Samael Dyson! But it wasn’t was it? Nope! Because Gravy you are two scoops of retirement package in a one scoop bag! Emphasis on the SCOOPS! Heh heh heh…

You’re fucking DONE, dude! And if the fact that you were only able to fight me to a draw isn’t proof enough of that, then I don’t know what is! 

By the way, I get SERIOUS WOOD everytime you call me KindaCarver. I literally devoted a whole promo to the memory of him and his ballsack you stupid shit! I aspire to be that man. To have people fear me so much they have to censor my name on live broadcasts. THAT’S THE SHIT, GRAVY! So please, continue with the comparisons. Me and my cock thank you!

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that even as you compare me to C.A.R.V.E.R. you yourself reap the largesse of Mark Flynn’s “Year of Gravy” you twit hypocrite! Christ you even talk in the same halting stilted, melodramatic cadence.

Talking just like this.

Over and over.

Because it makes idiots precum.

With one final push, Samael is able to make it off the stairs. As soon as he sets foot on the floor, the winds halt, and the effigies of both King and Graves vanish, leaving Sam alone with the embattered little boy.

Leaving him alone with himself.

And suddenly, the brashness is wiped away. Sam’s face tics. And his eyes lock onto the now comatose child.

I don’t give a fuck what you went through, Graves. And I don’t care how good you are, Kieran. Because everything I need to know about my motivation is on this floor. Bleeding out. Ignored.

This is not what I am. Not anymore.

And to prove that to you, my mother, and the world I am going to capture the Universal Championship. And I am going to win the March Madness Tournament. And I am going to fuck the XWF hard and fast without lube for years to come! And why?

Because Shane failed to do it.

Because my mother loved this place.

Because somewhere my father is watching even if he doesn’t want me to believe he is.

And most of all?

Sam smiles devilishly.

Because it’ll be a hell of a lot of fucking fun.

But first….

Sam picks up the child version of himself, doing so with an uncommon gentleness. And as he does, another set of stairs appears in front of him headed down into another abyss.

….first I spit in the face of the long. The cold. And the dark. And appear once more rebirthed. Refreshed. Ready to face my demons.

And ready to completely and utterly SKULL FUCK Michael Graves and Kieran King.

And thus, with a defiant mein, he walks down the black stairway, child in arms, ready to meet what comes his way.