The whiteness was not a color. It was an erasure.
Kaelen Vance was no longer standing in the Deep Cisterns. She was no longer pressing her shoulder against cold bone. She was simply... absent.
There was no floor, no ceiling, no horizon. There was only a silence so profound it felt like a pressure headache, a static scream that pushed against the boundaries of her ego. She looked down at her hands. They were translucent, sketched in charcoal lines that were slowly fading.
Don't look at the edges, the Voice whispered. It sounded different here—not the mocking baritone of the Passenger, nor the fearful echoes of the Banker or the Whore. It sounded small. Frightened. If you look at the edges, you realize you aren't real. Keep your eyes on the center.
"Where is the center?" Kaelen asked. Her voice didn't make a sound; it simply manifested as a thought, a ripple in the static.
Here.
The white mist parted. A chair appeared.
It was identical to the chair Lector Halloway had died in, and the chair the Killer had placed on the pier. But this one wasn't made of velvet or wood. It was made of teeth. Thousands of human molars, fused together into a throne of calcium and rot.
Sitting in the chair was a boy.
He couldn't have been more than ten years old. He wore a simple tunic of roughspun linen, the kind worn by the city's poorest before the Guilds rose to power. He was playing with a ball of red yarn, unraveling it and knitting it back together with bruised fingers.
He looked up. His eyes were the violet of a Mindsink, but they were old—ancient, tired, and infinite.
"You blocked the door," the boy said. His voice wasn't a child's voice. It was the sound of a glacier cracking. "That was very rude. I had my coat on. I was ready to go out."
Kaelen tried to step forward, but distance had no meaning here. One step brought her face-to-face with the boy.
"You're him," she whispered. "The Laughing God."
"I am the entropy that eats the systems," the boy corrected, winding the yarn. "I am the rust on the gear. I am the cancer in the cell. 'God' is just a title the Architects gave me so they could feel important when they locked me away."
He stopped winding. He looked at Kaelen's translucent hand.
"You taste like my brother," he noted.
"Your brother?"
"Sterling," the boy spat the name. "The Lord Arcanist. He reeks of order. Of golden geometry. You ate his magic. You ate the construct of your mother."
"I had to," Kaelen said, the memory of the golden blood burning in her phantom throat. "To stop him."
"And now you are here," the boy smiled. It was a terrible expression. His mouth opened too wide, revealing rows of teeth that matched the chair. "You are the doorstop. A little piece of grit in the cosmic hinge. Do you know what happens to grit, Kaelen Vance? It gets ground down into dust."
He reached out. He didn't touch her. He touched the idea of her.
Kaelen felt a sensation of absolute cold wash over her soul. It wasn't pain; it was deletion. She felt her name slipping away. She forgot the color of the sky. She forgot the taste of the rain in the Tanyard District.
He's eating you! the Voice screamed, regaining its panic. He's a Mindsink too! The original Mindsink! Fight back!
"I can't," Kaelen thought, watching her arm dissolve into white mist. "He's too big. He's an ocean. I'm just a cup."
Then be a poisoned cup, the Voice hissed. You have the Cipher. Sterling put the map inside you. Use the geometry!
Kaelen focused on the headache—the sharp, singing void in her skull that had plagued her since the beginning. The Cipher. The complex knot of madness Sterling had implanted.
She visualized it not as a map, but as a cage.
She lunged at the boy. She didn't try to hit him. She tried to sink him.
She opened the maw of her hunger and clamped it onto the boy's wrist.
The boy shrieked—the Laughing Note, pure and discordant. The white void shattered.
The Deep Cisterns
Valerius watched as Kaelen Vance went rigid.
She was pressed against the massive bone Door, her body vibrating so hard she was blurring at the edges. Her eyes were wide open, glowing with a light that wasn't violet anymore—it was white. Absolute, blinding white.
The crack in the Door was still there, leaking black mist, but Kaelen was plugging it. She was the mortar.
"She's seizing," Sterling wheezed.
The Lord Arcanist was in bad shape. His nose was broken from Kaelen's kick, blood streaming down his pale chin. The golden tattoos on his chest were dimming, flickering like dying gaslights. But he was still dangerous.
He crawled toward the Door, dragging a leg that had been shattered by Kaelen's gravity impact.
"Get away from her," Valerius growled.
He stepped between Sterling and Kaelen. He had no sword. He had no gun. He held only the small, curved skinning knife he kept in his boot. Against a Lord Arcanist, it was a toothpick.
"You don't understand, Inquisitor," Sterling gasped, coughing up golden ichor. "She is interfacing with the Void. If she breaks... the backlash won't just kill us. It will turn this entire cavern into a black hole. We have to finish the ritual. We have to push her through."
"She isn't a key," Valerius said, crouching low, knife held in a reverse grip. "She's a person."
"She is a container!" Sterling roared, his eyes flaring with sudden, manic power. "A bucket for the slop! That is all Mindsinks are! I built the Guilds to filter the Dreg, but I needed a place to put the waste. I created her bloodline to be the landfill!"
Valerius stiffened. "You created them?"
"Genetic alchemy," Sterling sneered, inching closer. "I needed a biological component that could process raw entropy. Why do you think they go mad? Why do you think they hunger? They were designed to eat the things we couldn't destroy. And now, she must eat the lock."
Sterling raised his hand. The air in the cistern rippled. A golden spear of light formed above his palm, aiming directly at Kaelen's back.
"Push her in," Sterling commanded. "Or I skew her, and we see if her corpse works just as well."
Valerius looked at Kaelen. She was making a sound now—a high, keening whine, like a kettle boiling dry. She was holding back a god.
He looked at Sterling.
"You calculated everything, didn't you?" Valerius said softly. "The geometry. The bloodlines. The stars."
"I am the architect of this age," Sterling said, the spear pulsing brighter.
"You forgot one variable," Valerius said.
He dropped the knife.
Sterling blinked, confused by the surrender. "What?"
Valerius reached into his torn pocket. He didn't pull out a weapon. He pulled out a small, unassuming object he had retrieved from the river muck while Kaelen was scaring off the Mud-Larks.
A rock. A simple, jagged piece of granite, heavy with iron ore.
"You're bleeding, Sterling," Valerius said.
Sterling looked down at the pool of golden blood beneath him.
"So?"
"So, you're wet," Valerius said. "And we are standing in a high-concentration mana field."
Valerius threw the rock. He didn't throw it at Sterling. He threw it at the pool of golden blood connecting Sterling to the manifestations of his power.
But before he threw it, he scraped it against the flint striker on his belt.
A spark. Tiny. Insignificant.
It hit the pool of volatile, alchemical blood.
WHOOSH.
The golden blood didn't just burn; it sublimated. The mana-rich fluid ignited with the ferocity of pure oxygen. The fire raced up the stream of blood, straight to Sterling.
Sterling screamed as his own essence caught fire. The golden tattoos on his skin turned from light to searing heat. The spear of light above his hand destabilized, exploding backward into his face.
He was thrown across the cavern, a burning comet of gold and flesh. He slammed into the far wall and collapsed, wreathed in alchemical flame.
Valerius shielded his eyes from the flash. When he looked back, Sterling was down, twitching, his concentration utterly broken.
But the explosion had destabilized something else.
The Door.
The shockwave hit Kaelen.
The Void
Kaelen felt the shockwave as a ripple in the white silence.
She still had her teeth sunk into the boy-god's wrist. It tasted like cold iron and static. The boy was staring at her, no longer smiling.
"You are annoying," the entity said. "You are small. And you are full of trash."
"I'm full of you," Kaelen thought-screamed.
She reversed the flow. She didn't try to eat him. She vomited.
She pushed everything she had absorbed—the golden blood of the White Queen, the gravity magic of the Silencer, the toxic Dreg from the rooftops, and the chaotic memories of the dead—into the entity.
She used herself as a conduit. She poured the pollution of Obolus straight into the pristine white void.
The boy recoiled. The red yarn in his hand turned black. The white floor stained with oil and grime.
"Filth!" the God shrieked, pulling back. "You are polluting the Zero!"
"You want to come into my city?" Kaelen roared, her form solidifying, regaining its color. "Then taste it first!"
She pushed harder. She emptied the library. She gave him the pain of the Tanyard. She gave him the despair of the Ossuary. She gave him the taste of the river water.
The entity snarled and shoved her away.
"Get out!"
The force of his rejection was harder than any physical blow.
Kae was ripped backward. The whiteness shattered into a million colors.
The Deep Cisterns
Kaelen Vance flew away from the Door as if she had been fired from a cannon.
She struck Valerius, knocking him flat, and they both tumbled across the floor, sliding to a halt near the edge of the black glass lake.
Kae gasped, sucking in air that tasted of smoke and burned gold. Her chest heaved. Her eyes were no longer glowing white. They were back to violet, but dark—bruised, deep, and terrifying.
She looked at the Door.
It was closed.
The crack was gone. The bone surface was smooth, sealed. But it wasn't white anymore.
A handprint—black, oily, and distinctly Kaelen's size—was burned into the center of the bone.
"Vance?" Valerius groaned, pushing himself up. "Did you... did you close it?"
"I didn't close it," Kae rasped, wiping black ichor from her nose. "I made him sick. He threw me up."
Across the cavern, the fire on Sterling's body had died down. The Lord Arcanist was a ruin. His skin was charred, his clothes burned away. He looked like a corpse that refused to stop moving.
He dragged himself upright, leaning against the cavern wall. One of his eyes was swollen shut. The other was fixed on Kaelen with a hatred so pure it felt hot.
"You," Sterling croaked. "You contaminated the vessel."
"I'm not a vessel, Sterling," Kae said, standing up. She staggered, her legs shaking, but she didn't fall. "I'm the landfill. You said so yourself."
She raised her hand. There was no Dreg left in her. No golden magic. She was empty.
But the threat was enough.
Sterling looked at the sealed Door, then at the two of them. He was broken, burned, and out of mana. He made a calculation.
"The Endgame is not decided by a single blunder," Sterling hissed.
He reached into the charred remains of his pocket and crushed something in his hand.
Shadows erupted from his fist—not the angry shadows of the Void, but simple, travel-worn shadows of a teleportation cantrip. They wrapped around him like bandages.
"I will see you at the curtain call, Black Queen," Sterling whispered.
And then he was gone.
Silence returned to the Deep Cisterns.
Valerius exhaled, a long, shuddering sound. He slumped back onto the stone. "He escaped."
"He ran," Kae corrected. She walked over to where Sterling had been standing. The scorch marks on the wall were still smoking.
"He's going to the surface," Valerius said, struggling to his feet. "To the fire. The city is still burning, Vance. The Sleepers are still awake."
"No," Kae said. She touched her temple.
The Cipher—the geometric headache—was different now. It wasn't spinning. It wasn't hurting. It was... ticking.
"The signal stopped," Kae said. "When I connected to the Void... I think I jammed the frequency. The Sleepers will go dormant. The riot will break."
"For how long?"
"Long enough for us to get out of this hole."
Kae looked down at her hands. The black veins on her arms had receded, leaving behind faint, silver scars that looked like lightning strikes.
You survived, the Voice whispered. It sounded exhausted. And you emptied the trash. I feel... spacious.
"Don't get comfortable," Kae muttered.
She turned to Valerius. "We need to move. The Guilds will be swarming the tunnels soon. And I don't think I can explain why I have a handprint on the door to Hell."
Valerius looked at the black handprint on the bone Door. "You sealed it with corruption."
"I sealed it with me," Kae said. She felt a chill that had nothing to do with the damp air.
She hadn't just touched the Void. She had left a piece of herself inside it. And worse... she had brought a piece of it back.
She could feel it in her stomach. A cold, heavy knot that didn't hunger for memories. It hungered for silence.
"Let's go, Inquisitor," Kaelen said, turning her back on the Door. "I need a drink. And I think you owe me a new coat."