After seeing Jay and reality set in, it was time to tell people who might help, or would give a fuck. But the fact was, he was incapable of doing jobs that he had been hired to do.

The first text he sent to Jacob.

Need to talk. Pick a day/time/place and I'll be there

Jacob's reply came back rather quickly

Going Hunt. Meet up afterwards

The Atharim needed to know he could no longer hunt channelers. He could but it was far more dangerous and more likely to get caught and he really didn't want to anyway.  But it was what it was and he would sit down with Jacob and they'd talk.

The second text went to his contact for the Ascendancy.

I need to debrief with the Ascendancy himself. In person. Important information to relay.

He was pretty sure that the whole thing would be a hassle and that they'd have to go in and out of negotiations on whether or  not to let him near the ascendancy. He's had ample opportunity to kill the leader of the known world he could have done it many times -- not that he'd survive the encounter,

Hours later the response came with a date and time and Nox was there at the Kremlin fifteen minutes before the appointment and walked into the Kremlin sans gun and knife even though he absolutely no protection for dying now. He unzipped his coat as he walked inside, he missed the warm bundle of baby he usually kept nestled against his chest, but now wasn't the time. 

His voice was neutral, devoid of any emotion as he walked up to the desk. "I have an appointment with the Ascendancy."  He wasn't wearing a suit like everyone else in the building. He was getting the side eye from security. He didn't care. He didn't feel anything. It wasn't like he was a stranger, he'd been here a few times before, dressed exactly the same, jeans, t-shirt except this time he work heavy hiking boots to stay warm and keep traction as he walked the streets of Moscow.  He should use the car Sage provided them, but he didn't. He could drive if he truly wanted to but it all seemed so frivolous and he didn't want to be in a car anymore than he had to. He preferred his own two feet.  Living in a car tarnished the luxury.

Nox showed the receptionist his ID and they went through the whole thing. He wondered how many hoops he'd have to jump through.

Continued from The Long Way Home


The car dropped Jay off at the curb. Medsi hospital rose in modern lines of glass and chrome, its facade glowing with lighting that bled softly into the icy sleet. Not quite elite, but high enough up the ladder that you needed real clearance or money to walk through the doors without a sideways glance.

The lobby was quiet at this hour, a lull between the late-night accidents and the pre-dawn emergencies. A security drone floated overhead, trailing a soft green light as it scanned his face and credentials. Dominion crest visible on his coat again, now that he’d removed the over-layer, he stepped to the triage counter.

A woman in hospital blues looked up. Her eyes flicked to the swelling hand he kept cradled against his chest.

“Emergency?” she asked, almost automatically. “Do you have clearance or are you paying out of pocket?”
“Clearance.” Jay replied, voice rough from the cold. He reached into his coat, withdrew a slim card, and let her scan it.

Her expression shifted. Not friendlier. Just more efficient.

“Take a seat. Someone will see you shortly.”

Jay nodded and moved to the low row of waiting chairs along the far wall. He might have gone to the Facility, but the place still gave him the creeps, and getting in at this hour would be an even bigger pain in the ass than a quick dash into an actual hospital.

He sank into the seat and leaned back, wincing as the motion jostled his hand. He didn’t look at his wallet nor at any unread messages there. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened to the slow drip of water off his coat onto the clean tile floor, and tried to relax. It went horribly.

Marta dipped her finger in the holy water outside the entrance before making the sign of the cross and entering the main area of the church itself.  She was here to take her religious education classes and they had just dismissed.  Ricky had dropped her off for class, and would return later.  She had asked to stay for awhile because she thought the church was quiet and pretty.  It was pretty common and it was good self-reflection time for her. It was a church; no one was going to hurt her here and she had Splash with her as well, covered in her Emotional Support vest. Marta's own eyes were covered by her contacts as always.

Marta wasn't just here to see the pretty church though and think.  Not today.  Today she was actually going to pray.  She went to the side and genuflected before putting down the kneeler.  She crossed herself as Splash lay down next to her.  She folded her hands together, resting her elbows on the pew in front of her. She looked up at the crucifix above the altar with Jesus hanging from it. She wasn't as devout in her prayers as some, but she did believe.  She had found herself praying more lately.  Sometimes she wondered if what she was planning was the right thing - if she really should stand up to the cartels. As she looked up at Jesus, she wondered what he would do if he was her.  She still didn't have an answer.

Her prayer today wasn't for herself.  Sage had told her not to worry.  Hayden had told her not to worry.  Everyone was telling her not to worry, but she couldn't help it.  It upset her how much Nox was hurting - or rather not hurting. He was numb, and that scared her more than it would if he was in pain.  So when she prayed it wasn't for herself.  It was for Nox.

God...if you can hear me. Help him...or help Sage help him...or anyone.  Please.

As was her custom, she never really spoke her prayers out loud - at least not her personal ones. She spoke the ones for Mass out loud like everyone else did. That was her whole prayer.  She kept it simple and to the point.  As she finished she felt moisture on her cheek and wiped away the tear.  Even if her prayer was done, she remained knelt with her hands folded, her eyes focused on the crucifix at the front of the church.

It turned out Natalie had no painkillers. No aspirin. Not even a forgotten bottle of expired cough syrup. Just bare shelves. Not surprising. Her apartment was bare-boned. A woman who lived light, unburdened, as if permanence might catch her off guard. He offered to stop at a vendor on the way back, toss a few dollars at something stronger, but she told him not to worry. The order had already been placed, and the delivery would beat him home.

That was when his mind began drifting. Dinner. Takeout, probably. Neither of them cooked. Grilling was always an option, but it wasn’t like he could haul a charcoal drum onto a fifth-floor balcony in central Moscow without setting off alarms. literal or metaphorical. He considered the usual spots. Ramen, maybe. Or the Turkish place with the flatbread that always came just a little burnt. And then.

Then it hit him.
He was planning dinner. Not for himself, but for them.

This is what people in relationships do.
'Hey, should I grab milk on the way home?'

The thought tightened around his chest like a rope, soft but inescapable. For a moment, he just stood there on the wet concrete, lips parted as if the cold had caught him mid-thought, and he forgot to breathe.

Was this what he wanted? This domestic drift? The soft gravity of someone waiting for him behind a door, with arms and silence and warmth?


Because when he was with Natalie — really with her — the rest of the world fell away. Her body against his, her glare, even the way she challenged him in the quiet… it felt like all the good things he thought had been scorched out of him in the years between then and now.

But when he stepped outside of her, it was like catching his reflection in some fogged mirror. He barely recognized the man he was anyway. This was like another life. It scared the hell out of him.

So he sent another message: Going to swing by the RLD. Grabbing something better for my hand. The good stuff. The kind you didn’t get in the upscale dispensaries. What he didn’t say. What he didn’t have the guts to say was that he needed a little more time. Just a few more streets between himself and that quiet warmth he couldn’t stop wanting.

He pulled up the collar of his coat as he turned off the main road. Government-issue, heavy, and warm. Buttoned up enough to hide the uniform beneath, the one marked with the sigils of the Dominions. The CCD crests were sewn into the shoulder and chest beneath, but here, he wanted to blend in. The RLD didn’t care for symbols of power, only money. Only customers.

The Red Light District was humming under frost and shadow, alive with false heat. Neon poured from every overhang, advertisements flickering through condensation and low static interference. The air carried a chemical sweetness. Engineered pheromones, vaped synthetics, electric cinnamon. All designed to dull, entice, pacify. Snow was piled in the gutters like forgotten ash.

Around him, bodies moved through the streets like ghosts. Augmented limbs. Glowing eyes. Faces too perfect to be anything but curated. Jay passed by a VR parlor pumping out soft moans and colorwashed light, then a bio-lounge that promised transcendence in five microdoses or less.

He’d been here before. Of course he had. But never looking for relief. Never like this.

Tonight, he wasn’t chasing pleasure. He was chasing silence. A chemical kind. Something to numb the ache in his knuckles, which were still sore and purpled from striking both Matías and the wall behind him. But it wasn’t just his hand that hurt. It was the hollowness in his chest. The kind that nothing could fix.

It took a few tries. Most dispensaries catered to the weekend crowd. Dream-syrups, synth-mirage injectables, neural-slow patches. But eventually, tucked between a gene-tweak parlor and an automated pleasure bar, he found a vendor that carried the military-branded stuff. Combat residue relief. Nerve quieters. Burn-skin regenerants. Things marketed to a specific group.

The attendant barely looked up. Just slid a digital display across the counter and gestured at the scanner. The place was warm, artificially so. Overhead, a reactor coil hummed softly, and red light spilled from the strip-lighting above like diluted blood.

Jay keyed in a code, jaw tight, shoulders hunched beneath the heavy weight of the coat. He could feel the eyes of the district behind him. Not specific, but aware, the way this part of the city always was. Like the whole block was a creature watching from the cracks.

As the machine processed his payment, he wondered again if he was stalling because of her or because he didn’t know what kind of man he was once he let himself be happy.

Either way, the drugs would help. Not just the hand. Not just the bruises.

He stepped out into the street once more to find a place to use the very product he just purchased.

The new Atharim Headquarters was perfectly reconstructed. Nora worked at the one prior to the fire, and nobody had questioned how she survived it. In the time it took for the HQ to reopen, she’d been staying at an Atharim owned apartment in the mid-city, someplace that didn’t attract attention and served a rotating guest list of Atharim needing someplace to stay. It felt more like a dressed up hotel room rather than a home. For that reason, Nora preferred spending her waking hours in HQ, but it just felt wrong now that she knew what she was.

But she had no other choice. The only way she could do her proper research was directly on the Atharim’s servers, with database access to Vatican digital archives. She brought Claude here a few days after his arrival. Being Saint-Clair’s he had no issue with admittance, and after a short tour of the newly finished Baccarat building, they were buried in the database room, and she was quietly showing him her findings.

She stood in the middle of the room, arms crossed, brows drawn together like she was daring the data to contradict her.
“This isn’t some mood-swing death spiral, okay?” she said, her voice firm, practiced, and maybe a little defensive. “I’ve been digging through the Vatican scans, translation records, all the flagged anomalies from the last decade. Everything they don’t publish but still track.”

She clicked something on the laptop and the screen split, showing a dozen digital entries, each tagged with variations of the same phrase: uncontrolled divine surge, fatality suspected. She didn’t look at Claude, but she knew he was there. Close enough to hear, close enough to catch her if her voice cracked. It didn’t.

“They’ve been cataloguing godmarked individuals since before the term even existed. No one talks about it in the open, but the data’s there. Every time one of … ahem… someone appears. Every time a god touches their powers, something follows. Something irreversible.”

She stepped aside, letting him look if he wanted. She didn’t wait to see if he did.

“The powers always escalate. Slowly at first. But no one fades out. No one stays the same. They either go dormant and self-destruct,” she pointed to one case file, “or they snap. Violently.”

She exhaled through her nose and pulled up another tab. A scan of an old illuminated manuscript, faded Latin text with annotations in three languages.

“I did a reverse search on godmarkings, abrupt endings, and cataclysms.. that sort of thing to try and understand whether it’s reversible. Can you prevent a god from … well, becoming what’s inevitable. I found this, and I can’t for the life of me figure it out, but it definitely doesn’t look promising.”[/color]

She enlarged the image. A hand-drawn wheel, stylized like a sunburst, formed the centerpiece. Around it were smaller glyphs—constellations, or possibly seals. At the center: a broken sword embedded in an open eye.

“It showed up in four different texts across three centuries. All referring to the gods. All ending in some kind of cataclysm.” She ran her fingers through her hair, letting her hand linger at the back of her neck where she squeezed the tense muscles. Her voice dropped lower, not quite a whisper but something conspiratorial, wary. She was looking for answers about herself. Can she suppress her power? Can she change herself? Did this mean she should avoid having children? It’s not that she wanted them now, but someday, she figured she would.

“I asked another Atharim scholar for their opinion. He said it’s tied to something called the Unseen Pattern. Supposedly a prophecy, but it’s written in what is called 'preconceptional language’… a kind of thought-form language. There’s no Rosetta Stone for it. Even AI doesn’t have a good interpretation.”

She paused, then glanced at Claude for the first time since she’d started speaking. Her expression wasn’t confident anymore. It was measured. Cautious.

“I’ve read every commentary I can access. None of them agree on what it means. But I swear it feels familiar. Like I’ve seen it before. Maybe in a dream, or…”

She trailed off, then gave a small shrug, forcing the moment back under control. She was no prophet. She next showed him the list of commentaries, some going back two-thousand years of scholars giving their opinions. “Look, I know it’s a long shot, but you’ve always been better with puzzles than I am. This one’s chewing a hole through my brain.”

She crossed back to the laptop and tapped a few keys, bringing the image into sharper resolution.

“I hate these damn prophecies. Do you see anything in it I don’t?”




Link to research information on Nora's wiki: Scroll to Nora's Research section.

Anna didn’t know why she went to the GUM, and especially didn't know why she went by herself. She had spent a lot of time with Elyse and she loved that, but maybe she just found herself needing to get away for a bit. She didn’t really live there after all, and it was quite crazy with all the kids there that didn’t shut off it seemed. It also helped that Elyse was doing okay. She wasn’t great, but she was better than she had been. Anna didn’t worry every day anymore. Elyse had been keeping in contact with the Shale’s too. It was kind of cute seeing Elyse get a crush after she made fun of Anna for her crush on Cade. The thought of it made Anna smile. 

Apparently Anna had missed Cade showing up at the house though. Marta had told Elyse who had told Anna that he had met with Nox, and had been once again introduced to the world of monsters, and it seemed like he was at least believing now. Anna shuddered at the thought of the vampire (dreykan Elyse had called it).  It was a bad memory from an otherwise pleasant day. She could still see the dead woman’s lifeless gaze. She pushed it aside, not wanting to think about it. In response, Anna reached for her power, still surprised that it came to her so readily now, the warmth of it within her, giving her comfort and pushing away the terrible memory.

Today Anna sat on a bench though, watching people pass by. A pair of lovers walked by holding hands, several sets of mother’s pulling children around as they finished their Christmas shopping. Other people were solitary like her, but walking around with a sense of purpose. Anna didn’t really have a purpose for being here. She had thought when she had left Nox’s place that she might do some shopping, but at this point she really hadn’t started. Perhaps she would later. For now, people watching seemed to be suiting her just fine.

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The stench hit first.

Even with the brisk winter air fighting to clear the streets, the area clung to the rot of old refuse and too many bodies packed too close together. Quillon Hawke adjusted the strap of his simple black jacket: thick canvas, built for work, with the Brotherhood of Ascension's emblem stitched modestly above the chest. His jeans were worn but clean, his boots sturdy enough for cracked sidewalks and mud-slick alleys. He looked out of place here, but not unwelcome. The Brotherhood's reputation reached even the forgotten corners of the city. If not respect, then at least tolerance.

Hollow-eyed figures watched from makeshift shelters: tents stitched from tarps and duct tape, blankets draped over shopping carts. Children peeked out and vanished again into the broken forest of rusted beams and concrete pillars. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. Always a dog, in places like this. 

Quillon shifted the heavy pack on his back, full of simple offerings: thermoses of hot soup, loaves of fresh bread, bundled socks, cheap but clean gloves. Enough for today. Not enough for tomorrow.

It never was.

He moved to a patch of cleared ground near an old, fire-scorched wall and set down a folding table, scratched and battered from use, then began unpacking. A few people drifted closer, drawn by the smell of real food. The scent of warm broth seemed almost unnatural here, in a place that smelled only of despair, body odor, and open sewage.

Quillon worked methodically, gloves off, sleeves pushed up to reveal forearms marked with faint scars from a childhood full of intravenous lines and medications. His presence was steady, grounded. Not friendly. Not soft. But sure.

As he handed out cups of steaming soup and warm bread, he spoke without sermonizing or shouting, just a simple reminder.

"No soul is too lost," he said, offering a sandwich to a young man whose hands shook from cold or hunger or something deeper. "Ascension waits for all who reach for it."

Most only nodded, or said nothing at all. That was enough. 

"If you think you have higher powers, we can help you find it."

"The veil calls to all. Who will answer?"

Quillon kept his face impassive, though a knot of old frustration twisted in his chest. Hope was a slow harvest. Hard to plant, harder to grow.

Today, he sowed what seeds he could.