When the devil greets you with a grin, it's never the first time you've met him. Sometimes… you've been dancing with him all your life.
Nocturne City – Above the Phantom Precinct (Present Night)
The city was too quiet.
Not the good kind of quiet—where peace hangs in the air like mist after a cleansing rain. No. This was the kind of quiet that made your skin itch and your teeth feel too big in your mouth.
Velvora—or what most still called Nocturne City—was rarely ever truly silent. There was always something: the rumble of freight trams splitting fog, the crackle of neon feeding ads into the smog, the distant screams and coughs of the broken and addicted. But now?
Now the city sounded like it was holding its breath.
Asher stood at the cracked lip of the old underground precinct, where the sidewalk had split like a wound. The metal bulkhead doors flickered with a faint red glyph, pulsing weakly like an artery giving up.
The precinct wasn't supposed to be here. Not anymore. It had been buried after the first purge—a myth among Watchers. A precinct that had turned on its own, swallowed by the city.
And yet…
Rosa approached, gloved fingers flexing in rhythm with the hum of the glyph. Her trench coat flared around her like smoke, hair tied back into a band of copper wiring and cloth. She smelled of ozone and old grease—like every machine she'd ever rebuilt.
"You feel it too, right?" she asked, voice low.
Asher didn't respond at first. He stared at the glyph. It wasn't just marking the door. It was the door.
Behind them, Lucien dragged his coat tighter. His shirt was torn near the shoulder—burned and crusted with blood not entirely his own. One of his gloves was missing, and his exposed hand twitched uncontrollably, like it remembered something he didn't want to.
"It's like something's breathing down here," Lucien muttered. "Old breath. Rotten breath."
Asher squinted up at the blood-orange night sky. A red moon—one of the sealed moons—leered over the skyline, pulsing like a reopened scar.
"We never really killed the cult," he said flatly. "We just knocked over one of its toys."
Rosa nodded. "We clipped its tail. And now it's grown new fangs."
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Descent – Beneath the Phantom Precinct
The descent was narrow, claustrophobic. Pipes dripped hot condensation that smelled like iron and rusted teeth. Lights flickered. Some showed images that didn't exist moments earlier—hollow silhouettes screaming without sound.
The stairwell led to corridors that no map had recorded. The walls were no longer concrete—they were some hybrid of stone, wire, and flesh. Veins of glowing glyphs pulsed along the walls, stitched into them with black thread.
Every step echoed like a whisper someone tried to bury.
They reached a sealed door.
Rosa stopped. Her breath caught. "Recognize this?"
She pointed. A symbol etched deep into the corroded surface—like it had been burned there by something alive.
Asher froze. A sliver of cold crawled up his spine.
"The Eye of Vexmor," he said, his voice hoarse.
Lucien stepped closer, his expression unreadable. "That's the same one we saw in the succubus lair… and the same one etched into your dreams."
Asher swallowed. "It's been with me longer than I thought."
The door groaned open—not by force, but by invitation. It sounded like metal sighing in relief.
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The Cathedral Below
It wasn't a chamber. It was a cathedral.
Carved from bone and rebar, towering arches reached into shadows that didn't end. The air smelled of burnt incense and rot.
Hanging from the ceiling—mannequins.
Not props. Not effigies. Human-shaped puppets suspended by fiberwire, each dressed in something familiar: Watcher uniforms, cultist robes, civilian garb. Their heads lolled to the side, eyes glassy but…watching.
A pulsing red core hovered above the altar like a heart exposed from a ribcage.
And standing beneath it—her.
She was beautiful and wrong. Skin pale like candle wax, eyes molten gold with pupils like slits. Her horns spiraled upward into obsidian curls. She wore a crimson dress woven from living runes. But none of that mattered.
It was her face.
Rosa stepped back, breath shattering. "That's… my mother."
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Flashback Fragment – Age 7: Rosa in the Church
The scene blurred into memory.
A younger Rosa, barely seven, curled beneath the altar of a run-down church. Her hands were clutched around a bronze cog.
At the altar, a woman—her mother—knelt, whispering to a book with a red cover. The book pulsed. Her eyes… bled black tears.
Behind her, a faceless priest stood silently, one hand on her shoulder. The stained glass behind them was shattered. A bell rang thirteen times.
Then silence.
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Return to Present
The succubus's smile was knowing. Timeless. Too familiar.
"You never wondered why the city kept calling you back here, Rosa?" she whispered. "Why even when you tried to run, it clawed you back?"
Rosa's mouth was dry. Her knees shook, fists trembling.
The succubus continued, "Because your blood runs in these walls. Your family built this city's heart. And now…it's time for the heart to be reborn."
She raised her hand.
The mannequins jerked—then twitched, necks twisting in a sharp, sickening angle.
One stepped forward.
It wore Lucien's old Academy uniform. Its eye—singular and mechanical—focused directly on him.
Lucien stepped back. "No. No, no, no…" His voice cracked like shattered porcelain. "That's not possible. That's not—"
Then the mannequins lunged.
Asher reacted first.
Slamming his gauntlet into the ground, he activated a radiant shockwave—barrier light exploding outwards in a protective dome that caught the first wave of mannequins mid-pounce.
They crashed against the shield like porcelain meteors, cracking but not stopping.
Rosa ducked beside him, drawing her modified taser-pulse pistol. Lucien's violin was already in his hands—strung with glyph-woven wires, already humming with dark resonance.
But none of them were ready for the figure that emerged behind the altar.
He moved with silence but carried weight, cloaked in dusksteel robes and wearing a mask with curling horns and golden teeth.
The same mask from Asher's first nightmare.
The same voice.
"You've met the devil," the figure rasped. "Now meet the puppeteer."
[End of Chapter 105]
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