||Smoke and Glass||
----------------------------
The metallic tang of blood hadn't faded from Seven's tongue.
Not the stalkers' blood. His own.
His body ached, torn between the residual agony from the shard's trial and the sheer violence of what had followed. He hadn't planned on killing the Psi-Stalkers so quickly—hadn't expected them to know.
They had said it aloud.
Seeker.
A title he hadn't earned yet. A name he hadn't chosen. And already, it painted a target on his back.
Ezreth didn't speak for several minutes as they moved through the industrial ruins of Kaarn's Outer Graveyard. The sky above was thick with gas plumes and aurora flickers. Atmospheric instability this far from a stabilized core was constant.
Seven barely noticed.
His senses were stretching far beyond the meat of his body. The shard had opened something inside him. Not a power, not yet—but a fracture of awareness. He could feel danger now. He could smell betrayal before it surfaced.
But the shard refused to speak again. As if withholding its gifts.
"Your aura's changed," Ezreth said quietly, navigating around a rust-slicked girder as they approached the makeshift elevator tunnel. "It's louder. Wronger."
"Good," Seven muttered.
She stopped.
"No," she said. "Not good."
He looked at her.
Ezreth Arlyn wasn't a stranger to danger. Her hair was still tied back in the jagged tail she favored, stained with engine oil. Her mechanical eye whirred softly as it refocused. She had half a dozen kill patches on her coat.
But the look in her real eye now—that edge of fear—was rare.
"The shard is fusing with your soul," she said. "And you're letting it in too fast."
"I didn't let anything," he growled. "It forced me through a trial. Burned me. Killed me dozens of times. It embedded itself when I proved I wouldn't die."
Ezreth shook her head.
"Shards don't embed, Seven. They bond—or reject. That thing used you. It hasn't accepted you. Not yet."
"So I push it harder."
"That's not how it works."
He stepped into the lift cage. She hesitated before following.
"It'll break you before it accepts you," she said.
"Then I'll break first."
-------
Three Hours Later – Eastern Drop Gate of Kaarn
The city's exit gates were crowded with scavenger bands, merchant drones, and bounty runners hauling freshly harvested biotech. Kaarn never stopped moving. Especially not at the edge of a zone where Planar distortion had been recorded.
Seven and Ezreth moved through the lines with fake ident keys and non-reflective cloaks. She had disabled half the sensors in the checkpoint node the night before.
It should have been clean.
Until a shimmer appeared in the corner of Seven's eye.
The distortion wasn't visual. It was instinctual. A presence pressing in from the folds of unreality. A gaze.
The shard in his arm pulsed cold.
[Observation Detected.]
[Unknown Entity: Class Unverified.]
[Location: Nonlinear.]
He froze.
Ezreth noticed immediately.
"Trouble?"
He nodded.
"Something's watching."
A child dropped a bag of scrap beside them. Her shadow stretched for a moment—longer than it should.
And just like that, the feeling vanished.
The shard dimmed again.
[Observation Ceased.]
[Warning: Anomaly Presence Confirmed in Current Sector.]
Ezreth moved faster.
They cleared the gates and hit the underdust roads beyond the walls, heading southeast into the Drifted Wilds—where half-dead forests met sinkhole ravines and ancient ruins swallowed entire hunting parties.
Only then did Seven speak.
"They're watching me now."
Ezreth's face was pale. "They?"
"The ones who watch the Planes," he said. "The old monsters."
-------
Elsewhere – A Silent Gathering
A mirror stood in the center of an obsidian chamber—rippling faintly.
Seven's image flickered on its surface.
Nine figures sat around it, cloaked in robes made of different realities—one shrouded in stars, one in magma, another of writhing symbols.
"He touched the shard," one said. Its voice was made of static and thunder.
"But he has not merged with it," another rasped. "Not fully."
"The Planes acknowledged him," said a third. "That cannot be ignored."
"He's incomplete," the star-robed one said. "He must remain that way."
"What if he doesn't?" whispered a void-throat voice.
They all fell silent.
"Then," said the eldest, "he will die. Or the world will."
-------
Back in the Wilds
By dusk, they reached a ruin site.
A former communications vault. Lost before the collapse of the Eighth Empire. Ezreth had mapped it out months ago—never expecting to bring someone like Seven here.
They took shelter in the lower antechambers, activating perimeter glyphs to hide their presence.
She lit a lowfire torch.
He sat across from her, still as stone.
Finally, she spoke.
"We need to talk about your identity."
He didn't move.
"You're not just Code Seven anymore. You're something more. Something the Planes responded to."
Still silent.
"Someone's going to find out," she said.
"They won't."
"You can't kill everyone who gets close to the truth."
"I don't have to," he said softly. "Just the ones who try to speak it aloud."
Her expression didn't change.
But her fingers tapped the edge of her pistol.
"You'd kill me?"
"If you said the wrong thing," he said, meeting her eyes, "yes."
Ezreth stared at him for a long time.
Then she nodded.
"Good."
He blinked.
She leaned forward. "I'm not your enemy, Seven. But this thing—this identity—it's bigger than you. It has teeth. You need to control it before it controls you."
She rose and tossed him a ration pack.
"Sleep. Tomorrow, we move. I've got someone you need to meet."
-------
Morning – Forgotten Temple Grounds
They hiked deep into the ravines, where mist hung between broken statues of forgotten gods and shattered obelisks.
Ezreth stopped at a rusted gate embedded in the canyon wall.
"This is his sanctum," she said. "He was once a High Whisperer in the Echo Circle. He's been hiding for thirty years."
"Why?"
"Because the Planes whispered to him once," she said. "And he whispered back."
The gate opened on its own.
Seven stepped inside.
-------
The chamber smelled of memory.
Scrolls floated midair. Crystals blinked in unknown sequences. And in the center sat a man with no eyes, no ears, no mouth—just smooth, blank skin.
The Whisperer.
But his thoughts spoke.
"You carry a shard," the voice rang in Seven's skull. "But it does not carry you."
Seven said nothing.
"You passed its threshold. But you have not passed yourself."
Ezreth stepped back, letting the two face each other alone.
The Whisperer raised a finger. A pulse of Planar energy expanded across the room, exposing the shard in Seven's arm. It writhed.
"You are unworthy," the Whisperer intoned.
Seven stepped forward.
"Then help me change that."
There was silence.
Then the Whisperer laughed.
Not with sound—with pressure. The walls shook.
"Good."
-------
He was taken to the Mirror Hall beneath the sanctum.
No doors. No light. Just reflections.
Each wall showed a different version of him—again.
Only this time, they spoke.
"You should have died in the lab," hissed one.
"You think you're special because you survived?" mocked another.
"You killed a child once," whispered a third.
"I did not."
"Not with your hands. But you let it happen."
Seven's fists clenched.
The shard pulsed.
[Warning: Neural Overload Threshold Approaching.]
[Emotional Stability: Fracturing.]
He stared into the mirrors.
"I don't care," he growled. "Let me fall. Let me burn. But I will climb."
The mirrors shattered.
-------
Aboveground
Ezreth waited.
The Whisperer emerged first.
"He will suffer," he said.
"But he will not break?"
"That depends on who he becomes."