The cultists lingered at the lip of the volcano, uncertain.
Black-robed figures with blood-red glyphs sewn into their hems stood above the smoldering maw, casting uneasy glances at one another. One of them gripped a comms crystal that flickered with erratic light, unsure whether to activate it. Reporting failure would come with consequences—heavy, painful ones. But doing nothing might be worse.
Before they could choose—
He rose.
Molten steam blasted upward, and from the heart of the volcano, Dawn leapt.
He landed on the beast-shaped stone with a hiss of vapor, the air itself bending from the sheer intensity of the heat rolling off him. He was cloaked in fire, yes—but it was the shadow that moved with menace.
Darkness crawled like a beast beneath his feet, veins of magma laced through its form like infernal arteries.
Dawn stared at the cultists.
And then—he remembered.
That smell. That pattern on their robes. That awful red gleam of blood-script…
The fire. The screams.
His town. The charred remnants of laughter. The twisted form of his young self screaming as his Mortal Shell fractured under pain and alchemical torment. And the cloaked ones—always watching, always laughing.
His fists clenched.
His heart ignited.
The Infernal Mantle around him pulsed like a living inferno, and the shadow twisted into something terrible—fangs, claws, a jaw like the void.
"You…" Dawn's voice was a low growl, burning with remembered pain. "You started the game. Let's finish it then!"
The cultists barely had time to react.
The shadow exploded forward, wrapping Dawn in monstrous tendrils that extended into bladed limbs and fanged maws. His feet never touched the ground. He glided, accelerated by fury and unnatural force, a beast in the shape of a boy wrapped in vengeance.
One cultist tried to draw a sigil—his arm was gone before he could blink.
Dawn hovered before him, face half-lit by hellish glow. "Now we can properly play the game."
The cultist screamed and vanished into the dark.
The others turned to flee.
Too late.
The shadow lunged with Dawn at its heart, and one by one, the cultists were hunted. Not with gore, but with precision. They died like shadows under a rising sun—each step he took swallowed light, each strike erased a life.
One tried to escape up the stone fangs.
Dawn glided up the wall itself, wrapped in shadow-tentacles that latched onto jagged rock, pulling him forward in a blur. His clawed silhouette eclipsed the moon for a moment—and then descended.
Another cultist vanished.
Another tried to leap away. Dawn's shadow bent aur to catch him mid-jump, ripping him back to the earth.
When it was done, the wind returned.
The mountain breathed again.
Dawn stood amid the robes and ashes, his own form simmering as the shadow retreated like a tide, wrapping him in a cloak of quiet power.
He knelt and picked up the strange device the first cultist had dropped. It sparked once, then flickered to life.
A map. A simple one.
And at its center: a glowing red dot.
His location.
His position had been broadcast the whole time.
Dawn's stomach dropped. If they found him…
He clenched the device tighter.
Ingrid.
She was the closest.
Without another thought, he sprinted down the mountain, fire and shadow trailing behind him like twin serpents.
---
Elsewhere…
Gary Amberson stood among the shards of a shattered altar, breath steady despite the thin air. A trail of ash marked where his attacker had fallen.
His twelve halos pulsed behind him—still far from their full power, but enough.
He adjusted his coat and glanced around. No more cultists. For now.
The memory came unbidden: his father, once drunk and rambling, had muttered about a group lost to time. "The Celestial Cults," he'd said. "Mad zealots who think the stars whisper back. Filthy remnants of a forgotten age. If they ever return, boy… don't wait for orders. Kill them."
Gary frowned.
They weren't supposed to exist anymore.
And yet, here they were. Attacking students.
He touched the side of his head, murmuring a light echo pulse. No response from the others.
He made a decision.
Ingrid. She's smart, but not built for sudden assault.
He turned west.
And so, from two ends of a cursed range, two forces began to converge—burning shadow and steadfast light, both racing toward the same destination:
Ingrid Lorne.
But neither knew she had already fallen into enemy hands.
---
Darkness hummed.
Not the simple absence of light—but an engineered void. Ingrid Lorne had seen darkness before, studied the properties of shadow and spatial folding, but this… this was constructed.
A prison with thought behind it.
She was suspended in midair, hovering inside a spherical puzzle-lock chamber she had just deciphered.
She couldn't see them. But she could hear them.
Whispers.
They circled around her cage, the cultists with their robes of age-old madness. She'd counted three distinct voices. One of them chuckled whenever she tried to speak. Another muttered equations—wrong equations, twisted by archaic logic. The third was silent, always listening. She could feel him.
Her Luminous Frame flickered faintly around her, its halo pulses sluggish. She grit her teeth. Eight halos, each a product of furious study and soul-deep attunement—and she could barely maintain one right now.
"The mechanism is absorbing the Primal Origin Light," she murmured, eyes scanning the glyphs on the interior wall of her prison. "Smart. Obscene. But smart."
There were symbols etched into the surface—circular, recursive, some moving of their own accord. The puzzle-lock was not merely spatial; it was logical. Her own curiosity had triggered it, and now her knowledge was being used against her.
A voice slithered through the air, sharp as frostbite.
"You solve puzzles, little scholar. How does it feel to be one?"
She didn't answer.
The voice hissed. Another voice snickered.
Ingrid closed her eyes.
Think. Think.
She replayed her last moments.
She had found the ancient construct half-buried under a waterfall of ice, its design clearly non-modern—something older, Primal Era at the latest. The language was dialectic, its runes too elegant to be brute-forced. She'd cracked the first layer and thought herself clever.
Then they came. The cultists. She hadn't even seen how they disabled her frame. The trap had sprung, and she was here.
In a prison designed for minds.
"She'll give us what we need," one of them muttered.
"Let the mechanism read her," another agreed. "We just need to do as ordered, nothing more."
Orders? They're an organisation?
Ingrid swallowed.
"…you are making a big mistake!"
They didn't respond. But the silence was confirmation enough.
Ingrid's heart pounded now—not with fear, but unease.
Her cage began to contract.
Sharp edges folded inward—not to crush, but to pierce, to extract her Primal Origin Light. She bit down hard, forcing herself to focus. She activated one halo—just one, and funneled its energy not into breaking out, but deciphering faster.
A single chance remained: solve the trap backwards.
She whispered under her breath, racing against the mechanism's pulse.
"Counter-pulse every fourth glyph… spiral logic must reverse clockwise in vacuum frames. I need—need three constants. Emotion. Intellect. Instinct."
The cage trembled.
Her Primal Origin Light surged once—just once—and a sliver of golden-blue leaked from her temple.
The device stalled.
The cultists hissed.
"Stop her!"
Too late.
The mechanism had learned something from her, but in doing so, it had revealed part of itself to her.
She saw the final glyph pattern.
Not an exit.
But a signal.
If she could pulse it once—just once—it would flare a bright beam of light outwards. And hopefully someone will see that and come to her rescue.
Anyone. Gary, Cedric, Dawn…
She clenched her fist and forced the last of her Origin Light into the rune.
A low hum resonated. Ingrid's prison shuddered.
She slumped in place, sweat soaking her robes, her mind spinning. But she smiled, faintly.
"I gave you nothing," she whispered. "But you gave me a flare."
The cultists hadn't realized it yet.
She wasn't alone!