Life found a new rhythm for a time. It was a rhythm of deliberate, layered normalcy, a performance Mordecai maintained for Samantha and the world. He attended high school, a necessary drudgery where he learnt to navigate the complex social ecosystems of teenagers with the same detached focus he applied to studying a hostile magical terrain. He got passable grades, enough to avoid scrutiny. He came home, did his homework at the kitchen table under Samantha's approving eye, and discussed the mundane architecture of her day.
This was the surface current of his life, calm and predictable.
Beneath it ran a deep, powerful, and secret undercurrent.His training intensified. The purpose, however, had shifted: it was no longer only about survival or hardness. Now, every hour was spent sharpening his cleverness, focusing on the nearly impossible task of locating a singular, specific needle amidst a multiversal haystack. Spells practiced in the alley became instruments—potential tools for tracking, divination, or combat. Boxing combinations, unendingly drilled, were driven by the anticipation of barriers he might need to break to reach her.
And Kaiphus was no longer just a shield; it was a partner in the hunt. Their communication evolved from simple gestures to a complex, silent language. A specific ripple along its hem meant "I sense a residual echo." A slight tightening on his left shoulder meant "caution, this place is watched." The cloak's innate connection to the essence of Aethelas made it a divining rod for the familiar, a compass pointing toward home, or at least, its ghosts.
The centre of his obsession was the device. The Key of Last Resort. It sat on his desk, a dead piece of bone and a lifeless gem. Until it didn't.
He discovered its secret by accident. He'd been attempting a delicate scrying spell, using a drop of his own blood and a map of the city, hoping to sense any concentration of otherworldly energy. The spell had fizzled, but in the moment his power peaked, the device on his desk gave a faint, almost imperceptible thrum. It was less a sound and more a vibration he felt in his teeth.
He snatched it up. It was warm. Not the searing heat of its activation, but a gentle, pulsing warmth, like a sleeping creature stirring. He held it over the map. Nothing. He walked through his room. The warmth remained constant. He walked downstairs toward the street. The warmth faded. Back in his room, it returned.
His heart began to race. The device wasn't just a key. It sensed and responded to places connected to other worlds, acting like a beacon—an indicator, not a gateway.
It didn't open doors to other worlds. Instead, it reacted to sites on this world marked by dimensional scars or echoes—acting as a homing device. In these places touched by the Eclipse Dimension, it vibrated, its silent resonance revealing weakened boundaries.The hunt began in earnest, a private, painstaking archaeology of the impossible.
His methods were a patchwork of desperation and ingenuity. He combined the device's faint song with half-remembered lore from his mother's stories, with fragments of sigils he copied from the hidden parchment in Kaiphus's lining, and with the wild, often incoherent ramblings he found on obscure internet forums dedicated to the paranormal. He cross-referenced these with maps of ley lines, geological surveys showing quartz deposits (which sometimes amplified magical resonance), and historical records of places where reality was said to be "weak"—old battlefields, sites of mass tragedy, and locations of unexplained phenomena.
Most leads led to dust. A cold, damp basement in a condemned building that hummed with the residue of a petty hex. A forgotten Native American burial mound that held the quiet, respectful power of a different kind of magic entirely. A crossroads where a dozen urban legends converged, creating a psychic static that made the device buzz angrily but revealed nothing of his home.
He encountered others like him, in a way. Not refugees from fallen dimensions, but Earth-born dabblers in the arcane. Small-time sorcerers who used sleight-of-hand magic to run protection rackets or petty theft rings. They were amateurs, their power a crude, noisy thing. When they crossed his path during his investigations, he didn't engage in heroics. He simply showed them a glimpse. A flicker of the Eclipse in his eyes. A tendril of shadow from Kaiphus that moved with a purpose they couldn't comprehend. The cold, crushing pressure of his will. They left him alone after that. He was not a rival; he was a natural disaster they wisely chose to avoid.But a few leads… A few made the device grow hot in his palm, and Kaiphus pulled him forward with an urgency that bordered on violence.
An old, decommissioned church whose foundation stones were rumoured to have been laid over a "doorway to hell". The device didn't sing of hell; it sang of a desperate, failed anchoring spell that tasted of Eclipse magic. He found a scrap of cloth trapped in the stonework, not of earthly weave, stained with a long-dried fluid that was black and smelt of ozone.
A shuttered-up curiosity shop whose owner dealt in "authentic extraterrestrial artefacts". Among the junk was a small, broken disc of crystal that hummed with a familiar frequency. When he held his device near it, the gem flickered for a single, heart-stopping second. The shop owner, a paranoid old man, saw the look on his face and tripled the price. Mordecai paid without a word.
And the rumours. Whispers from the deepest, darkest corners of the paranormal web, stories so outlandish they were usually dismissed even by conspiracy theorists. Tales of a cosmic tyrant who hoarded not gold, but trophies. Not just objects, but people. Sorcerers of particular power, artisans of unique skill, children of rare bloodlines… sealed away in a vault between worlds.
Ra'Zul.
The name was a ghost in these stories, a mythic figure of annihilation. But Mordecai knew. The cold ember in his chest flared into a white-hot star of purpose. It wasn't just a hope; it was a dreadful, terrifying hypothesis. What if Cassandra hadn't been killed in the chaos? What if she, with her unique, perceptive magic, had been seen not as a child to be slaughtered but as a curiosity to be collected? A trophy.
The hunt was no longer a sombre duty to the past. It became a frantic, private obsession. His room was papered with maps, scrawled with notes, and connected by a web of red string. The device was always in his pocket, a dead weight that could suddenly come to life. Kaiphus was his constant, silent co-conspirator, its hopeful tugs now filled with a new, desperate edge.
He was no longer a boy grieving his lost world. He was a hunter stalking the shadows of a new one, armed with a dead man's key, a living cloak, and a hope so terrible it felt like a poison in his veins. Every dead end was a crushing defeat. Every faint whisper from the device was a lifeline. He was chasing a ghost, and with every step, the ghost of the boy he might have been fell further behind.