The Japanese mend broken things with gold.

  Not to hide the fracture, but to exalt it.

  To make the break itself sacred.

  Kintsugi, they call it.

  The art of resurrection. Of flaw turned divine.

  Cracks become veins. Wounds become design.

  It is not restoration—it is evolution through devastation.

  And so, I begin with a question:

  What if this story is already shattered?

  What if it was never whole to begin with?

  You are not stepping into a pristine myth.

  You are stepping into the aftermath of something terrible.

  Something beautiful

  Something that broke the Gods themselves.

  And I? I am the lacquer.

  Gold-laced, unreliable.

  Trying—failing—to bind the pieces with grace.

  This isn’t coherence.

  This is ritual scarification of narrative form.

  Each voice, a seam.

  Each lie I tell, gilded in powdered truth.

  Because that is all I have left—Fragments. Wounds. Golden seams.

  And…

  Look there, do look towards…hmmm…a bit downwards and from left to right.

  Left

  Left

  A bit more…almost...

  Amidst the harsh fluorescent glow of the tiled bathroom, Lucifer Zagreus leaned against the sink, her vibrant copper hair falling in rebellious strands around her face. The twin tails that framed her features seemed to burn like flames against the mint-green tiles. Her eyes—sharp, emerald, and knowing—caught the light with an almost supernatural intensity. She traced one finger thoughtfully along her jawline, the movement deliberate and controlled. The white tank top she wore contrasted with the dark, oversized jacket draped over her shoulders, from which strange paper talismans dangled, swaying gently with each breath she took.

  The bathroom stall curtains—a deep, blood red—created an unsettling backdrop, as if she stood at the threshold between two worlds. Everything about her posture suggested someone accustomed to danger, someone who had seen more than her years should allow.

  She looked toward her reflection, and a smile curled…playing at the corner of her lips.

  Lucifer Zagreus was only a costume.

  The woman in the mirror, a shroud.

  Beneath skin and her charm, something older stirred—a body not made, but remembered. Her reflection wavered, skin peeling into scarlet glyphs and sinew as her flesh dissolved into myth.

  Crimson scaled limbs bloomed outward, claws curling like scythes, her spine arching as the bones warped and stretched into draconic-like coils. From her back uncoiled something monstrous and divine: a serpentine beast with too many eyes and a maw filled with teeth that shimmered like obsidian.

  This was no metaphor. This was her.

  A God masquerading as a woman.

  Even the walls seemed to shrink, the mirror trembling as though it could not bear her unveiled reality. The air tasted of iron and thunder, her blood no longer blood, but scripture.

  Godhood.

  Her expression is still composed, but the physical transformation would be feral, uncanny, and devastatingly powerful. So powerful…

  The boundaries between flesh and whatever void she is–dissolve as her form continues its terrible metamorphosis.

  Lucifer's spine would elongate, vertebrae splitting and multiplying beneath her skin like pearls on an endless string.

  What had once been human shoulders now branched into symmetrical arrays of obsidian barbs, each tip weeping a viscous substance that evaporated before touching the ground.

  Her eyes—no longer just two, but dozens—blinked open across the canvas of her transformed body, irises kaleidoscoping between venomous green and molten gold.

  Simultaneously gazing in all directions,, perceiving dimensions that human consciousness could not grasp without fracturing. These were the eyes that had witnessed the birth of stars and the death of pantheons.

  Across her scaled flesh, there are ancient symbols writing and rewriting themselves—a living text that spoke of origins older than language itself.

  The bathroom's tiles cracked beneath the weight of her presence, reality itself straining against the pressure of divinity compressed into material form.

  The paper talismans that had hung from her jacket now orbited her body like satellites, igniting into flames that burned without consuming—each one a binding seal, a fragile anchor tethering the immensity of her true form to this fleeting moment in time and space.

  Bounding Lucifer Zagreus, this woman with a name likened to the devil, a fallen angel that was never understood—only worshipped, feared, or rewritten by those too small to hold truth.

  She shared a name with it.

  No lineage.

  No inheritance.

  No apology.

  Names.

  Labels.

  Lies.

  Falsehoods.

  Lucifer raised a hand—her human hand...because she was human, just a bit adjacent from not being one. Then she smacked her cheeks, leaving them bright red.

  'Okay!' she exclaimed, the word bursting out with the wild ambition of a preppy cheerleader's battle cry.

  This was godhood unbound—not the sanitized divinity of temples and prayer books, but the raw, primordial force that existed before worship gave it name and form. Not a being of myth, but myth itself—breathing, hunting…

  ???

  Laughter rang like wind chimes in a sunlit void.

  Eluceryn Mujica-Pendragon tilted her head back and let the joy spill from her throat. It wasn't performative, not the kind of laugh you learn to give for strangers or cameras. It was pure. The kind of laugh that sounded like she forgot, what reality they lived in.

  She was radiant. Not in the fragile, fleeting way that light catches glass—but in the way stars burn for thousands of years and still manage to surprise you when you look up. Her fingers brushed the chains of the swing as she glided back and forth, her form silhouetted against a sky too perfect to be real. And it wasn't.

  It was a dream. His dream.Arcelius Zahryn knew it. He always knew.

  This wasn’t a memory. This was possibility—one of the rare, golden futures not stained in blood or regret. A soft thread in the tapestry of fate. One he would never quite reach but always revisit when the weight got too heavy.

  Eluceryn leaned toward him, the swing creaking beneath her. Her voice came soft, conspiratorial.

  “It’s time to wake up.”

  He didn’t respond at first. The grass swayed beneath their feet. A breeze tugged gently at her silver-threaded hair. He stared—not at the scenery, but at her.

  She had freckles across her nose, a splash of them like stardust. Her hair caught the light in a way that made even time hesitate. And those eyes—clever, unreadable, warm and cruel all at once.

  “I don’t want to go,” Arcelius murmured, and the words hung in the space between them like a confession. His voice cracked, barely audible above the rustle of the leaves.

  Eluceryn smiled—so small, so soft it might’ve been tragic. “Just remember…” she began.

  But the rest never came.

  Her lips moved, forming the shape of the word, that word—but time had already begun to unravel. He tried to hold onto it, to hold onto her. To the way she painted with Pointillism—those luminous constellations she wove into soul-objects. Each dot; a spell. Each shimmer a secret. She could craft galaxies across the surface of meaning with nothing but breath and will.

  He remembered the way her fingertips left trails of light in the air. The way her thoughts formed colors. How her power wasn’t just seen—it was felt, like warm rain, or revelation.

  But the dream was slipping.

  She blurred before his eyes—luminous, lethal. Even as her figure fractured into points of light, his mind clung to the curve of her silhouette, the outline of a smile that knew too much. Memory didn’t just soften her—it intensified her. And in that split-second between timelines, between what was and what could be, he desired her.

  Not with the clarity of a man, but with the ache of someone who would become one. A longing half-formed, as much about power as it was about beauty.

  El—his potential future wife. The Queen of Crown Emporium Infernum. Her name alone tasted like rebellion. Her presence was legend. Charisma weaponized, intelligence sharpened into teeth. She was iconic, a protagonist in her own brutal epic. And no, she was not good. Violence wasn't her vice—it was her vocabulary. Chaos rolled off her tongue like poetry, and she wore mayhem like a second skin.

  Even now, half-remembered, she overwhelmed the concept of consent. Not through force—but allure. The gravity of her was unnatural. Everyone fell toward her.

  He remembered—or imagined—how she laughed when cities burned, how her kiss might feel like signing a contract in blood. Her beauty was just another spell, another blade. Everything she did, every breath she took, was calculated for effect.

  And yet, he adored her.

  Even knowing what she might become. Even sensing she was as likely to ruin him as love him.

  Her silhouette broke into a flurry of particulate light, not dissimilar to her own creations. She became the art she conjured. She dissolved, dot by dot, until only the echo of her remained.

  “I–”

  Her voice pierced the dissolve.

  “I love you.”

  The final syllable barely formed before the world ruptured.

  SMACK.

  Reality crashed back in, brutal and sharp. Arcelius staggered—reeling not from the blow, but from the separation. The swing. Her freckles. The way the wind had once bent for her. Gone.

  Arcelius remembered everything and nothing all at once.

  The future whispered to him as vividly as any childhood memory, and his past played out like prophecy already written.

  He could recall the laughter of a lover not yet met, mourn a war that hadn't yet begun. He knew how every conversation could end—ten, twenty, a thousand ways. But when he searched for what had happened—what truly was his—he found nothing but gaps.

  Placeholders.

  His mind wasn’t broken. It was almost–empty. Not because he lacked content, but because there was too much of it—too many timelines, too many truths.

  No experience.

  He was still a child. He knew this. Rationally, he understood the limitations of his biology, the inconsistencies of his mind. But emotionally? Existentially? He felt older than the stars.

  That was the paradox of his birthright.

  To know all things… and yet be untouched by any of them.

  In its place: blood, dust, and the ragged breath of dying men laid.

  The training hall reeked of exertion and ozone. Bodies lay crumpled around him—not corpses, but sparring partners. Warriors. Challengers. Debts paid in bruises. He had fought them all, half-asleep in memory. Not out of malice, but because his body had learned to move without him. Even now, his knuckles steamed with kinetic heat, aching from the impact of things he hadn't meant to do.

  He barely registered the next opponent until a fist collided with his cheek—jarring his vision, splintering his thoughts.

  Pain brought him back.

  Arcelius blinked. Then moved.

  A single sweep, a pivot, a counter-blow—and the man dropped like punctuation.It was over in a breath.

  “Arcelius.”

  The voice rang through the hall, cool and precise.

  “In your distractions, there’s no difference between remembering ‘a past’ and imagining ‘a future’.”

  He turned toward it, still panting.

  There she stood—Byleth Majik Zahryn, his mother.

  Steel and elegance draped in ceremonial ash-gray silk. Her eyes were harder than mirrors. Her presence: unblinking. She loved him with the same force that broke planets.

  “What you desire,” she said, her tone glacial, “will not spare you from immolation.”

  The word immolation cracked the space like thunder. It wasn’t just fire she spoke of. It was sacrifice. Suffering. Destiny.

  “These crumbs of comfort you’re fond of,” Byleth added, glancing toward the bloodied floor, “they soften you.”

  He said nothing at first. His lip bled. His thoughts trembled, twisted through timelines and grief.

  Finally, “Because their romanticism is all I have…”

  It escaped like a prayer.

  For a moment, she didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. Her silence was a sermon. One he dared not interrupt. He didn’t have to.

  “Oh… Majik.”

  Another voice bemused. Then a chuckle—unexpected; brittle…

  Warm.

  Merlin Pendragon.

  She had been watching from above—no—not in the rafters, but on a screen. The projection was old tech, running off a disk. Grainy footage displayed every beat, every blow. The illusion of privacy: shattered in the now.

  The recording paused on Arcelius’ face—post-impact, blood-streaked, expression unreadable.

  He looked like a myth in mid-collapse.

  Merlin Pendragon—once warlock, now archivist—sighed.

  She looked not at the screen, but through it.

  There was no such thing as a moment anymore. Not for Arcelius.

  Only infinite loops of almosts and never reallys.

  Each timeline wore a different mask. But all led to the same ruin.

  Like a fixed shadow cast by a dying star, one truth remained immutable:

  Everybody he loved died.

  Eluceryn smiled a thousand times.

  Siobhan smiled a hundred-thousand more.

  They all died. Millions of deaths, across millions of premonitions.

  Some burned in wars.

  Some were betrayed in beds.

  Some withered slow, grotesque deaths across stretched eternities.

  All roads led to elegy.

  All futures, to funerals.

  All love stories, to graves.

  And the boy who was Arcelius Zahryn, once innocent, once soft,

  Did not fear death any longer.

  Because death was his inheritance. Misery, his first language.

  ???

  Elsewhere in the present day.

  The light over the station flickered, just once—like a blink from the sky itself.

  Then came the thunder.

  Not the distant rumble of a far-off storm, but something immediate, intimate, and wrong in its silence. The air rippled, ozone crackling through the stillness like whispered promises. A flash—brighter than the sun for a heartbeat—and she was there.

  Dakini Kaldera L'Esilrias stood barefoot on the concrete, steam rising from the cracks beneath her heels. The residual heat of her arrival warped the light around her, not like fire, but something colder, purer. Her coat fluttered slightly, red and loose over a charcoal bodysuit that clung like second skin. Electrical sigils shimmered faintly at the cuffs, pulsing with residual current. She did not descend. She did not arrive.

  She was already here.

  Her pale copper skin shimmered faintly under the halogen buzz, and her eyes—storm grey rimmed with gold—swept the station like a lighthouse scanning for shipwrecks. When they found Aurelia, their intensity softened, but only slightly.

  “Hey,” she said simply, like it was the most natural thing in the world. As if lightning made appointments.

  Aurelia stood a few feet away, frozen. Her sleeve was tugged down too low, too tight. The bruises weren’t visible, not directly—but Dakini didn’t need to see them.

  “Aurelia, right?”

  Her voice held that calm that only came from pain metabolized into purpose. No judgment. No pity. Just the unbearable weight of someone who sees you and stays.

  “I—I didn’t think you’d actually come,” Aurelia stammered, arms folding tighter around herself.

  Dakini’s head tilted slightly, as if confused by the suggestion. “I help,” she said. “Or at least, I try to.”

  “You didn’t have to. The email was... I was just venting. I didn’t mean—”

  “Only because,” Dakini interrupted gently, “something explainable doesn’t make what’s happened excusable.”

  The words didn’t slap. They cradled. Firm, but tender. Like cradling a scared little pup.

  There was a pause, the air between them heavy but breathable.

  “Y’know,” Dakini continued, “kindness can be a cruel magnet. Especially for narcissists.”

  Aurelia blinked. The truth of it stung worse than the bruises.

  “Prioritize yourself,” Dakini said, “and they’ll call you selfish. Help build their life, and they’ll use the scaffolding to hang you with.”

  Silence. Then—Aurelia finally whispered…

  “What are you asking?” Aurelia whispered.

  “Nothing I wouldn’t ask of myself. Not because you’re you. But because…”

  Dakini crouched slightly so their eyes met at level, her voice a low murmur against the noise of passing trains.

  “You already know what giving up feels like. Why not try again…”

  Her words hung there—unfinished, pregnant with potential.

  Then, as if delivering the final line of a poem written directly into fate, she stood and said, “Fail better.”

  Aurelia’s mouth parted, but no words came. Her eyes glistened.

  “If you’re okay with it,” Dakini added, her tone lightening just enough to suggest something like hope, “I’ll walk with you to the police station.”

  She didn’t say another word. She just smiled—a small, firm thing—and began walking beside Aurelia. Not ahead. Not behind. With her.

  They disappeared into the soft dusk, the air buzzing faintly around Dakini like it always did before a storm. She didn’t even seem to notice.

  Or maybe she did and simply welcomed it.

  They say she commands the storm, but that’s not entirely true. Dakini Kaldera L'Esilrias is not just a conductor of electricity—she is its consequence. An electromancer in the truest sense, her power is not confined to bolts of lightning or arcs of crackling energy. She manipulates the electromagnetic field itself—the invisible lattice that cradles every atom in existence.

  Magnetic resonance, neural pulses, the very architecture of light and radiation—she can bend these phenomena with the ease of breathing. Theoretically, she doesn’t just affect electricity; she is what electricity dreams of being when it grows up.

  And yet, despite all that, she walked. She walked to meet a woman whose cries weren’t broadcast across news networks. She was supposed to be in Treuna—where the scars of civil war were still fresh, and fires burned beneath treaties. But instead, she was here.

  That’s what makes her dangerous. The choice to care.

  Dakini was mythic, yes. But not distant. Not untouchable. She didn’t float above cities or demand adoration. She sat beside you, told hard truths, held your hand if you needed it. That paradox—strength with intimacy, power with presence—was what turned her into legend. A living contradiction, wrapped in thunder and grace.

  And while lightning moved at the speed of light, Dakini didn’t travel. She arrived. Where she needed to be.

  When someone needed her. And then, just like that—

  We’re elsewhere.

  ???

  In the bathroom, the mirror still trembled.

  And then, like a thought halfway through being spoken—Lucifer was gone.

  One blink, and the space she’d occupied was empty. A hush, a charge in the air, then silence.

  Where she reappeared—Treuna.

  The wreckage smoldered like the skeleton of a dying God. Steel rails twisted into question marks. Stone sleepers shattered into jagged teeth. The train itself had folded in on itself like paper—eviscerated by something that hadn’t been mechanical. Not entirely.

  Lucifer Santana Zagreus knelt in the dirt, running a gloved hand through ash and blood. Her expression was unreadable, but her voice still carried its usual distant lilt.

  Lieutenant Dempsey stood nearby, arms crossed, jaw set.

  “They pulled one another apart,” he said, gesturing to the scattered remains. “That don’t tie knots in your stomach?”

  Lucifer shrugged.

  Saminna-Cendrine Daresiel Chorus—the sophist from the Chorus House—scoffed, checking her readouts. “Blah.”

  “Meh,” Lucifer echoed.

  Dempsey narrowed his eyes. “You get used to it?”

  “To the death?” she said, glancing up at him. “Or the gruesomeness?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Lucifer stood, dusting off her coat. “Death isn't a thing that happens one day. It's constantly happening. It’s not final—it’s transitional. Transformative, even. And sometimes pain…” she exhaled slowly, “pain sustains us. Provides comfort. Keeps us moving.”

  Dempsey’s expression tightened. “That’s morbid.”

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “But it’s honest.”

  She looked back to the crash site. The twisted bodies. The bone structures that didn’t line up with anything in known anatomy.

  “Unfortunately,” she said, “this scene is as useful as a white crayon on a blank canvas.”

  “People are dead, Ms. Zagreus,” Dempsey snapped.

  Lucifer didn’t flinch. But Saminna rolled her eyes.

  “And monkeys with God-like power,” she muttered, “are still monkeys.”

  Lucifer sighed. “This… this is a mess,” she said softly. “I know you want answers. You deserve them.”

  She gestured at the residual traces in the air—sigils unraveling, traces of ether disturbed.

  “But the arcane disciplines used here?” she continued. “They’re not unique. This isn’t novel magical expression being used. It’s known phenomena being reiterated.”

  She touched one of the charred runes on the train, watching it crumble to dust.

  “It’s empirical. Corporeal even.” implying someone is using known systems in an unknown way. Which is worse because it meant someone had weaponized understanding itself.

  Lieutenant Dempsey crouched low, his eyes scanning the wreckage. He seemed to steady himself before speaking again, as if needing to gather his thoughts before voicing something that had been clawing at him.

  “Meaning it’s something we can understand and maybe even physically counteract?” His voice carried a thread of hope, though it was strained.

  “Conceivably,” she answered with the kind of disinterest that could freeze the air around her.

  Dempsey looked at her, brow furrowed, as if the word were too sharp to grasp all at once. Lucifer stood up, the weight of her presence as commanding as the devastation that surrounded them. Her gaze swept over the wreckage, her mind already working ahead, calculating the next move. She was always ahead. Always in motion.

  When Saminna-Cendrine Daresiel Chorus—Cinder, as Lucifer knew her—stepped forward, her voice a sharp contrast to the heavy atmosphere.

  “Siiiide bar?” she cooed, drawing out the word like a skipping record at half-speed, her voice looping with mock innocence and a manic undertow. Her head tilted at an angle too curious to be casual. “Lemme borrow your brain a sec!”

  Like it was a game. But it never was.

  “I won’t bite. Promise!”

  Spoiler: she would.

  “Hard.” she chuckled... fate's cruel gamble already in motion.

  Cinder’s grin slashed sideways across her face, not quite friendly, not quite sane. The kind of expression that didn’t ask for permission so much as dare you to decline. There was a glint in her eye—a shine too steady to be safe. The twitching in her fingers said the rest, flicking like broken Morse code as if timelines were loading beneath her skin.

  She was a sophic tempest in a hand-me-down body, radiating the kind of calm that came from seeing ten thousand endings and laughing at eight thousand of them. The others? She kept those close.

  Lucifer didn't flinch. Didn't blink. Just nodded once and followed. Because when Cinder said "sidebar," it never meant beside.

  It meant beneath.

  Within.

  Before it even happens. Let me spoil you.

  But what?

  The two of them drifted away from Dempsey, the scent of smoldering wreckage hanging in the air as they walked. The conversation between them would be one that only Cinder would truly be able to follow, as her mind operated like a machine of possibility, slicing through timelines and probabilities.

  Saminna-Cendrine Daresiel Chorus didn’t speak aloud.

  She didn’t need to. *cough* Well she did…but…uhhh…

  Her body moved like a question mark in a cyclone—half dance, half diagnostic. Fingers twitching. One hand brushing through soot like it was powdered thought. Her boots scuffed in slow, looping arcs as if she were stepping around something only she could see.

  Lucifer watched without interrupting. As always.

  Listened.

  But it would be gibberish to you.

  To the untrained eye, Cinder was eccentric. Erratic. But for those who understood her—those who had seen what her mind could do—her strangeness was not chaos. It was compression. Thousands of possibilities folding in on themselves, competing for expression.

  She spoke but the words mattered not. Because her thoughts were too dense for conversation.

  But formally interpolated, the gist would be something like this:

  The Wolf King—Raimondo Brutas Castellanos-Maul—is not stupid. Sadistic, yes. Brutish, certainly. But never stupid. His genius lies not in subtlety, but in clarity. He understands people—desperation most of all. Understands what it can do to a man. Or a nation. Or a myth.

  So he cultivates it.

  Hoards it.

  Manufactures it when necessary.

  Because desperation makes excellent kindling. And Raimondo builds his fire from the ashes of hope.

  See, when people are afraid, they turn inward. When they’re desperate, they look outward. They look for Gods, heroes, saviors—anyone who might reach down and pluck them from the fire.

  Anyone who seems to be listening.

  Enter Dakini, the Electromancer. (You know the one)

  Then Empyrean, where the extraordinary gather not by choice, but by gravity—pulled together by the weight of what they are.

  She doesn't just save people—she reminds them they're worth saving. And if people start to believe that? They get harder to manipulate. Harder to corral. The leash around their necks frays a little more each time someone like her shows up and gives a damn.

  That’s bad for business.

  That’s bad for Raimondo.

  So what does he do?

  He designs a problem tailored to her. Something urgent, visceral, and just strange enough to require her unique touch. A train full of bodies. Arcane phenomena with just enough sophistication to mimic mystery. Ritualistic—but explainable. Brutal—but solvable.

  He creates a spectacle too loud for her to ignore.

  Not because he wants her to fail. Because he wants her and them busy.

  While she investigates a problem he already understands, he reclaims the narrative. Reasserts his power. Undercuts her myth by making her reactive instead of sovereign.

  Making her a responder, not a liberator.

  Which ties her hands with good intentions and drops her into a pit of optics, theater, and controlled chaos.

  Because here’s the hard truth:

  Sometimes you don’t need to stop your enemies. You just need them in the wrong place long enough for your story to become the only one people hear.

  And if, in the process, a few dozen civilians die? If a train derails and a nation panics?

  Well…

  Then it was a policy, not a catastrophe. What’s a few bodies, if it buys you belief?

  If the tragedy unites the people in the direction you want them to move—was it even a tragedy?

  Cinder knew this. Knew all of it. Not just because of her foresight. Not just because Arcelius had echoed the same fears beforehand that Dakini ignored.

  She knew it because she'd run the math on human behavior, watched history writhe on the backs of lesser tyrants, and seen too many patterns in too many lifetimes.

  The Wolf King wasn’t playing to win.

  He was playing to stay in control.

  And the longer heroes danced to his tune, the longer the people mistook the beat for destiny. That is how Raimondo, the Wolf King, thinks—a former boxer turned semi-sadistic gang leader with incredible strength, now becomith a politician.

  A king.

  A man who learned early that bruises heal, but belief lingers.

  Lucifer Santana Zagreus didn’t say anything at first. Her face didn’t move, not really. Just a small shift in the jaw. A muscle tightening like a half-remembered insult.

  She’d heard Cinder’s unspeakable monologue. Not in words, not exactly—but in the rhythm of her movement, the atmospheric weight of her presence. She could feel the pattern forming, even as Cinder vibrated at a frequency only clairvoyants and madwomen understood.

  Lucifer exhaled smoke she hadn’t inhaled.

  “Of course that’s how he thinks,” she muttered, voice dry as sun-bleached bone. “Why start a war when you can outsource the confusion?”

  She dragged her boot through the dirt, watching the line it left. It didn’t solve anything, but it felt good to leave a mark on something today.

  “This doesn’t mean we don’t investigate—” she added, glancing sideways at the mess—burnt rail ties, charred bones, scorched sigils.

  And Cinder was already drifting away.

  Literally.

  She didn’t walk so much as skid across the dirt, her boots carving frictionless arcs like skipping a stone. With a flourish that suggested either a pirouette or the wind-up to a cartoon explosion, she’s—laughing, maybe. Snickering?

  Or growling.

  Hard to tell.

  The sound bent sideways, like her.

  Her breath fogged in the cold air.

  But her lips were chapped from heat.

  That was Cinder.

  She crouched suddenly, knees popping, and plucked a bit of copper wire from the debris—twisted it around her finger until the skin beneath turned pink. She liked how things felt right before they snapped. Said it helped her think.

  Lucifer watched, her expression hard to read.

  Maybe because there was nothing new here to discover?

  No, this was just what Cinder was—a kaleidoscope of instability, prophecy.

  And then, just as suddenly, Cinder stood.

  One blink, and she was walking away—shoulders hunched like a question, hands already reaching for something fun, something loud, something combustible. Chaos to stir. That was her way.

  “Don’t go far,” Lucifer muttered.

  Funhouse medicine for a collapsing reality.

  But Cinder was already halfway down the track, bootprints trailing soot, muttering back at her in some imagined conversation ahead possibly.

  Lucifer stayed behind a moment longer.

  Her hands on her hips, and an expression like cracked glass held together by posture alone. “She’s not wrong,” she said to no one. “Just inconveniently right.”

  And then—professional again—she turned back to the wreckage. Towards Dempsey. The facts still needed assembling. The dead still needed answers.

  And someone, somewhere, was counting on them to miss the point entirely.

  Dempsey’s voice broke through her thoughts, dragging her back to the present: "Everything okay?"

  Lucifer slumped slightly, the sharp edge of her casual demeanor slipping. She waved a hand lazily, a gesture meant to imply everything was fine—even though she knew it wasn’t.

  "Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Sure. Sure, sure, sure." The words tumbled out in a half-formed echo, like she was trying to convince herself more than anyone else. Maybe she was. Maybe her mind was already elsewhere, lost in calculations and pathways only she could see.

  Lieutenant Dempsey took a hesitant step closer, looking for a polite way to ask what they both already knew. He scratched the back of his neck, unsure. “Sorry, I’m thinking of... What’s the polite way to say this? Uhhh…”

  Lucifer Santana Zagreus cut him off smoothly, her tone sharp but uninterested. “You needn’t.”

  Her words fell effortlessly from her lips, as if speaking in riddles was a natural habit for someone who had long stopped caring about such things. The magi spoke in a way that was alien, their language both an art and a weapon—deliberate, dissonant, like they were playing a game with an audience that couldn’t understand the rules.

  Clarity, Lucifer thought, was a dying art. The way she moved in the world had long transcended any need for pleasantries. "Clarity is a dying art," she said aloud, her voice a soft rasp. "Just spit it out before your tongue ties itself in a knot."

  Dempsey blinked, confused for a beat, then deadpanned, “You just did it.”

  Lucifer let out a frustrated groan, gripping the edge of her jacket like she was trying to physically keep herself from unraveling. “Ugh—dammit.”

  She gestured vaguely, as if trying to scoop the words back into her mouth. “Sorry. My vernacular slipped. That was–esoteric. Elitist. Unreachable.”

  The whole superior magus thing—it disgusted her.

  Most mages didn’t talk like people. They talked like they were trying not to be understood. Like reality was a secret club, and they were the only ones with the password. Lucifer didn’t want to be that. But sometimes it crept in—centuries of arcane vocabulary and bad habits, baked into the bones and DNA.

  Dempsey gave a half-hearted chuckle, sensing the weariness beneath the edge of her words. “You were flying on autopilot. High stress. I get it. Brutas wants results."

  Lucifer didn’t respond right away. She was already staring at the horizon again, where the air still rippled with the ghost of the disaster. "Brutas will get what he gets," she muttered. "Even if it's not what he wants."

  Dempsey’s voice was quieter now, thoughtful, as if he was trying to make sense of what was happening around them. “Admittedly... we cannot understand or rationalize an enemy that defies reason.”

  Lucifer turned toward him, her gaze sharp. “How so?” Her voice was a breath of curiosity beneath the professional air.

  Dempsey rubbed the back of his neck, visibly uncomfortable. "I've read Wikipedia pages, listened to interviews, podcasts…" He trailed off, as if the absurdity of his sources made him question himself.

  Lucifer raised an eyebrow, her lips curling into something like a knowing smile. “Magic—or the arcane arts—is all about the small details,” she said. "It’s never the grand gestures you think. It’s always something you missed while you were busy thinking you had all the answers."

  Dempsey’s expression flickered with confusion. But it wasn’t confusion for long. Slowly, it turned into something else—recognition, maybe even a touch of awe. He may have been a “non-sorcerer,” but at this moment, the gulf between them seemed larger than ever.

  The way magi spoke was... different. To humans, their words could seem elitist, detached, or cold. It was as if the magi had long since realized the limitations of humanity, that humans were nothing but monkeys scrambling in the dirt of a reality they didn’t understand.

  It was an uncomfortable truth, one Lucifer wore like a second skin. The weight of it clung to her, unshakable, and it bled into everything she did. Her occupation—Arcane Astrophysicist Researcher—wasn't exactly the sort of thing one could easily explain at a dinner party.

  Senior Theoretical Mage in Astromagic at Icon Astris, a position under the massive, ever-grasping hand of The Icon Corporation. It was the perfect paradox.

  A mage who studied science, blending it with magic—alchemy for the modern age.

  An impossibility, really, since the very foundation of magic was built on resisting the confines of science. Which could be debated...

  Nevertheless, it was taboo in ways that tickled Lucifer’s dark humor. Oh, how utterly funny she thought, her power and her intellect both a contradiction in a reality that wasn’t quite ready for her.

  And yet, here she was: a laughing sorceress.

  The Laughing Sorceress.

  Dempsey’s voice brought her back, grounding her in the present. "Satellite and military drone photos show a geography completely different from what we’re standing on."

  Lucifer paused for a beat, taking in the information, a flicker of intrigue in her eyes. “You’re connected?”

  “Ex-Treuna Military,” Dempsey answered without hesitation, a hint of pride in his voice. “I have... friends. Been somewhat close to the monarchy.”

  "Hh." Lucifer let the sound escape her lips, a noise somewhere between recognition and indifference. It was good work, but it wasn’t much. Not enough for her to get excited. Still, her voice softened when she spoke again. “Good work.”

  Dempsey blinked at her response, his brow furrowing. “That’s it?”

  Lucifer grinned, the edges of her mouth twitching into something almost sinister. “Yeah.”

  Her eyes flicked back toward the wreckage, her thoughts pulling away from Dempsey’s comment. “Everyone around me is a rolling snowball of Freudianism,” she said with a casual, almost playful tone. “It’s... exhausting.”

  She wasn’t entirely sure why she was so amused by it, but there was something inherently funny in how people’s instincts were so predictable, so entangled with their own insecurities.

  And she?

  She was alone in all of it—a lone figure in a reality that couldn’t quite keep up. But that, to Lucifer, was a victory.

  "Being alone is a win for me," she murmured more to herself than to Dempsey, her voice barely above a whisper.

  The weight of her words hung in the air, the exhaustion of living with such knowledge pulsing beneath the surface.

  ???

  Cinder wandered into the woods, leaving Lucifer behind to play detective among twisted metal and mysteries. That was fine. That was her game. Cinder, by contrast, preferred trees to train wrecks, and paradoxes over post-mortems.

  While Lucifer stared at corpses and theories, Cinder twiddled her thumbs—figuratively and literally—whistling a tune that hadn’t been invented yet and wouldn’t make sense if it was.

  She hopped a root like it was a jump rope, twirled a stick in one hand, and stared at a tree trunk until it blinked.

  Because she found purpose in the purposeless.

  Companionship in loneliness.

  That was her mantra…

  Or maybe someone else’s. I couldn’t remember if she’d stolen it from a book, a dream, a story, or the hallucination of a friend who never existed.

  Cinder, the self-professed sophist and designated “Quintarii Numbuh 101,” was a living contradiction with a precognitive mind that wouldn’t shut up.

  She saw futures the way most people saw weather forecasts—predictive, chaotic, and wrong more often than they’d admit. And still, they defined her.

  Or maybe she defined them.

  She grinned at the thought.

  One. Zero. One.

  A perfect binary riddle.

  One: a signal, a self, a spark.

  Zero: void, absence, silence.

  And then One again—rebirth, emergence, something new. A self-fulfilling paradox.

  Her footsteps crunched leaves that hadn’t been there a second ago.

  Maybe they’d always been there.

  Maybe she’d invented them with the sound.

  She liked to think she did.

  Which reminded her of the Shadow Garden and her role within it.

  They had many names:

  ACME Corporation.Firmament Unlimited.Empyrean.The Quintessence.

  Names so obvious they became invisible to the public.

  A secret organization of post-human operators and anti-prophets, governed not by laws or morality but by what reality could be...if bent hard enough.

  There are one hundred Quintarii, each embodying a different idea, a function, a philosophy.

  And Cinder? She’s the sophist.

  Just wrong in all the right ways.

  Like how Lucifer Zagreus is Quintarii numbuh 666—unironically.

  And Numbuh Five is five and an em dash and an irrational number away from being... well, infinitum.

  But Five—also known as the Archangel—is another story.

  And another character.

  Not currently present.

  Cinder spun on her heel. Her precognition gave her too many versions of herself to love all of them. It’s fortunate she lost access to those timelines and can no longer know what direction her bedlam will take her.

  From what she remembers—thanks to hyperthymesia—some were monsters.

  Some were saints. Some burned-out stars in the vastness of space, quite literally, wearing mascara and grinning through the wreckage.

  But she is the only Quintarii. A unique identifying characteristic.

  And she liked being alone. Of course she did. That’s what everyone told themselves when they got too weird to keep around. But there was a strange truth to it.

  Solitude meant one voice.

  One echo.

  One reality.

  Loneliness is power to Saminna.

  True strength comes not from what exists, but from what’s missing—emptiness creates space to shape, manipulate, and define. Her solitude, unpredictability, and disconnection from linearity aren’t weaknesses—they’re where her power lives. Absence isn’t the lack of thereof—it’s potential.

  Numbuh 48, Cutter would have something witty to say about that, surely.

  Cinder grinned again.

  At nothing.

  That grin—that too-wide, gasglow-esque curve—could split sanity in half. A grin that said, “If I were you, I’d hate me too,” and meant it. With love, of course.

  That’s what made her dangerous.

  Cinder didn’t walk through the woods so much as unthread them. Her presence was a needle through narrative, unstitching cause from effect, reality from assumption. Branches bent out of her way before she thought to duck. A breeze kicked up only when she remembered it should.

  This was what it meant to be Quintarii 101: not to exist within a system, but to be its margin note—annotated chaos scrawled into the canon by a drunken god with a leaky pen.

  Most of the other Quintarii had rules. A design. A reason. Not her.

  Cinder was the answer to a question forgotten by the universe, and her role in Shadow Garden was like her laughter—wild, involuntary, and twice as sharp when you tried to suppress it.

  She picked up a stick and began to spin it between her fingers like it was a wand. Or a metronome. Or maybe the spine of some small animal.

  She couldn’t remember what it was, but she knew it had always been hers.

  And then—

  Somewhere behind her—

  Eluceryn’s name echoed in her mind like the twang of a sharpened string.

  Her sister and co-conspirator in violence and fun.

  The bloody-hearted bride of chaos.

  One of Arcelius Zahryn’s wives. Yes, wives—plural. There are four.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  She remembered their laughter—like children playing with knives. She remembered a man screaming in anguish. The twitch of his hand after El severed it cleanly. She remembered laughing so hard her ribs ached.

  “Did you hear that?” El had said, mimicking his cry.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhhhhhhh,” Cinder had repeated, breathless with joy.

  “Da fuck was that!?”

  Their laughter intensified.

  It wasn’t cruelty for cruelty’s sake.

  …

  …

  …

  …

  …

  It was.

  But to be fair—he (or it) had tried to kill them.

  But…

  Wait…

  Why?

  Oh gods. I sigh, vastly annoyed. If I could roll my eyes, I would.

  Pause.

  She’s doing it again.

  Empathic overload—Cinder’s favorite flavor of meltdown. The brain static that happens when her precognition starts chewing the furniture, digging up every unprocessed emotion and future ghost until the walls between now and maybe collapse into a very loud, very stupid now-maybe.

  Voices, echoes, avatars, regret—all crowding the stage like it's open mic night in her hippocampus.

  Enter Dakini Kaldera L'Esilrias. Or… not really. Just a hallucination painted in real-enough light, striding into the clearing like she owns the page.

  Cinder stiffens. Which is good. Means some part of her knows it’s not real.

  Or I hope she does.

  The hallucination tilts her head, speaks with Dakini’s gentleness—the kind that makes your worst thoughts feel seen but not forgiven.

  And then, softly, like she’s slipping a dagger into memory:

  “It’s not Ciel. It's an imposter.”

  Ciel, of course, being short for Arcelius Zahryn. A name she’s chewed on more than once in her sleep.

  She bit down on the silence.

  The words fall with too much weight to be casual. They land like a confession. And maybe, if I’m being honest, that’s my fault. I’ve omitted a few details—mostly because explaining Arcelius Zahryn requires time, metaphor, and probably a support group.

  He isn’t in this scene. Not physically.

  But his absence is louder than most people’s presence.

  They call him—The Basilisk, amongst many labels.

  Here’s the long story slightly less long: Arcelius saw too much too young. Not metaphorically. Literally. Visions. All kinds. The kind that cut deep. He knows every angle of a person—what they hide in their journals, their passwords, their patterns, their worst selves, their most noble potential. And amidst all that he knows, one certainty that remained unshakable:

  All of his wives would die.

  Violently.

  So he did what any haunted child born into…what he was born into…would do with trauma, and apocalyptic clarity might do. He trained until his bones broke. Learned every discipline. Touched every pain. And took notes.

  He bled to prepare for a future that hadn't arrived yet—but would.

  A self-inflicted crucible. A grief on layaway.

  His philosophy? Anti-determinism.

  Unparallel Freedom.

  Quintarii Numbuh 47.

  Break the story before the story breaks you. And to do that, he became something else. The Basilisk. A myth, not a superhero per se, nigh a vigilante. But even that feels too neat. He’s… a weapon with a conscience, sharpened thin like a keen blade that can cut through anything.

  Arcelius is shaped by the fire of what will—possibly, inevitably—be lost.

  He doesn’t carry scars. He carries a countdown. His soul fractures and splinters under the bedlam, each break dragging him closer to hate—to the gravitational pull of every careening black hole of loss.

  It makes him cold. Wounded. Trapped in a cycle that perpetuates violence, even as he tries to save the ones he loves from it.

  His tragedy is liquid. Not a clean wound, but a constant pressure. Every moment of happiness is underscored by the echo of its future erasure. Every hug, every kiss, every joke is haunted by the knowledge that he might one day fail—and not because he wasn’t enough, but because fate might simply win.

  And the boy who once screamed into the dark that he would not allow this cruel fate to exist—he yearns to fall. Into fury. Into vengeance. Into the blessed clarity of rage. Because rage is simple. It gives pain a direction. A target. A shape.

  But there was always another choice.

  He could embody their empathy. Their compassion.

  Because maybe it’s nobler to love than to win. That the real miracle wasn’t stopping death—it was making life worth something in spite of it.

  Intellectually, he agreed. With all his foresight, he witnessed the shape of what he could be. The hope he could carry.

  Yet—between the blood, between the fights, between the endless chess games with monsters and villains—he wrestled.

  Because compassion doesn't hit back.

  Because empathy doesn’t armor your ribs or disarm a prophecy.

  Because when the countdown hums behind your heartbeat, mercy feels like surrender.

  He tries. And sometimes, he succeeds.

  But more often, he doesn’t.

  He lives in the tension. The in-between.

  The event horizon between becoming a savior and becoming the monster that saves you. And it’s that anticipation—the pre-trauma, the ache-before-the-storm—that bleeds into everything.

  Into every plan, every glance, every fable told in his name.

  He’s not waiting to be hurt.

  He’s preparing to lose everything.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Because in the end, his enemy isn’t a man. Or a beast. Or a tyrant.

  It’s time.

  It’s fate.

  It’s inevitability.

  And that’s one of the fights he was born into. The one no one ever wins.

  “It’s not Ciel. It’s an imposter.” That’s what Cinder said, anyway. And for a second, maybe less, it lands with the weight of truth. But whose truth? Hers? Dakini’s? The goddamn trees?

  Everyone claimed The Basilisk caused the derailment. The dead bodies. The rupture in space and sense.

  There were eyewitnesses—too many to dismiss.

  And they all said the same thing.

  That the air changed first.

  They said it came in waves. Static. Pressure. A hush too loud to be silence.

  Then came the shadow. Not cast—moving. Like it walked ahead of him.

  They described him as a silhouette carved from living night, a vertical blade of violence draped in something that wasn’t a cape so much as a thing pretending to be one—glitching at the edges, coiling and trailing behind him like it remembered the void. Vapor lifted off its seams. Sometimes mist, sometimes steam, sometimes ash. No one agreed. No one forgot.

  The armor? Obsidian plates, fused with some fluid metal spine—organic in motion, mechanical in design. Thousands of small pieces, swarming together into something whole. His body was the weapon.

  Parts of the suit could detach and become blades, whips, shields—each transformation a sacrifice. Defense traded for aggression. Every strike precise. Every battle, victory, and kill earned.

  And his presence—the stillness—was what stuck with people the most. He didn’t run. Didn’t shout. He walked. Like gravity bent toward him, not the other way around.

  But the thing they remembered best—the part no one could quite agree on but all tried to describe—was the crown.

  A halo. Floating above his head like some divine afterthought.

  Not gold. Not light. Black.

  A matte-black ring with jagged, geometric spires rising around its rim—like a broken mountain range silhouetted against a sky no one could see. It didn’t glow. It devoured the light around it.

  Some said it was a crown fit for a king.

  Others swore it wasn’t a crown at all.

  Just a burden.

  When did I witness Areclius with a crown above his head?

  …

  …

  Saminna-Cendrine stares at the flickering shape of the woman in front of her. The way Dakini’s image breathes—slow and centered like lightning pretending to be calm. She’s barefoot, glowing faintly, a little too vivid for this reality, vivid enough to touch.

  “Cinder, I’m sure—” the hallucination begins again.

  “I’m sure,” Cinder repeats automatically, a bitter echo.

  Her voice doesn’t sound like hers anymore. It sounds like a chorus. Like static given form. Like too many timelines–ideas–concepts–unmeaning, nonsensical propositions–trying to harmonize and landing on dissonance instead.

  “Arcelius values me in his own ways? Finds me useful even?” she says next, but the words feel secondhand. Like someone else already thought them and she’s just recycling the guilt. But that isn’t possible.

  “Like Sol or Merry or whomever.”

  Cinder’s voice carries bitterness. Not the sharp kind, but the slow kind. The one that sets into your bones like weather.

  “We’re not the same, Dakini. He’s my brother.” she says, and the phantom shifts its weight.

  Dakini—at least, the idea of her—answers with that maddening calm. Not condescending. Just… centered.

  Centered like someone who’s finally unpacked all the knives you’re still tripping over. “Respecting doesn’t necessarily mean trusting him.”

  Cinder scowled. “That exception doesn’t make the rule.”

  “Yeah…” Dakini’s voice softened. “Because what good has anger at either of you done for me?”

  Cinder flinched like it had been a slap.

  “Because you’re so horribly good,” she muttered. Not quite sarcasm. Not quite awe. Something bleeding between the two.

  “But what choice do you have?” she went on, stepping closer—but not rustling the leaves. “Trust isn’t about perfection.”

  “It’s knowing it won’t be,” she added, voice low. Resigned. Maybe ashamed.

  The hallucination smiled—just slightly.

  “And on my honor…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. Didn’t have to. Maybe because Cinder already had.

  “We only do what everyone does,” she murmured, throat tight.

  “The best we can.”

  Dakini—or whatever ghost she was—sighed. Not disappointed. Not angry. Just tired in a way that made Cinder ache. Because even in her mind, Dakini still carried grace like armor.

  Cinder blinked hard.

  The hallucination was still there. Still too kind. Still too much.

  And Cinder, full of static and sharp edges, hated her just a little for it.

  Not because of what she said.

  But because she was probably right.

  The ghost leaned against a tree like it had weight. Like it belonged.

  “Was I selfish,” it asked, “for having faith in him? Or in you?”

  It wasn’t an accusation. No venom. No edge. Just honesty—clean and heavy—and somehow that made it worse.

  Cinder tilted her head back toward the forest canopy, trying to breathe past the hum in her skull. Every leaf shimmered with too many meanings. Every sound echoed like it might be her last.

  “No,” she said, voice fraying. “But that’s a leap, isn’t it?”

  Her voice split as it left her—one thread trembling and unsure, the other flat and omniscient. “Because you did have faith. That wasn’t selfish.”

  She blinked again.

  “It was brave.”

  Braver still because of who you gave it to. She didn’t say that part. She let the ghost fill in the blanks.

  Dakini’s eyes—no, not hers, just the memory’s—searched hers. Unjudging. Unflinching.

  “For him,” Cinder added, “it was the most honest act Ciel could give you.”

  There it was. The unsaid, said. Hanging in the air like blood-steam.

  “Killing Omi?” the hallucination asked quietly.

  Cinder didn’t flinch.

  “Yes. He was protecting Eluceryn.”

  His wife.

  Omi was going to kill his wife. It would’ve been a cold day in hell before Arcelius allowed that to happen.

  Dakini’s image closed her eyes. “I swear…” she muttered, dragging a hand down her face like the weight of that answer was older than the question.

  And then—because this wasn’t real, and the real Dakini would never say this—

  “It’s all the same pig-shit from different assholes, isn’t it?”

  Would she?

  Cinder laughed. Short. Ugly.

  “Pfft. Dark times demanded dark choices, Dakini.”

  She snapped then—not at the ghost, but with it—her voice rising in volume, her presence sharpening into something made of flint and fire.

  “And if his choice offended you so much,” she hissed, voice coiling into something feral—“You would’ve stopped him.”

  ???

  Returning to the accident site...

  The smoke still clung to the skeleton of the wreck like it couldn’t bear to leave. Metal curled back on itself like blistered skin. Ash drifted in slow spirals. And above it all, Dakini Kaldera L’Esilrias stepped through the chaos like she'd done it a hundred times before—because she had.

  Lucifer Santana Zagreus stood in the center of the site, her long coat fluttering behind her like smoke made sentient. Her eyes glowed faintly in the shifting gray, scanning with a precision so clinical it bordered on inhuman.

  Dakini didn’t break stride.

  “Luci,” she called, brushing a soot-smudge off her wrist. “Gory details, please.”

  Lucifer didn’t turn. Her voice came flat. “I gave law enforcement the answers they were looking for.”

  “And?”

  “And…” Lucifer exhaled through her nose. “Basilisk wasn’t involved. No magic. No ghosts. Nothing they’d have to write up awkwardly. The conversation was productive.”

  Dakini raised an eyebrow, arms folding across her chest like a storm cloud forming. “Was it the truth?”

  Lucifer finally turned to face her, and for a moment, the gleam in her eye looked almost offended. Almost. But considering she was concealing her usual contempt for authority, who could really tell?

  “These constructs,” she said, gesturing to the half-melted remains of what used to be a humanoid form, “are alchemically imbued. Poorly. They’re withering like overexposed negatives.”

  “Shoddy work,” Dakini offered, squatting beside one of the crumpled forms.

  Lucifer nodded. “His knives—” she began, levitating a makeshift shuriken, one of Basilisk’s. Possibly purchased online? Arcelius never did bother to pick up the tools he hurled at his enemies. “—have superior durability. Sharper edge retention. Y’know…the works.”

  Dakini gave her a side-glance. “Is that praise?”

  “I can appreciate an artist,” Lucifer said with a shrug.

  She nudged a scorched arm aside with the toe of her boot. The flesh crumbled. “Here, though—someone loaded chaos into a machine gun and let it rip.”

  She continued. “Not the blissful chaos the Nightmare Detectives stir up.” She was referring to Arcelius Zahryn and Saminna-Cendrine, the precognitives. “This is uninspired. Brutal for the sake of motion. Loud.”

  Dakini surveyed the graveyard, viewing the carnage more. “I don’t think this guy cares what anyone sees. Or thinks.”

  She stepped back, heels crunching glass and bone. “Considering the ashtray we’re in.”

  Lucifer knelt beside what had once been a face. “Not necessarily,” she murmured, her tone shifting. “The disposition of the victims… the residue in the aether… the flotsam of evidence. It could suggest something else.”

  Dakini waited.

  “He’s finding his calling.” Lucifer said quietly.

  “Like a lizard getting comfortable in a skin that’s not theirs?” Dakini finished.

  Lucifer’s eyes flicked upward—cold and glassy, like a window before the storm hits. “Bingo,” she said, voice flat but pointed.

  Dakini didn’t smile. Just narrowed her eyes at the crumpled bodies and burned wreckage. “But what’s the message?”

  Lucifer stood slowly, brushing soot from her coat in long, deliberate strokes. She didn’t look at Dakini. Not yet. “I don’t know,” she said, voice barely above the wind. “But I prefer magic over tricks.”

  Dakini tilted her head. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” Lucifer murmured, finally meeting her gaze, “if I had to choose between a monster with a spell and a man with a stage—” she gestured broadly to the surrounding devastation, “—I’d pick the monster. At least it’s honest.”

  Dakini stiffened, a flicker of guilt dancing across her face like heated lightning. Lucifer didn’t twist the knife—she didn’t need to. Because Dakini remembered.

  Arcelius had told her his truth offhandedly. Truthfully, in-front of her, in her face with calmness.

  Lucifer saw the recognition flash behind Dakini’s eyes. But she said nothing.

  Just added, “You trusted your instinct. That’s not the sin.”

  Then, quieter, “Ignoring his wasn’t a virtue either.”

  Dakini exhaled, jaw tightening. “I thought Ciel was being paranoid.”

  “He was,” Lucifer said. “But he was also maybe right.”

  Ash spiraled upward again, slow and uncaring, like it had all the time in the world to watch them both be wrong.

  Dakini bit back the instinct to say “When did you start believing in absolutes?”

  Instead, she let it sit between them, sharp and unsaid.

  Lucifer didn’t flinch. “Never.”

  Dakini’s jaw flexed. Her voice, when it came, was soft but unyielding. “Then we investigate. Search for every possibility. Give Raimondo the benefit of the doubt.”

  Lucifer’s brow arched ever so slightly. She didn’t scoff—but something in her eyes twisted like smoke around a suppressed fire.

  “Tell me you’ll try.” Dakini said. Not as a command. As a plea.

  And for a second, just a second, Lucifer looked like she might refuse.

  But she didn’t.

  She nodded once, sharp and small.

  Yet the silence that followed told its own story.

  Like someone flipping through a worn comic book where hope still wore a cape and optimism punched above its weight class.

  Because Dakini Kaldera L’Esilrias believed. Not in systems. Not in governments. But in people. In redemption. She had to. That belief wasn’t just her power source—it was her anchor.

  And it meant she still saw Raimondo not as the villain, but as the man he could’ve been.

  And might still be.

  She ran down the list of possibilities in her head the way a medic checks for a pulse:

  - Mind control?

  - Possession?

  - Doppelg?nger?

  - A clone with his memories?

  - Some slippery shade wearing his skin like a costume from a bad multiverse crossover?

  - Hell, maybe it was a tragic misunderstanding, a 4D chess move misread by everyone else in 2D.

  There had to be an answer that made this clean.

  Redeemable.

  Because the alternative was that Raimondo Brutas Castellanos-Maul chose this.

  That the man who once shared meals with her—who once joked about her lightning interfering with his pacemaker—wasn’t manipulated, or twisted, or infected.

  But complicit.

  That was the monster under her bed. The thought she refused to let tuck her in.

  So she did what heroes do when the ground starts to tilt—she planted her feet and looked the storm in the eye.

  “We find the truth,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “All of it.”

  Lucifer didn’t light a cigarette.

  She lit an incarnation scroll—old vellum threaded with sigil-ink and stitched entropy. A snap of her fingers sparked it, the paper curling into flame with a whisper like a name half-remembered.

  She didn’t smoke. Not really.

  Cigarettes damaged human lungs.

  But this—this was different.

  This was communion.

  The scroll burned down between her fingers, smoke curling into her nostrils, threading itself through her bloodstream. Not a habit. A ritual. A pact.

  It wasn’t about summoning. Not the old-fashioned way. The familiar wouldn’t materialize—not in full. But its essence, its temperament, its power—that would linger. Settle into her like a shadow finding its shape.

  Make her faster. Crueler. Colder. Depending on what she chose to burn.

  There were scrolls made from monsters. Others, harvested from dead gods, fractured timelines, synthetic dreams. Each one did something different.

  Each one cost something different.

  This one?

  Stimulated the brain. Sharpened instincts.

  It felt like rage honed into clarity. A precision beast. Predatory. Efficient.

  The fire helped when you were walking through darkness pretending you weren’t afraid of what you’d find.

  Lucifer had long since stopped pretending.

  Raimondo wasn’t the kind of chaos that happened organically. He was too precise. Too narrative-aware. Like a weapon forged for a specific myth.

  Lucifer had seen operators before—killers, spies, martyrs. But Raimondo... she knew him. Or thought she did. Not like Arcelius (Basilisk)—he and Raimondo had traded blows, danced in fire and consequence.

  Fisticuffs.

  But with Raimondo, there were only controlled detonations unfolding by design.

  Poise like his didn’t come from nowhere.

  So the question wasn’t what made him.

  It was who.

  Lucy didn’t like the short list of suspects.

  Seraphina Elara du Rien was the most obvious—and the most dangerous. Not because of strength or strategy. Elara didn’t fight reality. She reframed it. Quietly.

  Slowly. Like mold blooming in the corners of a cathedral.

  People feared her. And that was the problem.

  Fear bred doubt. Doubt begat faith. And Elara’s faith was a strange, reverse gospel: the more others wavered, the stronger she became. Her believers didn’t love her.

  They trembled. And trembling was enough.

  Her magic fed on hesitation, on the smallest fracture in conviction. She didn’t need armies.

  She needed whispers.

  Dakini had asked for patience—for grace—but Lucifer had no illusions about Elara.

  She was a cancer with a messiah complex. A precognitive cultist wrapped in silk and stillness.

  And if she was close to Raimondo—and she was—it wasn’t coincidence.

  It was design.

  Seraphina Elara du Rien didn’t unnerve Lucifer.

  She pressed against reality like a tumor distorting everything around it.

  In her mind, the possibilities stacked like cards—shuffled, dealt, and discarded in rapid succession. Lucifer Santana Zagreus didn’t think linearly. She thought like lightning: branching, fracturing, illuminating truths in sudden bursts.

  The second card hit the table.

  Wyrm.

  Alastor Wyrm Garrett.

  Plagiarist. Murderer. Intellectual cannibal in a poet’s skin.

  He’d once been human—arguably. Before he became a breach in the Mental Plane: the living intersection between thought and flesh, fiction and force. His ability had allowed him to draw on the realm of ideas, of written narrative, of imagined phenomena. To bring anything described in a book into physical existence.

  A tulpa-technician. An archivist of armageddon.

  Stories weren’t just stories to Wyrm.

  They were blueprints. Artifacts. Ammunition.

  He could summon characters from cheap pulp thrillers or sacred texts, weaponize the narrative physics of imaginary realities, wear concepts like armor. It wasn’t just hardcovers—he’d pulled spells from buried forum fanfics, glitched wizards from visual novels, stolen gods from out-of-print zines.

  If someone had written it down, he could make it reality.

  And worse—he learned from them.

  By diving into books, he absorbed decades of knowledge in minutes. Each narrative became a shortcut to mastery. Want to be a neurosurgeon? Read three textbooks, emerge with steady hands and better ethics than the author. Want to build a nuke? Just crawl through a Cold War sci-fi novella and steal the schematics from a villain’s footnote.

  He had almost—almost—found a way to retcon reality.

  To overwrite reality with the rules of a better story.

  Or worse, his story.

  But Drakken Angelus Y'stratola stopped him. Or caged him. Or scattered his mind across non-Euclidean footnotes. Accounts can vary.

  Lucifer inhaled the last of the scroll’s smoke and exhaled a memory that wasn’t hers.

  Could it be that again?

  A fake Basilisk created by a novice sorcerer playing with things they shouldn’t?

  It would track. The wound pattern wasn’t precise enough to be Arcelius. He’s too praticed in violence.

  The ritual glyphs present reeked of imitation. The thaumic residue read like copied homework: glyphs from half-understood scrolls, mispronounced incantations, sloppily traced runes. Like someone trying to reenact magic they read about instead of lived.

  This wasn’t a master’s work.

  It could’ve been fanfiction.

  Which narrowed the field.

  Her thoughts flickered sideways.

  

  
• A school of undertrained arcanists trying to manifest an astral companion, but pulling something hungrier?


  
• A rogue AI built to generate fantasy short stories, accidentally uploaded into an unstable golem shell?


  
• A teenager—always a teenager. Probably bored. Probably brilliant. Possibly cursed?


  

  Thoughts like that. Cartoonishly silly.

  Except… not entirely.

  Lucifer’s jaw set.

  She’d need to check the local schools. Not just the elite arcanist academies, but the public thaumaturgical remediation programs, the half-shuttered charter covens, the underground tutorial rings trading in pirated spells and banned dreamware.

  Because this magic wasn’t novel. It was replicated.

  Which meant someone, somewhere, was reading things they shouldn’t.

  Casting spells like cheat codes.

  Treating arcane law like an open-source project.

  Dakini was still waiting. Hopeful. Stubborn. Lucifer looked toward her, then simply said, “Okay.”

  ? ────── {.? ? ?.} ────── ?

  Leaving the theater after watching the final installment of the Rabbit’s Foot collection were Arcelius Slayer Zahryn-Pendragon and one of his two aegis—Stel-Axaxa Amour Sucré Serenades of the Angel-Breaker (there’s a Zahryn-Pendragon, somewhere in that mouthful of a name).

  His first wife’s name was Keneshara (or Kynesha) Ascalon Zahryn-Pendragon.

  That part of his life? Still living, still luminous—but like a torn page folded back in the book of him. Not forgotten. Just unread for now.

  Narratively unavailable.

  (But she’s not in this scene, so let’s not get too sentimental. We’ll cross that page when we come to it.)

  Arcelius was no longer the prepubescent enigma I once mentioned in these transcripts. He was a man now. A man who moved like the world owed him answers—and he was tired of asking nicely.

  Always in vanta-black pants, a coat that dragged behind him like the shadow of war, and boots that echoed with the sound of inevitability on concrete. His hair was jet-black but slashed with defiance: a streak of white like some God had tried to smite him—and missed.

  But not entirely.

  His eyes? Mismatched, like a coin flipped by fate. One red, one blue—anger and sorrow. Fire and water. And when they locked onto you, it wasn’t just looking. It was knowing. He knew things. Too many things. He looked at people like he’d already seen the moment they’d die—and was quietly grieving it.

  But you already knew that. I’d hate to sound like a broken record.

  They moved through the crowd like ants in a living maze of flesh and motion. Like lizards on ice. Gliding. Unbothered.

  It was almost cute.

  But Arcelius, in his later years, carried exhaustion the way royalty wears a crown: inherited, inescapable. Not that he looked old—his body held the strength of a thousand lifetimes—but his soul creaked like an ancient library.

  He didn’t lose sleep because he couldn’t. He lost sleep because the future screamed behind his eyes. And though he pretended to be fine, you could see it: in the slow drag of his steps, in the way he lingered in doorways like he was rehearsing his goodbyes.

  The film they had just watched was Rabbit’s Foot—a slow-burn spiritual horror series that followed a coven of mediums. Witches not chosen for power, but for pain. Each one bound to a mythic beast—lions, tigers, bears (oh my)—not as companions, but as reflections of their deepest wounds. They were intermediaries between the seen and unseen.

  The living and the broken.

  But as the series progressed, something shifted. The monsters weren’t just rising—they were winning. Not outside the witches, but inside them. The line between guardian and vessel blurred. And the monsters—oh, they didn’t want to kill the witches. They wanted to become them.

  The final act was devastating.

  “Terrible,” Stel-Axaxa muttered, tilting her head just enough for the glossy black lenses of her visor to catch the streetlights, the traffic, the buzz—the everything.

  Neon bled across the wet sidewalk. Puddles caught the color like open eyes.

  Arcelius didn’t flinch. He breathed the way people do when they're still halfway inside a dream—or a funeral. Quietly. Deliberately.

  There were few things left in life that could surprise someone with precognition. Movies and books were among the few. They were... controlled chaos. Manufactured mystery. And Arcelius, ever the archeologist at heart, relished that.

  Yes, he could’ve searched for the script. Could’ve known the ending down to the VFX teams and their render schedules. But that wasn’t the same as feeling it. And unless he actively sought that knowledge, it remained dormant—another unopened tomb in the archives of time.

  And so, he watched Rabbit’s Foot like anyone else might. With suspense.

  Axaxa glanced sideways. “Why watch this film specifically, master?”

  He looked up. The stars weren’t visible. Too much light. Too much skyglow. Still, he spoke: “To feel, Axaxa.”

  A pause.

  “It was depressing sometimes,” he said. “About sadness. Fears.”

  She said nothing. He went on.

  “And hope. It had personality. It was nice.”

  Axaxa scoffed. “Sorry, I still don’t drink fancy piss.”

  He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

  “I’ll confess,” she said, “I enjoyed the score. But the plot was contrived.”

  “Are you saying it shouldn’t exist?”

  “I’m saying it’s shitty that it does.”

  They kept walking, boots on concrete, passing a late-night noodle stall and a couple arguing in three languages.

  “People who experience trauma,” she said suddenly, “aren’t lost causes.”

  He nodded, slowly. “So there’s beauty in the broken? Kintsugi.”

  She started to say something—his name, maybe—but he cut in.

  “The characters weren’t the happily-ever-after kind,” he said. “The suffocating dread on their chests was all they’d ever known. They hurt everyone and everything around them. Needing to prove...”

  His hand twitched, like he was holding something that wasn’t there.

  “...that their pain and demons were all they’d ever experience.”

  They passed under a flickering streetlight.

  “When they didn’t,” he said. “And the idea that their pain and grief were pointless—with that ending...”

  He swallowed—quiet, but it sounded like glass breaking in his throat.

  “That desperation they carried. To make the pain matter. To believe they could’ve been loved. Been happy. Finding purpose in that damage…”

  He stopped. The city moved around them.

  “So it wasn’t damage.”

  He turned to her, voice quiet.

  “I can sympathize.”

  She looked at him. Really looked. Through the armor, the title, the myths.

  Then she said, dryly: “Like I said. A frightfully dull film. You’re romanticizing rot.”

  Arcelius’s smirk crept in slow—like a knife slipping between ribs, casual, amused.

  “It wasn’t the 120 Days of Sodom, Axaxa.”

  Stel-Axaxa halted mid-step, pivoting on a heel with the drama of a dagger unsheathed. Her glossy lenses flashed under the glow of a streetlamp. “That—was an indulgent film, Master. NASTY!”

  He laughed—really laughed. Not the half-breath chuckle he gave when pretending at humanity, but a genuine ripple of amusement that cracked his usual cold composure. It startled a few passersby. Maybe because it sounded so rare.

  She kept going, animated now, chasing the theatrical momentum of her own disgust at the ultimate film about depravity.

  “Oh no,” Axaxa growled, mock scandalized, “do not laugh! Despair for despair’s sake! Vanity disguised as depth! And don’t you dare say otherwise!”

  She smacked his shoulder—not hard, but with practiced flair, like she was knocking sense back into him one playful strike at a time. He staggered with exaggeration, spinning slightly on his boot heel as though she’d wounded his pride. It was a rehearsed dance. The kind only old comrades, or old flames, ever perfected.

  “That was an empty film. About the pointlessness of pain. The smugness of its own nihilism. Obsessed with human degradation.”

  Spectacle through suffering.

  Axaxa had said it best.

  As they stepped into the streetlight glow, Stel-Axaxa glanced down at Arcelius’ phone—still set to silent from the theater. The screen lit up with messages from Dakini. Her expression shifted. Subtle. Almost imperceptible.

  But Arcelius was gone.

  Arcelius was gone?

  Hmm…

  [Signal Lost]

  [Reacquiring narrative thread]

  …

  [Loading]

  ???…

  {A cough. A pause. Something recalibrates.}

  {The voice clears. Focus sharpens. Reality—or something like it—resumes.}

  …

  {If that's still what we're calling it—}

  ? ? ━━━━━ ? ?

  ???…

  Saminna-Cendrine tapped Dakini’s shoulder gently from behind, her presence grounding. This wasn’t a hallucination—not like before, in the woods. This was the real Dakini. Flesh and lightning.

  Dakini turned, calm as the rising sun.

  “I called Kovach,” she said, grinning.

  Kovach—or Kovacs—was an alias used by Arcelius Slayer Zahryn-Pendragon, a carefully constructed false identity he hid behind. He had many. But sometimes the pronunciation slipped out as Kovach instead of Kovacs, which was technically correct.

  “It was fan-damn-tastic when he didn’t answer,” she added.

  Cinder leaned against a bent rail post, arms crossed, boots dusty from wherever she’d tumbled in from. Dakini’s eyes found her and softened, like lightning retreating into a cloud.

  “Insidria,” she said with a little nod. Like naming a wild animal and hoping it wouldn’t bite. “Y’know why?”

  The nickname hung in the air—cracked and strange. A word that sounded dangerously close to insidious. Not exactly the sort of title you pin on a hero. Maybe the -sidria softened it. Made it prettier. Drinkable, even.

  Saminna cut in, deadpan: “Sabbatical?”

  “Trust me,” she added, eyes narrowing as she scanned the smoking wreck. “If there was intel worth sharing, you’d know, bug-zapper.”

  Dakini smiled at that one. “I believe you.”

  Saminna blinked. “Just like that?”

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  There were a dozen reasons why not. But let’s roll with it.

  Then her voice dropped, low enough for only the two of them to hear:

  “With your strengths, I’d trust you—even as my enemy.”

  Saminna looked away, her mouth tightening. That line—the weight of old trust and older betrayals—settled in her bones like dust.

  Cinder’s eyes lingered on Dakini, silent. The name Insidria still curled in her mind like smoke.

  A sophist in hero’s clothing. A walking contradiction in violet.

  She scoffed, mostly to herself, and said nothing. Masquerading as a hero? Please.

  She was just channeling her inner Dakini maybe? And like always, she didn’t know if that made her better—or worse.

  ??????

  Tap.

  Slide.

  A smooth, seamless motion—too smooth. Almost inhuman.

  It wasn’t Arcelius moving like that.

  It was the Basilisk.

  Live, in the flesh.

  Shadow and scarlet collided in the narrow corridor window, backlighting the figure now perched in the center of the crime scene like a grim punctuation mark.

  He stood with arms outstretched, framed by blood-red light, a silhouette cut from the void itself. No visible features—just the shape of a hooded figure, arms wide. Triumphant. Or warning.

  The window behind him slowly closed with a hydraulic hiss.

  Rain streamed down the glass, each droplet ignited by crimson glow—liquid rubies sliding down into darkness. The walls themselves hummed, bioluminescent veins pulsing with something alive. Or dying.

  Basilisk stood perfectly still, steam rising from his shoulders. Either violence clung to him, or he'd just emerged from something... unnatural.

  Something hot, dark, and transformative.

  The officers already inside the room froze—staring, breathing shallow. One officer’s hand hovered over her sidearm, hesitating.

  Basilisk’s eyes, twin needles in the shadow of his hood, narrowed just enough to say: Oh, honey. Please don’t.

  Security footage from their body cameras would later fail to capture the weight of the moment.

  They would say he moved like a ghost.

  That he already knew what had happened.

  That Basilisk—Arcelius—wasn’t investigating a crime.

  He was reconstructing fate in reverse.

  As for why: paranoia?

  Or the terrible hope that this time, just maybe, he was wrong?

  The officers spoke Spanish, murmuring among themselves.

  Basilisk said nothing.

  A rookie stepped forward anyway, voice steady despite the tremble in his shoulders.

  “” the captain muttered

  “” the rookie added.

  “”

  “”

  “”

  The Captain grunted. Basilisk ignored him as he walked observing–taking in—everything.

  “”

  Another officer, older, leaning against the wall with crossed arms and a fresh cigarette, muttered:

  “

  ”

  Miguel frowned.

  “”

  A third officer chimed in without looking up:

  “”

  “”

  “”

  “”

  Silence, heavy.

  “”

  “<...or accept what won’t be.>”

  Then came the noise.

  A faint hum beneath the floorboards.

  Not mechanical. Not structural.

  Alive.

  The floor shifted.

  “”

  The air turned sharp. Metallic. Like ozone and blood.

  Basilisk turned his head slightly—just enough.

  He already knew what was about to burst through.

  They didn’t.

  Not yet. He walked out the room of the apartment.

  But inside the floor creaked. Then it bulged.

  Something beneath the cheap laminate writhed, pushing up in long, sinewy ridges. One of the officers drew her pistol, trembling.

  “”

  A low, wet crack echoed—like muscle tearing against bone. The linoleum buckled—and burst.

  It exploded in a geyser of muscle.

  Not sinew. Not flesh. Something worse. Engineered. A body sculpted by rage and violence into an obscene mass of hypertrophied muscle layers, all shifting independently—rippling and coiling like living cables.

  It landed with a thud that shook the walls. Hulking. Masked by bone. Eight feet tall, skin torn in places where the muscle could no longer be contained. Pulsing tissue layered and recoiled with every breath.

  And it grinned. A vertical smile like a cracked sternum.

  One officer screamed. Another opened fire—bullets sinking into the creature’s flesh and disappearing, swallowed by the dense muscle strata without even drawing blood.

  Then it moved.

  Too fast.

  The Captain didn’t even get a word out before the thing's forearm—thick as a truck’s axle—smashed him into the wall like a thrown doll. His spine crumpled audibly.

  “”

  The creature roared—a guttural, vibrating bellow that shook picture frames and made the ceiling light burst in a flash of sparks.

  Miguel, the rookie, scrambled back toward the corridor—

  Only to see him.

  Still standing there. He screamed for help

  “”

  Unmoving. Shadow-sculpted.

  Watching.

  The creature turned, sensing threat. The hyper-developed cords of its arms twisted like turbines, swelling in real time, blood pumping like magma under translucent skin. Its eyes glowed the color of an open wound.

  And still, Basilisk did not move.

  Not until the monster charged.

  It lunged with impossible force—each footfall cracking tile, arms raised in a brutal overhead slam that would have crushed a lesser being into paste.

  Basilisk stepped forward—one step—and raised his hand.

  CLANG.

  The edge of a kitchen knife, forgotten in the hallway wreckage, screamed across the floor—and leapt to his grip.

  He didn’t even look at it.

  The blade gleamed once in the red light—and then was gone, vanishing in a blur of silver arcs as he walked through the monster.

  Not past it—through it.

  For a breathless second, time seemed to halt.

  Then the creature screamed.

  Veins split. Sinew unraveled. A dozen perfect cuts bloomed across its body, barely wide enough to bleed—yet deep enough to sever control.

  The thing reeled, limbs spasming, a tangle of unspooling muscle tissue.

  But it wasn’t over. Not yet.

  Basilisk exhaled slowly and lowered his hood.

  The light caught on his cheekbone—pale, calm, and cold. A warrior’s gaze. Not hungry for violence. Merely resigned to it.

  The rookie whispered: “”

  Another knife shivered in the air, hovering near Basilisk’s shoulder. Not drawn. Not summoned. It simply wanted to be near him. Like all blades did.

  He was no telekinetic. Not quite a magician. Something older. Stranger.

  A myth given posture.

  Call him: The King of Blades.

  Every sword ever forged, every knife that cut down tyrants or carved the name of heroes or villains into legend—he knew them. He had danced with them, in dreams or memory. Both?

  Every cutting edge—sharpened or chipped—answered to him.

  The monster roared again, reforming, muscle thickening, bones cracking as it adapted, grew denser, harder. A walking fortress of self-wrought meat.

  Basilisk cracked his neck once.

  And then he moved again.

  The monster’s next charge rattled the floor beneath them, bursting pipes and collapsing plaster. The apartment complex moaned like a sinking ship.

  And Basilisk stood still again.

  Not paralyzed.

  Calculating.

  Inside his silhouette, Arcelius’ eyes were closed.

  Not to the present.

  But to everything else.

  He already knew what would happen if he missed the next strike by a fraction.

  He saw the shockwave, heard the chorus of rib cages collapsing. He saw Phineas—a jazz musician on the seventh floor—try to shield his daughter with his back. She died anyway.

  He saw Ferb, above them, gripping a half-empty wine bottle, already five days sober, ready to start over—until the floor buckled and took him with it.

  He saw Sally, three doors down. She didn’t scream. She was too tired. The monster would have reached her after it finished with the cops. She would’ve died alone, gripping the urn of a cat she never replaced.

  He saw Franklin on the twelfth floor, not die. Just cry. For hours. Not for himself, but for the others. Because he would hear them go. And he’d live. And he wouldn’t want to.

  The list expands to all the tenets.

  But that’s not what happens.

  Because Arcelius steps left.

  The creature’s boulder-sized fist obliterates a support beam. Dust flies. Concrete peels back like bark. But Basilisk is already in motion—a blur of cloak and silver glint.

  The fight isn’t just movement. It’s prevention. Every step, every flick of a blade, is a rejection of one potential timeline.

  Each choice is a prayer said backwards.

  Steel sings.

  Another blade appears—maybe a letter opener dropped by a tenant, maybe something older, a ritual dagger lost between the floorboards decades ago. No matter. To Arcelius–Basilisk, they are the same: Edges. Tools.

  He doesn’t throw it. He points.

  The blade flies like a bullet, piercing the monster’s ankle. Not deep enough to kill. Just enough to shift its center of mass.

  It stumbles. And Basilisk is on its back in an instant.

  The monster roars again—muscles shifting, adapting, armoring, bulking with obscene volume.

  But Basilisk isn't trying to match force.

  He places his palm to the beast’s neck—where the skin has grown too tight, too hard, nearly armored—

  —and whispers.

  Not aloud. Not for the cops. Not even for the monster.

  But for the blade inside the spine.

  A shard of porcelain from a broken mug embedded moments ago. It’s not a weapon.

  Unless he says it is.

  It slices.

  Silently. Deeply.

  The monster shudders.

  Still not dead. Still regenerating. Still evolving.

  Arcelius lets go.

  Steps back.

  Let’s it scream.

  Let’s the officers see what it is.

  Let’s it become ugly in full light—because monsters like these don’t deserve the dignity of being mysterious.

  The young officer—Miguel—backs against the wall. His eyes wide. His knuckles white.

  Basilisk finally speaks, voice low and clear, in perfect Spanish.

  “”

  Beat.

  “”

  Then…a beat…

  ?????

  Elsewhere.

  Saminna-Cendrine Daresiel Chorus would’ve much rather been making shadow puppets. Or tying cherry stems with her tongue. Or—hell—stealing hubcaps from parked cars. Anything but this.

  “With your strengths, I’d trust you—even as my enemy.” Saminna looked away, her mouth tightening. Last you read…

  “We’re frenemies?” Saminna said with a crooked smile, one eyebrow climbing as if trying to escape the rest of her face. “That’s a weird compliment.”

  Dakini’s response was smooth as silk caught in static. “Keeps things interesting.”

  A gust of wind tugged at the edges of her invisible cape—not that she wore one, but it felt like she should’ve. That’s the kind of presence Dakini had. Mythic. Painfully kind.

  “Besides,” Dakini added, casually brushing a speck of ash off her sleeve, “when your valor depends on my discretion, you're fun company. Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?” Saminna echoed, deadpan. “Ouch. You wound me.”

  Dakini smiled, just faintly.

  Saminna tilted her head, grin sly. “Not everyone has a strict definition of the word useful, Dakini.”

  The sophist smirked and continued. “And yet, here I am. Talking shop in hand-me-downs.”

  Dakini nodded toward the skyline, where the sun draped itself over broken towers like a gold-spilled secret. “Lucifer’s efficacious.”

  Saminna barked a laugh. “Lucifer’s chaos incarnate!”

  “She’s following a spectral thread as we speak,” Dakini said, her tone shifting, like a melody turning minor.

  Saminna tilted her head, watching her companion carefully now. “Albeit to?”

  Dakini's eyes narrowed, not in suspicion, but focus. “Your precognitive, Cinder. You know how the yearning for freedom can drive desperate people.”

  And there it was. The turn. The heart of the conversation wrapped in thorns.

  Dakini went on, “How false hope keeps economies and communities alive. When people are fearful…”

  “And your conclusion?” Saminna asked, quieter now. Less banter. More blade.

  Dakini turned to face her fully.

  “Sadly,” she said, “there’s always an opportunity in desperation. Someone’s desperate, hence—”

  She didn’t finish it. She didn’t have to.

  Saminna already felt it. Like a tremor in the soul. Like fate adjusting its grip on the wheel.

  Saminna tapped her fingers together looking towards the edge of what used to be a bench; now broken. Once a bus stop before jumping on the express train, now a throne for graffiti and bad decisions.

  “Inside job,” she said flatly, as if announcing the weather. “Followed by his highness getting beset by ‘loyalists’ of his enemies. Or, y’know… my brother was right.”

  She didn’t name him—didn’t need to. She’d rather chew glass than say "Raimondo Castellanos" was king-ly out of loud respect.

  Dakini nodded, slow, like thunder rolling in just past the edge of hearing. “Mhm. The targets. The damage. It’s all too specific.”

  “Oh?” Saminna perked up. “We’re in lockstep finally, then. You believe him.”

  Dakini didn’t speak right away.

  There was a glint in her eyes—faint, like lightning threading behind cloud cover. When she inhaled, it wasn’t just breath. It was certainty. Destiny metabolized. The kind of silence that came before a revelation or a war.

  She blinked, and the tension snapped like a violin string.

  “So,” Dakini said breezily, “what challenge awaits us?”

  Saminna squinted suspiciously. “Have you seen The Rabbit’s Foot collection?”

  Dakini groaned. “It’s not like those terrifier movies you showed me, is it? Or Belladonna of Sadness?”

  That earned a snort from Saminna—genuine, amused, slightly offended.

  “Excuse you,” she said, poking Dakini in the shoulder. “Belladonna is a masterpiece. You just hate symbolism that bleeds sometimes.”

  She stood, arms crossed in dramatic mockery of sophistication.

  “Terrifier is cinema” she said. “I like art that’s honest about its madness, Not sanitized, two-jump-scares-and-a-creepy-kid nonsense.”

  Dakini raised an eyebrow. “Cinema with trauma.”

  “Tomato, tomato,” Saminna said with a shrug. “Don’t act like you didn’t like the clown.”

  Dakini stifled a laugh and shook her head, already regretting giving Saminna the conversational wheel.

  Cinder likes Terrifier for the same reason she likes herself: it’s a beautiful, bloody contradiction.

  She doesn’t just enjoy the gore—she relishes the honesty of it. Terrifier isn’t pretending to be deep. It’s not wrapped in moral lessons or sanitized villainy. Art the Clown doesn’t talk. He doesn’t explain. He just is—chaos incarnate.

  There’s no pretense.

  No redemption arc.

  Just a walking contradiction in greasepaint: funny, mute, cruel, creative. And that? That speaks to her soul.

  Art without apology (pun intended).

  Narrative anarchy.

  No safety.

  No rules.

  No one is guaranteed survival just because they’re the protagonist. It’s the cinematic equivalent of her power—Paradox Cascade—tearing through cause and effect like it’s a joke only she understands.

  The Rabbit Foot Collection on the other hand…

  It tried so hard to say something. And in the end, said too much—and not enough. It wanted to be mythic. Tragic. Cathartic. And it was...kind of? But to Saminna, the myth-making felt mechanical. Like someone had charted pain on a whiteboard and tried to alchemize grief into prophecy.

  She understood the final twist. The mediums severing their ties to the spirit realm, killing themselves to banish the monsters once and for all. Sure. It had weight. It had consequences. But it also had ego.

  She muttered the words now, more to herself than Dakini:

  “At the end of the series...done playing with lions, tigers, and bears…”

  Dakini looked over, her expression shifting from amused to curious.

  “The mediums take their own lives,” Saminna continued, her voice steadier now, not bitter but measured. “After severing themselves from the spirit realm.”

  A beat. Then another.

  “Effectively allowing the monsters to roam free in an attempt to banish them in death.”

  Dakini tilted her head, her voice gentler than before. “That’s...grim.”

  “I hated it too,” Saminna admitted.

  But that wasn’t the whole truth.

  She respected it. The ambition. The attempt. The weight of it. But hate was easier to hold than disappointment. Because for all the sweeping emotion and gorgeous symbolism, the story didn’t feel earned.

  She dug her hands into her coat, walking slower now.

  “From the monster’s perspective,” she said, “control rested in its mastery over destruction.”

  Dakini didn’t interrupt. She just let her talk.

  “I have the power to destroy a thing—therefore I dictate its fate.” She stared ahead at nothing. “And what the monsters want…”

  A pause. Wind brushed past them.

  “…when rationality sleeps—”

  The rest came not in words but in voiceover. Not to anyone, not even to Dakini. Just a thought stretched too thin to speak aloud.

  (V.O.) Saminna-Cendrine Daresiel Chorus: Madness and ruin comes forth. That’s what awaits…

  That, at least, felt true.

  The last image I see are not angels—quite the opposite. But not demons. They’re monsters. Very old monsters.

  It’s a painting.

  God, it’s an awful painting. A painting painted with blood from over a hundred—no—thousands of people. Drained. For this.

  For this...

  At first, I thought it was just a hallucination. Some cruel trick of vision, like staring at fire too long and seeing faces in the smoke.

  But then I saw her–Sitri–it calls itself.

  The woman with the brush. And I knew—she wasn’t human.

  Not entirely.

  Her face is wrong in all the ways that would escape notice if you weren’t staring directly at her. Too symmetrical. Too still. Her eyes moved like glass orbs half-filled with ink—slow, smooth, intentional. She painted not with emotion, but memory. As if she remembered this nightmare from a time before time.

  As if she’d seen the conclave before it ever needed paint. She isn't inventing these monsters from imagination. She's recalling something ancient, real, and long hidden. The painting is less a work of creativity and more an act of revelation.

  And the brush—

  It wasn’t a brush. I was wrong. ??

  So horribly wrong.

  It was bone.

  A hollowed femur sharpened to a calligrapher’s edge. The bristles weren’t bristles. They were hair. Human. Silken, dark, and still clotted with scalp. She dipped it into a basin that I will not describe.

  Each stroke she laid was a surgical incision into the veil of reality.

  She didn’t create the monsters. She revealed them.

  As though they’d always been there, in the walls, in the dark, just waiting for someone to remember.

  She hummed. Not a song. A frequency.

  Something beneath sound. Something I could feel in my teeth.

  And the chamber she painted in—it was breathing. The walls shifted with a wet, pulpy rhythm. The air itself sagged with rot and reverence.

  And all I could think—

  This is not just art.

  It's a documentary.