The morning air hit my lungs. It tasted of rain and wet bark, nothing like the air I remembered breathing on the way in, though I couldn’t have said why.
The first step was, in fact, a lawn of ferns. I filed no complaint, on the grounds that it would be enjoyed.
I stood in the dirt and listened to the gate fold in on itself behind me. The glow died out until nothing was left but a low ring of scorched stone.
I wanted to try something.
I raised my hand and aimed two fingers at a nearby oak, mostly to see if I still could.
Umbra gathered at the tip without my asking it to, compressing into a dense purple sphere.
I released it before I had decided to.
The beam tore across the clearing and vaporised the oak. It punched through four more trees behind it, leaving a smoking fissure along the ground.
The woods went silent.
Your world is crowded with mana. The air alone is almost insulting.
He sounded impressed.
The only thing I do not like about this place is the sky. It is grey and it does nothing.
“What’s wrong with it?”
Look up. Your trees do not even glow. What is the point of growing that tall if you are not going to do anything interesting with the leaves?
“They make good shade.”
Boring. But I will allow it.
“System window,” I said, and felt faintly ridiculous doing it, which I suspected had been the point of telling me to do it out loud.
A panel unfolded in the corner of my vision, like before. A thin bar sat at the top, empty, a zero beside it, and it wasn’t the merge bar. That one had finished its work and gone, and whatever this one was counting hadn’t started yet.
Beneath it sat five words, and it took me a moment to understand why they stopped my breath.
[ STRENGTH: 24 | AGILITY: 29 | VITALITY: 20 | MAGIC CAPACITY: 58 | PERCEPTION: 27 ]
It wasn’t a density figure. Where the card would have printed one pooled number and a letter beside it, the window gave me five separate readings, split out, each on its own line.
No plate anywhere could do that.
I had spent eleven years knowing my density and guessing at the shape underneath it. I was looking at the shape.
“It broke them out,” I said to nobody, to the trees. “It actually broke them out.”
You are staring at your own hand like it has grown a second thumb. They are only numbers.
“They aren’t only numbers. Nothing in this world can read these.”
Then you are the first, and you are wasting it gawping. Read them. That is not a paladin’s sheet.
It wasn’t. The capacity line alone was fifty-eight, and that’s more of a mage rather than a paladin.
“The top bar,” I said, aiming it at the window. “Explain this bar.”
Nothing answered.
“You were chatty for three years. Explain what it’s.”
Still nothing.
Perhaps it does not owe you an explanation simply because you ask for one.
He sounded more entertained by my confusion than troubled by it.
A puddle sat in the scorched dirt where the gate had stood, rainwater collecting in the one patch of ground the beam hadn’t touched. I hadn’t meant to look down into it.
The face looking back up wasn’t wrong. It was mine, the same jaw and the same nose. It was also a face I hadn’t worn since I was twenty-one, before the demotion, before the cold had started earning its keep.
The colour was wrong.
Thirty-one years of British weather had left me the sort of pale that goes straight to red in July and never once went brown.
What looked up out of the water had gone warmer than that, and it belonged to neither of us. Somewhere in between, like a mix nobody had asked my opinion on.
I touched my own cheek the way a stranger checks a locksmith’s work.
“I was thirty-one yesterday.”
You mentioned.
Azazel sounded faintly bored of the subject, which told me he had had three years to get used to an idea I had had thirty seconds.
“It took more than a decade off. I’ve gone a different colour.”
You have gone to a better one. I contributed. It would have been rude of the frame to build you out of one of us and not the other.
“It’s not nothing. Anyone who’s seen me in the last decade could look right through me and not know it.”
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That was rather the point, I would have thought.
He was right, and I hated that he was right. I filed it under the same drawer as everything else that used to be a loss and had been quietly re-billed as an asset.
I lowered my hand and started walking toward the edge of the trees.
Smoke rose somewhere ahead of us, thin and grey against the morning sky. A town, close enough to smell if the wind turned right.
More of your kind, packed close together.
Not quite a question.
Is that concerning to you? So many of them are so near the exit.
“They don’t know what came out of that gate. As far as anyone’s concerned, I’m just a hunter walking home.”
A hunter carrying a blade I spent months remaking, with enough power in one hand to level a hillside.
“They don’t know that either.”
Convenient. For now.
We found a deer half a mile later, lying crushed in the ferns. Something larger had torn its stomach open.
It was bleeding out. Its eyes found mine and stayed there, wide and panicked.
I knelt down before I had decided to.
The pull toward it was the pull it had always been, immediate and thoughtless.
I reached for the place behind my chest where the warmth used to live.
Nothing answered. The old core was gone, and the warmth had left it years before the rest went. Whatever I had once been able to do for something like this, I couldn’t do anymore.
It is suffering. Ending it would be mercy. Healing it was never an option you still have.
“I know.”
It couldn’t be saved. There was no version of this where I stood here longer and it lived.
I drew Nadir and ended it in one motion. No hesitation in it. I was back on my feet before the ferns had finished settling.
You feel for things that cannot feel you back. A pause, steady. It is not how I am built, and I find it strange. I do not find it weak.
There was nothing to say to that. I sheathed the blade and kept walking.
The edge of the forest finally thinned. The concrete edge of a town appeared through the branches. Suddenly I could feel something closing in.
Duck.
I dropped.
A hand swept through the empty air where the back of my neck had been a half second earlier.
A weight slammed into my shoulders and drove me face-first into the dirt.
Pressure locked my limbs in place, heavy enough that it felt like a building had been set down on my spine.
“Who are you?” a man’s voice said. “Your life depends on the answer.”
I caught a glimpse of him from the corner of my eye. An Association uniform cut in black. Dark glasses and a lit cigarette.
I opened my mouth to speak. Something shifted behind my eyes, and the forest snapped a half-step further away.
“Our purpose is irrelevant to your survival.” The voice came out of my throat, but it wasn’t mine. Flat and cold. “I’ll answer anyway. We don’t remember much. We came out of that gate, which you already know, since you were watching it. I assume that’s why you’re here.”
The cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.
“You’re not panicking,” the man said. He didn’t loosen his grip. “Liars panic and threats make them sweat. You’re doing neither.”
“Would it help if I did?” Azazel said through my mouth, sounding intensely bored.
“I watched that site swallow ten hunters three years ago,” the man said. “The file says it collapsed on all of them. This morning it opened just long enough to let one man out, and you didn’t even look over your shoulder.”
He leaned his weight harder into my back. “I was watching you the whole way. You didn’t notice me. That should scare you.”
He wasn’t wrong. Neither of us had felt him at all.
The man exhaled smoke. “I’m not walking you to a cell. There’s an office two minutes from here. You’re going to start from the beginning, and I’ll listen to every word before I decide what you are.”
He tied my wrists and marched me into an unmarked building at the edge of town.
We walked through the last stretch of it like that, my wrists bound in front of me, a stranger in dark glasses keeping one hand on my shoulder the whole way.
An old woman crossed the street to avoid us. A group of kids stared, then looked away fast.
This is undignified. I was a prince. Now I am being marched down a public street by an armed civilian in sunglasses, and apparently my opinion of the matter is not required.
I said nothing. There didn’t seem to be a version of that reply that ended well for me.
The office inside was small, the fluorescent light buzzing overhead.
“Sit,” he said.
I sat. He lit a second cigarette.
“Everything,” he said. “Start from the part where you don’t remember anything.”
Azazel answered first.
“That gate wasn’t a gate. It was a workshop, for something your world has no word for. I’m what it was holding. The body across from you is one the workshop was building. A vessel, half-finished. No memory and no core. He chose none of it. I chose what came after.”
The man didn’t write anything down.
“You’re saying you’re not human?”
“I’m saying the part of me that matters to you isn’t.”
The room snapped back into focus. I had my own tongue again.
“I don’t remember anything before I woke up,” I said quietly. It wasn’t quite true, but it was true enough to say without my voice changing.
He studied me for a long moment. Then he pulled a slim device from his jacket and thumbed it open. He read something off the screen.
“After the collapse, our sensors kept reading one live signature inside that site,” he said. “You know how long?”
“No.”
“Three years.” He looked at my face when he said it. “The file says nobody survived. The sensors never once agreed with the file, and nobody upstairs wanted to hear about it.”
I said nothing.
“We logged ten hunters into that gate and none out, and the Association closed the file inside a fortnight,” he said. “Now you walk out alone with a hole in your memory, three years unaccounted for, and enough power to flatten half an acre of forest. You understand why containment is the easy answer.”
“And the difficult one?”
He almost smiled. “Intelligence doesn’t run on hunters who colour inside the lines. You’re the best lead I’ve had in years on a case I was told to let go cold.”
He took a drag. “I could put you through standard registration. Whatever you are gets flagged the second they scan your core and your dubious origins. Or I bring you in under my division, where I control what gets looked at.”
“Why would you do that for a stranger?”
“I’d rather hold the leash than read about you in someone else’s report.”
He slid a blank form across the desk.
“Provisional registration. Temporary D-rank. Sign it, and you work for me.”
I looked at the blank line where a name was meant to go.
“Noah,” I said.
He wrote it down and extended a hand across the desk.
“Frank Doyle. Senior officer, Intelligence Unit, First Division.”
I shook it. “If I work for you, I want something back.”
“You already have a rank you’re not using and a roof that isn’t a cell. What else is there?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s the problem.” I gave that a second to land. “Whatever this becomes, I want it to be mine, instead of another file with someone else’s name on the spine.”
Doyle studied me as he had outside on the ground, still pricing something he hadn’t decided whether to buy.
“Funny you’d say that.” He tapped ash onto the floor. “I’ve got a pattern I can’t get anyone official to look at twice. Gates that don’t do what their files say they should. Clear times that don’t match the reports. People who go missing in places that are supposed to be empty.”
“And you want someone chasing it who isn’t on anyone’s books,” I said.
“I want someone chasing it who isn’t afraid of what it turns into.” He said it flat. “That’s rarer than you’d think.”
“That’s vague enough to mean almost anything.”
“It’s.” Doyle didn’t apologize for it. “I don’t know where it goes yet either. That’s the whole reason nobody’s cleared it up already.”
I thought about the alternative: searching from scratch and alone, with nothing to hold on to but a wall of alcoves and a face from a Tube station poster.
“Fine,” I said. “Anything that crosses your desk that doesn’t make sense comes to me first. I chase it on your time. You get a hunter who doesn’t flinch at the cases everyone else wants buried.”
“That’s my line,” Doyle said, something almost like the start of a smile at the corner of it.
“Feels right coming from either of us.”
Doyle stood. “Welcome to the division, Noah. Try not to make me regret the paperwork.”