Emerson Chapter 36 Voids and Vengeance 458
Emerson
The world has been reduced to a set of very clear, very satisfying variables.
Variable One: the concrete grit under my knees.
Variable Two: the slick, hot pulse of blood around my fist.
Variable Three: the choked, gurgling protests of the man whose throat is currently serving as my primary focal point. Not Asag—he's already gone, slipped away with her. This one is just a soldier. A tool. But tools can still bleed.
Forrest is speaking somewhere in my periphery.
Something about Izzy, something about a debrief.
The words are but sonic lint, irrelevant.
The only data that matters is the pressure I’m placing on the windpipe under my palm, the way the light is fading from the pathetic wretch’s bulging eyes, and the exquisite feedback from the knife I have twisting deeper into his side.
A counter-clockwise turn. Thirty degrees. The resulting scream is muffled, wet.
Good.
He helped take her.
At least this one, one out of the twenty, is still here to feel this.
“It’s time, Emerson,” Forrest informs me.
I don’t look up. Instead, I increase the pressure by five percent. The man’s legs kick out in a desperate attempt to escape. I lazily run my eyes over my brothers, who are all standing close by.
Anik has stopped bothering with pretense.
His shadows aren't drifting anymore—they're hunting, lashing at the walls, the floor, the air itself.
His eyes are lit from within, gold bleeding into something feral.
He's not going to be using words for a while.
The Beast is driving now, and the Beast doesn't negotiate.
Leandre has gone still. Too still. His hands—those hands that are always moving, always fixing, always doing—are clenched at his sides as he stares at a spot somewhere over the prisoner's shoulder. I've seen him do this before. After battles he couldn't win. After patients he couldn't save.
Forrest has turned to ice. Not the controlled cold he wears like armor—something deeper. Something that's been switched off. He's talking to Izzy in that flat, efficient voice, but there's no one home behind his eyes.
I pause longer on Kieran.
His face is a mask. Not calm—empty. His eyes are the only part of him that's alive, and they're locked on the prisoner's face like he's memorizing every pore, every flicker of fear, every pathetic twitch. His hands are shaking. Just a little.
Kieran needs this more than I do.
The logic is impeccable. The rage twisting Kieran’s usual laughter into dead silence is a volatile, unused resource. My own fury is not volatile; it’s fuel, best spent on precision, not prolonged, messy expenditure.
I have extracted my immediate, physical proof of the displeasure. Further interaction with this variable was an inefficient use of my time.
I’ve had my fun. Now I need to find her.
I stand. The rage turns logical. The screaming in my skull becomes a silent, static white-noise—a frequency I can think around. The knife slides from his side with a satisfying squelch, leaving him to choke on blood and air on the filthy ground.
I go to stand by my brothers as Anik’s shadows wrap around the man, wrapping around him like bandages do a mummy.
The gut-wrencher snaps between Forrest’s fingers. The world tears sideways, a nauseating jump that never gets easier. Then we’re spilled into the penthouse foyer, the familiar space now feeling like an empty shell.
Protocol takes over like a grim, silent ballet. Anik, who has not spoken a word since the market, hauls the man towards the elevator, still wrapped in a cocoon of living darkness. They’ll keep him contained. They’ll keep him afraid.
And then they’ll make him talk.
I don’t follow. Instead, I turn and walk straight to my workshop, my boots leaving faint, bloody prints on the polished floor.
I lock the door before taking a moment to bask in the silence.
The silence here is always different—it’s my silence.
Specially curated. This time, though, it holds the faint traces of my anomaly.
Her scent of crushed violet and ink still lingers on the sheets from where she napped; a few empty chocolate wrappers sit on the bedside table; a thick pair of her socks lies strewn on the floor by the bed.
Currently, instead of comfort, they just bring back the screams. Something I can't think around.
So I walk to the far wall, to a panel that is seamlessly blended into the others. My fingers, still tacky from drying blood, dance a specific pattern over the veneer. A click, a hum, and a seam of amber light appears, outlining a small square door.
My vault.
A pocket dimension anchored to a frequency only my technopathy could resonate with. Inside: a few bars of gold for emergencies, the original schematics for MORDRED, a lock of hair I’d taken from her brush the first week she crashed into our lives, and her unreadable journal.
Before lifting the book out, I grab a handkerchief, wet it with a bottle of water Leandre stocks for me, and wipe my hands clean. There’s no telling how an unknown entity’s blood will react with the book.
I lift the leather-bound journal. It feels heavier than before. Maybe because before it only held her past—now it might also hold a clue to her present. To her captors.
I open the bookcase that leads into my workshop, going straight to my main workbench and setting the journal under the warm light.
Next to the ordered bench, the text looks wrong.
The bench is arranged exactly as I left it—tools by function, components by frequency, sketches filed by date.
It's efficient. It's mine. And it's wrong. It lacks the correct catalyst.
I make my way to the shelf, pulling down three thick, leather-bound sketchbooks.
I flip them open on the bench around the journal.
Pages and pages of her stare back at me.
My anomaly laughing—a captured moment of stolen joy.
Sleeping—a study in vulnerable peace. Mid-snark, eyebrow arched.
Her hands. The curve of her neck. Dozens of studies of her eyes, trying to capture the exact shade of mercurial silver.
I select three. Not the peaceful ones. The fierce ones. The ones where her gaze holds a challenge. I tear them out with a careful, deliberate ruthlessness I save for my special projects, and pin them with three of my knives to the wall in my direct line of sight.
There.
Now the workspace is calibrated. Now the objective is clear.
I sit. Studiously ignoring the house in collapse—Forrest's ice-cold anger on the phone; the terrifying silence where Kieran's laughter should be; Leandre's frantic voice, calling in centuries of favors.
I can’t fix them. I can’t fix their broken, noisy emotions. They are a chaotic system in failure.
But I can fix this .
First, transcription.
I pull a slim, crystalline slate from the rack beneath MORDRED—one of its portable interfaces. With quick, precise strokes, I begin copying symbols from the journal onto the slate’s glowing surface. Each character is captured, cataloged, and fed directly into MORDRED’s core.
A familiar, deep hum builds in the walls—not the static in my head, but a steady, resonant frequency I know like my own breath. The sound of order being imposed on chaos. Of a problem being met with logic, not emotion.
Vacuum tubes brighten in a gentle sequence. Tape reels spin up with a soft whirr-click, a sound so ingrained in my nervous system it registers as safety. Amber and blue lights pulse in rhythmic, responsive clusters. MORDRED is thinking. With me. For her.
It doesn’t erase the void her absence has carved inside me, but it fills the silence with purpose.
The machine’s calm, predictable processing is a balm against my own panic.
Here, in the glow of its panels, with its data streams scrolling beside me, I am not a man who has lost everything.
I am a researcher with a puzzle. A cryptologist with a code. A hunter with a scent.
MORDRED highlights possible phonetic values, suggests grammatical structures, and flags repeating motifs that might be names, places, or incantations.
It works, and I work with it—a seamless feedback loop of focus and function.
This is the language we speak best: problem, solution.
Input, output. Loss, and the relentless pursuit of retrieval.
I flip on my demonic radio, adjusting it before setting it at my elbow. Currently, there’s nothing helpful about the chatter—outside of the fact that the low, discordant frequency somehow resonates with the panicked static that has once again won out over the screaming.
With my decoding lens in hand and MORDRED’s loyal hum at my back, the world outside the pool of light ceases to exist. There is only the text, the puzzle, the ghost of her in the pinned sketches, and the vow turning in my mind like a key in a lock:
Find her. Burn everything else.
Unknown
A tremor comes first—a shiver through the still water of my pool. Not a ripple, but a shock of foreign feeling. I hold it close, treasuring the fragile link that has somehow snapped into place across realms.
There’s contentment. Joy. Peace.
Then—fear. Sharp, bright, and laced with betrayal.
Then nothing.
A void. An emptiness where a vibrant, stubborn light had only just begun to resonate in the edges of my awareness.
I wait. That's what I do. I wait and I search for meaning, for the fading imprint, for anything. It doesn't come back. Doesn't flicker. Doesn't breathe.
Where is she? The bond does not say. It only echoes what she feels. And now she feels… nothing.
I did not see what happened to make this possible. I only felt the click of a bond snapping into place—a new note in the quiet I've spent centuries building.
Now, that note is gone. Smothered. And the quiet feels different. Wrong .
I rise and cross to the ornate, crystal-encrusted mirror on the far wall of my cave.
Again, I wait. Watching.
It takes time, but eventually, they come.
The scene is everything I feared, everything I tried to keep at a distance. It is laced with pain—a raw, discordant symphony that scrapes against the deep, resonant peace I have cultivated for an age.
Figures move in the glass—not her. The others. They are in a cluttered space smelling of ozone and desperation. The warlock gestures wildly. Their faces are strained, voices sharp with a panic that confirms what I already know.
She is gone.
And they have lost her.
I have tolerated their noise, their bonds, because it created a balance I could live with. I watched from afar. I stayed in the deep where I belong. She was safe. She was content. That was always enough. More than enough. It was everything.
But this… this emptiness where her light should be? This is not peace. I know peace. I've spent centuries learning its shape. This is something else. A void. A wrongness so profound it threatens the quiet order I have struggled so hard to maintain.
I merged with refugees of forgotten wars to survive. I withdrew to the trenches to keep the peace. I endured the ache of her distance to avoid disrupting her new world.
All for harmony.
Now, harmony is gone. Ripped away by hands that do not understand the fragility of the ecosystem they have poisoned.
I gave them time. I trusted them to guard what mattered.
And they failed.
The path of least resistance is no longer an option. Isolation is no longer an option. I didn't choose this. I wouldn't choose this. But the choice is already gone.
There is only one path left.
As I press my hands to the glass, it does not break. It yields—its surface losing its stubborn solidity, becoming a meniscus between worlds, trembling with the weight of my resolve.
Enough waiting.
Enough endurance.
Let them have their plans, their interrogations. They play in the shallows, unaware of what truly lurks in the hidden corners of this world.
Now, I will remind everyone what dwells in the deep.
I will bring my wayward soul back myself.
And everyone involved will regret the day they made me leave this trench.