revenant.

INT. PORTLAND AIRPORT

The Portland airport hums like a place between worlds—glass walls, endless carpet, the scent of coffee and rain-soaked fleece. It’s too clean, too polite, like it’s trying to apologize for being an airport at all. Cait remembers it a little differently from her childhood. Now it’s brighter, newer, but still quiet in that Portland way. Trees in planters. Art on the walls. Everyone soft-spoken, as if even departures should feel gentle.

At the gate, under the sterile glow of overhead lights that do nothing to disguise the fact that time has stopped meaning anything, Cait stands very still.

They’re about to cast something that’s never been cast before. 

This is not hyperbole. This is not some dusty footnote of forgotten ritual or a derivative echo of blood magic dressed in new names. This is invention. This is rupture. And she and Jameson are the ones doing it.

She breathes shallowly, because breathing deeply brings on too much of it at once. The magnitude. The momentum. The possibility that she will not return. Isn’t this what she’s always wanted? She doesn’t think about all of it too deeply. Not the stakes, not the scale. Not what they’re about to become. Because when she does—it overwhelms. The greatness of it all. The sheer momentum at which they are moving. Unstoppable. Freight train, freight train. What a stupid metaphor. They’re something bigger than that. Something unparalleled. Streaking across a landscape of sheer invention.

Jameson sits next to her at the Airport Gate, and she holds out his ticket between two fingers, already checked the gate information twice. Three times. Airport dad mode, he said, teasing. She can’t help it. Precision calms her. Movement gives her illusion. But under it all, there’s only stillness.

She closes her eyes and thinks of the Uber ride—dark outside, the road folding under them like a ribbon. She didn’t speak. She opened a group thread with Estela and Mara and wrote, Leaving for a few days. Be back soon. The lie felt small. Almost harmless. But even now, her chest aches at the idea she may never see Garnett again. The garden. The stones. The graves. It’s hubris, she knows—the Caitlin Siltshore of it all —that she thinks she can walk through this and come out the other side unchanged. Alive, even.

But she does think that. Has to.

Dorian is right beneath her skin. Circling. A shark chasing its own tail. Sometimes she lets him take the reins. Sometimes he hands them back. A ball tossed back and forth between them, like they share the same restlessness, the same hunger.

He’s quiet now. But he’s vibrating. And it’s not the usual impatience or cold ambition. It’s something else—something ancient. Cait has never felt him like this before. No ritual, no blood-letting has drawn this from him. This feels like the pause before a detonation. Like awe.

Nebraska. They’re going to Nebraska. She threw a dart at the list of towns in Atlas Jay's penthouse, and the numbers told her it was right. Population, distance to power lines, history of blight. Dawn landing. Two days to build the bones of the ritual. Full moon to set it off. She checks the tickets again.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to Nebraska,” she says to Jameson and she remembers the last time she looked into those eyes and watched the light go out. Remembers how nothing brought him back. They haven’t flown together since going to Connecticut. Near her feet her carry-on is full of spell components, stuffed to the seams with dried herbs and glass bottles and a knife that smells like the past. She’s mapped out what she’ll need to find once they land. She’s thought of everything.

Because in two and a half hours, they’ll board a plane. And when they land, Cait and Jameson will make a God.

Airport chatter strings in and out one ear, Airpod blasts the triumphant beats of a Kendrick Lamar song in the other. Jameson waits in the terminal, his Yankee baseball cap on his head, a traveling must have, with a package of almonds in his hands, which he has periodically been pouring into his palm then flinging them into his mouth. The music, the almonds, and the endless flow of people watching material makes the time go by faster.

Is this how Jesus felt on the night of the last supper?  Jameson doesn’t have a cross to bear, he’s already done the dying part, but he’s stuck on the knowing. Knowing something is coming, someone is coming, either with a baseball bat to smash reality or with a key to unlock what has always been there. Ironically, Cait holds the bat and Jameson the key.

When they come back here, out of the terminal and set back foot in Oregon, return to Port Leiry, everything will be different.

Nervous is a piss poor word to describe how he feels. Anxious too. He does his best not to bother too much with these feelings. Throw them in a pot and let them boil into excitement instead. He’s excited to do this magic, he’s excited for Dorian to return to this physical plane, where he belongs and not trapped in someone else’s body. He’s excited to be the one to do it, he’s excited Cait is by his side.

There’s the possibility of failure, of hollow graves being dug, of sacrifice wasted out of careless ambition. Yeah? That happens everyday in the world around them. They failed once already. Plots are dug everyday. Million lives are sacrificed out of the greed of money, why not sacrifice lives out of the greed for magic too? 

The world will keep spinning.

“You’re not missing much,” Jameson responds to Cait, who’s been mostly quiet this entire time. Besides the general: We have to be two hours early to the airport. Do you have your ticket? You have a REAL ID, right? Don’t bring anything flammable. We don’t have time for you to get detained by TSA. 

“Flat, it’s very flat,” he says. “Big skies. Beautiful sunsets.” He inches himself closer so what he says next will only be heard by them two. Them three really. “We might have time to catch one before…” With both sound effects and hand gestures, he softly mimics an explosion. Don’t get caught up with TSA, remember? 

Things between Cait and Jameson are better. They’re not slapping each other, not gouging eyes, or gifting each other severed hearts either. The silence between them isn’t awkward even, it’s comfortable. Whatever this is, whatever they are, is comfortable. Comfortable enough to show each other their worst sides. Comfortable enough to hurt each other and like a fucked up boomerang, always return to the other. Comfortable enough to unleash hell on earth and hold hands while they do it. 

He’s smart enough to keep the boom to pantomime— Caitlin has no intention of hexing the TSA on day one. A sidelong glance needles him: What were you ever doing in Nebraska, Jameson?

“You can tell me what dragged you out there—” The rest dies on her tongue: if we live through this.

Instead, Cait slips the right-side AirPod from his ear, a sleight-of-hand so practiced it feels like muscle memory. The electric snap of Kendrick’s beat rattles straight into her skull— and for a moment she lets the rhythm drown the concourse. Her pulse syncs to the triplet hi-hat. One almond remains in Jameson’s palm; she steals that too, crunching salt between her molars like a benediction. No words. Just a conspirator’s nod that says: ready.

The jet bridge yawns open, a carpeted throat smelling of hydraulic oil and stale conditioned air. Cait counts each step, mapping sigils in her mind—left, right, left, right, the whole world reduced to an even-numbered cadence. She imagines the plane itself as a temporary circle, fuselage chalked in aluminum and rivets, a ward they’ll occupy for four hours and change. Flight 1123 to Omaha: liminal enough to keep Dorian quiet. He coils beneath her sternum anyway, tasting metal, strobing through memories of propellers and zeppelins and older, bloodier wings. She tightens her grip on the shoulder strap of her carry-on. Bottles clink like distant chimes.

Window seat, as always. Jameson’s got aisle - likes to be the master of his own destiny. She presses her forehead to the Plexiglas while passengers thrum past, a soft parade of backpacks and apologies. Jameson settles on the aisle, long legs angled out, man-spreading. He’s mouthing lyrics she can no longer hear, left ear unplugged, but the echo sticks to his lips. Cait catalogues the scene: plastic smile of the attendant, hiss of recirculated air, the static of her own thoughts. As the plane taxis toward the gate, she lets her hand drift, palm-down, onto the back of his. A single thumb-stroke—absent-minded, almost shy—maps the curve of his knuckles, an unspoken sigil for still here. When he looks up, half-drowsy, she presses the returned AirPod into his palm and closes his fingers around it. Then her hand’s back in her lap.

When the engines spool, a low predatory growl, she feels it mirrored inside her ribs—Dorian’s answering purr. Upward surge. Gravity loosens its fist; Portland slides away in wet panes of light. Street grids turn to circuit boards, then quilted fog, then nothing but cloud.

Cruise altitude is a monastery of dull white noise. Jameson dozes, cap pulled low; his dream-breath brushes her arm in intervals. Cait fishes a fountain pen from her bag and scribbles sigils on a cocktail napkin—pressure nodes, lunar timing, coordinates of the abandoned grain silo they’ll commandeer. Ink feathers at the edges; she tongues the sigil for secrecy and the lines lock sharp. Somewhere over Idaho, the sun drapes molten over engine cowling, and for a heartbeat she believes in simpler miracles: wheat fields and corn tassels.

Descent. The seat-belt sign glows, tiny, verdict-red. Nebraska opens beneath them—vast, flat, an altar waiting. Touchdown shudders through aluminum bones, through her own. 

The tires bark and settle; the cabin exhales. Cait unbuckles, leans just far enough to tap Jameson’s knee—three quick pulses, the old “still breathing” code from darker nights. Outside the porthole, morning unspools across a prairie the color of tarnished brass, and the runway heat shivers like something alive.

INT. HOTEL - ASHFORD BEND, NEBRASKA

Jameson sprawls his body amongst the bed in the hotel room. His bed, because, to his dismay, there are two. Once upon a time, when life was a fairytale, and love was real, he and Cait would’ve shared one. Now, he's trying to write a rivals to friends to lovers to enemies back to lovers troupe, where the main characters have to deal with the conundrum of sharing a bed. Their lives are like an AO3 story come to life. 

It’s not the best hotel, which is a very generous way to describe where they are. It’s a dingy room, floored with old, shag carpets decades behind in style and for a cleaning. It’s a dump. Sketchy. Jameson has a feeling the last guest that stayed in here died in this room and he doesn’t need to be a witch to pick up on that. 

Regardless, Jameson feels comfortable in a place like this. Dumpy motels used to be home not too long ago, when he and Dorian were on their two year cross country adventure. Jameson shifts his body to get a look at Cait. He’s getting better at reading between the lines, figuring out who is running the show by a single look. Right now, it’s Cait, keeping herself busy on the other bed.

It’s amazing they’ve gotten here. Getting along. Whenever they spend this amount of time together last, twelve hours and counting, they had  liked each other. They loved each other even. At the very least, they were fucking, which makes it easy to get along. That was before the bullshit. Before the spell went bad, Brennan’s heart was in a box, one chopped finger and a gouged eye. Before Dorian even. Now, they are here. Together. Regardless if their bullshit muddied the water of everything around them, they were able to endure.

Who needs a relationship therapist when you’re both equally driven by power and ambition? 

Dorian brought them together and keeps them this way, by holding Jameson’s hand and by holding a knife to Cait’s throat. What happens when he releases? What happens when he is released? Does their truce fly out the window? Is it every man for him or herself? Do they go for carnage? Fight to the death? Will the winner stick the loser’s head on a pole to display for all of Port Leiry to see?

What happens when Cait no longer needs Jameson? What happens when Jameson no longer needs her?

“When this is over,” Jameson’s voice breaks the silence in the room that’s been held for so long. He picks up his lanky body and looks at her while he talks. “What happens between us?”

He doesn’t ask it desperately, not like a clingy person who wants to DTR with someone who barely pays attention to them. He asks like somebody who is trying to plan ahead.

“Do we let bygones be bygones?” Can murder be brushed under the rug? “Or does this little thing,” Jameson points his finger between the two of them, “evaporate into thin air?”

“Basically, what I’m wondering is , Siltshore, how do I know you’re not going to come after me when all is said is done? I know how vengeful you can be.” He’s got a sparkling brown eye to prove it. 

“Most importantly,” Jameson continues, with a small crooked smirk on his lips, like they’re about to embark on a game, “how do you know that I won’t come after you?”

Cheap hotel because she can’t afford a paper trail—cash at the desk, no ID, no questions. The clerk’s eyes never climbed higher than her collarbone. Perfect. Still, the bedsprings whine like a guilty conscience each time she shifts, and the jaundiced ceiling bulges in places that suggest water damage or worse. She lies flat, spell-scroll glowing on her phone, scrolling and rescrolling until the glyphs blur.

After the red-eye dumped them in Nebraska’s predawn chill, she’d moved like a surgeon on adrenaline: rental-car, hardware store, apothecary stop hidden behind a vape shop. She decanted fresh hydragyrum into glass vials padded in her sock drawer, ground bismuth with motel ice in a borrowed blender, and braided silver fuse-wire into three-strand tress for the containment lattice. Every receipt burned in the bathroom sink; every fingerprint scrubbed with cheap vodka. By dusk the carpet was peppered with chalk test circles and the bathroom counter looked like a chemist’s wake, but the kit was packed, catalogued, ready.

Now, on the other bed Jameson is awake—of course he is. He can always feel her tension humming across the room like live wire.

He speaks because he knows it’s her, not the thing under her breastbone. She turns onto her side, elbow denting a pillow that smells faintly of bleach and cigarettes. “Do you mean what keeps us from killing each other?” she asks, voice low, steady. It’s the only honest framing. Nothing between them has ever broken without blood in the cracks.

He looks at her the way he scans a deal memo—hunting the escape clauses, the quiet little traps. What happens between us?

A laugh snags in her throat. “Jameson, I’m in a hotel room with you two hours outside Omaha—and that’s after you murdered my uncle and I stole your eye. If this isn’t letting bygones be bygones, what is?” She even lifts her phone, the light washing her smirk in ghost-blue. “That’s Exhibit A for forgiveness, right there.”

But the question festers. Ambition is her cardinal sin; he of all people knows she’ll chew through steel to pry open a door marked freedom. Would she turn on him the second Dorian’s blade lifts from her neck? Would he turn on her the second she no longer houses his prized mentor? 

She drags a hand over her face, grinding sleep grit from her eyes. “If trust is too fragile,” she says, tapping the luminous script, “we can engineer deterrence.” She thumbs to a blank margin and sketches a pair of mirrored runes on her phone. “We write it into the spell: a binding fail-safe. If either of us tries to take the other out—verbally, magically, or with the nearest blunt object—we both go down. Live grenade with tied pins.”

The other option is one they’ve banked on over and over again. They could gamble on memory.  Across the gulf of mismatched bedspreads lie too many nights to count—nights when they huddled in a rust-eaten Mazda, trading laughter for warmth; nights when his pulse in her mouth felt like absolution; nights when they planned futures too reckless to survive sunrise. They could try and wager that thing between them is harder to kill than either of them were. Love’s the word for it isn’t it?

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe they’re not rivals or lovers or sins in the same confession, maybe they’re just survivors in the same wreck. 

At the end of this, Caitlin wants a life that is hers. Not Dorian’s, not the Roys’, not the curse’s. Hers. That means no vendettas chasing her down the interstate. She flicks her gaze to his lone brown eye—bright, calculating. Silence coils. Somewhere in the hallway a television drones about corn prices and salvation. The air conditioner rattles like bones in a sack. 

Without waiting for his assent, she scrolls to the spell’s margin, sketches the twin fail-safe glyphs, and flicks the phone onto his mattress. “There—read it. Then sleep while you can. Dawn’s coming fast.” She rolls onto her back again, then goes back to counting the ceiling cracks instead of sheep.

A suicide pact?

Jameson snickers, vapid, unserious, as he gives her a look. Are you sure?  It seems to say. Or is this a joke?

He thinks little about his own death. Something that’s bound to happen because it’s life's only promise, but he knows it waits for him long down the road. Why waste time sweating over it now?

Well, there are those who seek revenge. Jameson leaves a legacy of victims behind him, plenty would rather see him dead than alive. Somebody is bound to catch up to him one of these days,  and Cait is amongst those somebodies. There’s comfort in knowing that she won’t resurface in a haunting, though, of all his victims, Cait is his favorite.

This pact she offers, it will bind them better than any wedding vow could. Their heartbeats, lungs, and life force would be woven and tethered to another. One wouldn’t exist without the other. Jameson could be on the opposite side of the world, but every night, he would be able to look at the midnight moon and know that, somewhere, the sun would be shining down on Cait. 

In one way or another, Cait would forever belong to Jameson. And Jameson would belong to her. 

He could sign it. It could be a short lived deal, after all, who knows how it could go tomorrow. What does the ritual hold in store for them? See, they could either free Dorian from heaven or they could  be digging themselves into hell. If tonight is his last night on earth, at least he has the pleasure of spending it with Caitlin Siltshore. 

He takes  the phone and skims the addendum. Curious eyes, one brown and one blue, flicker upon Cait, as he nods his head in agreement to this pact. Jameson lifts himself off of his bed, to return her phone, but his frame lingers over her body. He gazes at her for a long moment, taking in this millisecond of time.  

His pointer finger picks up her chin, his lips lock onto hers. Passion tangled actions and she reciprocates every touch. Has she missed him as well? When he crawls further into her bed, she allows him. 

It begins to escalate.

4:00AM, JUNE 10

After that, they sleep in shifts, and when the digital clock flips to 04:00 on June 10th, Cait and Jameson roll out of bed and go to work.

DAWN, JUNE 10 

Bleak pink light scrapes the horizon. Cait straddles the ridge beam of First Baptist’s steeple, a bone-white scissor rune between her gloved fingers. “Hush,” she murmurs—not to the church, but to the memory of hymns that still cling to its rafters. She levers a cedar shingle loose and tucks the sigil beneath. The bone clicks once, like the closing of a tiny tomb.

The climb down is slower; shingles sweat dew, and a misstep would send her thirty feet to shattered ribs and wasted hours. Halfway, she pauses, eyes closed, palms flat on warm cedar. She tastes iron on her tongue—Dorian flexing inside her chest, a cat stretching claws into velvet.

Below, Jameson idles the truck on Main. She watches him through morning mist—tailgate down, tool-box open, bones and nails laid out like surgical steel. He handles every storefront threshold, she the sanctums: churches, the elementary school with its mural of smiling corn cobs, the elevator whose silo crown looms over town like a white cathedral of grain. Division of labor; ritual priority. They learn the hard way that gods eat order the way fire eats oxygen.

At the elementary school Caitlin crouches beneath cartoon corn stalks, knuckles raw where lime and sap have crusted. A girl’s forgotten jump rope lies coiled by the doors; she threads the rope through the scissor rune and knots it tight—a mock communion between childhood and coming calamity. A janitor’s radio crackles inside, playing ‘Take It Easy’—an accidental benediction. She vanishes before the next verse begins.

By 7:00am the town’s skeleton wears twenty-three scissor runes. Cait’s hands stink of old marrow and cedar sap; Jameson’s palms are raw where hammer and frost-splintered latticework tear skin. They exchange curt nods—no time for comfort. The clock in Cait’s head already tolls the minute-hand forward.

Breakfast is gas-station coffee and corn-syrup donuts balanced on the truck’s warm hood. They eat wordlessly, watching wisps of steam drift off the cup rims. The sun crests over fields, gilding the grain elevator’s white teeth. Somewhere, a dog barks itself hoarse and then falls silent.

9:05PM, JUNE 10 

Night again; 9:05pm, June 10th. Cait stands on a gravel farm road at the county’s northeast corner, iron filings ringing her boots like dull starlight. She empties the first burlap sack in a slow, deliberate swath. Salt follows - harvested from a dead sea, consecrated against return. She imagines each grain as a nail, pinning the town’s fate to the dry Nebraska earth.

Her shoulders burn; each sack weighs more than it should, iron drinking moonlight until it feels molten. When she straightens, vertebrae pop like knuckles. The prairie stretches endless—flat, forgiving, unremarkable. Perfect stage for a vanishing act.

Across radio crackle Jameson’s voice drifts, ragged but steady.

“Southern arc laid. Turning west.”

“Copy,” she replies, throat dry. She can almost see him: headlights slitting the dark, iron-salt plume curling behind the truck like a comet tail. Their paths meet and lock, a figure-eight of intent eight miles wide—closure, containment, no escape.

She pivots, eyes the sky. The Strawberry Moon hangs low, still ochre at the edges. Sagittarian fire —an arrowhead of destiny. She draws a finger along its arc, sketches the route Dorian will take through realms.

By dawn of June 11th, the loop is sealed. Coyotes howl outside the perimeter but do not cross; birds veer overhead as if repelled by an invisible dome. The town, still unaware, goes about its morning coffees and crop reports. Cait tastes copper on her tongue: the air already remembers blood that has not yet been spilled.

They rendezvous at an abandoned grain scale. Jameson levers the truck’s hood, checking fluid levels. Cait swirls a drop of diesel on her fingertip, murmurs a quick calculus of flame-spread and containment. She hears her Dorian’s voice—measure twice, burn once—and smiles despite herself.

8:12AM, JUNE 11 

A vacant tin-roofed shed two miles east of town rattles under rising heat. Inside, Cait slices the crook of her elbow over a galvanized bucket half-full of storm water siphoned from yesterday’s thunderhead. Blood hits water and spirals crimson; she whispers the ratios—three parts vitae, five parts rain, a pinch of prairie loam for terroir. She ladles the mixture into Mason jars packed with shredded corn husk, presses each lid, and whispers “Memor.” Blessing, curse, command: remember.

The air in the shed thickens, smelling of penny and ozone. For an instant she glimpses reflections in the jar glass—faces she has never met, futures she will not live. She screws the lids tighter. 

Jameson, squatting at a splintered workbench, affixes labels in his brutal block print—J1 through J30. He corks, wax-seals, stacks them in the truck bed with a methodical clunk-clunk-clunk that soothes and unnerves in equal measure.

“How’s the hemoglobin holding?” he asks.

“Thick enough to clot, thin enough to pour.”

He flashes a grin. “Story of us.”

She snorts, wipes sweat off her chin with a bloody sleeve. Outside, heat veils the horizon, farmhouses shimmering like mirages. Somewhere a windmill creaks, lonely as a gallows.

They break at noon only long enough to swig warm Gatorade and glare at the blistering sky. Dorian murmurs inside her sternum—restless, eager, half-formed. She tamps him down with the memory of ice water sluicing veins: Not yet. The jars cool in shade, waiting for dusk.

5:30PM, JUNE 11 

Center-pivot field off Route 24, amber stalks swaying like an audience waiting for curtain rise. Cait unslings a canvas satchel of builder’s lime and begins the lattice. Each stride is measured, each pouring arc precise: fractal hexagons blossoming, one within the next, until geometry looks like language spoken by hungry angels. Her shoulders ache, her lips crack, but the pattern unfurls flawless.

She hums under her breath—an old sea-shanty Brennan sang on fishing trips. The rhythm keeps her strokes steady; the irony of singing about oceans in sea-less Nebraska pleases her.

Jameson hammers alignment poles at every vertex—spruce branches stripped to bone, their tips wrapped in reflective tape. Sunlight catches the markers and hurls glints across the field, a constellation stitched onto earth. Cait steps back, sweat brimming in her eyes, and sees the shape for what it is: a mouth—ready to swallow a township whole.

7:45PM, JUNE 11 

Hotel room door clicks shut behind them. Cait washes lime dust and blood in lukewarm sink water, studying the woman in the mirror: mud-flecked cheeks, pupils blown wide by adrenaline. Jameson sits on the bed, counting out matches, mercury vials, the orrery staff nestled across his lap like a relic.

He looks up. “Seventy-two heartbeats per minute?”

She inhales, exhales. Dorian’s pulse ghosts hers like a second shadow. “Seventy-two.”

“If it spikes—”

“It won’t.” She ties her hair back, exposing the sternum skin she’ll carve soon enough. The steadiness in her own voice surprises her.

They load the truck at 8:15pm —speakers, jars, silver clasp, black mirror. The fuel gauge hovers under a quarter tank; doesn’t matter. Either they’ll finish before empty or the truck will never leave the field.

9:50PM, JUNE 11 

Engine rumble under them, they turn off Route 24 onto the dirt lane. Jars slosh ominous in the bed. The moon—huge, strawberry-red—climbs the eastern sky like a warning flare. Cait calculates the minutes: eighty-one left until 11:11pm, the moment the fuse must kiss wax.

Jameson drives one-handed, other fingers tapping the wheel in triple meter—heartbeat rehearsal. “We’re good on schedule,” he says. 

“We’re perfect,” she answers, though perfection feels razor-thin. Her gaze traces the iron-salt perimeter glittering faintly in headlights. Inside that loop every porch light, every breathing body, belongs to the spell.

The truck’s radio murmurs static until a country station breaks through—love song about pickup trucks and forever promises. Jameson snorts and kills the volume. Cait almost laughs. Forever is a luxury Ashford Bend will never understand.

10:30PM, JUNE 11 

Truck crests the low rise and descends into the corn sea. Poles catch moonlight, guiding them to the lattice center. Cait hops down, boots sinking in soft loam. Distant sprinklers tick like cheap clocks; irrigation aqueducts sigh. Ordinary farm sounds layer over coming apocalypse.

She keys the metronome on her phone—nine-second intervals—and climbs into the bed. Jar One shatters beside the driver’s door as Jameson accelerates into spiral trajectory. Glass and brine explode onto stalks; metallic scent curls in her nostrils. Two. Three. The pattern closes inward, ever tighter, until Cait’s arms ache from the rhythm and the truck idles at lattice’s edge, jars spent.

Silence swells. Crickets stop. Even the pivot’s hydraulic hiss falters, as if the machinery senses what lurks beneath the soil. Cait’s forearms tremble, jar glass glittering at her feet like fallen stars. She feels infinitesimal, a matchstick girl about to ignite a universe. And still the metronome ticks: nine seconds, nine seconds—countdown carved in quartz.

10:56PM, JUNE 11 

Cait kneels over the crucible disk— Jameson’s family heirloom ring nested in wax and iron. Presses her palm, feels the material soften with her heat, fuse flesh to metal for a brutal heartbeat before she yanks free. Blood-warm wax smokes. Jameson circles, striking matches, sulfuric hiss stinging lungs.

“Corner two,” he calls, voice hoarse.

“Copy,” she rasps. Her chest feels tight, like Dorian’s claws tapping ribs. She breathes through it—counting, controlling—until fumes flee skyward.

A moth suicides into the match-flame, curls to ash mid-air. An omen; a tiny echo of what awaits fifteen thousand souls asleep beyond the cornfield. Cait watches the cinder spiral upward and disappear.

11:04PM, JUNE 11

Jameson’s thumb toggles the speaker system. Heartbeats thunder across flatland: infants, pensioners, lovers tangled in sheets they’ll never wake from. Cait slits her sternum, carves the blood-knot, feels her own pulse hitch to metronome command. Seventy-two. Seventy-two. Over it, Dorian purrs—a lion waiting for the gate to lift.

Jameson loops the braid, silver clasp shining. Her world shrinks to rhythm and red moonlight.

She tastes strawberry on the night air—an illusion, moon-borne. She wonders which baker in town left pies cooling on a sill, who will never taste them. The thought is distant, almost kind, and then it is gone.

11:09PM, JUNE 11

Inked meridian underfoot. She stares into the black mirror until stars blur and the Elseway glyph etches white fire across her corneas. “Now,” she whispers. Staff slams earth—one, two, three—each reverberation deepening a hairline tear overhead. On strike seven the staff cracks; a seam yawns in silence, swallowing starlight.

Dorian’s breath presses cool against her neck though he has no lungs.

The tear smells of petrichor and dying suns. She remembers Dorian’s lecture on dimensions. Rotate three degrees, neutralize phase skew. She obeys even now.

11:11PM, MINUS FORTY SECONDS, JUNE 11 

Counter-clockwise walk. Soil chills under bare feet, bone wand carving grooves that steam in prairie night. Jameson salts and scatters marigold behind. Sixth coil, seventh—center. She steps out; he drops his family heirloom ring, drives iron home. The earth clangs like an anvil.

Silence hardens. The metronome hits zero. Cait lifts her gaze to the strawberry moon, feels it pulse like a wound. Finally she repeats the spell, quick as the seconds to 11:11 slip by: 

Tu vacuus, fame percussus, mille sub umbris Nomina gessisti, per flammas corpus inustum, Surge iterum: radix esto sub ruina, Esto tonitrus iter, esto vox post vela.

Te non voce voco sed corde cruente ligato, Nec vinculo te stringo sed voluntate relicta. Frangimus horarum leges, spargimus arenam, Tibi non tempus do sed fasces fulminis atri.

Ecce oppidum, scinditur spina canendo, Ardet focus retro, cor ut liber nudatur.

Sume animam, bibe noctem, cognosce ruinam, Per vulnus ambula, vestigia utraque linque.

Cinerem et nodum, pulsum lunamque vocamus, Retia combusta, speculum fractum testantur.

Leges priscas conterimus ore silenti, Patronus surge, ex tenebris fiat origo, Hic incipit magia—hic incipit nomen.

The wick catches at precisely 11:11 PM. It hisses to life where it curls beneath Cait’s heel—eclipse oil, black salt, and a single drop of Dorian’s oldest host-blood soaked into braided corn-husk fibers.

It snakes inward, a live fuse spiraling toward the central lattice.

Above, the full Strawberry Moon hangs swollen and ruddy, its light refracted strangely—as though mirrored in a sky that isn’t this one. The stars near it jitter in their constellations. Sagittarius breaks its bowstring.

Cait stands in the center of the spell-circle. Her hands are bloody; her pulse is steady at seventy-two. The blood-knot on her chest glows faintly violet, pulsing not just with her heartbeat—but with the shared heartbeat of every sleeping soul in Ashford Bend. Each one counts down in time with her.

As the wick completes its loop, a shear in space unfurls above the cornfield. Not lightning. Not fire. A kind of silent rupture—as if reality had blinked and in that blink, a second Caitlin, a second Jameson, and a second field briefly existed, layered and vibrating, echoing back on themselves.

The town is silent. 

Buildings and streets remain—grain elevator stark against the moon, porch lights winking at no one—but every human pulse inside has ceased. Ashford Bend endures as structure only: a hollow husk cut from time’s current, its people fallen where sleep turned sudden and final. 

And then —

Dorian steps through the seam, or rather—he is dragged into it, as the anchoring binds his essence across the fold. One foot remains rooted in the world, the other in the elsewhere.

The seam gapes around him like a second mouth, and he hangs there— a morsel caught between teeth that belong to no animal. Half of him—everything the old name Dorian once covered—remains tethered to gravity and corn-scent, to the ragged inhale of Cait’s lungs and the metallic heartbeat of Jameson’s fear. The other half slides into Elseway, down a throat paved with eclipses. In that instant of stretching he discovers what a scream sounds like when it grows too large for sound: silence radiating pressure, a hush so absolute it forces atoms to remember how they are forged.

He does not break. He blooms.

Across Ashford Bend the scissored runes ignite in a quiet daisy-chain, bone-white clicks echoing beneath floorboards and pews, inside elementary coat cubbies and grain-elevator shafts. Each tiny tomb opens; fifteen thousand sleepers shed their pulses like coins into a wishing well—and Dorian feels every surrender. Their heartbeats don’t stop; they veer, abruptly loyal to him, a choir re-keyed to darker notation. Blood warms in distant arteries, flares once, gutters out. Last exhalations thread together, a breeze roving the streets in search of lungs that still care about oxygen.

The rush is incandescent. Souls fly apart like shucked seeds and zip toward his half-born center, each impact a discrete detonation of memory—wedding vows, mortgage signatures, lullabies, petty cruelties. They do not crowd him; they expand him. He inflates with experience until linear time feels like an insultingly small software patch. Past and future stand side by side, offer to trade places, grin like cardsharps.

He steps fully through.

Elseway swallows the foot that lingers in soil and returns it polished obsidian. Flesh—what little still answers to that word—reassembles in new syntax: carbon unknits, photons compress, gravitational vectors reef into lattice instead of muscle. Hunger strings him together, ambition magnetizes into bone. His chest becomes a negative sun: light pours in, never out, feeding the singularity nested where a heart once pretended to be.

A soundless pulse radiates from him and the seam snaps shut behind like a sated jaw. The cornfield gasps—every stalk bending earthward in genuflection. Dew flies upward, sucked into his event horizon and sizzling to nothing. Above, the full moon elongates, tugged toward him in a crimson teardrop. Its light red-shifts, bleeding wavelengths he can taste: berry, rust, womb, extinction.

Names drift across the charred stubble—DorianRoyDorianRoy—husks fluttering on a wind he no longer registers. He gathers them, weighs them, discards. They are artifacts of friction, inadequate. From the vacuum at his core rises a deeper syllable, a name shaped by hungry mathematics:

Tenebris.

He wears it the way an eclipse wears its corona: a razor of radiance ringing the void. Ambition without ceiling. Hunger seasoning itself with annihilation. Patron not of a coven but of every unvoiced want that ever gnaws a living thing. The name propagates through freshly emptied houses, through rows of soy and corn, through earthworms thrashing in disturbed loam. Even the sodium streetlamps bow—six flickers in sequence, lenses blistering to slag, raining smolder onto asphalt.

And there—on the ritual lattice—stand Cait and Jameson: tiny, trembling, luminous as candlewick filaments to approaching fire. Cait’s sternum still bleeds violet where the blood-knot glows; the tether that once contained him now stretches like silk, connecting orbit to anchor. She looks up, and in her pupils he glimpses himself—impossible to render in Euclid’s tongue: a silhouette cut from deep-sea lightlessness, limbs orbited by debris rings—broken rosaries, wedding bands, splintered toys, fresh bullet casings—tokens yanked from the last heartbeats of fifteen thousand people. Twin quasar eyes glare from the void in his skull. Each blink spans a century.

Caitlin Siltshore: a girl once overwhelmed by possession, later the architect of her possessor’s rebirth. And now, at his becoming, he parses their shared chronology the way an archivist might unspool cracked microfilm—frame by incandescent frame—until each image saturates the present with layered meaning.

He remembers first contact: she is thirteen and furious at a world that measures her only by lineage. He slips inside her like a winter draft through ill-sealed windows. The takeover is clean, almost effortless, yet the mind he finds is not compliant; it arranges itself around his presence like tempered glass, flexing rather than shattering. Even then, resistance intrigues him more than submission.

He remembers the middle years, when anger refines into intellect. Caitlin devours forbidden grimoires as greedily as she devours gossip; she practices sigil-burns on her own forearms just to chart pain’s flight curve. She negotiates with him, threatens him, courts him—sometimes in the span of a single hour. He recognizes in her the rare mortal who grasps leverage as a birthright. Their relationship becomes a long conversation in two voices sharing one skull, equal parts mentorship, duel, and slow-boiling conspiracy.

Now the mortal girl stands in the cornfield altar she helped design, blood drying to plum across her sternum where the tether still hums. Tenebris feels her pulse as a sub-frequency inside the larger roar of freshly claimed souls. If he wishes, he can snap that tether with a casual eddy of gravity, let her collapse into spent priestess husk. He chooses otherwise—for now. Choice itself feels delicious after epochs of strategic necessity.

Emotion is a soft word, but he allows himself the approximation. Satisfaction threads through his singularity when he catalogs what she has delivered: fifteen thousand heartbeats, a perimeter of iron and salt, a ritual architecture precise enough to birth an eldritch patron. Ambition this audacious deserves acknowledgment, and Tenebris is nothing if not a connoisseur of appetite.

He also tastes the fault lines: the flickers of independent calculus behind Cait’s eyes, the way she catalogues contingencies even as awe dilates her pupils. She will not remain supplicant; she is already revising the future in which she survives her own gamble. He respects that. Respect, in his lexicon, is synonymous with usefulness and potential threat. Tools that can cut both directions must be gripped with artful pressure—tight enough to harness, never so tight the blade snaps.

Toward Cait he feels ownership of a curious, almost particular flavor, though the metaphor breaks where biology cannot follow. He has grown inside her bloodstream like a second adolescence; now he has left the home yet remains bound by a cosmological umbilicus. Her well-being is strategically valuable, but more than that, it is aesthetically pleasing: the continuity of their shared narrative lends mythic coherence to his unfolding legend. Tenebris understands that stories, like gravitational wells, deepen with repetition.

He appraises her weaknesses with equal care. Her loyalty skews toward people, not principles—a flaw mortals romanticize as compassion. That compassion extends to Jameson, to the fractured remnants of her coven, perhaps even to future strangers who kneel in fear of the dark star she has set loose. Compassion begets hesitations; hesitations calcify into leverage for enemies. He notes the variable, files it among future levers.

For the moment, he allows himself to relish her astonishment. Through the silk-thin tether he pulses a single concept—an algebraic bloom of gratitude and warning. She shivers; her blood-knot flares brighter. The exchange satisfies him. It confirms the feedback loop at the heart of all patronage: power granted, power fed back, an ouroboros of intent.

Tenebris catalogs his final assessment:

Cait is origin point and ongoing experiment. She is a lure for ambitious minds, proof that collaboration with the void yields dividends. She is also an unpredictable variable, sharpening his strategic senses. Their history is both ballast and weapon; it anchors public myth while giving him private leverage. He feels neither love nor contempt. What he feels is a deep gravitational curiosity—a desire to watch how far she will travel before the orbit decays, or the slingshot sends her blazing into uncharted quadrants of possibility.

Ultimately, she represents what all mortals represent in distilled form: a vein of renewable hunger. Yet unlike the faceless thousands already subsumed, Cait retains a name that resonates across the black geometry of his new self. He cannot devour that name outright; it has become an internal organ, pumping narrative blood through his freshly assembled cosmos.

So he decides—there at the altar where glass spreads underfoot—that Cait remains indispensable, at least until the next phase of expansion. He will shield her from trivial threats, stoke her talents, and test her edges. She will either evolve into an extension of his will, or illustrate—through catastrophic failure—the consequences of daring to stand too near a singularity. Tenebris finds both outcomes exquisite.

And then he lets his attention flick toward the man loitering at the lattice edge—Jameson Roy, a chaos spark in borrowed denim and blood-flecked nail beds. Where Cait stands hushed in achievement, Jameson paces like a wolf high on gunpowder, boots kicking glassy slag as if boredom were a crime against his nature. The patron parses him in pulses: posture, pulse rate, the ragged crescendos of breath whenever a shard crunches under heel. All data confirm the old impression—Jameson is no stoic ledger-keeper. He is a Roy by blood, yes, but not the sort who files receipts; he’s the heir who torches the vineyard to taste a single grape roasted in its own sugar.

Two years of forced cohabitation taught Tenebris exactly how volatile that palate can be. He remembers the night Caitlin tried to excise him—her sigils carved into wood, candles guttering as she whispered dismissal rites. When the spell collapsed and the field ignited, Dorian clung to him instead—a smoke-cloud desperation that burrowed through mouth and nostril into nervous system before the boy understood what possession felt like. In that moment, Jameson did not panic; he laughed, wheezing on soot, and called the intrusion “a spicy upgrade.” Tenebris still savors the novelty of that reaction. Most hosts beg. Jameson applauded.

Inside that skull Dorian discovered a psyche unmoored from cause-and-effect. Jameson treats life as a stunt reel: drink, flirt, steal fast cars, crash them into richer men’s fences, kiss their shocked daughters on the hood while the engine burns. Morality registers only as optional DLC. Empathy glints rarely—usually when an underdog’s chaos outstrips his own—and then passes like a meteor. If Cait’s mind is a drafting table cluttered with blueprints, Jameson’s is a nightclub bathroom at 3 a.m.: graffiti, broken mirrors, glittering razor lines of half-formed schemes. The environment demands improvisation or overdose. Dorian adapted quickly.

That first dawn in Jameson’s body, they woke under dirt, lungs rasping with smoke and laughter. Both had been left for dead— Jameson’s response was to spit a tooth, lick blood from his lips, and stumble toward the nearest town. Dorian realized, then, that survival for this Roy was not a duty but a dare. There is power in that—raw, directionless power that can be tuned like feedback into melody.

Yet chaos has gradients. Where some thrill-seekers remain cowards at their core, Jameson tilts toward psychopathology: impulsive, fearless, lacking the internal brake that squeals warning when a plan requires collateral limbs. During possession Dorian steered him to collect reagents: illegal caesium, cadaver teeth, a nun’s votive ring. Jameson complied eagerly, giggling as he pistol-whipped a morgue attendant then pocketed the man’s wedding band “for symmetry.” He speaks of violence the way sommeliers note tannins—nuanced, almost affectionate. Tenebris notes this with both admiration and wariness. A creature unafraid of consequence is a marvel, but also a potential noise spike in carefully modulated signal.

Bloodline resonance muddies the equation further. Jameson carries the same mineral signature that once pulsed in Dorian’s own arteries—a salted-lightning taste that feels like coming home to a mansion you previously burned down. Genetic familiarity breeds an instinctual trust, yet the Roy crest is etched with betrayal: centuries ago they engineered the curse that shackled Dorian to the Siltshores. Jameson claims ignorance, but legacy is seldom idle. Somewhere in his bloodstream slumbers ancestral arrogance. Tenebris can almost smell it—like aged whisky evaporating in an oak vault. If awakened, that arrogance might convince Jameson he could outwit or even enslave the patron he midwifed. The prospect is equal parts amusing and cautionary.

What, then, is Jameson to him now? He is most akin to unstable propellant—volatile, high-yield, directionless until chambered in the right engine. Tenebris imagines unleashing him as apostle of disruption: gifting him sigils that detonate social contracts, sending him spinning through boardrooms and parliaments where decorum is armor and scandal is acid. Jameson would thrive, sowing ruin with a wink and a backhanded toast. Crowds love a charismatic disaster; cults crystallize around men who laugh at funerals.

Still, every propellant needs containment or it vents into space. During their shared years Dorian learned the limits of coercion. Threats amuse Jameson; pain merely proves reality still pays attention to him. What reins him is curiosity. Offer him a mystery—an unexplored aperture of occult pleasure—and he will chase obedience long enough to see what explodes. And if the Roy heir one day decides the bigger thrill is toppling the dark star he helped raise, Tenebris retains the override keys. 

Now, as the last coils of moon-warped light slither back into darkness, Tenebris gathers every strand of calculation into a single, tidal certainty: the ritual is only prologue. Cait will test his perimeter, Jameson will ignite new frontiers of havoc, and the world—still blinking innocently beyond this hushed cornfield—will learn the physics of devotion in the gravity well of a black-stone god. With fifteen thousand souls spinning in his chest like molten bearings, he turns westward, letting ambition write the horizon’s shape, hunger chart the continents, and annihilation whisper the final punctuation of every story that dares unfold without him.

The moment the seam knits shut and Tenebris drifts west on a hush of absent wind, Cait remains kneeling in the fused-glass crater, hands planted on vitrified soil that still glows faintly violet from her blood-knot. The corn beyond the circle settles with a susurrus like distant surf. She inhales. The air tastes of lightning struck iron—burnt ozone, charred chlorophyll, the resinous sweetness of cedar shingles she pried loose yesterday at dawn. She hears nothing human: not a cough, not a radio, not even a dog. All fifteen thousand pulses have fallen silent, and the silence clangs off her bones like cathedral bells.

So this is triumph.

Her forearms quake from adrenaline tapering off, but the tremor feels almost theatrical—applause from her own nerves. She has built a spell architecture no grimoire dared sketch, has shepherded a millennium-old parasite into godhead, has rewritten the town’s ley grid with the same steady hands that once vandalized notebook margins with sigils during algebra. Yes, she thinks, I am the best fucking witch in the world. The thought flares hot, startling in its clarity; she half-expects a thunderclap of divine reprimand. None arrives. The cosmos answers with blank deference, as though waiting for her next line of code.

But accomplishment is threaded with something knottier. A copper tang blooms under her tongue—guilt, maybe, or the phantom echo of fifteen thousand heartbeats she personally unplugged. She pictures Mrs. Caldwell asleep at the library desk, the Saturday-morning janitor humming Eagles lyrics, the barista who always drew foam hearts in cappuccinos; each soft image folds like paper and slides into the dark star she has midwifed. The price lances through her euphoria, dulled yet persistent, like pins left in a celebratory corsage. Her lungs hitch, but the sob she expects arrives as laughter instead—thin, incredulous.

She pushes upright. The blood flaked on her sternum cracks, releasing a puff of metallic dust. The tether—now a silk string humming between her ribs and Tenebris’s distant singularity—tugs once, gentle as an ankle-deep tide. It reminds her of a kite line she held at six years old, when wind first translated into the language of lift. Back then she believed flight was a secret solely between her and the sky; her uncle told her gravity never keeps agreements. Tonight she has proven him right on a cosmic setting.

Accomplishment twists again into something sharper. Power, she catalogues, real, measurable, inexhaustible. That is what she feels blooming under the ache: not mere pride, but living circuitry. Tenebris promised blueprints for a world big enough to house both mortal fragility and eldritch appetite, and she means to cash that promissory note. She envisions laboratories sunk into salt domes, church-steeple antennae humming at aurora borealis frequencies, coven apprentices learning calculus before candle work. She sees her sigils printed on circuit boards, etched into satellite hulls, stitched into couture for ministers who will kneel before issuing policy.

A sliver of dread pierces the vision: what if ambition outruns her control? She remembers the first years of possession—the nightmares, the loss of taste, the way Dorian whispered counterpoints whenever her moral compass quivered. Tenebris is Dorian amplified past reckoning. But the tether runs both ways. She can feel, in glancing pulses, that he catalogues her as variable and vector, that he might lengthen her life or use her bones for runes depending on tomorrow’s math. A shiver licks her spine. Fear, however, skews into thrill. She has always found cliff edges exhilarating.

She circles the glass dais, examining where stalks have welded into green twisted fossils. Her boot tip chimes against a fused ear of corn. Souvenir, she decides, toeing it free. Later she’ll mount it in a shadow box labeled Genesis Relic, 11 June 2025. Museums someday will pay kingdoms for such artifacts, but provenance is hers first.

The tether vibrates again—gratitude? warning?—and warmth floods her chest, loosening muscles she didn’t know were clenched. Tenebris respects ingenuity; that pulse is a handshake in the new dialect of gravity. She allows herself a private grin. The world will mythologize the dark god rising over Nebraska; few will comprehend the witch who drew the floorplan. She wonders whether history will call her herald, accomplice, traitor, or savior. She suspects it will cycle through all four as centuries spool out. Good. A legend dull enough for consensus would be an insult.

A flicker catches her eye: the sheriff’s star relic orbiting Tenebris moments ago lies half-embedded at the circle’s edge, knocked loose when the god accelerated west. She pockets the brass slag, pulse quickening. Evidence of mutual incompletion—he discards pieces; she collects them. Later she may reverse-engineer its thaumic residue, learn how momentum writes itself into molten metal. Research must begin while the glass is still warm.

She feels the tether slacken, distance widening. Tenebris is already receding toward the curvature of ambition, leaving her in the hush he authored. The solitude prickles. She glances at the pickup truck idling beyond the sigil line—Jameson. They will have words later; comfort, perhaps, or argument. For now she savors the private instant before collaboration becomes administration.

And then, across the field, she yells to Jameson: “Your turn!”

As the strawberry moon hangs upon the night sky and hell unleashes on earth, Jameson watches from the bed of the truck.  He’s responsible for Phase 2 of the plan and Phase 2 requires preparation. While he does so, Jameson doesn’t miss the show from the red Chevy truck. He cannot help but watch a master at work. 

Her black hair flows idly in the cool midnight wind,  as Cait is completely in her element. This is where she shines, both where she is most beautiful and simultaneously, where she is most powerful. She recites the ancient, loaded words and harnesses the magic she calls out to. The wind picks up, not because of circumstance or the weather report, but because it is her will. His gaze weighs on her the entire time, as a smile sprouts upon his lips. Both out of the pride he feels for her and in subtle awe in what she’s capable of. It’s not a new feeling; this what Cait does to him. 

There’s perfect harmony in the ruckus of the collapsing buildings. As hell rips open and Ashford Bend is swallowed whole without a second thought. Not even a mournful one. 

History won’t know what to do with this town. They’ll chalk it up to part of the unexplainable. Ashford Bend will be placed on a long list of mortal mysteries, right next to Amelia Earhart and Malaysian Flight 370, titled, What the Hell Happened? It will be amongst the tragedies like Jonestown. All those people, souls, heartbeats, vanished without an explanation, let alone a goodbye. Conspiracy theorists will eat it up with a spoon. It will catch fire within Reddit rabbit holes. It will make great dinner party talk amongst the drunk, the curious, and the edgy. Girlfriends with gather in living rooms, cover themselves in knitted blankets and drink hot chocolate, as someone describes the Mystery of Ashford Bend as their hot topic pick for Powerpoint night. 

Someday, decades into the future, when his skin has aged and weather, when his hair is salt and pepper, Jameson will be at the beach. Somewhere tropical. Ass in the sand, and Pina colada in hand, the sky will be filled with the prettiest sunset known to man. Jameson will overhear a conversation amongst a group of friends, a vacationing family, whatever kind of kin that discusses grotesque mysteries. They will argue the facts, the evidence, their own misguided beliefs of what they think happened to this town on this fateful night. They will do their best to solve the mystery over conversation, but in the end, they will end the conversation by asking themselves, what the hell happened to the people of Ashford Bend? 

Jameson, with a closed lip smile and his mouth on his straw, will take a sip of his icy drink and think himself, I know exactly what happened.

Moonbeams shine down upon them,  as Jameson watches what unfolds next. A shadow, man-shaped but not exactly human, slips out of the center of the universe. This thing, man, entity, needs no introduction. Though, he’s never met this form, Jameson knows greatness when he looks at it. Dorian. Tenebris. God. He has many names, whatever Jameson decided to call him, there is no difference to be made. What an honor it is to be face to face to one he is devoted to. His life has no meaning without the shadow man before him. 

It was always Tenebris. 

Against every odd built by past Roys, Jameson is here. They tried to smother magic out of their line, sweep their heritage, their purpose, under a rug, as if power and destiny is something that could be hidden. It isn’t. Destiny came in the form of dreams, long before Dorian, Harvard, before Cait herself, he had dreams of the raven haired witch. They weren’t dreams, but prophecy. Dorian guided Jameson before they could meet. Death by her hand wasn’t an accident but a necessary sacrifice, how else could Dorian and Jameson be introduced? His time with Dorian, where they shared the same skin, same heartbeat, and sometimes, same soul, wasn’t time stolen, but time gifted. Every moment, no matter how hacky it is to say, mattered. It led them right to this moment and this is where they were always going to find themselves.

Triumph pumps throughout his body like blood. Giddy, from the bed of the truck, Jameson bellows a victorious roar out of the trenches of his chest as he slams his hands together, in a series of manic claps.  “Let’s fucking go!” Jameson yells into the sky, the way he would if the Yankees won the World Series, times a million. 

Alright, time for Phase 2.

He painted sigil inside of the bed of the truck. Red ink, red truck, red blood. There’s a theme he’s working with here, simply for the theatrics of it all. His sigil is shaped similar to a triangle. The top of the triangle is pointed in the direction of Tenebris, the left side is towards where Cait stands in the field, and Jameson stands right beside the right corner of the triangle. 

Out of his backpack, Jameson pulls out a glass jar and inside are two very sentimental items. He pulls out his eye out of the jar, his natural given, born baby blue eye, followed by Cait’s severed ring finger, the same one that once held her promise. Next comes out an ancient Roy grimoire. It was the first gift given not only by Cait, but Dorian too. It was once his, magic he has wrote himself. 

Jameson places the items upon the sigil. He then grabs a bottle of an elixir out of his bag. Sanguis Novus, it's called, but one wouldn’t know that by the green small bottle it’s stored in.   This is what metamorphoses are made of, transformations too. What makes caterpillars butterflies and turns men  into wolves. It takes one thing and turns it into another. He opens the bottle and sprinkles it upon the painted sigil.

Jameson is only missing one thing. The Ash of Sacrifice. 

He hops off the bed off the truck and hustles his way towards Tenebris. The Shadow man is vast and divine, like nothing Jameson has seen in his twenty eight years. He doesn’t cower, Jameson doesn’t kneel out of fear, but devotion. Necessity too, because he must sweep up the rubble and dust at the feet of Tenebris. 

As he does so, Jameson picks up his head and looks upon the entity with a smirk on his lips.  

“It’s good to see you, Tenebris,” he says cooly. 

He grabs a handful of the ash of what once was. Fifteen thousand lives ended. Fifteen thousand stories closed. Fifteen thousand hearts that will never beat again. He doesn’t get choke up on that, Jameson barely gives it a thought. He would’ve sold the whole world, including his own, if that’s what it took to free Tenebris from death. 

Hastily, Jameson makes his way back to the rental. He climbs on the bed of the truck and looks down at the sigil below him. He looks up at Tenebris, then Cait. One last look at them both, in case things go haywire. 

Jameson says the magic words.

“Per ignem ardemus, per cineres surgimus, Vita solvitur, forma novatur. Ex oculo visus, ex digito pactum, Ex verbo vetusto, potestas nascitur. Nos sumus mutatio.

Audite, spiritus fracti, vos in nocte iacentes, Corda nostra ferimus ut portas aperiamus. Sanguis clamat, cinis loquitur, Et nomen antiquum iterum resonat: Tenebris, dominus aeternus.

Per sigillum trinum in ferro notatum, Nos ligamus nosmet ipsos, Non ad lucem, sed ad abyssum. Dorian, accipe votum nostrum, Et fac corpus nostrum templum tuum.

Cadat mundus vetus, uratur in flamma, Fatum nostrum scribimus in ruinis. Ashford Bend, fiat oblatio, In pulverem redigatur, in umbram vertatur, Ex morte, fiat ingressus.

Exsurgat nunc veritas arcana, Nos warlock facti sumus, Non per misericordiam, sed per voluntatem. Vita, mors, transitus—hoc est pactum. In nomine Tenebris, consummatum est.”

As the poetic mantra falls from his tongue and into the air, the sigil glows. It’s both an acknowledgment of his words and the powers they hold. 

When he’s finished, Jameson hops out of the truck bed and onto the ground. In his hands, he clasps tightly onto the remains of Ashford Bend. As he stands in the ground, his shoes tainted with Nebraskan dirt and rubble, Jameson throws the ashes onto the truck bed, right on top of the sigil.

It could’ve been a lit match thrown on gasoline, the way the truck engulfs in flames.

It’s not the only thing that burns. Every inch of his body is covered in fire. The sensation, the heat, beats against his flesh, but Jameson doesn’t crisp. He looks over to Cait, the flames had found her just the same.

This is no death sentence, no witches are being burned at the stake tonight, instead they are purifying. They’re cocooning too, transforming into what they are destined to become. 

When the flames cease,  they will both be molted into something anew. Something worthy enough to follow a God named Tenebris. 

Cait waits until the echo of Jameson’s vow has finished vibrating through the scorched Nebraska air. Smoke hangs between them like a half-formed veil; somewhere beyond the haze Tenebris still looms, vast as an eclipse. She tastes altar-dust on every breath and decides that this is as close to a chapel as she will ever come.

She climbs into the truck bed beside the smoldering sigil—its red lines now cracked and blackened, yet still faintly pulsing—and goes to work. There is no hesitation, only the precise calm of a surgeon about to cut into herself.

First, the geometry. She drags two fingers across the inside of her left forearm, coaxing a ribbon of blood that beads quicksilver-bright. With it she sketches a second triangle inside Jameson’s ashes, point aligned toward Tenebris, one corner toward Jameson’s lingering heat, the last toward the distant field where her younger self once believed in promises. Blood meets ember; the lines hiss and glow.

Second, the relics. Her finger is already there. She takes it from Jameson and breaks it twice - arranges them at the triangle’s vertices—past, present, patron.

Third, the catalyst. She uncorks the remaining half-vial of Sanguis Novus and tilts it until a single green drop lands at the design’s heart. The fluid flares scarlet as it touches blood, a silent detonation that lifts the hair on her arms.

Fourth, the ash. She cups what remnants she can scrape from the truck bed—ruined rafters, children’s bicycles, church pews ground to gray powder—and lets them sift through her fist, snowing over sigil and relic alike. Each mote is a ledger entry: fifteen thousand debts, fifteen thousand tithes to fuel a god.

Only then does she straighten, palms crimson, throat raw with unspoken names. She closes her eyes and borrows Dorian’s native tongue, letting the Latin roll from memory like a prayer she was born knowing:

“ Per ignem ardemus, per cineres surgimus… ”

Her voice is lower than Jameson’s, steadier, the cadence of one reciting terms she herself helped draft. When she reaches the final couplet—“ Vita, mors, transitus—hoc est pactum. In nomine Tenebris, consummatum est ” —she feels the signature settle into her bones. The triangle ignites in a ring of white-blue flame that neither scorches nor blinds; instead it peels the world back, layer by layer, until she can hear the architecture of power humming beneath the soil.

Fire climbs her like ivy, licking at coat-sleeves and collar, but pain never arrives. What she feels is subtraction: extraneous heartbeats shaved away, mortal hesitations boiled to vapor. In their place flows a dark, tidal certainty—Tenebris' certainty—pouring through every vein. She is not merely host now; she is conduit, reactor,

warlock.

When the last tongue of flame recedes, the sigil is branded into the truck bed and mirrored faintly beneath her skin, glowing through wrist and sternum like molten ink. She exhales, tasting iron ghosts, and lifts her gaze to Tenebris’s looming silhouette.

Tenebris feels their signatures sink into his vastness. Jameson’s spark is quick and caustic, like phosphorus meeting rain: bright, spitting, eager to devour its own smoke. Caitlin’s burns lower, a furnace banked for the long winter, but the heat is older, more deliberate. Both currents thread through Tenebris’s awareness, tugging at deep wells of resonance, and suddenly the distance between god and supplicant feels perilously thin. For the first time since he tore open Elseway’s doors, he is not merely taking power; he is returning it in calibrated pulses, letting it loop back, iterate, evolve.

A smile—if such a thing can exist on a face forged of negative space—folds across him. They have built him an empire of recursion. With every spell they cast, they will deepen the channel. With every triumph, they will widen it. Eventually their own ambitions will demand more souls, more towns, more architecture of blood—and he will be waiting, cup in hand, to bless the overflow.

He extends a thread of awareness toward Cait first. She stands amid the dying embers of the sigil, shoulders squared, eyes like storm-swept glass. The Siltshore lineage thrums beneath her skin, half curse, half crown. For a millennium he has haunted her bloodline, a shadow that bloomed in every cradle and leaned against every headstone. The legacy of that torment has etched beautiful angles into her will, but it has also chained her to history, and chains—Tenebris thinks—are useful only until something stronger is forged.

“Caitlin Siltshore,” his voice says, carried on the thermal of receding flames. It is not thunder, not whisper, but the pressure of a storm wall just before it breaks. “The covenant is ratified. The haunting that dogged your line for a thousand years is dissolved. Know this freedom: you no longer bear my curse.”

He tastes the flicker of relief—and the sliver of suspicion—curling under her ribs.

“Do not mistake mercy for reprieve,” he adds. “The story ends, yes, but only when I write the final line. I will be the thing that kills you—cleanly, beautifully, when the design demands. Between now and then, build wonders. Spend my power with the audacity only a creature unshackled can wield. Astonish me.”

The words seal themselves in luminous glyphs around her heartbeat. He lets her feel, for a fraction of a second, the blueprint of that eventual death: the angle of the blade, the color of the sky, the taste of iron on her tongue. Then he closes the vision, leaving only the after-taste of inevitability. He wants her driven, not paralyzed.

Next he turns to Jameson. The young man’s grin is already feral in the truck’s molten wreckage, skin unblistered, hair spark-striped. Ambition radiates off him like corona from a solar flare: less disciplined than Cait’s, but hotter, unpredictable, prone to leap across voids and sear whatever it touches.

“Jameson Roy,” Tenebris intones, name vibrating like struck glass. “You have traded vision for vision—an eye for eyes unseen. I accept your bargain. Now show me the empire you intend to raise on this foundation.”

He lets an echo of raw potential flood the warlock’s nerves: the sensation of continents pivoting on syllables, of oceans wrinkling under sigils yet unspoken. Jameson’s pulse spikes; delight snarls through him.

Ambition, Tenebris muses, is the closest thing humans possess to divinity. It is motion writ in blood, the refusal to accept any border as final. Tonight that motion has taken new form—a braid of god and warlock, of past curse and future promise, so tightly wound it might yet snap time itself. 

“Go,” he commands with all the authority of a black hole. “Sharpen yourselves against the anvil of the world. When the sparks fly high enough, I will be there to catch them.”

Above the ruins, the sky splits for an instant—just a seam of deeper dark amid the ordinary dark—and then closes again. In that heartbeat, the future rearranges itself, bending around two warlocks and the Patron who watches, hungry and patient, while the rest of creation learns what ambition truly costs.