The Council's "Quarantine" protocol differed from our internal "Yellow Code."Back then, months ago, we had simply closed the sector's borders and prepared for an economic blockade by the Ognev clan. Now, we were locked down magically.A Class Four protection dome covered the Obsidian Palace. Outside, beyond the perimeter fence, trios of the Council's combat mages stood guard. Through the tinted glass of our armored windows, I could see their auras—bright, pulsating patches of light, patrolling the perimeter with mechanical precision. They rotated every four hours. Ognev's Guard. Valerian's Inquisitors. Mercenaries from the neutral Clans.They weren't there to protect us from the outside world. They were there to make sure we didn't escape.We were the plague. And we were locked in a maximum-security isolation ward.

  “Left hand higher,” Adrian's voice was dry.I adjusted my stance. The muscles in my back ached as if they had been run through a meat grinder. But the inside was worse. My magical channels, barely recovered from necrosis, burned with phantom fire. Every movement echoed with a flash of pain in my chest.We had been training for four hours. No magic. Only physical combat.The training hall on the second sublevel had been refitted into a torture chamber for my body. There were no soft mats here. Only concrete, cold metal, and weapon racks.“You're leaving your liver exposed,” he took a step forward. Slowly. Lazily. A predator playing with food he had already backed into a corner.I jerked, trying to cover my torso with my elbow, to regroup, to sidestep, but he was faster. Always faster.His movements were a blur. The human eye couldn't track such speed without magical enhancement, and I was forbidden to use magic.“Learn to see with your body,” he growled.The strike landed where I didn't expect it. Not on my torso. A sweep. Hard, chopping, breaking my momentum.The floor vanished from beneath my feet. I crashed onto the concrete, hitting my hip and shoulder hard. The air whistled out of my lungs, leaving the acrid bitterness of ashes in my mouth. Colored circles danced before my eyes.“You're dead,” he stated, looming over me like a dark cliff. “In a real fight, you'd already be bleeding out. Your liver would be on the floor, and your throat would be slit.”I rolled onto my back, trying to suck in a breath. My ribs creaked in protest.“I'm... learning...” I wheezed, spitting thick saliva onto the floor. “But I lasted longer than yesterday. Twenty seconds longer.”“Twenty-one,” he corrected, and a flicker of something akin to approval flashed in his voice. “There is progress. Slow, but it's there.”He crouched beside my head. He grabbed my chin, holding my face in a rigid grip, forcing me to look into his eyes. The violet abyss in them was calm. Frighteningly calm. It wasn't the anger of a teacher. It was the cold calculation of an engineer who realizes his weapon isn't ready for war yet, but the enemy is already at the gates.“The Inquisition gave us time. A week? Two? While they analyze the Sphere's data, while they write their reports, while they argue over the wording of your arrest. Bureaucracy is our only shield right now. But Eliza won't wait for papers with seals on them. She knows what you are. She saw what you did to the artifact.”“We're safe here,” I argued, feeling his fingers tighten around my jaw. “The Council's shields... Morozov raised the dome himself. It's Class Four. It could withstand an orbital bombardment.”Adrian smirked. A wicked, crooked smirk that bared his fangs.“The Council's shields hold back attacks from the *outside*, Anya. They're designed for a siege, a ramming, magical artillery. But they are permeable to those who have the keys. Or to those who know how to walk through walls. Or to traitors who are already inside.”He let me go abruptly and straightened up.“Get up. Fifty more reps.”I groaned, but forced myself to stand. My knees were shaking.“Do you think they'll attack here? Right under the Guards' noses? That's a declaration of war against the Council.”“I would attack,” he walked over to the weapon rack and grabbed two training knives. “The best time to strike is when the victim thinks they're in a cage. A cage relaxes you. A cage gives a false sense of security. ‘I'm in prison, therefore no one will touch me.’ It's the perfect position for a kill.”He tossed one knife to me. I caught it right in front of my face, my fingers reflexively clamping around the hilt.“Defend yourself.”

  ***

  The days blurred into a gray, viscous routine, like swamp sludge.Every day I teetered on the edge, forcing my mutilated body to work. Regeneration was a miracle, but even miracles had their limits.Up at six in the morning, when the sun hadn't even thought of rising. An ice-cold shower to get the blood pumping. Breakfast—proteins, vitamins, no carbs, no sugars. Adrian monitored my diet like a maniac, calculating the calories and micronutrients needed for channel regeneration.Then—magical theory. The Obsidian Palace's library became my second cell. Ancient tomes that smelled of dust and decay. Grimoires written in dead languages. I studied nodes, vectors, spell geometry, calculating entropy on paper. Adrian made me draw diagrams until my fingers cramped.“Magic isn't a miracle, Anya. It's math. If you miscalculate when working with the Abyss, you won't just fail to cast a spell. You'll collapse space, taking yourself and the entire city block with it.”Then back to training. Until dark. Until I felt nauseous. Until total muscle failure.And, finally, the Night.The nights were different.At night, we stopped being teacher and student, commander and soldier. At night, we became communicating vessels.The darkness in the Palace thickened, reacting to us. To our proximity. To the resonance that sparked when we were left alone behind the closed doors of our bedroom.Adrian came to me not as a man comes to a woman. He came like a thirsty man to a spring. And I waited for him. Because the Abyss inside me demanded to be fed, too.When he touched me, the shadows around the bed rose like a wall, forming a dense, impenetrable cocoon that cut us off from the rest of the world. This wasn't love in the human, romantic sense of the word. There were no flowers, poetry, or tender sighs under the moonlight.It was an exchange. Brutal, necessary, almost narcotic.I was a battery. I absorbed entropy from space, concentrated it in my channels, condensed it into a state of liquid darkness. But I couldn't process it completely. I needed someone to siphon off the excess, to ground the charge; otherwise, I would have burst from the inside.Adrian was a reactor. He took my darkness, ran it through himself, transformed it, and returned it to me as pure control, structure, and will.We slept in the same bed. He held me, pressing me against him so tightly that I felt every beat of his heart. His hands traced my back, my shoulders, my hair—not caressing, but *reading*. They scanned my channels, checking the stability of the flows.“More,” he whispered, biting my neck as I arched my back from the overwhelming energy filling me. “Give me everything. Don't hold back.”I scratched his back, leaving bloody trails that immediately healed over with black smoke. I felt his aura penetrating mine, intertwining with it, merging into a single pulsating organism. We ceased to exist separately. We became a single entity—a two-headed monster living in the dark.But we didn't cross the line. Not yet. He kept himself in check. And so did I. Because we both knew: if we crossed that boundary, there would be no turning back.Symbiosis. Perfect. And terrifying.

  ***

  “Tea, Lady Anna? With bergamot, just the way you like it.”Martha's voice snapped me out of my trance.I was sitting in the small drawing room by the fireplace, staring at the schematic of Obsidian's magical flows spread out on a low table. Letters and symbols danced before my eyes, blurring into meaningless script. My head was splitting.I blinked, returning to reality, and turned around.The housekeeper stood in the doorway holding a massive silver tray. Fine porcelain, a small vase with cookies, napkins bearing the Chernov monogram. Normalcy. A suffocating, completely out-of-place normalcy here.Martha was the only living, warm spot in this cold, black-and-white world of stone and shadows. She was past sixty. Plump, with a kind, round face and toil-worn hands, she seemed like an alien from another universe. From a world where people baked pies, knitted socks for their grandchildren, and watched soap operas in the evenings.She smelled of pastries, vanilla, and lavender. And not of old ashes, blood, and fear, like the rest of us here.She wasn't afraid of me. Even when I walked past her with pitch-black eyes after a breakdown at training, when I radiated a graveyard chill so intense that the flowers in the vases withered in a second, she just made the sign of the cross behind my back and sympathetically asked if I wanted a warm berry drink with honey.“Thank you, Martha,” I rubbed my temples, trying to soothe the throbbing. “You're right on time as always. I'm... tired.”She set the tray on the table, carefully nudging a stack of applied necromancy grimoires. As if they were just ordinary fashion magazines.“You need to rest, dear,” her voice was full of genuine care. She began to pour the tea. A dark, fragrant, amber stream. “The Prince is driving you too hard. He's always been like that. Obsessed. I remember him as a boy. When the old Prince, his father, made him meditate in the freezing cold for hours... Adrian was just like this back then. Stubborn, angry, coiled like a spring. He never knew how to pity himself. And he doesn't know how to pity others either.”She handed me a cup. The porcelain clinked against the saucer.“He wants me to survive, Martha. It's not cruelty. It's a necessity.”“Surviving is important, no doubt about it.” She sighed, straightening her apron. “But you have to live, too. You're so young, Anya. You should be going to balls, picking out dresses, falling in love... But your eyes already hold... winter. Eternal winter. Just like his.”I took the cup. The warmth of the ceramic heated my cold fingers.“Winter is good, Martha. Winter kills parasites. Winter freezes the rot.”She shook her head, looking at me with sadness. She placed her hand on my shoulder. The warm, soft palm of a living human being. Such a simple gesture, but it resonated with a strange pain somewhere in my chest, right where my heart used to be.“You aren't made of ice, Anya. You're just very badly wounded. Freezing over is easy. Thawing is hard. I've seen many mages who gave themselves over to the cold. They became strong, yes. Great. But happy—never.”I touched her hand with my own. Carefully. Barely making contact. Fearing that my skin, whose temperature now rarely rose above sixty degrees, would burn her with its chill.“Happiness is a luxury for peacetime. And we are at war.”“Wars come and go. But family, home, warmth—that's what should remain. Eat. I baked your favorites, with cinnamon and nuts. The dough turned out wonderful today, light as down.”I smiled. For the first time in a week, my lips stretched into a real smile, not a snarl.“You're a miracle, Martha. Really. I don't know what I'd do without you here. I'd probably go completely feral and start biting people.”She laughed. A warm, deep laugh that made it easier to breathe.“Oh, my lady. I'm just doing my job. Keeping this house while the men play their terrible games. Eat, while it's still hot.”She left, quietly closing the door behind her.I stared at the closed door and felt a strange warmth inside. Not magical. Human.That was our last conversation.

  ***

  Three in the morning.The false hour. The Hour of the Bull. The time when hopes die and nightmares awaken.I awoke not from a sound. There was no sound.The Palace always "breathed." Even at night. The magical power circuits in the walls hummed lowly, maintaining the microclimate and lighting. The ventilation rustled, driving air through the massive halls. Somewhere far away, at the very edge of hearing, the guards' footsteps tapped rhythmically in the corridors of the outer perimeter.Now, all of that was gone.The silence was an oppressive, sticky molasses. Dense. Artificial. It pressed against my ears, clogged my nostrils, enveloped my skin in an invisible film.It wasn't the silence of peace. It was the silence of a vacuum.I opened my eyes, peering into the darkness of the bedroom.The space beside me was empty.Adrian's pillow was cold. He hadn't come to bed. Or he had left a long time ago.That was wrong. The nights were "our" time. If he wasn't there—it meant something had happened.The outer perimeter? A false alarm? Sabotage? He never left me alone without a reason. That meant the reason was grave. Someone had lured him out of the bedroom.Active magic directed at us, he would have sensed. His sensory perception was attuned to aggression.But there was no aggression. There was... an absence of presence.I slowly sat up in bed. My heart beat steadily, slowly, obeying the cold rhythm of the Abyss. There was no fear. Just extreme concentration.I inhaled the air.A scent.A faint, barely perceptible aroma. Not perfume. Not sweat.Bitter almond and rotting leaves.The smell of decay. The smell of poison. Or the masking reagent professionals used to hide their natural scent.I didn't call out for Adrian. Every second counted. If he wasn't here—it meant he was busy. Or cut off.The darkness within me stirred. It woke up before I did. It was hungry. It smelled prey.*"Stranger,"* the Abyss whispered in the back of my mind with the voice of a thousand snakes.I stepped out into the hallway, without opening the door with my hand, simply seeping through the crack using partial body deformation. I was only just learning this, but now it happened on its own, purely on instinct.Empty. The hallway was empty.But something was wrong with the shadows. They were... wrong. Too thick in the corners. Too motionless. They didn't bow to me as usual. They lay in wait. They were afraid of someone else.I followed the scent. To the grand staircase. I stepped soundlessly, shifting my weight from toe to heel, controlling every creak of the parquet.In the grand hall on the first floor, the emergency magical lights were on—dim spheres beneath the ceiling.At the foot of the marble staircase stood a figure.It wasn't a human. It was a cluster of gray fog that only vaguely resembled a human silhouette.A "Ghost."I had read about them in Adrian's files. Elite assassins of the Wind Clan. High aeromancy. They knew how to change the density of their bodies, turning into rarefied gas, into smoke, into mist.This one carried the moniker "Gray Cloak"—one of the renegades who had turned mercenary after the Great Schism.For beings like that, walls and doors didn't exist. Physical obstacles were a mere technicality to them.But the shields? A Class Four dome?My brain feverishly analyzed the facts. The shields were tuned to block magic and physical objects. Even in gaseous form, an assassin remained a mage—his aura should have triggered the sensors.If he was here... it meant the shield had been disabled. Locally. In one sector.*Treason?*No. Codes.Someone had used the active access codes of an allied Clan Head to pass through the defenses as an ally.And he was standing in my home.He was standing over someone lying on the floor.

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  But something was wrong. The air around him shimmered with a faint silvery glow—like a broken mirror. I recognized the effect. "The Lantern of Oblivion." An artifact that blinded magical entities, erasing their perception. The shadows couldn't see him. To them, he was a void.

  I took a step. The floor creaked treacherously.The figure spun toward me. The "Ghost" had no face. A smooth, gray, matte mask with no slits for eyes. He "saw" by the vibrations in the air, like a bat.In his right hand, which was denser than the rest of his body, was a short kris—a curved ritual dagger. The blade was pitch-black, absorbing all light. Coated in a poison that killed on touch.He saw me.A sudden dash.He was fast. Unrealistically fast.The gray fog rushed at me, stretching into a spear. The kris aimed straight for my heart.A flash.My amulet, hanging from my neck, exploded. The black stone shattered, releasing a wave of protective energy. Adrian had promised the artifact would withstand two strikes, but he hadn't accounted for the "Sting of the Void." The assassin's dagger, imbued with breaching energy, devoured both protective circuits instantly, turning the battery into useless dust. The sound of shattered glass rang out. The dagger bounced off, clanging against the marble, but the shield was destroyed permanently.But the assassin didn't stop. He was regrouping for a second strike.I lowered my gaze. To the spot where the body lay. Adrian? Dead?!!...

  ***

  On the floor lay Martha.She must have come down to the kitchen. Or she heard a strange noise that wasn't supposed to be there. Or she was simply suffering from insomnia.She was wearing her old, cozy floral flannel robe and soft slippers.The hilt of a throwing knife protruded from her throat.The strike had been delivered professionally. Neatly. Dead center of the neck, severing the larynx and the artery.There was almost no blood. The blade had gone in deep, sealing the wound. Hermetically.Her eyes were wide open. Glassy, staring at the ceiling. Surprise was frozen in them forever. She hadn't even had time to be scared. She just didn't understand what had happened. She saw the fog, and then the light went out.Beside her hand lay the shattered tray. The silver was bent. The cinnamon cookies had scattered across the black-and-white marble floor, crumbling into dust.

  A little further away, near the wall, the massive bulk of Lucifer rose like a black mountain. The Cerberus was lying on his side, his tongue lolling out. He wasn't dead—his sides were heaving steadily in a deep, unnatural sleep. From his thick neck, right beneath the collar, stuck a small feathered dart. A tranquilizer that could drop an elephant in a second. The assassin was a professional. He didn't kill "tools". He removed obstacles.

  I stared at it.I searched inside myself for a scream. Hysterics. Tears. Pain.I should have screamed. I should have thrown myself at her, pulled out the knife, tried to put pressure on the wound, tried to resuscitate her, pour magic into her...No. Martha was dead. I saw her aura. It had faded. It was empty in there. The body was cooling down. Physiology. Irreversibility.I wasn't overwhelmed by fury in the usual sense. A hot, red veil of anger.I was overwhelmed by an absolute, crystalline cold.There was... understanding.Adrian had been right. Every word he had said had been the truth.There is no safety.There is no home.Comfort is a lie. Tea with bergamot is a lie. Cookies are a lie.The "crystal dome" I had almost believed in shattered into a million pieces. The shards pierced straight into my soul, carving out the last remnants of my humanity.And the floodgates inside me opened wide. Not just by a hair, as they had in the Council Hall.Wide open.The valves blew off. The fuses blew.The Abyss poured out.

  The assassin flinched. He was an ultra-class professional. He realized he'd been spotted and assessed the threat. His task was complete (reconnaissance? a warning? or had he come for me, but Martha had become a random obstacle?). He began to dissolve into the air, going into full invisibility, transitioning into a state of pure aether.He thought he was invulnerable. He was air. You can't strike him with a sword, you can't burn him with fire, you can't freeze him with ice.“Stop.”My voice wasn't mine. It was the grinding of lithospheric plates rubbing against each other before an earthquake. A sound that ruptured eardrums.The darkness didn't strike out of me in a beam. It struck in a wave. An omnidirectional sphere of annihilation.It filled the entire grand hall in a fraction of a second, displacing light, air, and space itself.The assassin tried to fully transition into his aether form. To become immaterial.A mistake. A fatal mistake.To Entropy, there is no difference between matter and aether. Entropy is the decay of everything. The structure of atoms. The structure of magic. The structure of the soul.Entropy devours all.I raised my hand. I slowly curled my long, slender fingers into a fist.The gray fog around the assassin's figure solidified. I "froze" his transition state.The only thing that remained real was the dagger. It had slipped from his hand a moment earlier, knocked away by the shield's backlash, and rolled to the wall, outside the blast radius.The killer himself was stuck between worlds.It hurt. It had to hurt monstrously. It tore the entity to pieces, separating consciousness from the host.He screamed. Soundlessly, because fog doesn't have vocal cords. But I heard that scream mentally. The wail of horror of a creature that realized it was about to cease to be.“You killed my ‘home’,” I said. I stepped closer. My feet didn't touch the floor. I floated on a stream of black energy, levitating two inches above the marble. “You broke my teapot. You ruined the cookies.”Logic was gone. Only resentment remained. The deep, childish, irrational resentment of a kid whose favorite toy was taken and broken by an evil adult just for fun.“Vanish.”I clenched my fist until my knuckles turned white.The node in space where the assassin hung collapsed into a point of singularity.The assassin wasn't blown to pieces. He wasn't consumed by flames.He... began to be erased.Like an eraser scrubbing a pencil drawing off a piece of paper.First, the mask vanished. Beneath it, there was no face, just a gray, featureless biomass. Then this mass began to dissolve. Crumbling like dry sand.Molecular bonds were breaking. Carbon was decaying into protons. The aether body was burning out, swallowed by the Void.Bones collapsed into gray dust. Equipment, artifacts—everything turned to nothing.Only the dagger survived. The very one lying a few feet away, untouched by entropy.The process took three seconds. Three seconds of absolute annihilation of existence.Nothing remained on the marble floor.Everything that was left of an elite killer who had lived for decades, trained, murdered, loved, breathed.Absolute emptiness.And silence.Now it was real. Dead. Eternal.

  “Anya!”

  Adrian's shout sliced through the silence.

  He flew down the stairs like a whirlwind. In nothing but his training pants, barefoot, with a drawn sword in his hand. His left side was drenched in blood—apparently, he had still run into the assassin's shadow traps or the "Ghost" himself on the upper tiers while trying to break through to the hall. The wound looked nasty, smoking with gray cold, but he didn't seem to notice it. He didn't need the steps; he vaulted over the second-floor railing, landing softly on the hall tiles.

  He froze three feet away from me.The sword in his hand faltered and lowered.His gaze darted to Martha's body. Registered the death. Then to the empty spot where the enemy had been a second ago. Registered the annihilation. His face contorted with pain—both physical and the kind that couldn't be bandaged.I stood in the middle of the hall. The darkness around me was slowly calming, reluctantly pulling back under my skin like a well-fed snake returning to its hole.But the cold remained. The temperature in the enormous hall had dropped to nearly zero. Thick steam poured out of my mouth. Frost bloomed on the walls. The flowers in their pots blackened and crumbled to dust.The shattered tray with the cookies still lay on the floor, dusted with frost.“Martha...” I whispered. My voice was strange, brittle. “She baked cookies. With cinnamon.”Adrian walked up to me. Very carefully. Slowly. The way you approach an unexploded bomb or a wild beast caught in a trap. Afraid the timer would reach zero.“Anya.” He simply placed his sword on the floor. He held out a hand. Palm up. A gesture of peace. “Look at me.”I managed to tear my gaze away from the emptiness on the floor and raised my eyes to him.“He killed her, Adrian. Just like that. In passing. She came out to the noise. She wasn't a threat. She was... Martha.”“I see,” his voice was quiet, hoarse.“I killed him. I erased him. He's gone. Not in this world, not in the afterlife. I devoured his soul.”“I see.”“I... I feel nothing, Adrian. Nothing at all. Here,” I pressed a hand to my chest, “it's empty.”It was a terrifying truth. I looked at the body of the woman who had been kind to me, who had replaced a mother to me in this hell, and I felt no grief. Feel no pity. Only a vacuum. The Abyss stretching back, staring at me in return.The Abyss didn't care. Martha's death was a biographical fact. The assassin's death was a meal.The Abyss was fed. The assassin was tasty. Energy-rich.Adrian stepped right up to me. Bridging the barrier of cold. He wrapped his arms around me.His skin was hot. Scalding, like an oven. The temperature contrast was so sharp it felt like we'd sizzle upon contact.“It's shock,” he said firmly, pressing my head against his chest. I heard the heavy, jagged rhythm of the beats beneath his ribs. “It will pass. The emotions will return. You are not a robot.”“No,” I buried my forehead in his shoulder, inhaling his scent. The scent of a man, a warrior, and a beast. “It won't pass. I'm not human anymore, Adrian. Humans cry when their loved ones die. But me... I want seconds. I want to find the people who sent him and devour all of them.”

  He froze. I felt his muscles tense.Then his arms tightened, holding me against him so hard that my ribs cracked. It was painful, but this pain was the only thing anchoring me to reality.“Then we'll feed them,” he whispered into my hair. His voice vibrated with restrained fury. “We'll feed your hunger so much that the Council will drown in blood. They broke the 'Quarantine'. They sent an assassin into my home. They killed a civilian under my protection.”He pulled back and looked into my eyes. A storm raged in his violet irises.“War? They wanted to show strength? Fine. They'll get a war. Total. No rules. No prisoners.”

  They were breaking in, but I couldn't see it anymore. I had no strength left even to take a breath. Reality rippled like a malfunctioning monitor. The darkness I had just summoned now turned on me, demanding payment for every erased moment of life.

  Adrian caught me, but I didn't feel his arms. The world rapidly collapsed into an infinitely small point until only ringing silence and cold remained.

  Then came complete oblivion.