Twelve years on Earth. Time felt strange and elastic. Sometimes it stretched into eternity, and the boy he once was seemed like a ghost haunting his memories. Other times, it collapsed into a single, breathless moment, with the terror of falling from Aethelas as vivid as yesterday. The fear of Ra'Zul was not just a memory. It lingered in him, a constant, low-grade infection, a hum just beneath his awareness.
He had learnt a terrible truth. Ra'Zul did not merely conquer; he consumed. He did not just leave ruins—he left scars on the very fabric of reality. The rumours Mordecai gathered revealed locations where the tyrant's influence had seeped through, akin to poison oozing from a wound in the world. There was a small town where the night air grew thick with a taste of lead. Birds fell silent. People dreamed of suffocation. There was a farmer's field where nothing would grow. The soil, when dug, hummed with a low, sickening frequency—the residual energy of sorcerers' bones ground into dust.
These were not the grand battles of legend. They were quiet, creeping contaminations. They were echoes of the tyrant's power, and Mordecai became an auditor of these echoes. He followed them like a bloodhound, a map of misery spread across his mind.
The trail took him forty miles north of the city, to a place left behind by time and prosperity. A ruined Art Deco theater stood on the edge of a dying town, its marquee now just rusted metal, the letters of its name long gone. The air was still and cold, even though the day was warm. The device in his pocket had lost its warmth and now vibrated with a steady, angry buzz. Kaiphus sat stiffly on his shoulders, its fabric tense, and its usual playful teal color faded to a dull, anxious gray.
This was a place of ending.
He slipped in through a boarded-up side door, the wood giving way easily as he pushed. Inside, the place felt like a cathedral of neglect. Dust floated in beams of light from the broken roof. Rows of seats, covered in rotten velvet, lined the room. The stage, once alive with dreams and performances, now served a different purpose. The air felt wrong. It smelled of rust and dry rot, with a hint of ozone and old blood beneath it all.The device pulled him toward a trapdoor hidden behind the collapsed remains of a painted backdrop. He descended into the darkness beneath the stage, Kaiphus extending a corner ahead of him, emitting a soft foxfire glow that pushed back the oppressive gloom.
The space was small, a dressing room or a storage area. And it was here that the echo was strongest. The walls were scarred, not with tools, but with heat and force. A dark, sticky stain marred the concrete floor, a stain that still held a psychic chill that made his teeth ache.Then he saw it. A glint of metal in the corner, half-hidden by a pile of collapsed lumber.
His breath hitched. He moved slowly, as if approaching a sleeping viper. He knelt, brushing away the dust and splinters.
It was a locket.Small and delicate, it was crafted from a pale, silvery metal that was not quite silver. The chain had been snapped cleanly, as if by a sharp, powerful tug. His hands trembled as he picked it up, feeling its ice-cold surface.
And on its face, worn almost smooth but still unmistakable, was a tiny, engraved motif. A crescent moon cradling a sliver of light. The Eclipse.
It was Cassandra's. A name-day gift from their mother. Lys had referred to it as a "ward of gentle dreams", intended to keep nightmares at bay. He remembered fumbling with the tiny clasp for her when she was too small to manage it herself.
A sound escaped him, a half-sob, half-gasp. He clutched the locket in his fist, the cold metal biting into his palm. He poured a trickle of his power into it, not a spell, but a question. A reaching out.
The response was immediate and brutal.It was not a memory. It was a fossilised scream. A single, crystallised moment of pure, undiluted terror, imprinted on the metal like a psychic burn. He felt it—a small, human shock, the violent snap of the chain, a dizzying sensation of being pulled, and then a suffocating, overwhelming darkness. It was her fear. Her last moment of consciousness before this world, or this place, vanished.
The impression lasted only a second before fading, leaving him on his knees, gasping, the cold of the concrete seeping through his jeans. The small, silent scream echoed in the vault of his mind, a moth beating itself to death against a pane of glass.
For a long time, he didn't move. He just knelt there, holding the locket, the proof he had both sought and dreaded.
Hope and hatred, two serpents, coiled together in his chest, each feeding the other. The hope was a painful, sharp thing: she had survived the fall of Umbra. She had been here, on Earth. She had lived long enough to lose this locket. The hatred was a cold, familiar fire: Ra'Zul's touch was on this place. The locket hadn't just fallen; it had been torn away.He had found a thread. A single, frayed, agonising thread leading from a ruined theatre to a sister he had thought lost forever. But the thread was soaked in terror. It didn't lead to a rescue; it led to a battle.
The quiet hunt was over.
The war he had been preparing for since childhood had just become terrifyingly real.