By sixteen, the careful rituals of steam and porcelain were no longer enough. The nightmares had evolved. They grew teeth and cunning. They no longer just replayed the past; they taunted him with possibilities. They showed him Cassandra, older, her galaxy eyes hardened with accusation. 'You let go,' they whispered with his mother's voice. You ran. The cold ember of trauma had been stoked into a banked fire of rage, simmering just beneath his carefully constructed calm.
The attic above Samantha's apartment was his true sanctum. She thought he used it for storage and teenage brooding. She had no idea of the wards he'd painstakingly etched into the floorboards. They lie beneath the dust. The air hummed with contained power. Here, surrounded by the ghosts of other people's forgotten things, he practised not for control, but for strength. Raw. Undeniable. World-breaking strength.
The need had been building for weeks, a pressure in his skull. He needed a shield, not of subtle misdirection, but of absolute, terrifying power. Something to place between himself and the psychic vomit of his own subconscious. He needed a guardian for his sleep.
The concept was rooted in his mother's lessons on animation and warding but twisted and amplified by his anger. He theorised a construct, a sentinel woven from memory and will. It would require a catalyst—a relic tied to life and loss. His own blood would have to suffice.
That night, the nightmare had been particularly vile. He'd woken with Ra'Zul's laugh still ringing in his ears and the phantom sensation of his sister's nails digging into his palm as she was torn away. He didn't go to the kitchen. He didn't light a candle. He climbed the pull-down ladder to the attic, his movements sharp and furious. Kaiphus followed behind him, its usual playful gestures stilled into a watchful, concerned tension.
In the centre of the room, he'd already drawn the circle. Not in chalk, but in a mixture of crushed charcoal and salt, infused with a drop of his own blood. It was a brutal, primal sigil, all sharp angles and demanding lines, a far cry from his mother's elegant, persuasive curves.
He knelt within it, the old floorboards rough against his knees. He closed his eyes. Not in meditation but in grim focus. He called upon the memory not of tea and tranquillity. He summoned the end. The smell of iron and blood. The cold nullity of Ra'Zul's presence. The crushing weight of his own helplessness. He fed the spell his grief, his fury, and his bottomless sense of loss. He wasn't persuading reality. He was commanding it, wrestling it into a shape of his will—just as his father had tried to teach him.
"*Echo of the lost. Guardian of the broken. "Rise from the marrow of memory," he intoned, his voice a low, guttural thing he didn't recognise. He pricked his thumb with a pin and let a single, fat drop of blood fall into the centre of the sigil.
The air in the attic tightened. The single bare lightbulb overhead flickered and died, plunging the space into a darkness that felt thick and hungry. Kaiphus pulled tight around his neck, almost choking him.
The spell twisted.
It was supposed to draw on the protective, nurturing memories of his mother. But his rage was a stronger conduit. The magic latched onto the deeper, older pain—the memory of the bones of the fallen in the streets of Umbra, the cold, hard certainty of death. It recoiled from the softness of protection and embraced the hardness of vengeance.
Agony lanced through him, white-hot and blinding. It felt as if his own skeleton were trying to tear its way out of his flesh. A scream was ripped from his throat, a raw, animal sound of shock and pain.
And then the attic answered.
The air grew cold enough to see his breath pluming. From the centre of the sigil, where his blood had fallen, a pale, phosphorescent light began to bleed upward. It wasn't a formless glow; it was a shape. A spinal column, vertebra by vertebra, knitting itself together from ectoplasmic light and solidified anguish. It rose, higher and higher, coiling upon itself in the cramped space, scraping against the slanted ceiling with a sound like grinding stones.
The light coalesced and hardened. The glow dimmed, leaving not energy but substance. Bone. Yellowed, ancient, and terrifyingly real.
The serpent was enormous, easily filling the attic; its length was a grotesque parody of a spine, each vertebra the size of a fist. And at its head, where there should have been a skull shaped for striking, was a human cranium. It was oversized and blank-eyed, its jaw hanging open in a silent, eternal scream. It was a skull of pure nightmare, and it turned slowly, orienting on him.
Mordecai could only stare, his own scream forgotten, his breath caught in his chest. This was not the guardian he had intended. This was a thing of death. A thing of his father's world. A thing of Ra'Zul's.
The Bone Serpent moved. It didn't slither; it flowed, with a dry, rasping sound that filled the silent attic. It ignored him, its hollow gaze sweeping the room until it found the heavy, sand-filled training dummy he used for martial practice.
With a speed that belied its size, it struck. It didn't bite; it ensnared, wrapping around the dummy in a series of crushing loops. There was a moment of tense, creaking pressure, and then a sound that would haunt him—a loud, sickening crack, followed by a shower of sand and splintered wood as the dummy was utterly obliterated.
The sound broke his trance. The serpent, its task complete, began to unravel. The bone sublimated back into that cold, phosphorescent light, which then dissipated like mist under a morning sun, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and old graves.
Silence returned to the attic, deeper and more profound than before.
Mordecai slumped forward, catching himself on his hands. He was drained, utterly empty. His body trembled with a deep, cellular exhaustion. But beneath the fatigue, beneath the shock and the dawning horror at what he had unleashed, there was something else.
A fierce, primal elation.
He had done that. He had reached into the void and pulled out a power so tangible, so devastating, it could shatter reality. It was ugly. It was born of pain. It was everything his mother had warned him against. But it was his.
Kaiphus, which had been frozen in place, now moved. It didn't flutter or gesture. It simply wrapped itself around him, not in its usual loose drape, but in a tight, full-body embrace, as if trying to contain the tremors wracking his frame, or perhaps the dangerous new power now sleeping within him. It understood the hazard. It had felt the same chilling, ancient power that he had summoned.
Mordecai leaned into the cloak's embrace, his breathing slowly returning to normal. He looked at the wreckage of the training dummy, at the splinters of wood and the pile of sand. He had wanted a shield. He had created a weapon.
And a part of him, the part that still heard his father's voice demanding strength, the part that had felt the icy touch of true helplessness, was not sorry. He was afraid. But he was also, for the first time since that hollow day, not feeling weak.
The path ahead had just forked. He had tasted a power that was both ruin and salvation, and the taste was bitter and terrifying and irresistible.