Lucien stood before the manor.
It was a pitiful sight.
The once-beautiful and intricate stone engravings, which were proudly displayed on the mansion's walls, had been reduced to mere smudges on what was now a blackened slate. The fountain he once knew and adored when he was a child was in shambles, and the foundation itself had been burned to the ground.
He eyed the two stone protrusions in the ground a couple of feet away and thought silently to himself.
Lucien turned his back on the estate.
Rain thundered overhead, dark clouds pressing low against the treeline. The wind carried the faint smell of ash even though the fire itself burned out years ago.
Lucien walked the overgrown path leading away from the ruins, boots crunching over gravel and dead leaves. Ten years. A decade since that night, yet the weight in his chest felt as heavy as the day it happened.
He hadn't come back since.
The Gray Man. He thought with a distinct kind of intensity.
He had been the cause of this.
His parents' bodies had never been found.
Lucien stopped at the edge of the forest. He hadn't cried when it happened and he wouldn't now.
He looked at his hands.
On his arms, thin silver chains shimmered faintly, coiling as if they were alive.
He remembered the torture he went through, the cold and the fire, the chains the Gray Man had wrapped around him, and how in the midst of that pain everything had gone blank. When he woke, the world was silent, his parents gone, and yet somehow, in that emptiness, the chains had been born within him.
He didn't understand it himself, but whatever it was, it was growing stronger.
He needed it to grow stronger.
Lucien clenched his fists until his knuckles went white.
He would find the Gray Suits. He would find the Gray Man.
And when he did, he would drag all of them down with him, straight to hell.
His train of thought was then suddenly interrupted by a voice.
"Yo, Lucien, where the hell are you, man!" A voice echoed in the distance.
Max? Lucien thought.
The crunch of footsteps came a moment later, and then Max appeared between the trees, his jacket thoroughly soaked from the heavy overpour, his hair plastered to his forehead. He looked out of place here in the middle of nowhere, like someone who belonged in the hum of the city, not the skeleton of a dying forest.
"There you are," Max said, breathing hard. "You vanish into the woods without saying a word, and you want me to just sit in the car? In the dark? You didn't even tell me what the hell this place was."
Lucien didn't answer immediately. His head tilted to the right, letting the silence stretch for a few seconds before muttering, "Didn't think you'd follow me..."
Max snorted. "Yeah, well, I did. Someone's got to make sure you don't fall into a hole or get eaten by whatever the fuck's out here." He paused, eyes flicking toward the blackened ruins beyond the trees. "What is this place, anyway?"
Max had been his only friend since the beginning. The only one who stuck around when the foster homes changed, when the other kids whispered about the quiet boy with the strange eyes who didn't talk much. Max didn't care about the rumors. He never asked about the scars either, or why Lucien sometimes vanished for hours with no explanation.
But even Max didn't know about Ashvale. About the Gray Man.
"It's nothing," Lucien turned back toward the path. "Let's go."
Max frowned, clearly unconvinced, but he didn't push. That was another thing about him: he knew when to shut up.
The two of them made their way back through the trees, the rain picking up, the old road a cracked ribbon leading to a rusted-out car sitting on the shoulder. Max's pride and joy, though it looked like it had been salvaged from a scrapyard and reassembled with duct tape.
The drive back was quiet at first. Max tapped the steering wheel, eyes on the slick road winding toward the lights of Ironvale in the distance.
"You know bro," Max said finally, "normal people don't drag their friends out into the middle of nowhere just to stare at burned-down houses. A little weird, man. Even for you."
Lucien stayed looking straight ahead. "Never asked you to come."
"Yeah, well, tough. Someone's gotta keep you from brooding yourself to death." Max glanced at him, then sighed when Lucien didn't bite back. "Whatever. Let's just get home before this heap of shit dies on us again."
Home was a narrow, peeling-walled apartment wedged between two other crumbling buildings in the lower stacks of Ironvale. It wasn't much, but the rent was cheap, and no one asked questions, which allowed for questionable activity.
By the time they parked and climbed the creaking stairs, Max was muttering about the rain, the road, and the car battery while Lucien stayed silent, lost in thoughts of chains and ash and a faceless man in the fire.
Tonight had changed nothing, just like always.
But soon, it would.