Chapter 26:

  "The Prophecy Begins"

  Arc 3: Chapter 5

  POV: "???"

  In the silent and sterile heart of the House of Science building, long after hours, only the ghostly hum of energy reactors echoed. In Laboratory 7-B, Fencer was collapsed over a workbench, surrounded by unintelligible circuit diagrams and polished metal parts.

  He was not sleeping. He was immersed, with a book pressed against his face.

  In his mind, the image was vivid and warm. A different sun, more yellow, illuminated a modest but book-filled room. He was small, his fingers stained with graphite, holding a sketchbook. The hero he had created was not in a colorful cape; it was a figure of hard lines, wrapped in shadows, a black cape floating, a silent vigilante. He raised the drawing, his heart swollen with pride.

  The eyes looking at him were blue like a summer sky, and the hair framing the smiling face was premature silver-gray, like moonlight trapped in strands.

  “This is beautiful, my son.” The woman’s voice was honey, safety, everything.

  Little Fencer smiled, a rare and complete smile he no longer remembered possessing.

  “Wake up, Fencer!”

  The memory shattered like glass under a hammer. A thick book fell from above and struck the back of his neck with a dry thud, knocking the other book off.

  “Ouch!” He jolted upright, the sharp pain fusing with instant rage.

  In front of him stood Reinhard, one of the junior nobles of the House, the one tipped to be the next commander, smiling with his usual condescending expression. His friends laughed softly in the dark corridors of the laboratory.

  “Sleeping on the job, ‘great scientist’?” The title came laden with oily sarcasm. “Ver?nica would pay to see her prodigy fallen over his own schematics.”

  Fencer rubbed the back of his neck, his fingers finding the cold of the mechanical arm beneath the sleeve.

  “I wasn’t sleeping. I was… concentrating.”

  “Sure, sure,” Reinhard shrugged, turning away. “Come on, turn off the lights. The useful work here is done.”

  They left, leaving behind the echo of their laughter. Fencer stood motionless in the thickening darkness, his breathing the only sound. With a brusque movement, he swept the schematics into a folder. Then his eyes fell on a book that had fallen from his face: Everything About Ghouldnar.

  He picked it up. The cover was worn leather. For a long moment, he simply held it, as if weighing an entire memory. Then, with a sigh that came from his feet, he carefully stored it in his backpack, beside his flashlight and an unopened package of cookies. He turned off the lights.

  The path to Flávio’s house was a familiar trail of shadows. The party, he knew, would be a spectacle of noise and lights he had no energy to face, but an obligation to his brother pulled him forward.

  It was at the street intersection that he found them. Luna and Raphadun came from the opposite direction, their steps a little faster than usual. Raphadun looked like he had washed his face, but his eyes were still red and heavy. Luna carried a forged serenity, a mask of normalcy that Fencer, connoisseur of masks, recognized instantly.

  “Fencer!” Raphadun’s voice tried for cheer but failed halfway.

  “Hi, guys,” Fencer replied, adjusting the backpack on his shoulder, his metal arm partially visible.

  “So you came too,” Luna said, a professional smile touching her lips. It was the queen’s smile, not the friend’s. “Let’s go in before we miss the cake.”

  Flávio’s house was a volcano of disordered joy. The arrival of the three caused a brief surprised silence, followed by a new wave of excitement. Flávio enveloped them in damp and clumsy hugs, his happiness so raw and genuine it was impossible not to be infected, even if only superficially.

  The cake moment was a climax of light and laughter. The seven candles on the small whipped cream crown were blown out amid animated shouts. Juliet, her face illuminated by the weak flame, was the only pure thing in that environment laden with complex histories. Amanda, from her wheelchair, watched. Her gaze passed from Juliet to Flávio, who now tried to balance a plate on his head with the seriousness of a conductor. And then, something unexpected happened. A tiny, almost imperceptible smile touched the corners of her mouth. It was quick, bitter, tired. But it was a smile. A recognition, perhaps, of that pathetic and stubborn effort that was Flávio.

  The night unfolded in the predictable rhythm of family parties. Wine flowed. Raphadun, Luna, and Flávio plunged into it with the determination of those seeking to drown something deeper than thirst. Conversations grew loud, stories exaggerated. Raphadun told for the thousandth time, with newly invented details, the day Empty turned the Pursuer’s wolf into a bulldog. Luna laughed, a loud and slightly shrill laugh that made wine come out of her nose, a grotesque and human moment that broke her royal pose for a few seconds.

  Fencer nestled in a corner, a glass of flat, insipid soda in his hand. The effervescence of the bubbles against his palate was more real, more controllable, than the false warmth of alcohol.

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  Luka approached, a nearly empty glass of red wine swinging elegantly in his fingers. He looked like an anthropological observer, studying the scene.

  “No more drinking, Fencer?” he asked, his tone neutral, without apparent judgment.

  “Yes, I drink. But lately… I’ve been stopping.”

  “I understand,” Luka nodded, taking a sip. “I remember when you got drunk, almost two years ago. Talking about the virtue of weakness.”

  Fencer stared at the brown liquid in his glass.

  “Yes… I get strange when drunk. I say things.” He looked toward the center of the room, where Flávio tried to teach Luna a ridiculous dance step. “They have fun that way.”

  Luka followed his gaze, a genuine—if slightly sad—smile touching his face.

  “I’ll try to join them, then. It seems… more honest.”

  He stood and joined the clumsy dance. Fencer watched. He saw Raphadun laughing, but his eyes, for an instant, fleeing to the window, to the darkness outside. He saw Luna’s mask crack in genuine amusement before quickly recomposing. He saw Flávio, the center of that small universe, radiant.

  “Daddy’s the best!” Juliet’s high-pitched shout cut through the noise. She was in an aunt’s arms, pointing at Flávio, who now tried to balance a plate on his head. The innocence of the declaration was like a blade in Fencer’s heart. He looked away.

  It was when Raphadun disentangled himself from the group, muttering about the bathroom, and headed for the back door. Luna, at the height of her brief alcoholic euphoria, laughed at something Luka said, the sound so loud and free it seemed to belong to someone else.

  Meanwhile, in another part of the city, in a discreet apartment in a noble neighborhood, Bruce Darking removed his heavy commander’s cape. The roar of the “Strongest Man in the World” had faded. In the cozy living room, a table set for three. Ver?nica, without her scientist’s lab coat but in a simple dress, finished serving soup. And running from the small balcony, eyes shining, came Bruno, his ten years of age, a contained hurricane of energy.

  “Dad!” the boy grabbed Bruce’s leg with a force that would make an ordinary man stagger.

  Bruce placed a huge, scarred hand on the boy’s disheveled head.

  “I’ve told you not to call me that here, Bruno.” The reprimand was gentle, almost a whisper.

  “You spoil him too much, Bruce,” Ver?nica said, her tone carrying an affectionate irony no one in the Council had ever heard. “He’ll never learn.”

  “No one saw him, right?” Bruce asked, his eyes, for an instant, returning to those of the general, sweeping the closed curtains.

  “No. Everything’s calm. Come on, let’s enjoy it.” She pulled out a chair.

  Bruce sat, the chair’s frame creaking under his weight. As Ver?nica served the soup, his hand—the same one that had crushed skulls and delivered blows that could split the earth—rose and caressed Bruno’s hair with a tenderness so immense and contained it seemed something sacred, stolen from time.

  In the vast sunroom of the House of Exploration, the noise was of a different kind. Aldert Fingard was surrounded. Not by maps and crews, but by a horde of children of all ages—his legitimate and illegitimate offspring, fruits of decades of expeditions to distant places. Gifts made of carved bones, polished stones, and exotic fabrics covered the great table. His wife, Yona, a woman of serene face and practical hands, watched with a tired and loving smile.

  “This is absurd!” Aldert roared, holding a necklace of giant snake teeth. “I don’t deserve so many gifts, you spoiled kids! Pay your debts first!”

  The children laughed, well acquainted with their father’s blustery facade. The eldest daughter, a young woman with the same explorer’s eyes as Aldert, approached and kissed his wrinkled forehead.

  “Shut up, old man, and be grateful.”

  He grumbled, but the necklace did not leave his hands. It was a domestic, chaotic, and living scene, a universe apart from the dead frontiers he mapped.

  On the cliff, the night wind was cold and carried the sweet, persistent smell of the impossible grass. Raphadun staggered to the edge, the almost living wine bottle dangling from his loose fingers. The moon bathed the vibrant green circle that had never died, pulsing softly like a buried heart.

  He fell to his knees at the circle’s edge, not in reverence, but in collapse.

  “Why?” the question came out as a breath into the void. “Why did you have to do this? Why didn’t you… wait?”

  The words of the prophecy rose from afar, from the wind, from somewhere impossible to observe.

  “There will come a day when everything will be at peace…”

  He looked at the grass. It seemed… brighter. It was not his imagination. A faint, phosphorescent green glow began to emanate from the tip of each blade. Raphadun rubbed his eyes, attributing it to the drink.

  “…that people will be happy and living well.” Images of Luna laughing with wine coming out of her nose, Flávio’s family, Bruce’s secret smile, passed through his mind. Peace. Happiness. A farce built on an misunderstood sacrifice.

  The glow intensified. It was no longer subtle fluorescence. It was active light, seeming to suck the darkness around it. Threads of green energy, subtle as charged weapon webs, began to rise from the circle’s center, twisting in the air like liquid emerald serpents.

  The wine and sadness evaporated in an instant. A primordial cold, deeper than the wind, ran down Raphadun’s spine. He leaped to his feet, senses on maximum alert, the alcohol fog dissipated by pure shock.

  “Until ‘Everything’ returns…”

  At the light’s epicenter, the air began to distort. The grass bent backward, as if blown by wind coming from within the earth. And then, from the point of greatest intensity, a form began to materialize.

  It was not an apparition. It was not a ghost.

  It was a solid, dense silhouette rising from the ground like a black tree sprouting in fast motion. Armor. Black, familiar in design, but terribly different. It was not polished or rusted metal. It seemed organic, blackened like coal, with the texture of petrified tree bark, growing directly from the skin beneath. On the head, the same featureless mask, the same eyes hidden in the shadows of the slits.

  “…bringing war and change.”

  The being was now fully formed, standing in the center of the pulsing circle. The body beneath the black armor was no longer Empty’s translucent skeleton. It was more filled, defined by tense muscles under skin that retained cadaverous pallor but now veined with greenish threads pulsing softly with the same light as the circle. Green energy, cold and silent, flashed at the armor’s joints, at the connections between plates.

  Raphadun choked. The air fled his lungs. His brain, trained for the impossible since childhood, refused to accept what his eyes registered.

  “What… what the hell is that?” his voice came out hoarse, a terrified whisper. “Identify yourself!”

  The figure turned. It was not a full-body movement. It was the precise rotation of the head, the black mask focusing on him like a weapon’s lens.

  “And when this ‘Everything’ appears…”

  “You…” Raphadun’s voice failed, the gears of his understanding desperately trying to fit. It was impossible. They had buried… something. The stone… the body… it was impossible. “Empty…? Is this… some trick?”

  “…I will defeat him!”

  The figure took a step forward, out of the grass circle. The sound of its boot on the ground was not metallic. It was a wet, organic thud. It stopped a few meters from Raphadun.

  And any last trace of courage in Raphadun vanished.

  “Where is the Restoration Stone?”

  And, for the first time, Empty speaks.