The half-finished cello sat on his workbench, a silent monument to the life Silas was leaving behind. He packed a single duffel bag with a few clothes, a small amount of cash, and a worn photograph of him and Lia laughing on a park bench. He looked at the picture for a long moment, his thumb tracing her smile. The knot in his stomach tightened. This wasn't just running; it was an act of severance. He was cutting himself from the world he knew, for its own good.
Stepping out into the pre-dawn darkness, the cold air felt heavy and unforgiving. He didn't dare take his car. It was too visible, too traceable. Instead, he walked, a ghost slipping through the silent streets. As he reached the edge of town, he risked a glance back. The streetlights flickered in an erratic rhythm, a final, broken pulse from the world he had created and was now abandoning.
He walked for hours, the rural highway a long, empty ribbon stretching out before him. The only sound was the crunch of his boots on the gravel. He kept his head down, but his senses were on high alert. He didn't need to see the rearview mirror to know he was being followed. He could feel it, an uncomfortable presence a few miles back, like a faint static in the air. The Collectors were already on his trail.
The world around him was not the same. It was breaking in big, violent ways now. Ahead, he saw a stretch of asphalt shimmer in the morning light, rippling like heat haze from a scorching road. Except the air was cool, and the distortion wasn't heat. It was the road itself, briefly turning liquid, causing the cars on the opposite side of the highway to swerve wildly. Silas felt that familiar, primal instinct rise in him again. He didn't think; he simply was the path he wanted the road to be. The liquid asphalt hardened into a solid, albeit bumpy, surface for the brief moment he needed to cross it, a perfectly smooth passage in a river of chaos.
He kept moving, but every mile was a new challenge. He felt the threads of reality fraying. A dense fog, cold and unnatural, rolled in with impossible speed, chilling him to the bone. A stand of old pine trees up ahead suddenly twisted and contorted, their trunks spiraling into grotesque, knotted shapes. The anomalies were no longer contained to a single town; they were a systemic failure, a virus spreading across the globe.
He was a hundred miles from home when the first memory came back to him. It wasn't a flashback of starlight or geometric patterns. It was a feeling. A feeling of purpose, of knowing where to go, even though his human mind had no idea. He felt drawn toward an old, abandoned forest just off the main road, a place marked on his map only as "Deadwood Forest." People in the town spoke of it in hushed tones, a place where compasses didn't work and lost things were never found.
He walked into the tree line, leaving the road and the pursuing black sedan behind. The moment he stepped under the canopy, the world shifted. The static in the air vanished. His senses, which had been screaming for hours, finally quieted. The forest felt… stable. It was a place where the laws of nature, his laws, held strong.
After an hour of walking, he found it. Tucked away behind a cluster of ancient oak trees, almost hidden from view, was a stone altar, not of modern make, but a single, smooth slab of granite covered in faded, strange symbols. They weren't words. They were symbols of concepts he instinctively understood: the flow of time, the dance of gravity, the composition of matter. His human mind couldn't read them, but his deeper self recognized them as a language. A language he had written.
Lying on the center of the altar was a small, smooth, obsidian sphere, pulsing with a faint, warm light. It was no bigger than his palm, but it hummed with an energy that vibrated in his bones. He reached out and touched it. The moment his fingers made contact, an overwhelming surge of information, of memory, and of pure, unbridled power flooded his mind. It was terrifying, but for the first time since he left his town, it wasn't a feeling of wrongness. It was a feeling of truth.
The sphere was a piece of him. A fragment of Gor'rak's essence that he had left behind as an anchor, a failsafe. He knew now that this was his path. Not to run, but to find the other pieces he had left. He had to reassemble himself to save a world that was falling apart without its maker. He was on a mission, and the terror of being hunted was now replaced by the grim determination of finding all of himself again.