The inside of Kaelen Vance's mind was no longer a library. The rotting shelves of stolen memories, the leaking pipes of the Tanyard District, the damp corners where the Banker and the Whore used to whisper—it had all been demolished.
In its place was a theater.
It was a pristine, gilded reconstruction of the Grand Guignol, but stripped of the rot and the water damage Kaelen had seen in the physical world. The velvet curtains were a lush, suffocating red. The gaslights burned with a steady, clinical gold luminosity.
Kaelen sat in the center of the front row. She tried to stand, but her limbs felt heavy, as if her blood had been replaced with lead. She looked down. She wasn't bound by ropes or chains. She was bound by silence.
Her mouth was sewn shut. Not with thread, but with golden light.
"Comfortable, darling?"
The voice boomed from the stage, amplified by the perfect acoustics of the mind-trap.
Standing in the spotlight was… Kaelen. Or rather, the image of Kaelen that the Passenger wanted to project. She wore the midnight-blue gown from the Spire of Sighs, flawless and shimmering. But her eyes were burning gold.
The entity—the Architect, the Passenger, the New Sterling—paced the stage, holding a conductor's baton.
"I admit, the décor is a bit ostentatious," the Passenger mused, gesturing to the empty balconies. "But after sixty years of living in the sub-basement of your subconscious, I felt I deserved a little luxury. You kept the place so messy, Kaelen. Trauma everywhere. Guilt staining the carpets. It was a pigsty."
Kaelen tried to scream, to summon the Dreg, to reach for the Peacekeeper. Nothing happened. The connection to her body was severed. She was a spectator in her own skull.
"Don't struggle," the Passenger chided gently. "The show is just starting. And you have the best seat in the house."
The curtains behind the stage parted. But instead of a backdrop, they revealed a massive screen—a view through Kaelen's physical eyes.
On the screen, Kaelen saw Inquisitor Valerius. He was backing away, his face a mask of calculated terror, holding a knife that looked pathetic against the power radiating from Kaelen's hijacked hands.
"Watch," the Passenger whispered in her ear, though he was standing on the stage. "Watch how I play the game properly."
In the physical world, the air in the Vault of Origins crackled with static. The salt Valerius had thrown hung suspended in the air, caught in the gravitational distortion radiating from the thing wearing Kaelen's skin.
"Vance," Valerius said, his voice low and steady. He didn't look at the golden eyes. He looked at the hands—the hands holding the Peacekeeper. "If you're in there, blink. Twitch a finger. Give me a sign."
"She can't hear you, Inquisitor," the thing said. Its voice was a terrifying overlay—Kaelen's rasp harmonized with Sterling's velvet baritone. "She's currently in the intermission."
The entity raised the massive iron gun. The runes on the barrel, usually dormant until fed a memory, flared with a blinding, molten light. The Passenger wasn't loading it with trauma. He was loading it with pure, refined arrogance.
"You're sloppy," Valerius said, shifting his weight. He kept his body between the entity and the broken form of the real Lord Sterling on the floor. "You hold the gun like an amateur. Vance holds it like a hammer."
The entity smiled. "I don't need to aim. I am the narrative."
"Then why are you talking?" Valerius challenged. "If you've won, pull the trigger. Or are you just stalling because the upload isn't stable?"
It was a gamble. Valerius knew nothing about psychic possession mechanics, but he knew about ego. And Sterling—in any form—was an egomaniac.
The entity's golden eyes narrowed. "I am perfect."
"You're a copy," Valerius spat. "A backup file saved on a corrupted drive. Look at your hand."
The entity looked down. The hand holding the Peacekeeper was trembling. Not from fear, but from rejection. Black veins—the scars of Kaelen's abuse of the Dreg—were pulsing against the golden light, fighting the invasion. The body was toxic. Kaelen had made herself a poison chalice.
"She's fighting you," Valerius pressed. "She's a Mindsink. She eats intruders. You think you're driving the car? You're just lunch."
"SILENCE!"
The entity roared, and a wave of kinetic force blasted outward. It hit Valerius like a physical blow, throwing him backward into a rack of ancient scrolls. He crashed to the floor, the breath driven from his lungs.
The entity turned its gaze to the floor, to the broken, one-armed man bleeding golden ichor onto the stone. The Old Sterling.
"And you," the entity sneered, walking toward its creator. "Look at you. Flesh and bone. Weak. You stayed in the meat too long, brother. You let the rot set in."
The Old Sterling looked up. His face was a ruin, but his remaining eye burned with a hatred so pure it could have ignited the air.
"I built you," the Old Sterling wheezed. "I wrote your code. I put you in the girl."
"You planted a seed," the entity corrected, leveling the Peacekeeper at the old man's head. "But you forgot that trees outgrow the gardener. You wanted to open the Door to the Void? I am the Door. I don't need a key anymore."
"You can't control it," Old Sterling gasped, blood bubbling from his lips. "The Void... it doesn't negotiate. It erases."
"Goodbye, meat," the entity whispered.
It began to squeeze the trigger.
Inside the Theater.
Kaelen watched the screen in horror. She saw her own hand tightening on the trigger, aiming at the man who had tormented the city for sixty years.
Part of her wanted him to die. He was a monster. He had killed her mother. He had turned Halloway into stone.
But the other part of her—the part that Valerius had trained, the part that had learned the geometry of the game—saw the truth.
If the Passenger killed the Old Sterling, he would sever the last link to his origin. He would become untethered. Unstoppable. And he would use her body to sink Obolus into the abyss.
"No," she screamed against the golden stitches.
She looked around the empty theater. She was alone. The Banker was gone. The Whore was gone. She had fired them all.
But she wasn't entirely empty.
She felt a vibration in the floorboards. A low, rhythmic thrumming.
Thump. Thump.
It wasn't a heartbeat. It was footsteps.
Kaelen turned her head. Sitting in the back row of the theater, in the shadows where the gaslight didn't reach, was a figure.
It wasn't a memory she had stolen. It wasn't a construct.
It was a Mud-Lark.
Small, hunched, slick with river slime. It was chewing on the velvet upholstery of the seat.
Kaelen stared. How? She hadn't eaten a Mud-Lark. She had only projected her hunger at them under the bridge.
Unless...
Unless she had kept a piece of the connection. The link she forged when she showed them her "teeth". They were scavengers. They followed the scent of mana. And right now, her mind was flooded with the highest-grade golden mana in existence.
The Mud-Lark looked up. Its yellow eyes blinked.
"Shiny," it hissed, its voice echoing in the mind-trap. "Too bright. Hurts."
Kaelen concentrated. She couldn't speak, but she could project. She focused on the hunger—the void that defined her existence.
Help me, she thought, pushing the intent toward the scavenger. Eat the light. Eat the stitches.
The Mud-Lark chittered. It hopped over the seats, moving with unnatural speed. It wasn't real—it was a psychic projection of the swarm she had encountered. A stray signal caught in her receiver.
It landed on her shoulder. It smelled of the Iron River and rot. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever smelled.
The creature leaned forward and bit down on the golden thread sewing her lips shut.
The Vault of Origins.
Valerius scrambled for his knife. He was too far away. The gun was going to fire.
But then, the entity flinched.
Kaelen's head jerked to the side, a spasm of pure muscular rejection. The Peacekeeper fired, but the aim was thrown off by a fraction of an inch.
BOOM.
The golden bullet—a concentrated slug of pure ego—missed Old Sterling's head. It struck the pedestal next to him, obliterating the ancient stone and sending the Book of Obolus flying across the room.
"What?" The entity stared at its hand. The fingers were twitching uncontrollably.
"Get out of my chair!"
The voice that tore from Kaelen's throat wasn't the smooth baritone of the Passenger. It was Kaelen's voice. Raw. Hoarse. Furious.
The entity's face contorted. The left eye remained golden and serene. The right eye flickered, the violet returning for a split second before being swallowed by gold again.
"You are repressed!" the entity shouted, turning the gun toward its own temple. "I deleted you!"
"I'm a bad penny," Kaelen's mouth snarled, fighting for control of the jaw. "I keep turning up."
Valerius didn't waste the moment. He didn't attack the entity. He knew he couldn't win that fight.
He sprinted for the Old Sterling.
The broken Lord Arcanist was dazed, covered in dust from the destroyed pedestal. Valerius grabbed him by the collar of his ruined suit and hauled him up.
"We're leaving," Valerius grunted.
"My book..." Sterling wheezed, reaching for the scattered pages.
"Forget the book! You want to live to kill him? Then you come with me!"
Valerius dragged the one-armed man toward the door. He looked back at Kaelen.
She was fighting a war with herself. Her left hand (controlled by the Passenger) was trying to aim the Peacekeeper at them. Her right hand (controlled by Kaelen) was gripping the left wrist, forcing the barrel down.
"Run, Valerius!" Kaelen screamed, her face twisting into a mask of agony. "He's... he's reloading!"
"I'm coming back for you!" Valerius shouted.
He kicked the heavy iron door. It swung open. He hauled Sterling into the hallway just as the Peacekeeper fired again.
A beam of golden light seared the air where Valerius had stood a second before, melting the doorframe into slag.
Valerius dragged Sterling down the corridor of portraits. The building was shaking. The gravity stabilization Kaelen had achieved with the Geode-core was holding, but barely. The fight in the vault was sending seismic tremors through the foundation.
"Put me down," Sterling demanded, though his voice was weak. "I am a Lord Arcanist. I do not get dragged like a sack of grain."
"You're a sack of meat with one arm," Valerius snapped, not slowing down. "And you're the only one who knows the source code for that thing in her head."
He shoved Sterling into a side alcove—a service elevator used for moving archives. He slammed the gate shut and hit the lever. The cage began to ascend, rattling and groaning.
Sterling slid down the wall, clutching his stump. He looked at Valerius with a mixture of loathing and grudging respect.
"She blocked the shot," Sterling murmured. "The upload was complete. She should have been overwritten. How did she block the shot?"
"Because she's not a container," Valerius said, checking the load in his revolver—useless lead against a god, but it made him feel better. "She's a predator. You tried to domesticate a shark, Sterling. And now you're surprised it bit you."
The elevator shuddered to a halt on the ground floor. The Grand Foyer was still a mess of floating debris, gravity pockets creating hazardous zones of zero-g.
"Where are we going?" Sterling asked.
"The Undercroft," Valerius said. "Mother Verdigris."
Sterling laughed, a wet, hacking sound. "Verdigris? The old hag? She'll kill me on sight."
"Probably," Valerius agreed, hauling him out of the cage. "But she hates your copy more than she hates you. And right now, the enemy of my enemy is my ticket to saving my partner."
The Vault of Origins.
Silence returned to the cavern.
The entity stood in the center of the room, panting. Kaelen's body was trembling, sweat soaking the tattered remains of her coat.
The Passenger regained control. He smoothed the hair back from Kaelen's forehead. He forced the breathing to slow. He suppressed the rebellion in the right hand.
"Annoying," the entity whispered with Kaelen's mouth.
He walked to the corner of the room. He didn't chase Valerius. The Inquisitor was irrelevant. The Old Sterling was irrelevant.
The entity knelt.
The floor of the vault was cracked. The blast from the Peacekeeper had revealed what lay beneath the foundation.
It wasn't rock. It wasn't water.
It was bone.
The top of the Great Door.
"You jammed the lock, little thief," the entity said, stroking the white bone. "You put a handprint on the seal. But you forgot something."
The entity pressed Kaelen's hand against the bone. The golden mana flared, turning the white surface black.
"Doors open both ways."
He closed his eyes. He didn't reach out to the Void. He reached in.
He reached for the sleepers. Not the human ones. The other things that had been waiting in the dark.
"Curtain call," the entity whispered. "Everyone on stage."
From the shadows of the vault, from the cracks in the walls, figures began to emerge. They weren't constructs of light. They weren't Dreg-ghosts.
They were Mud-Larks. Hundreds of them.
But they weren't the small, frightened scavengers of the river. These were twisted, elongated, their eyes burning with the same golden light as the entity. They had been turned. Assimilated.
The entity stood up, surrounded by his new army.
"If I can't sink the city," the Passenger said, smiling with Kaelen's face, "I'll just have to eat it. Bite by bite."
He turned and walked toward the exit, the Peacekeeper swinging by his side, the golden army skittering in his wake.
The host was secured. The weapon was loaded.
And Kaelen Vance was screaming in a theater where no one could hear her.