The spores' whispers coiled around Kael's thoughts like smoke, insidious and constant. He lay rigid on Mira's examination table, the leather straps digging into his wrists as she leaned over him, her breath fogging the lens of her shard-eye monocle. The needle pierced his chest, siphoning venom into a vial that pulsed with sentient malice. Six months of this. Six months of her clinical precision, her cold curiosity, her lies.
"Fascinating," Mira murmured, tilting the vial to watch the venom writhe. "The spores are forcing your Shard to metastasize. See these fractal patterns? It's adapting to survive."
Kael turned his head, staring at the photo pinned above her desk—the girl with Mira's sharp cheekbones and hollow eyes, standing beside a corpse consumed by Oblivion crystal. Her sister. Another ghost in Mira's graveyard of failures. "You said the tinctures would stabilize me."
"And they have." She labeled the vial Subject V-K-42 and slotted it into a steel case. "Your corruption would've reached your heart by now. Instead, it's… negotiating."
He sat up, rolling down his sleeve to cover the black veins spidering up his arm. The numbness had receded since she'd started the treatments, but the price was carved into his body—his sweat left salt-white trails on his skin, his shadow twitched at the edge of his vision, and the spores' whispers sharpened nightly, their voices fractal and cruel.
The rats undid him.
Mira kept them in glass cages along the clinic's back wall—twisted, squirming things injected with diluted venom. Kael watched her one night as she force-fed a spore tincture to a hairless rodent. Its spine arched violently, bone spires erupting from its flesh before it liquefied into black slurry.
"What's the point?" he asked, his voice graveled by sleeplessness.
"Control." She scribbled notes without looking up. "Your Shard's venom is chaos. I'm learning to direct it."
"To cure your sister?"
Her pen stilled. The clinic's single bulb flickered, casting her face in jagged shadows. "My sister is dead. This is about understanding."
But he'd seen the ledger hidden beneath her desk—Project: Sovereign's Pyre. His name listed beside dates, symptoms, and a damning note: "Ascendant potential: 0.3%. Insufficient for ignition." He didn't know what it meant, only that he was a stepping stone in her hunt for something larger. Something worse.
He stole the tinctures at dawn.
Mira slept slumped over her desk, her cheek pressed to a blueprint of a Shard-grafting device. The steel case glinted in the weak light, six months' worth of doses nestled in foam. His hands shook as he lifted it, venom roiling in his veins like a cornered animal.
She'll hunt you, the spores whispered. This solves nothing.
But staying meant rotting in her cage, feeding her research until the Blight—or Jarek—finished him. He slipped into the refinery's labyrinth, the case clutched to his chest.
The factory welcomed him with the groan of rusted metal. Kael climbed the skeletal remains of an assembly line to his old hideout—a hollowed-out boiler where he'd slept before Mira's false salvation. The spores in the stolen tinctures glowed brighter here, reacting to the factory's latent Oblivion energy. He injected the first dose himself, the liquid burning worse without her stabilizers. The black veins retreated. For now.
Six months.
Enough time to disappear. To train for Jarek's arrival. To forget the way Mira's breath hitched when she spoke of her sister.
The factory's air hung thick with the stench of rust and decay, every breath tasting like a mouthful of nails. Kael crouched in the shadow of a dead conveyor belt, his back pressed against the corroded metal, and stared at the oily venom pooling in his palm. It shimmered faintly, alive and restless, a living shadow that refused to obey. Three weeks had passed since he'd fled Mira's clinic, her betrayal festering in his chest like a second Shard. Now, the factory was his only refuge—a graveyard of steel and forgotten ambition where the walls whispered secrets of dead Shardbearers.
He flexed his fingers, the black veins crawling up his forearm pulsing in time with his heartbeat. The spores embedded in his skin glowed faintly, their fractal patterns shifting like broken constellations. Six months. That's what Mira had promised him—six months of borrowed time. But survival wasn't enough. Not with Jarek hunting him. Not with the Inquisition's hound-drones circling like carrion birds. He needed to fight.
The first attempt ended in failure.
Kael willed the venom to harden, his mind clawing at the Shard's power. The liquid coiled sluggishly, forming a crude dagger before dissolving into acrid smoke that burned his eyes. He cursed, slamming his fist into the factory floor. Dust rained from the ceiling, and somewhere in the distance, a rusted gear clanked to life, as if the refinery itself were laughing at him.
The spores whispered, their voices slick and venomous. "Weak. Pathetic. You'll die here."
He ignored them.
Days blurred into a cycle of pain and stubborn repetition. The factory became his reluctant tutor, its derelict machinery a testing ground. He tried cooling the venom in stagnant puddles, only to watch it eat through concrete. He mixed it with spores scraped from the walls, triggering explosions that left his ears ringing and his skin blistered. Once, in a fevered haze, he channeled the Shard's whispers directly, their alien cadence nearly liquefying his mind. He woke hours later, nose bleeding, the taste of burnt sugar sharp on his tongue.
But he kept trying.
The spores mocked him. The factory groaned. And Kael's body paid the price—his hands scarred from corrosive mishaps, his left eye twitching uncontrollably, his ribs aching from nights spent curled on cold metal.
It was the Rusted Chain that changed everything.
Kael found himself drawn to it again and again, the massive anchor hanging over the refinery's heart like a executioner's blade. Its links were etched with names—hundreds of them, maybe thousands—the fallen who'd attempted the Trial it represented and been devoured. He traced the grooves with a trembling finger, the metal icy against his skin.
"What did you do to them?" he muttered, though he already knew. The Chain was a relic of Oblivion's hunger, a monument to the Shards' cruel calculus.
The spores hissed, "Ask what you will do."
That night, he dreamt of the dead—Shardbearers frozen mid-transformation, their bodies fused to machinery, their mouths open in silent screams. Among them stood Mira's sister, her hollow eyes glowing with fractal light. "You're running out of time," she whispered, though her lips didn't move. "The Chain breaks all."
He woke drenched in sweat, venom crusted around his nostrils. The factory hummed around him, alive in a way it hadn't been before.
The breakthrough came at dawn.
Kael stood before the Chain, venom dripping from his palms like liquid shadow. This time, he didn't force it. He listened. The Shard's power was a coiled serpent, wary and defensive. He'd spent weeks trying to dominate it, to bend it into weapons. Now, he let it speak.
Adapt, it seemed to whisper. Survive.
He closed his eyes and pulled—not from the Shard alone, but from the factory's rotting veins. Rusted gears ground to life. The Chain swayed, its names glowing faintly. The spores on his skin flared, their fractal patterns mirroring the venom's restless swirl.
The liquid in his palm shuddered, then solidified—a jagged shortsword, its blade shimmering with unstable energy. It hummed in his grip, alive and hungry.
Oblivion's Tooth.
For three seconds, it held. Then it unraveled, dissolving into smoke that seared his lungs. But it was enough.
The Cost of Power
Progress came in blood and broken flesh.
A dagger held form for five breaths before severing a tendon in his pinkie. A whip of solidified venom lashed a support beam—and his own calf. A crude axehead shattered mid-swing, embedding shards in his cheek. Each failure left him weaker, the spores feasting on his pain, their whispers threaded with perverse encouragement.
"Closer. Almost. Break."
But Kael learned. He adapted.
By the seventh day, he could conjure a blade for a full minute—a serrated monstrosity that hummed with lethal intent. By the tenth, he'd fashioned a shield, its surface rippling like black water. The factory responded in kind, machinery shuddering to life as he passed, conveyor belts clanking as if applauding his defiance.
The toll was written on his body:
His right eye clouded permanently, seeing only the venom's eerie aura.
The black veins now pulsed gold where spores bonded to his flesh.
But he could fight.
Mira watched from the refinery's shadows, her shard-eye glowing faintly. She'd tracked him for days, drawn by the factory's unnatural revival. Now, she crouched on a catwalk, her breath stilled, as Kael conjured a spear of pure venom and hurled it into the darkness. It struck a fossilized Progenitor, the corpse exploding into crystalline shards.
"Fascinating," she murmured, her voice lost in the factory's groan.
She didn't reveal herself. Not yet.