What the hell. What the hell is that. What the HELL is that.
The curses were a silent, frantic drumbeat in Chloe's skull, a primitive counter-rhythm to the pounding of her heart against her ribs. The gunshot's echo still vibrated in the marrow of her bones, but it was the aftermath that had frozen her blood. The serpentine tendrils of living wire and cold light. The hiss of a bullet becoming smoke. The grin—that unholy, widening grin on Lucian Freeman's face, now illuminated from within by the cyan core burning in his chest.
Her own face felt stiff, a mask of salt-dried tears and slack-jawed terror. Her lips were numb. She tried to form a word, any word, but her tongue was a dead weight. A faint, airless stammer was all she could manage. "Wh… what… what is that?"
Beside her, Elijah hadn't flinched from his protective stance, but his posture had changed. It was no longer just defensive; it was analytical, a fighter assessing a completely new and terrifying vector of attack. His confusion was a quiet, potent thing in the set of his shoulders, in the way his eyes tracked the swaying, crackling tendrils.
Lucian's grin didn't waver. The cyan light made the amusement in his eyes look surgical, inhuman. "What's the matter, Miss Chloe?" he crooned, his voice a mockery of their shared, privileged past. He brought a hand up, making delicate, quoting gestures in the air. "You used to run that clever mouth of yours back in our Ever Thorne days. All that fire about Halvern legacy, about how privilege was a shield nothing could pierce." He let out a short, sharp bark of sarcastic laughter that didn't touch his eyes. "Look at you now." His gesture swept over her, taking in her trembling form, the discarded pistol at her feet. "Shaken. Disarmed. Ordinary."
Chloe could only stare, the shame of his words—true and weaponized—mixing with the terror, a toxic cocktail that left her paralyzed.
Elijah's hand found hers. His grip was firm, warm, an anchor in the screaming unreality. It was a simple touch, but it siphoned a fraction of the panic, gave her something solid to cling to beyond the nightmare in front of them.
Lucian's eyes dropped to their joined hands. The mockery on his face curdled into something colder, more genuinely offended. "Elijah. Elijah," he sighed, as if addressing a profoundly slow child. "You do realize what she is, don't you? A Halvern. That name alone makes her your enemy. Your natural enemy. Why are you trying to protect her?" He tilted his head, the tendrils on his back mimicking the movement with eerie grace. "This… this sentimentality. This isn't you."
Elijah's brow furrowed. The confusion on his face was stark and genuine. He didn't understand the reference, the history Lucian was alluding to. It was as if Lucian were speaking a language he'd once known but had long forgotten.
Lucian's dramatic gasp was audible. He took a half-step back, his free hand flying to his chest in a new pantomime of shock. "Ooohhh," he breathed, the sound dripping with dawning, theatrical horror. His eyes widened, scanning Elijah's face not for lies, but for absence. "Wait. Please. Don't tell me you don't know."
He said it aloud, his voice hushed with disbelief. Then he brought both hands to his head, fingers threading into his hair as he shook it slowly, a man witnessing a sublime tragedy. The crackling tendrils twitched in agitation.
"This," Lucian declared to the red-lit night, "has to be the single greatest joke of the past decade. The most elegant punchline delivered by fate itself." He dropped his hands and stared at Elijah, his expression shifting to one of pity so profound it was more insulting than any sneer. "The blade forged in the deepest fire, one of the eleven premier instruments of the Mystrium, a weapon with the monstrous potential to become a Sutran—a sovereign blade—reduced to… a loyal guard dog for the very bloodline he was honed to cut."
The words were proverbial, layered, meant to convey a terrible truth without spelling it out. They hung in the air like the lingering scent of ozone from his suit.
Elijah's perspective sharpened. The confusion was a fog, but beneath it, a deep, instinctive unease stirred. The Negasign's bloody pulse painted everything in strokes of madness. Lucian, standing there wrapped in impossible, living armor, having just vaporized a bullet. The creeping, cold feeling that he was standing in a play where everyone knew their lines except him. He wasn't scared of Lucian—a deep, intrinsic part of him dismissed the man as a dangerous annoyance. But he was profoundly bothered. Bothered by the gaps in his own memory, by the sense of a colossal, vital truth just beyond his mental grasp, like a familiar name on the tip of his tongue. It felt less like forgetting and more like being carved empty.
Lucian read the lingering blankness in Elijah's eyes. The pity on his face solidified. "You fell out with them," he murmured, almost to himself. "And they did something to you. That's why you're like this. A masterpiece, scrubbed clean of its purpose." He then seemed to remember Chloe, whose fearful gaze was fixed on the cyan core in his chest. His mood shifted again, back to performative charm.
"But where are my manners!" he exclaimed, spreading his arms, making the tendrils flare out in a mesmerizing, deadly halo. "You're curious about the getup." He tapped the glowing circuitry on his chest with a metallic ting. "This is a Ghast-weave Harness. A Special Operative's second skin. Not a suit—a symbiont." Pride seeped into his voice. "Only the most experienced, the most talented, those chosen and anointed by the architects of the World System itself, are permitted to bond with such technology. It is a mark of singular favor."
Chloe found her voice, the rage cutting through the fear like a shard of ice. It was all connected. Ever Thorne. The murders. The mask that had haunted the campus rumors. "You…" she stammered, the accusation giving her strength. "You were the one. The one murdering those people at Ever Thorne. You were masquerading as Az—"
"Azaqor is not me and was never me!" Lucian cut her off sharply, his theatricality vanishing into a flash of genuine, irritated venom. "Do not confuse a master with the myth it uses for a—"
Crunch.
The sound was small. Deliberate. The snap of a dry branch underfoot, coming from the deep shadows beyond the reach of the G-Wagon's dead headlights and the Negasign's glow.
Lucian's head whipped toward the sound, his tendrils snapping to attention like alerted vipers.
Elijah's senses, already screaming, zeroed in on the new threat. He turned, pushing Chloe slightly more behind him.
His heart, which had been beating a steady, controlled rhythm of combat readiness, gave a single, hard, dislodging thump against his sternum. A cold that had nothing to do with the night air flooded his veins.
Chloe followed his gaze. Her mind, already stretched to its breaking point, simply… surrendered. The world tilted, the lurid red light swam, and her knees gave out. She slumped against the fender of the G-Wagon, consciousness fleeing into a quiet, welcoming blackness before she even hit the ground.
It stood at the edge of the clearing where the trees grew thickest.
A figure, slender and genderless, with an unsettling, poised stillness. It wore no discernible clothing, only the stark contrast of its own form against the darkness. Its face was dominated by a sharp, orange mask—a hollow, void-like shape that terminated in a sharp chin and high cheekbones. Across where a mouth should be was carved a wide, evil crescent grin. There were no eyeholes. Only a profound, light-eating darkness within the sockets.
On its chest, glowing with a soft, inherent light of its own, was the symbol: a concentric, inverted spiral inside a closed triangle. At each point of the triangle, a single eye, rendered in perfect, dripping blood-red. Thin, watery trails of black ink or paint stained its limbs, as if it had emerged from a pool of liquid shadow. And across its back and shoulders, visible as it stood slightly angled, was the sigil: a six-fingered handprint, the fingers stretched to unnatural, grasping lengths.
It was not looking at Lucian. Its blank, orange-masked face was directed, with an intensity that was palpable even across the distance, at Elijah. It held for a split second, then the head inclined a bare fraction toward Chloe's collapsed form, before returning, irrevocably, to Elijah.
Lucian's initial shock twisted into impatience. "Hey!" he barked, the master of ceremonies affronted by an uninvited guest. "Buddy. Here! What the heck are you?"
The figure did not acknowledge him. It didn't move.
Lucian squinted, his eyes tracing the outline of the mask, the glowing sigil. His impatience morphed into a dawning, greedy recognition. A slow, incredulous smile started on his lips. He pointed a finger, one of his tendrils mirroring the gesture. "Wait… wait. Are you… are you Azaqor?"
Silence. The figure's complete and utter indifference to him was a physical force.
Lucian's face darkened. The smile vanished, replaced by ugly irritation. The cyan light in his core flared. "Hey! You! I asked you a question!" He strode forward, no longer cautious, emboldened by his Ghast-weave and his fury at being ignored. He reached out, aiming to seize the figure's slender shoulder.
His hand never made contact.
The movement was a blur—not of speed, but of wrongness. It seemed to skip frames. One moment Lucian's arm was extending, the next, the figure's own hand—slim, pale, and stained with those same black trails—was wrapped around Lucian's wrist. There was no sound of grip, no strain.
The figure lifted.
It was effortless. Lucian, harness and all, was plucked from the ground as if he were made of straw. His eyes bulged, his tendrils lashing out in a frantic, crackling whirl. The figure gave a slight, almost casual twist of its torso and threw him.
Lucian didn't tumble; he projectiled. He cut through the air, a cyan-streaked comet, and crashed into a thicket of young trees twenty yards away with a sound of shattering wood and a truncated cry. He did not get up.
The figure then turned fully. Its blank, grinning mask fixed once more on Elijah. It began to walk forward. No rush. No threat. A simple, inevitable approach.
Elijah's mind, usually a room of orderly strategies, was a whiteout of primal alarm. Every instinct screamed of a predator that made Lucian's harness look like a child's toy. The cryptic words, the missing memories, Chloe's collapse, the hellish red light, the silent, grinning thing advancing toward him—it all coalesced into one coherent, screaming thought in the center of his being.
Oh, fuck.