Silence. That's the only thing my apartment ever truly offered, and now it was a heavy, suffocating blanket. Julia sat on the edge of my worn-out sofa, her posture too straight, her hands folded neatly in her lap. She was taller than Dao, with messy black hair stuck to her damp cheeks and glasses slightly askew on her nose. But her new red eyes, while still wide, weren't darting around in panic anymore. They were just… empty. Fixed on a crack in the floorboards as if it held all the answers.
Dao noticed. She stood by the window, arms crossed, not looking at the street but at the reflection of the room behind her. Her jaw was tight. I could feel the weird tension radiating from her, a hot, prickly static in the air. It was stupid, but I understood it. This stranger had crashed into our nightmare and was now looking at me like I was some kind of anchor. It felt like she was stealing something, though I couldn't name what.
The air in the room grew cold. A shadow in the corner deepened, and Kephriel stepped out of it. He looked… offended. His perfect features were twisted into a scowl of pure, majestic disdain.
"That common Devileater,"
he spat, the words like chips of ice.
"A disgrace. Repelled by a emotional parasite."
His glowing eyes locked onto me, and I felt that familiar hollow ache in my chest intensify.
"The creature is attuned to you, hollow boy. It feasts on your particular flavor of despair. It will not stop. It will grow fat and bold until it can physically unspool your soul from your ribs."
"So what do we do?" Niran's voice was rough with frustration. "We can't fight it."
"We do not send a child to do an executioner's work," Kephriel declared. "We are going to the Scorched Markets. A bazaar in the purgatorial layers. We will find the strongest Devileater to ever grace the void, and we will hire it."
His gaze slid to Julia. She flinched under his attention, a tiny, involuntary tremor returning to her still hands. Her breath hitched. The panic was trying to claw its way back.
"This one is useless like this," Kephriel stated, his tone utterly clinical. "Anxiety is a currency, but it is weak, diluted. For a transaction of this magnitude, we need a purer form of payment."
He didn't ask. A single, whisper-thin chain, no thicker than a thread, unspooled from his wrist and touched Julia's forehead.
She gasped. And then, all the tension drained from her body. The tremor vanished. Her hands went completely still. She slowly leaned back against the couch cushions, her posture becoming languid, almost relaxed. Her red eyes lost their frantic sheen and gained a deep, unsettling serenity. She looked at Kephriel, then at me, and offered a small, peaceful smile. It was the most terrifying thing I'd seen all day.
"There," Kephriel said, as if he'd just tidied up. "A soul's anxious energy, refined into pure, marketable calm. A much more valuable trade good. Now. We go."
His chains wrapped around us, not as restraints, but as a cage. The world didn't fade; it unraveled. The beige paint of my wall bled into the air, the sound of the city stretching into a high-pitched whine that vibrated in my teeth. I felt a nauseating lurch, not in my stomach, but in my soul. We were falling through the layers.
We landed on something that wasn't quite ground. It felt like solid black glass, but it was warm under my sneakers and hummed with a low, sub-audible frequency. The air hit me first—it was thick, scorchingly hot, and smelled of ozone, ash, and something coppery, like blood on the wind.
I looked up, and my breath caught in my throat.
The sky was a swirling, bruise-colored vortex. Jagged obsidian stalactites hung from a ceiling I couldn't see, dripping globs of sizzling… something… that hit the ground and vanished. This place was vast, a cavern that stretched into a dizzying, impossible infinity.
"Do not gawk. It marks you as prey," Kephriel's voice was a low thrum in my mind, not my ears.
We followed him down a winding path through the market. Stalls weren't built; they were grown from crystalline structures, or woven from shifting shadows, or floated within spheres of captured light. The vendors… my mind struggled to process them. A creature with too many mouths was haggling with a floating, sentient smoke. A being made of shifting, mirrored glass reflected nightmares I quickly looked away from. The cacophony wasn't just sound; it was a psychic pressure, a thousand alien thoughts brushing against my mind. I heard clicks, hisses, and the occasional, crystal-clear whisper in a language I'd never heard but somehow understood the intent of—desire, trade, consume.
We passed a stall selling jars of captured laughter that sounded like screaming. Another offered vials of liquid starlight. The sheer, overwhelming strangeness of it was a weight on my chest.
Kephriel moved with purpose, a glorious shark moving through lesser fish that instinctively gave him a wide berth. He led us to a quieter section of the market, where the stalls were simple, dark stone podiums. This was where the mercenaries gathered.
And then I saw it.
It stood alone, apart from the others. It was humanoid, tall, and clad in armor that seemed forged from the absence of light itself. Its helmet was featureless except for a single, vertical slit that glowed with a cold, ancient blue light. It didn't move. It didn't need to. Its absolute, silent authority was a pressure that made the air around it feel dense and still. This was the one. The Wailing Void.
Kephriel didn't haggle. He gestured to Julia, who stepped forward with that unnerving calm. The Devileater's blue slit focused on her. It was assessing the product. The payment. After a moment that stretched into eternity, it gave a single, slow nod. The trade was accepted.
Keph held out his arm, Julia's anxiousness in his hand.
The return trip was another nauseating lurch through reality. We stumbled back into my apartment, the sudden, mundane silence a physical shock. The beige walls, the dusty floor—it all seemed cheap and fake after the market's terrifying grandeur.
The artificial calm Kephriel had imposed on Julia began to fade, but a deep, unsettling serenity remained in her red eyes. She looked at me, and for the first time, there was no fear, just a quiet, unnerving intensity.
"It's going to be okay, Rafael,"
she said, her voice soft and certain.
Before anyone could speak, the air in my apartment turned freezing. The lightbulb overhead flickered and died with a pop. From the corner of the room, a small, wretched form coalesced out of the shadows. It was on my ceiling, its sagging grey skin clinging to the plaster, its huge black eyes fixed on me. In its clawed hand, the tiny vial of my evaporated tears now glowed with a sickly light.
The bottom-feeder had found us. It was here.
And it was no longer alone. Shadows peeled away from the walls, taking the form of two more of its kind, their puckered mouths smiling identical, vacant smiles.
"They multiply..."
Niran whispered.
Suddenly, the devileater we hired walked in through a portal, his eyes full of anger.