A pounding on the door wakes me in the middle of the night, and I groggily push myself up. It can’t have been more than an hour or two since I finally managed to fall asleep. I palm a dagger, Delving shows someone panicked on the other end, but still… Opening the door just a crack I see one of the guards. “He showed up…” He says, gesturing agitatedly. “Come on, he left… a message, for you.”

I nodded, gesturing for him to lead the way. He looks to the other rooms, and I shake my head. “Let her sleep, she won’t be alone here.” I say. “You’ll be walking with me anyway right?” I ask. He nods, leading me out the inn and into the streets. We end up at the southwestern gates, but the faint smell of blood clues me in quickly that he’s struck again, only this time, not one of ours…

“The residents say that there was a huge scuffle a short while ago.” He says, nervously looking around. “And at the end of it someone screaming aloud for them to call you here, or they’d be next.” The guards had been massacred, to even call it that downplayed the extent of it. The luckiest of them had his helmet and skull crushed against the stone wall, while the others had throats ripped out, or their blades turned against them.

I knelt down next to one of the bodies. “What in the hell?” I mutter under my breath. If he had been capable of this much carnage… I shake my head, assessing the damage. “How many people did this?” I ask aloud, dreading the answer. Beside me I can hear the guard swallow. “One then…” I say, shaking my head. This has to be some kind of game to them. I think.

[But why break their own rules now?] Page wonders. Maybe it wasn’t a rule in the first place.

“A fine mess this is…” The sheriff says, walking up beside me. “I take it back, it really might’ve been a good thing if we hadn’t known about them. What on earth would we even do to kill them?” He mutters under his breath. “He left a message for you on that wall. More blood, I swear this bastard thinks he’s a regular goddamn Emmauri.” I look up at him. “Artist, likes putting his blood in the ink, it doesn’t matter.” He says.

The blood on the stones, dried as it is, is difficult to read under the flickering torchlight. I end up tracing the words with my fingers. “Off… to see… the Wizard?” My eye twitches at that, and I slam a fist into the side of the wall. “Bullshit. He’s breaking pattern.” The sheriff walks up beside me, grimly looking at the message. “This can’t be right.” I turn, Delving to look at the others. Nothing. Not that he really needs to hide. I think, looking at his handiwork.

“So he’s left us then?” The sheriff asks, running a hand through his hair. “What a bloody mess.” He lets out a sharp breath. “We’ll take care of this, you should be going after him. I don’t think there’s anyone around right now who can fight him except you.” He eyes the bodies. “Half of them were veterans, survived void blasted sun cursed demons to die here. What a bloody mess…”

I move to leave, if he’s gone after Qent, then I have to catch up. Even if he hasn’t, I need to stay close to Numen, with how strong this thing is… It could probably break straight into the inn and kill both Sel and Numen, it’d be a fight… but one they weren’t likely to win. I hasten my footsteps.

I Delve to scan the inn as I close, entering as I see no signs of death, or any trace of the soul I’ve been tracking. Sel looks up at me from one of the tables. “Why’re you still here?” She asks, and my blood runs cold. “Numen said you were both going after the bastard.”

“What. The. Hell. Are you talking about?” I ask, leaning down onto the table. “I left her to sleep when the guards came.” My voice comes out with a quiet, harsh intensity. Sel leans back, surprised “Who did she leave with?” I continue, my hands a vice grip on the table.

“Wait, wait, wait.” Sel says, holding up her hands. “He came in the flesh, Numen told me it was fine, that that was… you?” For a moment my brain ground to a halt. I straightened, pulled out the stool, and sat down. She stares at me. “If it wasn’t you, how did he manage to convince her?” I stare at her for a moment, my mind grappling at the absurdity of the idea.

“Did you see his face?” I ask, after a moment. Sel hesitates, but nods.

“It was… kind of in shadow, but I got a good look at it, mostly.” She grimaces.

I nod a few times, to myself, looking around the room. This early in the morning, they haven’t even opened. No customers, just one of the serving swain sitting over at another table, having a quick drink. I lean forward, and removing my faceplate. “Like this?” I ask. The serving swain stops, looking over in my direction, before a hard glare forces them to resume drinking. She studies my face, looking more and more concerned.

“Y… Yeah…” She says. “He looked, almost exactly… Oh gods…”

I replace my faceplate, leaning forward onto the table as I take a deep breath. What are the odds? I think to myself. That there is someone unhinged enough, who hates us, knows my face, and has my face, my build?

[Astronomically low, especially in this world.] Page notes. It then pauses, and I can feel a flash of panic passing through it. [He also has your voice.] He says, almost a whisper. [I couldn’t place it back then, when he was laughing, but I just did a comparison, he mimicked your voice almost exactly, there’s some minor differences in pitch but…]

It’s like he was purpose… built… I pause that thought. Page and I both stop, and I can tell we’re both starting to think of the same event. That son of a… I snarl, snapping out of my thoughts as the serving swain puts a note down on the table. He flinches, quickly retreating up the stairs. Sel flips open the note. Dark brownish red stains the parchment. “More blood… Of course.” I say, my voice flat.

Come alone to the caves just south west of here. Leave your toy behind, or she just might meet a fatal end long before her time. Another smiley is placed where a signature would be, I just about resist the urge to tear it up.

“Toy?” Sel asks uncertainly. I reach into my armour, pulling out the Aesor before dropping it on the table. “Oh.” She says. I stand to leave. “Wait, you aren’t really going to just leave this behind are you?”

“Can’t see that I have a choice.” I say. She grimaces. “I know, it’s probably lying, she’s probably dead, but you and I both know we won’t take that chance.” She reluctantly nods. “Keep it safe, maybe leave town for the day. I’ll be waiting outside the southern gate at nightfall, today or tomorrow. If I’m not there… Get rid of it, bury it out of town, send it off to the Tower, I won’t care, you don’t want that beacon on you. Just… don’t use it.” I say, gesturing to the activation runes. “Anyone with a soul dies if it’s active, even the wielder.” She looks at me with a certain amount of terror. “I know, but there’s no one else I can trust… Actually, give me a moment.”

I pull out a strip of my armour from my pack, wrapping it around the Aesor, and sealing it off. She picks it up gingerly still, and I stand, leaving the inn behind.

The caves themselves are easy to find, the gate guards tell me it used to be an old mine, until the monsters got too rowdy and the ore too poor, the war only made things fall apart that much faster. They also note though, that there’s a bit of a nice view, a chamber that had its ceiling cave in a long time before work even started. It’s a thought that I keep in mind as I step into the cold, pitch black entrance. I shut my eyes, extending Sense, and the walls snap into my consciousness.

I find the chamber easily enough, some torchlight flickers through into my eyes, and as I near the entrance, I Delve. What I thought was a broken soul I now know as an imperfect facsimile of a real one, and the other… dissipating, slowly returning to the Aether. It clutches her in a waltz hold, and as it spots me a large grin spreads across its face. Its face is rough, covered in scratches and minute patchwork scars, like staring into a grotesque mirror. “Ah, I’ve finally arrived.” The voice taunts as I near, pushing Numen’s corpse aside where it falls to the ground with a thud. “We’ve been waiting.”

Creepy asshole. I think, drawing my sword and engaging my shield. “Don’t be so mad. This isn’t the first lie we’ve told myself.” I don’t bother responding to that, darting in to strike. It laughs. “Would I like to hear how they died?” It parries my sword with a blade of its own, in a stance that mirrored my own, but instead of a shield, a parrying dagger. Its blade swats out at me, and I deflect it across my shield. “Qent was the first.” It sighs.

“Had to make sure this would fool them, a test… of a sort. We spent so much time watching me, carving our faces from our first form. Adjusting our height, whittling away at our form, modifying our voice.” Its blade slithers between us, probing. It steps back, lifting its tunic to reveal burns and scars across its stomach. “It worked too well, we underestimated him.” Its smile hardens, and it steps in, throwing together vicious strikes that pound against my shield, as a dagger snakes past, aiming for my heart. I shift to the side, and it punches into my lungs instead.

“Azarint, Frejr, their deaths were exquisite, the pain and suffering we inflicted, watching them break…” It cackles, and my anger flares. I flail the sword at it, snarling, and it steps around me, knocking me aside, and tearing into my back. “They died cursing my name, believing their senses as we robbed them of them one, by, one.” I yell, swinging the blade with a hand and a half grip right at their chest. They dodge, darting in close with an unnerving grin as theirs smashes into my side.

[Calm down.] Page says. [Don’t let him get to you. He’ll kill you.] My mind disregards the warning, charging straight at it.

“But the last two… those were the true prize. I didn’t need to do anything to them at all.” It flashes me a vicious grin, settling into one of my combat stances as he drops the dagger, roughly pulling down my shield. “Nothing we could ever do physically would compare to the sheer anguish the idea of me harming them ever would.” It crows, jamming the sword into my side. I twist, slamming the pommel of my sword into its face and escaping its grip.

“She loved me you know.” He says, gesturing to Numen’s corpse. “We get the feeling I didn’t even notice. But Rince did, I’d know too if I’d watched as he struggled, strength bleeding out as we tell him he didn’t deserve her.” Its grin widens. “As we tell her what we did, that we did it all ‘for her’.” It cackles, and I feel something snap in my mind. Cold anger stops me in my tracks, and I close my shield, swapping my sword to my left hand as I break several strips of the shield into my right, holding them between my fingers and fusing them on.

[… That works too.] Page mutters to itself, a hint of worry and fear in its voice.

I sublimate the edges into molecular blades, darting in to slash apart its sword. They stop barely half a centimetre deep, already blunted, and I instead twist the blade aside to let my sword bite into its right arm. It headbutts me, denting the faceplate, breaking my nose, and I reel back. I engage Sense, discarding the razors as I dodge under its next blow, removing my faceplate to relieve the pressure. My left leg hooks his, and I slam the faceplate onto his face, turning aside as it detonates. It flails, a blindly groping arm pulling me to the ground with it. I grab its wrist with a free hand, freezing it and fraying away whatever muscle this thing had.

I finally pin the creature, my knees on its chest, sword in hand. I snarl, giving an incoherent scream as I drive the blade down. It’s over.