For three nights, Ezra haunted the periphery of his own territory. He was a ghost in a graveyard of plenty, starving amidst a feast he now found tainted.
Every burst of laughter from a pub, every tearful argument on a doorstep, every quiet sigh of contentment in a park,all of it was now overlaid with the invisible, psychic scar-tissue of Hannah 's Stain.
He could feel it seeping into the city's emotional ecosystem, a low-grade poison.
He couldn't feed. The very act felt like a betrayal. To siphon the sweet overflow while a predator in their midst was draining the source felt… parasitic in a way it never had before.
He was a tick; she was a wolf. The comparison left a bitter taste, and his hunger grew, a hollow, aching thing that made his vision sharpen to a painful clarity and his thoughts turn inwards, gnawing on the past.
He found himself drawn to the library,his true haven, not just the sub-basement crypt he slept in, but the vast, silent stacks above.
Here, emotions were secondary, fossilized in ink and parchment. The dominant essences were the quiet intensity of study, the dusty satisfaction of a solved puzzle, the gentle awe of preserved time.
It was cleaner. Safer.
He was in the Restricted Archives, fingers trailing over the cracked leather spine of a 16th-century treatise on melancholy, when he felt it. Not a Stain, but an Echo.
A psychic impression so faint it was like a single, perfect note held in a bell long after it had been struck.
It was a flavor of Essence,not stolen, but freely, generously given. Awe, mixed with a profound, self-sacrificial love.
It was old, decades old at least, but it had been so potent, so pure, that it had soaked into the very stone of the building.
And it was a Variant's signature. But not like Hannah 's corroded blast, nor his own refined whisper.
This was… integrated. Whole. It spoke of a feeding not of lack, but of completion. It was utterly alien to him.
The Echo led him to a forgotten corner of the archive, a small, windowless room used to store cleaning supplies.
The feeling was strongest here. He pushed aside a mop bucket and saw it, carved into the stone floor beneath a threadbare rug: a symbol.
It was a closed circle, bisected by a sinuous line that both divided and connected the two halves. Within each hemisphere was a smaller, inverted teardrop. It was the Variant sigil for Symbiosis.
Ezra knelt, his cold fingers tracing the grooves. Who had made this? And why here?
The library had stood for two centuries. How many of his kind had walked these halls, hidden in plain sight?
He had always considered himself a solitary creature, but this sigil, this Echo, spoke of a different philosophy entirely.
A heresy opposite to Hannah 's, but a heresy nonetheless in the lone predator's creed.
His contemplation was shattered by a fresh wave of wrongness. A Stain, new and vicious, blossomed on the edge of his awareness. This one was different.
It wasn't the systematic unraveling of a single soul. It was a wide, shallow scourge,a brushfire of emotional nullity. Hannah was experimenting. Or growing impatient.
The Stain emanated from the City Center Park, a place usually thrumming with the diverse Essence of urban life.
Ezra was moving before he had fully formed the thought, the mystery of the sigil temporarily shelved.
He emerged onto the library steps, the cool night air hitting him like a physical blow.
The park was a scene of quiet chaos. Dozens of people sat on benches, stood by the fountain, leaned against trees. They weren't hurt.
They weren't unconscious. They were… paused. A young couple sat with untouched ice creams dripping over their hands. A street musician's hands rested silent on his guitar strings.
A businessman stared at his phone, the screen dark. The emotional landscape was a flat, gray plain. Not Hollowed, not completely,the core was still there, but muffled, smothered under a blanket of psychic ash.
She had fed on the entire park's ambient emotional energy in one rapacious gulp.
And there she was. Hannah stood in the center of the round fountain, the water shimmering around her ankles.
She was no longer trying to hide her nature. Her form seemed to shimmer, drinking in the moonlight and the surrounding emptiness. She saw him immediately, a slow, triumphant smile spreading across her face.
"Come to scold me again, ghost?" Her voice echoed in the silent park, a mockery of the life that should have filled it. "Or have you come to finally understand?"
"This is a slaughterhouse," Ezra said, his voice cutting through the unnatural quiet. "You're not feeding. You're burning the field."
"It grows back," she shrugged, stepping out of the fountain. The water where she had stood looked dull, lifeless. "Fear, joy, love… it's a renewable resource. And I am the harvest."
"You'll draw attention we cannot afford."
"You cannot afford," she corrected, moving closer. The smothered people unconsciously shrank back from her path, a field of wheat bowing before a toxic wind.
"I am beyond hiding. What can they do to me? Lock me in a cell? I'll feed on the warden's despair. Shoot me? You'd need to find my heart, and it's not where it used to be."
She was now only ten feet away. The sheer volume of raw, stolen Essence radiating from her was dizzying.
It was chaotic, a cacophony of half-digested emotions that swirled around her in a nauseating vortex. Grief twisted into glee. Love curdled into rage.
"Join me, Ezra ," she said, and for a moment, the corruption in her eyes softened, revealing the fledgling he'd once known. "The old ways are starvation.
This… this is power. We were never meant to be scavengers. We were meant to be gods."
He looked at her, at the hollowed tableau of the park, at the sigil of symbiosis burning in his memory. There were only paths of heresy now.
"We were meant to survive," he said quietly. "Not to reign. You've forgotten what we are."
"And you've forgotten what you could be," she sneered, the moment of vulnerability gone. "Stay in the shadows, then.
Feed on scraps. But stay out of my way. The next time you interrupt my feast, I won't just show you my power. I'll make you a part of it."
She turned, a blur of motion, and was gone, leaping to the rooftop of a nearby building and vanishing into the nightscape.
The psychic blanket over the park began to slowly lift. The couple looked at their melted ice cream in confusion. The musician strummed a discordant chord. The businessman swore, shaking his phone.
They were bewildered, slightly drained, but whole. It had been a demonstration. A display of control, and a warning.
Ezra stood alone amidst the returning murmur of life. The hunger in him was a roaring void now.
But the idea of feeding, of taking even a drop, made him sick. He was trapped between a monster and a mystery.
He looked back toward the library, toward the hidden sigil. The Echo of that ancient, generous Essence called to him, a whisper in the psychic storm Hannah was brewing.
He had no strength to fight her. Not yet. But perhaps, in the forgotten corners of his own kind's history, he could find a different way. Not to become a god, nor to remain a ghost.
But to become something else entirely.