She walked through the main gate.
Light-gray metal bloomed behind her—folding into itself like a steel flower, smooth and structured, etched with designs too elegant to be man-made. Mechanical wheels turned softly along the inside, locking together with a soft hum.
Then a groan.
Then a deep, final thud.
The gate sealed.
No turning back.
The forest air hit her like a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. Cold, clear, still touched with snow. The trees stood silent, branches coated in white, but the road below her feet remained untouched—dry, clean, as if even the snow knew not to linger on this path.
And just beside the gate, like something left by accident, was the car.
Gray-blue. Modern. Four doors. Tires sunken just a little into the dirt like it had been there for longer than it should've.
She approached.
The handle clicked open without resistance.
Inside, everything was ready.
Keys in the ignition.
Seat warm.
And in the backseat—four bags.
One wrapped neatly in wax paper, with Noah's angular handwriting on the side.
Another—simple brown cloth tied with twine. Ariela's touch.
A third—black with a paper tag listing the contents. James. Of course.
And the last?
Bright red plastic with a note scrawled in marker and barely legible handwriting:
"If you crash I'm haunting you. – J."
She almost laughed.
Almost.
Instead, she got in.
The car gave a soft hum as the engine turned.
The A/C kicked on gently, warmth curling around her legs and chest. It smelled like cinnamon. Or maybe that was just the food in the back.
She adjusted her grip on the wheel.
Put her foot gently on the brake.
Then the gear shift—down into drive.
The tires rolled forward with a crunch as gravel shifted beneath them.
And slowly, steadily, she began her journey down the long, narrow road through the woods.
Away from Menystria.
Away from the impossible.
She reached for the radio and twisted the knob.
Nothing.
Just silence.
No static. No hum. No broken fragments of news or songs from the old world. Just the void of an empty frequency. She let her hand fall back to the wheel.
Of course.
The outside world was a mess.
But now she had stories to tell it. Names. Truths. A future that could actually exist if people stopped killing each other for power, if they stopped making idiotic oaths to gods they didn't understand.
She exhaled through her nose, trying to shake the chill off her thoughts.
Trees flanked both sides of the road, tall and skeletal. Nothing moved between them. Not birds. Not deer. No howling things or flickering shades. Just trees, snow, and quiet.
It should've creeped her out.
But it didn't.
It was almost peaceful.
No living shadows trailing behind her.
No tree women humming warnings into her ear.
No men with hammers capable of imploding the planet just to prove a point.
And definitely no—
She groaned.
"—no flirty, stupid shadow gods proposing just because I didn't die from seeing their stupid, catchy little eyes," she muttered.
She wasn't smiling.
But she wasn't frowning either.
She reached behind the seat with her still-bandaged hand. The pain had dulled to a throb now—more annoying than unbearable.
She dug around until her fingers brushed metal.
Pulled out a cold can.
The label read "SPACE-FLAVORED."
Of course it did.
She popped it open.
It fizzed softly in the quiet.
She brought the can to her lips and took a sip.
Peach.
Blueberry?
She wasn't sure.
Not unpleasant, but not something she'd choose again. Definitely not soda you drink without second-guessing.
Still.
She'd opened it.
She had to finish it now.
She took another sip—too much this time—and coughed, the bubbles catching in her throat. Her eyes watered slightly as she blinked through it, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist.
And then, it came.
Not all at once.
But memory.
Menystria.
The stupid, impossible city with floating islands and gods who didn't act like gods.
She thought about the first day—when she'd run across that bridge with shadow tendrils lashing at her heels, her voice recorder slipping from her coat and vanishing into the crater below. She'd never even looked back to see where it fell.
She remembered the Citadel—when James and Evodil turned its stone halls into warzones, arguing about whether she should live or die, punching holes into god-forged walls.
And Evodil… defended her.
She remembered the way he stood in front of her like it meant something. Like she meant something.
Then there was Neruin.
If he even existed.
An eel? An anglerfish? A hallucination? Maybe just stress. But he had a weird charisma, and teeth too sharp to be human, and somehow she'd survived that, too.
And Evodil again—
Lifting her up like she weighed nothing.
Telling her—
No.
She shook her head.
Enough about him.
Stupid shadow man.
Proposing like that to a poor, innocent human girl.
Pervert.
She took another sip.
She looked back at the road.
Still nothing but trees.
The same snowy limbs stretched above, silent and swaying. Maybe it would be like this for miles. Maybe she'd pass right around the continent and end up back at the gate again like nothing ever happened.
She took another sip of the soda.
Then, almost without realizing it, she started to hum.
A slow, looping melody—one her parents taught her. They said it was their wedding song.
Soft.
Old.
Something with warmth tucked inside every note.
She smirked, eyes drifting shut for a brief second.
A literal god got into her head.
How stupid is that.
She opened her eyes.
And something stood on the road ahead.
A figure.
Tall.
Too tall.
It wasn't a deer.
It wasn't anything that belonged here.
Seven feet? Eight? Maybe more. It stood perfectly still in the center of the road, framed by bare trees and falling snow.
Its hair hung long and black, trailing across the asphalt like ink. Tendrils coiled out from its back—slowly pulsing, too smooth to be muscles, too alive to be cloth.
Its limbs were two-toned—white from the top, black from the elbow down, like paint poured over bone. The chest was worse—a crack, jagged and glowing faintly like a broken TV screen, flickering blue and red.
Then she saw the antlers.
Massive.
Sprawling.
Reaching so high above the windshield she couldn't see where they ended.
And just before she could slam on the brakes—
She saw the eye.
One giant, unblinking eye in the center of its skull.
Staring straight at her.
Right through the glass.
Then—
Gone.
No sound.
No blur.
Just empty road again.
She looked around, eyes wide, foot hovering over the brake.
What if she hit it?
She didn't mean to.
What if it was alive? What if it was one of the shades from the city? What if it got lost? What if—
She checked the mirrors.
Left. Right. Nothing.
The road stretched on behind her, empty.
But something pulled at her spine.
She turned.
And there it was.
In the back seat.
Its head bowed just slightly, tilted like a puppet waiting for command.
Long black hair coiled over its chest like wet seaweed. The tendrils had gone still, wrapped tight around its ribs, the cracked glow in its torso pulsing slow and steady. Antlers pressed into the roof of the car, scraping slightly as it adjusted.
And that eye.
Still wide. Still watching.
She barely opened her mouth.
"What the h—"
The tendril moved.
It didn't twitch. It didn't hiss.
It pierced.
Straight through the back of her skull. Out the front. Shattering the window in one clean motion.
A single, wet crack.
Blood splashed across the dash.
Her body slumped forward, hands twitching once before going still.
The wheel spun.
The car swerved.
Right, then left—then slammed into a tree with a dull, twisting crunch.
The branch didn't bend.
Her corpse landed on it face-first, the broken bone jutting clean through what was left of her head.
And the creature?
It didn't move.
It didn't speak.
But the air—
the air felt joyful.
The kind of joy that didn't need celebration.
Like something fulfilled a promise.
Like Christmas to a thing that had never known gifts.
And after one final look around—
it vanished.
No sound.
No smoke.
Just—
Gone.
Like it was never there.
Like a hallucination.
Except for the blood.
Except for the wreck.
Except for the girl, dead and alone in the snow.
Evodil stood twenty meters from the wreck.
No blindfold.
No coat.
Just a smirk pulling at the corners of his lips as he scanned the road like a man about to win a bet.
In his hand, he held something.
Small. Plastic. Worn.
A voice recorder.
The same one she dropped into the crater on her first day.
Perfectly intact.
He waved it slightly in the air.
"Caroline?"
No answer.
"You're gonna run me over, aren't you," he muttered to himself. "Come on, i got something!"
Still nothing.
He stepped forward, smirk growing. "I've got a surprise for you, dumbass—guess what I found—"
Then he turned.
And saw it.
The wreck.
Steam curling from the hood. Window shattered. Blood sprayed across the interior like red mist.
The driver-side door was open.
His pupils—those tiny white dots—widened. Sharpened. Began to shake as he stepped forward slowly.
No.
Not this.
Not now.
Not her.
He reached the car.
She was still there.
Slumped.
Head shattered open—half of it still pressed against the wheel, the rest scattered across the dashboard and cracked glass.
Evodil didn't speak.
He didn't blink.
He just stared.
The recorder slipped from his hand.
Hit the ground.
Soft.
Useless.
His mouth parted like he was going to speak—but no words came.
The Joker card—
Could it?
No.
Maybe Noah—
James?
Jasper?
Anyone?
She was supposed to talk to him every week.
She was supposed to keep her promise.
Maybe—
His knees wobbled.
His pupils shrank.
And then—
He split.
The body he wore—the human shape he clung to for over a century—peeled apart. A shell. Pale and hollow. It collapsed forward like a broken puppet.
And from it came the other half.
The real half.
The shadow thing.
The fury and chaos and hate—screaming. Wordless. Raw. Like a tear in the air itself.
It tried to crawl away from the body. From the scene. From her.
But he couldn't.
They couldn't.
The two halves snapped back together with a sickening pull.
Evodil fell to his knees.
Gasping.
Choking.
And then vomiting black essence onto the dirt, staining the white snow beneath him like tar.
He kept vomiting.
Black at first. Then red.
More and more.
Until the ground was stained—snow drowned in darkness and old blood.
The body he'd worn for over a century—
Finally bleeding.
Not magic.
Not divine ichor.
Just human blood.
The price of wearing skin that wasn't his.
And when it stopped—when his lungs stopped convulsing and his throat stopped burning—
He started to laugh.
A low, broken wheeze of a sound.
It cracked through his ribs, staggered out of his mouth in dry, choking coughs. He laughed at himself. At her. At the others.
At Noah, hiding in books and thinking that would save them.
At James, forging order with a hammer and thinking that would hold.
At Jasper, pretending his jokes made him untouchable.
At Caroline—because she trusted him.
At himself—because he let her.
He put his faith in a human.
A regular, soft, breakable, temporary thing.
He thought—maybe—
Just maybe—
He could stop being a monster.
He thought he could change.
He thought she—
He stopped laughing.
Slowly, he stood.
His coat was soaked.
His shirt stained.
Blood in his hair, on his chin, across his hands. Some hers. Some his. All of it pointless.
He didn't look back.
Didn't dare.
He already knew what waited there.
Already knew what would happen if he saw it again.
So he limped forward.
One step.
Then another.
Back toward Menystria.
Back toward the place that let him pretend.
He already knew what had to happen now.
To him.
To the world.
And most of all—
To humanity.
He reached the Gate.
It opened on its own.
Of course it did.
It always obeyed him.
Unlike her.
Unlike those useless worms in the underground district who thought faith was enough.
He stepped through.
His pupils still shaking. His thoughts flickering like broken lights behind his teeth.
Island to island.
The floating roads of Menystria that once shimmered with ambient life now dimmed as he passed.
The birds—usually singing—fell quiet.
The shades—usually chatting, lounging, moving—vanished indoors.
Some peeked through windows.
But only for a second.
Then they hid.
He walked.
One island.
Then the next.
He silenced them all without saying a word.
And the worst part?
They didn't notice the blood on his hands.
Didn't see her stains on his coat.
Didn't see his eyes—truly see them—with no blindfold.
Didn't see the black hair that wasn't dyed anymore.
They didn't notice.
Not like she did.
Never like her.
The bridge greeted him next.
The one that connected it all.
The final divide.
He stepped through the gate of light—Noah's invention. Meant to disintegrate anything unauthorized.
It didn't touch him.
It never could.
He was hard-coded into the world.
Untouchable.
Unworthy of mercy.
He walked into the Citadel.
And there they were.
Noah.
Jasper.
James.
Waiting.
Jasper gasped, shielding his face with his arm the second he saw Evodil without the blindfold. He pressed himself against the far wall, silent.
James didn't flinch.
Noah's stare tightened behind his glasses.
Neither said anything about the eyes.
But both noticed the blood.
James was first. "What happened?"
Evodil smirked.
But not the kind they knew.
Not the chaotic grin of a man with a bad idea.
Not the sly curve of a joke.
Not the quiet warmth he'd given her during coffee and clipped conversations.
This one was different.
This was direction.
He looked at them.
And told them his plan.
To curse humanity.
To curse the world.
To curse the universe, if it dared cross him.
Because he tried.
He trusted.
He gave it a chance.
And the world took it away.