Prologue #2
Five minutes in, the downpour became violent.
Sheets of water blurred her vision to near-nothing.
Talia ducked beneath the bus stop’s corrugated hood, breath coming ragged and fast. Her coat was useless now, sodden wool clinging heavy to her frame.
She leaned against the shelter’s back wall, watching rain turn the street into a river.
No other soul visible. No movement save the relentless fall of water.
Then the feeling returned. Stronger now. Wrong.
An ache clawed outward from her sternum, leeching heat from her marrow.
Her Calysteri senses stretched instinctively, desperate to grasp the ambient emotional landscape that usually defined the night—the steady breathing of sleeping households, the alertness of late-shift workers, or even the small, frantic tremors of urban wildlife.
Instead, she found only a jagged vacuum that swallowed her reach whole, leaving her stranded in a terrifying stillness.
Nothing.
Not silence. Silence implied absence. This was void.
A hollow where sensation should exist, a world scooped out. The air seized in her lungs. She couldn’t feel anything approaching, couldn’t sense another living presence within range. But something was here. The certainty rooted itself deep in her gut, primal and absolute.
The emptiness pressed against her awareness like cotton wool stuffed in her ears, muffling everything that made her what she was.
Even the rain sounded distant now, as though the downpour hammered somewhere else entirely.
The void swallowed everything—emotion, instinct, the drumming of water on metal. All of it drowning in that absence.
Impact slammed her forward—shoulder cracking against the bus stop’s metal frame. Air punched from her lungs.
Pain whited out thought, her knees buckling as reality fractured into streaks of rain and shadow. Hands closed around her throat before she could scream.
Magic constricted her windpipe, a vice crushing cartilage as fingers locked the spell.
Panic ignited, burning through her chest as she clawed at the hands framing her throat. Her nails scraped fabric, then skin, but the suffocating grip wouldn’t relent. The world tilted sideways, rain and lamplight bleeding together into smeared colour. She couldn’t breathe.
Magic churned around her, buzzing with a wrongness that crawled like insects. It lacked Calysteri warmth or Varkyn solidity. The alien magic was primeval and hungry, unspooling through the quiet like smoke through cracks.
More shapes closed in from the periphery.
Talia’s heels skidded over the wet stone, the jarring friction rattling through her shins as the world lurched backward.
A brittle thought sliced through the panic: it shouldn’t be this easy to take her.
She scrabbled for purchase, desperate to anchor herself to the damp cobblestones, but the hands were a mechanical weight.
Above, the streetlights guttered and failed, strangled by an alien shadow that lunged from the dark—a dense, suffocating presence that pressed against her face like damp cloth, snuffing out the city and the memory of Mark’s voice in the same breath.
She thrashed—a final rebellion of muscle and bone—her heels gouging tracks into the mortar between the cobbles.
She fought for every inch of the pavement, her fingernails clawing at the rough brick of the alley wall until the tips bled, but the struggle was met with a dead weight.
Her limbs moved with the stubborn resistance of setting concrete, and the world receded, turning into a hollow, distant echo of the street she knew.
The silver pendant at her throat—Mark’s gift—dug into her skin, the last physical anchor as she was hauled further into the mouth of the dark.
The thought surfaced and sank, drowning in the void pressing against her consciousness. Can’t see. Can’t feel.
The magic swelled, frigid and absolute, swallowing the last fragments of light. Everything went black.
Damp seeped through her back first. A bone-deep chill. The kind that lived in abandoned places where warmth forgot to exist.
Talia’s eyes cracked open to darkness cut by slivers of sodium light bleeding through gaps in corrugated metal. Her head throbbed, skull packed with broken glass. The warehouse spun, concrete pressing against her cheek, gritty and damp.
Hands seized her arms before thought solidified. Strong. Unyielding. They hauled her upright, her feet dragging uselessly across the filthy floor. Warehouse. The briny stench of dock water saturated the air, salt and rot and diesel fuel.
Riverforge. She was at the docks.
A sharper grip now, fingers digging into her arms as she was dragged deeper into shadow. Her magic reached automatically, grasping for the emotional signatures that should have surrounded her, for anything that might anchor her to reality.
Nothing.
The void swallowed her senses whole, leaving only the physical—rough hands, concrete scraping her heels, the chemical burn of fear flooding her throat.
“Please—” The plea was a strangled, pathetic sound against the stillness.
At this moment, Mark would be setting the kettle on the stove in their flat, the familiar whistle a signal that her day was finally over.
The crushing weight of the ‘never’ hit her then—she would never feel the steam on her face or the scratchy wool of his favourite jumper.
There was no response from the shadows, only the mechanical force backwards, dragging her away from the failing streetlamps towards a depth that was intentional and final.
They stopped. Talia’s knees buckled, but the hands forced her upright, pinning her in place. She tried to turn her head, to see who held her, but movement ignited fresh agony behind her eyes.
Then—pain. White-hot and immediate, lancing through her left forearm like a brand pressed to skin.
She screamed, or tried to, but her voice died in her throat as something pulled.
Not physical. Deeper. The sensation tore through her centre, ripping at the core of what she was.
Her magic—the quiet, essential architecture of her soul that charted her love for Mark and her place in the world—now being unspooled with an agonising precision that threatened to leave her hollowed out and utterly alone.
It drained away in a torrent, flooding outward through the burning point on her arm, leaving nothing but hollow absence in its wake.
The warmth that had defined her existence since childhood—the constant vibration of emotional awareness, the gentle murmur of Calysteri magic—vanished like water through shattered glass.
Empty. She had never known such emptiness.
Panic flared, primal and overwhelming, but even that felt distant now, muffled by the growing void consuming her from within. Her vision blurred, tears or darkness or both, and through the haze she caught them.
Eyes.
Inhuman eyes hovered above her—pale, cold, devoid of life. They pierced through the darkness, fixed on her with chilling intent, and the weight of that gaze stole what little strength remained.
The predatory focus consumed her.
The burning spread from her forearm through her chest, her throat, her skull.
Everything inside her drained towards that single point of contact, siphoned inexorably away until there was nothing left to give.
Her knees gave out properly at last, but the hands didn’t release, holding her suspended like a puppet with cut strings.
Talia tried to speak, to beg, to scream—anything—but her body no longer responded. Numbness crept inward from her extremities, fingers and toes going cold, then arms and legs, then core.
The pendant at her throat burned against her skin one final time, Mark’s gift searing into flesh, and then even that faded.
The last thing she registered were those terrible, silver-swirled eyes. Endless.
Then darkness folded over everything, absolute, and Talia Merrin stopped struggling.