Prologue: The Birth of Argus
Meridian City had never been kind, but Elias Veyne once believed in it.
He had been the kind of man who trusted data more than people, an intelligence analyst buried in screens and code, untangling the hidden threads of organized crime for government agencies that claimed they wanted justice. He was good at it — patterns revealed themselves to him like constellations in the dark, strings of numbers and coded messages lighting up into truth.
But all the truth in the world hadn't saved his sister.
Her name was Marin Veyne, nineteen years old, with a voice that used to sing from their kitchen while Elias drowned in paperwork. She vanished one night without a trace, just another face lost in a city that consumed the vulnerable. Elias used everything he had — contacts, surveillance, clearance codes — to find her. And he did.
Too late.
The files came first. Hidden transactions, falsified manifests, encrypted communications. Then came the photographs, slipped anonymously onto his desk — Marin's face, lifeless, bruised, discarded in a shallow grave beyond the city limits.
The people responsible had names Elias knew. Men protected by power, by money, by Draegon's empire. He brought the evidence to his superiors. They buried it. He pushed again, harder, louder. And the machine turned on him. He was dismissed, discredited, left with nothing but grief and a truth no one would carry to light.
So Elias did what no court, no badge, no politician would do. He broke. And in breaking, he became something else.
The mask was born first.
A prototype he'd been developing long before Marin's death, intended for field analysts who couldn't risk being seen. He finished it alone in his apartment, hunched over soldering irons and shattered circuit boards until the glow of dawn cut through the blinds.
It was black, molded to the face like a predator's skull, its surface matte to swallow light. Across the visor ran a lattice of faintly glowing red lenses — not just one, but many, a constellation of eyes stitched into glass. Each lens was tuned to a different spectrum: infrared, ultraviolet, thermal, night vision, motion tracking. Individually they were powerful. Together, they gave Elias something no man had before — the illusion of omniscience.
When the mask was active, the world fractured into layers. Walls dissolved into heat signatures. Faces lit up with biometric patterns. Data scrolled in silent overlays: time stamps, coordinates, captured audio. Every breath, every movement, every heartbeat became visible.
And most of all, it concealed Elias entirely. His voice passed through a modulator, flattened and metallic, resonating with a low echo that felt less human than spectral. Behind it, Elias disappeared, replaced by a figure whose gaze could never be escaped.
He chose the name from myth. Argus Panoptes — the hundred-eyed sentinel who saw everything, who guarded without rest. If no one else would watch, then Elias would. If no one else would protect, then Elias would.
He was no longer analyst, brother, or man.
He was Argus, the Watcher in the Dark.
And so, when the rain began to fall on Meridian and the streets whispered of crime unchecked, Elias Veyne stepped into the night.
Not as himself. Never as himself again.
But as the mask. As the many-eyed.
As Argus.