Second Genesis

Grey stopped a few steps away from the old woman, Brad still slung over his shoulder and white-gold strands dancing through his hair. He looked down at her, then past her toward Xerchen pulling himself free from the ruined wall.

"What, old hag? You gonna protect the bitch?"

The old woman’s expression didn’t so much as twitch. Whatever irritation Grey had managed to drag out of her earlier was gone now, replaced by something cold and indifferent, as though his words were little more than a breeze passing over stone. "Behave yourself," she said calmly. "Otherwise, there will be consequences."

Grey snorted. "Consequences? Lady, if I had a credit for every old person who threatened me with consequences, I’d—"

Something touched his Neural Frame.

Grey stopped talking.

At first, he couldn’t even understand what was happening. The edges of his vision simply started shrinking, like the borders of some old video were closing in around him, and everything beyond that narrowing frame became nothing.

Then the resolution began to drop as well, colors bleeding together, faces losing detail, stone turning into vague grey smears until Grey blinked several times and realized he was going blind in real time.

’What the fuck?’

His Resonant Frame reacted instantly, expanding outward to replace what his eyes were losing. It was practically instinct by now. Grey had spent so long relying on Resonant Sense that losing his sight should have barely mattered, especially against someone standing directly in front of him.

Except his Resonant Sense never came back.

The moment it spread outward, something swallowed it.

Grey’s heart skipped a beat.

He knew that feeling.

That endless pull, that impossible absence, the sensation that everything reaching outward was being stripped away and dragged into a place it could never escape from. It was the exact same black-hole-like presence he had just felt from Xerchen, except the difference between the two was so absurd Grey almost wanted to laugh.

Xerchen was a puddle. This was an ocean.

’No fucking way.’

Grey’s vision vanished completely.

The old woman wasn’t some head nun. She wasn’t even a fucking nun.

’This hag is his master.’

The Immovable.

Grey had never met the Guardian before, didn’t even know what The Immovable looked like, but there was no other answer. Xerchen’s Frame was too similar, except this thing standing in front of him felt like its completed form, a monstrous endpoint that swallowed not just energy and resonance, but seemingly information itself.

And somehow, nobody else had noticed.

That was the part that made Grey’s skin crawl.

Mauve had been standing beside her. Elowen had been standing beside her. Petri had looked right at the old woman several times, and none of them had reacted like they were standing beside one of the most powerful Guardians in the entire Holy City. It wasn’t like she was hiding her face behind some illusion either.

It was almost as though the very idea of who she was had been swallowed too.

Footsteps echoed somewhere nearby.

Grey heard them for only a moment.

Another familiar figure entered the courtyard, Lloron, disciple of The Forsaken and one of the two Guardian disciples who had been present when Grey dealt with the Old One Instance. Behind him came two distinct groups of young nobles, one carrying the familiar arrogance of the Valdi, while the other belonged to the Enphro Dukedom.

Grey saw none of them.

Then he stopped hearing them too.

The sound of Xerchen pulling stone from around himself faded first, followed by distant voices, footsteps, the rustle of clothes, even the sound of Grey’s own breathing. Silence didn’t descend all at once, it crept inward piece by piece until eventually there was nothing.

Grey’s jaw tightened.

’Okay. That’s fucking annoying.’

Then his sense of balance started disappearing.

Grey couldn’t tell if he was standing straight anymore.

For a moment, he wondered if Brad was still on his shoulder.

Was his arm wrapped around the bastard’s legs? Was his other hand hanging by his side? Were his feet still touching the ground?

Grey tried to move a finger.

He had no idea if it worked.

His stomach twisted.

’Where are my fucking arms?’

For all Grey knew, The Immovable could have cut them off already.

Would he even feel it?

That thought hit harder than losing his sight ever could.

Grey had experienced death enough times that pain didn’t scare him the way it probably should have. He had been burned, crushed, blown apart, frozen, had his head explode, and had experienced enough horrible shit that if he had a therapist, if his mouth didn’t kill her first, she’d probably leap off the building herself.

But this was different. There was nothing to fight, orto dodge. Nothing to understand or grasp. It was just a vast, endless well, a gap that existed between two being on polar opposites of existence. One was an ant. The other was a mountain.

Grey couldn’t even tell whether he still had a body.

That realization sunk deeper and deeper, crawling into spaces and insecurities he didn’t even know he had. SInce when was he such a bitch? He couldn’t breathe, the air felt too heavy. Did his lungs even know how to expand and contract anymore?

For the first time in a long while, Grey felt something cold settle into his chest, and he felt a fear creeping up within him, one that he couldn’t shake.

One that was Immovable.

She was stripping him of everything that could have ever meant something to him. Even taking his voice and rendering him mute. How could he speak when he couldn’t even control his tongue?

Maybe next she might even invade the crevices of his mind and turn that black as well.

Maybe Grey would just disappear inside himself, or maybe he would disappear entirely, an erasure from existence even Prometheus couldn’t fix.

The terror of it sank into his soul.

And then came the bubbling rage that replaced it all, churning from the deepest parts of him.

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