POV: Bela Talbot
Strength wasn't just power.
It was discipline, precision—control.
It was waking up at five a.m. to master how to kill someone with your pinky. It was smiling in silk while building an empire from shadows.
And it was knowing that one day, someone might try to take it all away.
So I would make myself into something they couldn't touch.
"Again," Don said calmly.
The knife in my hand slipped, fast and silent, across the surface of the dummy.
Not wood. Not cloth.
Flesh-substitute. Runed clay and animal muscle wrapped in alchemical sinew. It bled like a real body. Reacted like one too.
"Good." Don walked around me, watching my footwork. "But shift your center. If you telegraph the wrist turn, a trained fighter will catch it."
"I don't plan to give them the chance," I said flatly, adjusting.
He chuckled.
"That's the point."
Training
I had committed myself fully now—formally and relentlessly.
Don was my physical tutor: martial forms, weapon discipline, and how to end things cleanly. He trained assassins during the Spanish Inquisition and cult-breakers during the Cold War. The techniques he gave me were elegant, brutal, and timeless.
Maggie, in contrast, taught finesse. Style. Poison. How to weaponize social space.
"You must be beautiful, not just for their eyes," she said, lacing a corset over my training leathers. "But for their assumptions. Let them underestimate you."
I could now kill in lace.
And do so while quoting spell theory.
I trained with cold weapons—blades, spikes, hidden needles—and firearms, although I preferred close combat.
"I don't want to rely on Void magic alone," I told Don one morning, sweating and breathless after disarming him in under three moves.
He nodded.
"Power is not endurance. It's a resource. The body is your foundation. Strengthen both."
That same week, Maggie enchanted my first personalized weapons set—a folding fan with razor runes, twin karambits inscribed in High Infernal, and a pair of fire-shot cuffs that could incinerate an enemy's hands if they grabbed my wrists.
They were beautiful. Deadly.
Like me.
The Organization – Early Form
By the time my training grew routine, so did the murmurs.
I had followers.
Loyal girls from school. Recruited minds I could shape. Borrowers I had taught to make power from ingredients. The magically sensitive. One boy who'd been bitten by a wraith and survived.
And Beth, of course. My first. My closest.
I needed structure.
Not cultish chaos.
Structure.
"They'll come to you for power," Don said. "But they'll stay if you give them purpose."
"I want an organization," I said, eyes focused on the pages of a hand-bound grimoire I'd copied by hand from a French black-market archive. "But one that can function in both the supernatural and mundane worlds."
He leaned in.
"Explain."
So I did.
We'd disguise witches as "psychics"—something softer, less threatening. The word made hunters hesitate, not attack.
We'd also recruit trained humans: veterans who had seen things, who'd survived what others hadn't. People hungry for revenge, meaning, or both.
My core agents would wear no signs. No names. Just clean cover identities built through forged documents, dead-end trails, and magical laundering.
I needed forgers. Hackers. Charmers. Ritualists. And muscle.
"Hunters will distrust you," Don said.
"I don't care," I replied. "I won't be working for them. I'll build a system they'll depend on."
We designed a quest board system—coded contracts that would circulate through a sealed network: kill contracts, tracking jobs, rescue operations.
All jobs would be paid. Hunters wouldn't beg—they'd be hired.
A percentage would go to us.
And we'd use that money to grow.
Profit – The Glamour Behind the Veil
I've always liked profit.
Not just money.
Power through economy.
Maggie understood.
"She prefers markets to monsters," she said once with a laugh.
So we created the foundation of a company that would use harvested monster parts—carefully sterilized, magically filtered—and transform them into products.
Siren glands for high-end perfumes
Ghoul bone powder for experimental medicine
Vampire blood diluted into longevity creams (mostly illusion)
Fairy dust as stimulant-laced luxury lip balm
Above ground? Glamorous. Expensive.
Underground? A miracle resource for hunters, mages, and black-market specialists.
I called it Silverhollow Industries.
Beth just smiled and called it "terrifyingly brilliant."
Loyalty: The Sigil
Even with these structures forming, I needed a control point.
I didn't believe in free power. Not for long.
So I developed a sigil of loyalty—a magical imprint placed through ritual, hidden beneath the skin. It would not bind them completely, but it would allow me to:
Cut their access to magical supply
Disrupt their focus in combat
Send a warning pulse directly to their hearts if they ever betrayed me
Not yet the Chronolock—but close.
The sigil was reversible.
Chronolock would not be.
Progress on the Chronolock
The spell that would define my authority.
Chronolock was more than a binding—it was ownership of power itself.
When completed, it would allow me to revoke what I gave, call it back into myself, or redistribute it. Borrowers would be nothing without me. Naturals would burn trying to sever it.
But it wasn't finished.
The matrices weren't stable yet. Recoil tests had ruptured a test subject's aura—she survived, but only barely.
Beth watched me refine it every night in candlelight.
"You're almost there," she said.
"I'll finish it before twelve."
"Why then?"
"Because by then, I'll need it."
She didn't ask what I meant.
She trusted me.
Divination – The Thread That Binds
I began divination studies in the evenings, seated in circles of powdered crystal and incense under moonlight.
I was good at it.
Too good.
The Void must've done more than change me—it had marked me.
I could see deeper than I should've.
Twisted timelines. Dead stars. Echoes of possible deaths I hadn't died.
And one night, during a mirror scrying ritual, I felt something pulling.
Not from this world.
Not from Hell.
From the Void.
It had followed me.
Or tried to.
A shape, not a form. A will. A hunger that should not have survived—but tried.
The mirror rippled.
The air warped.
My blood froze.
Then something inside me—something ancient and newly formed—pushed back.
The glass shattered.
I screamed.
Don and Maggie were beside me in seconds.
But whatever had reached…
It hadn't succeeded.
It had seen me again.
Late Night – A Conversation
"I'm not scared," I said to Maggie.
"No," she agreed. "But you are unsettled."
I nodded.
"Good," she said. "Unsettled means you're still growing."
Don stepped in then. Set a heavy book in front of me.
"What's this?"
"A first edition of Astral Inversion and Dimensional Anchorwork. The original author went mad."
"Delightful."
I flipped the cover open.
I wanted more.
More knowledge. More precision. More control.
My fingers itched for ink. For circles and wards and rewritten fate.
I wanted to know everything.
Final Thoughts
That night, I stood alone on the balcony, hair loose, silk robe rustling in the wind.
The stars shimmered above Savannah.
And something shimmered below.
A ripple.
Not danger.
But… coincidence sharpening into intent.
A place. A path. A town.
Soon.