The locket's discovery shattered the illusion of safety. No longer was this a grim pastime born of loss; it became a ticking clock. Cassandra was out there, and Ra'Zul's darkness had already brushed her fate. The life he'd so carefully constructed—school, sparring with Lina, the fragile mask of normalcy—suddenly seemed like mere props on a stage, flimsy and insubstantial. Behind this facade, the real force driving him surged to the surface, insistent and powerful.
His training became ruthless. The alleyway drills were no longer enough. He needed to test the ultimate expression of his power, the technique that was his birthright and his curse: the Eclipse of the Abyss. This was not merely an advanced spell but a total rewriting of reality within its domain. The Eclipse created a pocket dimension that erased light, sound, and physical law, leaving only emptiness and isolation. Within this space, he could exert absolute control, but each moment drained him, demanding an immense toll in concentration and life force. The danger lay in its insatiable nature; it consumed the caster's essence as fuel, risking their very existence. He had conceptualised it, felt its blueprint in his soul, but he had been afraid of its price. Now, fear was a luxury he could not afford.
He chose his crucible amid the bones of a bankrupt car plant on the city's edge—a cavernous expanse of rust and broken concrete, open to the indifferent sky. It was a graveyard of ambitions, a fitting stage for the trial he was about to unleash.
The first time, he stood alone at the heart of the ruined factory, cold wind threading through shattered glass. Kaiphus pressed down on him, heavy and anxious. He shut his eyes—not to summon the soft touch of his mother's magic, but to claim the iron command of a ruler. He reached into the emptiness inside him, the hollow left by everything he'd lost, and he pushed.The world did not bend. It screamed.
It was not a noise but the feeling of the world's foundation being torn loose. The dirty, dusk-stained sky folded in on itself, as if a giant's hand crushed it like paper. Light did not dim; it vanished, devoured by a single, dreadful point overhead. A new reality, a pocket world of his own creation, unfurled and settled over the factory like a shroud.
The sky was now a dome of absolute, starless black. At its zenith hung the Eclipse, but it was wrong. It was not the balanced, watchful eye of Aethelas. It was a wound. A black crescent that bled a corona of sickly, teal-tinged light, and at its centre, a perfect, hungry pupil of nothingness.
The Eye of the Abyss.
The sensation was overwhelming. The silence was a physical pressure, so absolute it felt like it would crush his eardrums. The air grew cold and thin, stripping away all smell, all taste, and all sensation of touch except for the crushing weight of the void. The only thing that existed was the Eclipse above and the terrifying gravitational pull emanating from its centre. He saw rusted machinery groan and shift, slowly sliding across the concrete toward the epicentre of the domain.
He held it for ten seconds.When he released it, the backlash was immediate and brutal. The factory snapped back into existence with a nauseating lurch. He stumbled, falling to his knees as a wave of vertigo washed over him. His hands were numb, his fingers tingling as if he'd gripped a live wire. His vision swam, the edges raw and blurred with phantom afterimages of the eclipse. A sharp, metallic taste filled his mouth.
That night, sleep was a distant country. His mind raced, thoughts thick and syrupy, unable to form coherent chains. He felt hollowed out, scraped clean. Kaiphus refused to leave him, wrapping itself around him so tightly it was almost difficult to breathe, a constant, worried pressure. It didn't loosen its grip for two full days, as if physically holding the pieces of him together.
This was the cost. It was no trivial theatrical trick. It was a transaction with a monstrous bank. It fed on his certainty and his will, and when those were spent, it fed on his very life force. Each use was a small death.He returned to the factory, again and again. Each time, he managed to hold the domain a few seconds longer. Each time, the price was the same: two nights of sleepless, jittery exhaustion, a mind fogged like a dirty lens, and a body that felt like a borrowed, ill-fitting suit.
And with each activation, he began to understand the true nature of the power. The domain was not just a technique; it was a comprehensive approach. It was a reflection of his soul. The overwhelming void mirrored his grief. The relentless pressure pulling inward echoed the heaviness of his past. The single, visible eclipse represented his sense of being completely alone.
And the Eye… the Eye at the centre was like a silent accusation, staring back, unblinking, demanding justification for its existence.
To use the Eclipse of the Abyss was to play god within its boundaries. But to do it well, to do it with control rather than brute force, required a clarity he did not possess. What was his purpose for those trapped inside? Annihilation? Punishment? Interrogation? The Eye demanded an answer. It forced him to stare into the heart of his own intent. Did he seek to protect, or only to destroy?
Mordecai had not yet learnt that discipline. His use of the domain was a blunt instrument, a scream of power that left him ravaged and his hypothetical victims—the rusted machinery, the crumbling walls—subjected to a force they could not comprehend or resist. He was a child swinging a god's hammer, and the recoil was breaking his own bones.
He would leave the factory each time, stumbling back to Samantha's apartment, returning to the tranquil realm of homework and domesticity, a spectre haunting his own existence. He would brew tea with shaking hands, the ritual now a futile effort to anchor a soul that had been briefly cast adrift in the void. He was beginning to grasp the price of the power he required to save his sister, and he dreaded that by the time he had mastered it, there might be nothing left of him capable of effecting that rescue. The journey towards Cassandra was littered with the very oblivion he sought to resist, and he trudged along it, each step laden with pain and expense.