Page 129 of Godslayer
One of them—young, too young, half his face replaced with crude, rusted plating—tries to turn his head away. Tries to step back.
His legs don’t listen.
He snarls. At himself.
Epsilon chuckles. His giant, grotesque face warps on the screen, pixels shifting, lines buzzing, godlike and bored. “Do youseeeeeeeeeee, Saarinen?” The voice wraps around me, slides into my bones. “They don’t want to fight you. You’re better than them. You’re better than they could ever hope to be!”
The augments shake, their limbs snapping into motion, dragged forward by some invisible force. One of them lets out a guttural, agonized noise—more like a scream strangled before it ever reaches the surface.
I see it now.
Epsilon isn’t just controlling them. He’swearin’them.
Three bodies, one will.
And I am exactly where he wants me.
I reach down,but I’m not in the cage. I’m in the cave and I’m reaching for nothin’. It’s empty. Not like a room after someone leaves. Not like a battlefield after the bodies are cleared.
Wrong.
There’s no trace of the monks. No footprints. No blood. No echo of their voices bouncing off the stone.
I did this.
Taking a step forward, my boots hit the rock floor without a sound. The air is too still, thick with something I can’t name. Mybreath feels loud, sharp. My fingers twitch. I don’t know what they’re reaching for. There’s nothing here…
Except thereis.
The space where the monks were is warped. Like the air itself is trying to hold on to something that no longer exists anymore. It shimmers—like heat on pavement.
I reach out.
Nothing.
But my arm—my own arm—leaves a streak of light in its wake. Blue. Glowing like wire-thin threads. I draw a heart, thinkin’ of Clara and her talent of drawing shapes in the air with her light. I find myself smiling as I watch it hang in the air in front of me.
I have spark in me.
Just like her.
It’s good. It’s…good. It is. I’m gonna need this spark.
It’s for Clara. She’s gonna need it.
So you can steal it back, right Tyse?
I didn’t make the rules now, did I?
I want to tell myself I won’t take it back. But it’s true. I will becauseI feed on her. And when I kill, and take the spark from all those monks—I can spool her back up after she’s drained to near death.
Negative feedback loop. I wish I didn’t know what that was. That I didn’t understand it the way Clara doesn’t understand it. But I do.
I close my fist.
A sound—so soft I almost miss it—slips through the cavern.
A sigh.
