East City pulsed with alchemical tension beneath its orderly streets.
Aeon walked through its marketplaces and alleyways like a wraith, unnoticed but never unaware. The people here moved quickly, soldiers patrolled with measured urgency, and something old and wounded lingered just below the surface. The stonework was sharp. The air tasted of chalk and sweat. Alchemy was alive here—but out of tune, its rhythm offbeat, discordant.
He had followed the Elric brothers this far.
They hadn't seen him. They wouldn't. But he had watched as Edward scowled through debriefings and bickered with officers, as Alphonse quietly followed, always guarding his brother's back, his voice too gentle for the body of armor that held it.
Their bond stirred something buried in Aeon's soul—something too old to name.
He'd seen them again that morning, speaking in hushed tones near the station. A manila folder clutched in Edward's gloved hand. A military lead. A location circled in red ink.
Laboratory 5.
Now, night had fallen, and the brothers crept through the crumbling perimeter wall of the abandoned complex, unaware of the silent presence shadowing them from a distance.
The lab was worse than Aeon had anticipated.
Not in the obvious ways—though the building was cracked and twisted, scorched by past violence—but in the patterns burned into the floor. The transmutation arrays were wrong. The lines weren't simply geometric—they were sick. Their curves wept into the stone. Some whispered.
This place had seen the forging of Philosopher's Stones. And something had been left behind.
Aeon stepped lightly between rubble piles, invisible and silent, watching from the second level as Edward dropped into the lower levels through a loose grate. Alphonse followed carefully behind.
The steel corridors below were unnaturally cold. Lights flickered with no electricity.
Then—
A metal screech. A shape darted past. The Slicer Brothers.
Aeon didn't interfere.
Edward fought with fury, nimble and sharp. His automail sparked against sword edges. Blood stained his sleeve. Alphonse was cut off—diverted by the second suit of armor.
The battle deepened. Alphonse faltered, caught between combat and confusion.
That's when it began.
A faint pulse in the air.
Then a voice.
Not loud.
Not spoken.
"Are you real?"
Alphonse staggered. His hands dropped from his defensive posture.
"What are you, Alphonse Elric? A soul bound to armor? Or a lie your brother built?"
The whispers came from the stone buried in the core of the lab—a failed Philosopher's Stone, cracked and flickering with unstable souls.
But this one had been touched by the Shadow.
Aeon moved.
He descended in silence, his form veiled by layered perception. The boys couldn't see him. The homunculus guards couldn't feel him. But the stone pulsed harder as he approached.
He raised a hand toward the wall, not touching the transmutation array scrawled across it—but knowing it.
And it responded.
The circle bent, not breaking its laws but warping its rhythm. The whispering stuttered, as if choked mid-breath.
Alphonse gasped. He shook his head, the doubt clearing just enough to raise his arms again. His opponent lunged—and this time, he countered, smashing the enemy into the wall.
Meanwhile, Edward had cornered the other attacker and finished the fight with a final alchemic strike—his spear turned wall, his pain turned momentum.
The silence returned. The brothers regrouped.
"Did you hear something?" Alphonse asked, voice shaking.
Edward frowned. "What? During the fight?"
"I… I thought something was speaking to me. About me. I—" He stopped. "Never mind. It's over."
They left cautiously, unaware of the gaze that watched them from the upper floor.
Later, when the lab had grown still again, Aeon approached the stone.
It was embedded in a pedestal of transmuted iron, its surface cracked, the essence within unstable and screaming silently. He could feel the souls—hundreds, confused, angry, terrified.
And beneath them, the Shadow.
He extended his fingers.
The alchemical lattice beneath the lab quivered, then aligned, responding not to a circle, but to Aeon's will.
The structure of the stone came apart—not explosively, but cleanly. Dissolved into harmless crystal, no longer able to whisper, no longer able to feed on the pain of others.
The Shadow's tether was cut.
For now.
Aeon stood still in the dark, eyes faintly glowing.
His power had stirred. Not fully. Not openly. But enough.
He left the lab before dawn, his footsteps soundless, his presence undetectable.
Above, the city of East hummed back to life.
To be continued…