The transition is a violent rending of reality. One moment, the screaming chaos of a dying universe, the next, the sterile hum of a stable one. The portal collapses behind us, sealing the silence of the safehouse around us like a tomb. The air here is filtered, lifeless. A grey box in a grey world, chosen for its utter lack of significance. A perfect place to hide. Or to die.
The whisper still coils in my mind, a greasy residue left by the Weaver's Child. Not a sound, but a thought planted behind my eyes. A seed of rot. I feel the blots on my mask shift, a slow, agitated swirl of black on white. A mirror to the turmoil within.
Morales watches me. The kid sees too much. He mistakes silence for pain he can fix. "You good, man?" he asks, his voice soft, hesitant. The kind of voice that gets you killed.
I turn my head, my faceless gaze landing on him. "Define good."
"I just mean… that thing. It got close. What it said to you in that journal—"
"Irrelevant," I cut him off. The word is a shard of glass. I don't do 'emotional discussion.' Emotion is a vulnerability. A weakness to be exploited by the enemy, or worse, by yourself. I move toward the central console, my trench coat sweeping over the clean floor. "Debrief. O'Hara. Status on the multiversal signature."
Miguel O'Hara, the man who leads this cult who's always so busy, we the main squad, don't even get to see him. A man who sees the multiverse as a complex machine in need of maintenance, taps at a holographic display. "Faint. Fading. It knows we're hunting it. It's learning to cover its tracks."
"Good," I grunt. "A smart predator is a predictable one. It will develop patterns. We find the pattern, we set the trap."
My gloved hand moves to the satchel at my side. My journal. My sanctuary, now invaded by rot by this creature. It was important to me, something I could always trust. My words. Now not even that is safe. Now, it feels like an anchor, dragging me down.
I place it on the metal table. The silence in the room deepens, weighted by the object's presence.
"Anything new?" Morales asks, his curiosity overriding his caution.
"We will see," I say.
I open it. The pages are brittle, smelling of ozone and something older, something like forgotten gods. When I arrived here most pages were blank. Now, they are not. As if our hunt, our proximity to the Child, has acted as a key.
Ink, blacker than the void between worlds, bleeds into the vellum. It doesn't just appear; it crawls, writhes, coiling into sentient script. Living webs of prophecy. My eyes lock onto the new passages, and a strange pressure builds behind my temples. My own voice feels distant, a tool being used by another force, as the words begin to spill from my lips. I am not reading. I am channeling.
"The Web trembles…" I begin, the sound hollow in the sterile room. Morales takes an involuntary step back. O'Hara leans forward, his face a mask of cold, predatory analysis. "…before the coming Unraveling. Six threads are pulled from the Great Pattern. Six hunts. Six masks. Only one sees the end."
My gaze drifts over the two of them. I feel like a pawn in a game, my choice stripped away. I hate games I don't control.
The ink continues to flow, and I continue to speak its venom.
"A child born of echoes will devour its own reflection. It seeks a vessel. It seeks a face."
My hand tightens on the edge of the book. The whisper from the creature echoes again. I know what's under there. I know the real you.
Then, the final lines appear, stark and damning, aimed at me with the precision of a sniper's bullet. "A mask without a face will end the Child or become it. The Web will hunger for its reflection."
The words hang in the air, thick and poisonous. A mask without a face. The ink on my own mask seems to pulse, a slow, rhythmic beat. My identity, the thing I forged in filth and fury to stare back at a world that refused to see, was now a line in a cursed storybook.
"A warning," Morales says, his voice barely a whisper. "It's telling us what we have to do. Maybe… maybe how to save everyone!"
O'Hara scoffs, though his eyes remain fixed on the journal. "It's not a warning. It's tactical intelligence. A variable in the equation. 'End the Child or become it.' That implies a choice. Or a failsafe. We can use this."
They dissect it. They interpret it. They accept it. They see a path laid out for them, a destiny to be followed or fought against. They are fools.
"No," I snarl. The sound rips from my chest, raw and full of contempt. "You see a script. You see fate. I see a cage."
I stare down at the moving ink, at the words that presume to know my end. They speak of destiny as if it's an immutable law, like gravity. But I have seen men defy gravity. That moment is all that matters. The choice.
"Destiny is a narrative for cowards who fear choice," I spit, my voice low and dangerous. With a surge of rage, I slam the journal shut. The sound cracks through the room like a gunshot, making both of them flinch. The book lies dormant, a dead thing once more.
"The creature is an anomaly. A threat. We hunt it because it is a cancer on reality. That is the mission. That is the only 'why' we need," I declare, my faceless gaze sweeping over them. "We hunt it on our terms, not by script."
I leave them there, their doubts and strategies hanging in the quiet air. I need a room. A box to contain the rage. I find a small, featureless chamber and lock the door behind me. The silence is a pressure cooker.
For an hour, I stand in the dark, forcing my breathing to even out, forcing the patterns on my mask to still. But the words of the prophecy are hooks, dug deep into my mind. A mask without a face. My reflection in the dark monitor of a nearby console is a void. A blank slate. A question.
My control frays. The need to know, to understand the weapon the universe intends to use against me, is an itch I cannot ignore. My hand moves against my will, pulling the journal from my coat. It feels warm to the touch.
Alone in the dark, I open it again. I don't look at the script. My attention is caught by the margins. There, sketched in the same living ink, are images. Diagrams. Variations of spider-emblems from a thousand dead worlds. And then I see it.
A sketch of a mask. It's shaped like mine, like all of ours. But it has no features. No eyes. Just a smooth, white, ovoid surface. A perfect, horrifying blankness. Faceless. Utterly and completely. The reflection the Web will hunger for.
A cold dread, something I haven't felt in years, trickles down my spine. This is the 'mask without a face.' Not just a description of me, but a final form. An evolution. Or a devolution.
I close my eyes, my gloved fingers tracing the edge of the sketch. The world can write its stories. The universe can set its stage. But the actor still chooses how to play the part. My part is the hunter. Nothing more.
I whisper it to the silence, a vow made to myself. "I choose the hunt… not the ending."
I look at my reflection in the dark screen again. But something is wrong. The familiar, shifting Rorschach patterns on my mask are gone. For a fleeting, terrifying moment, the ink has smoothed and settled, receding into a perfect, blank, white oval. The exact, faceless design from the journal's page. A destiny already taking shape on my own face, laughing at the choice I just claimed to possess.