The café door slammed shut with finality, its echo carrying the weight of a vault sealing. Neon signs bled their electric glow across Calestia's face, one heartbeat crimson, the next jaundiced yellow, as Kura's fingers twitched toward the mysterious paper in his pocket. The ruby ring pulsed against his skin like a second heart, its rhythm accelerating in time with his own.
"Take it," Kura growled, thrusting forward the yellowed parchment. The lamplight caught its edge, revealing stains that might have been blood or merely the city's grime. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed—a dying animal's last cry, while a shop's metal shutter rattled like chains on a prisoner's cell.
Calestia accepted the document with gloved fingers that didn't tremble. For three impossible seconds, the world stood still. Then her sharp inhale fogged the air between them as those hunter's eyes, green like his own, yet ancient in ways that chilled him—scanned the cryptic text.
"Gibberish," she declared, even as her thumb deliberately smudged a particular rune where her glove was still damp with whiskey.
The ring seared into Kura's flesh. He barely registered the simultaneous events:
- A streetlight exploding in a corona of blue sparks
- The paper tearing itself along a preordained seam
- The wet shhk-shhk of something being dragged from the alley's depths
Calestia moved between blinks. The sphere in her hand, red and white like a bleeding eye—now pulsed in perfect sync with Kura's ring. "Move," she commanded, her voice the scrape of a knife being unsheathed. "Eyes forward."
They became a single organism navigating the electric-chilled streets, their elongated shadows dancing under strobing neon. The dragging sounds multiplied, emerging from every alley mouth now. Kura's ring burned through his pocket lining, casting hellish shadows that twitched unnaturally on the wet pavement.
When the streetlights died in unison, Calestia's order came razor-sharp:
"Run."
Kura obeyed, lungs burning as he fled toward the distant hum of crowds. The silence behind him was worse than any pursuit. He turned to see Calestia standing like a monolith beneath the last functioning lamp, her revolver gleaming with the same cursed light as his ring.
Three gunshots ruptured the night—not explosions, but absences, bullets that carved wounds in reality itself. The shadow creature came apart with a scream that shattered glass for blocks, its form dissolving into mist that reeked of scorched copper and funeral flowers.
The alley where Calestia stood now wept condensation, the brick walls sweating droplets that defied gravity, running sideways or upward. Her amber-lit eyes tracked something Kura couldn't see—something slithering into the storm clouds above.
Then she breathed out, and the world tore open behind her.
The soul creature unfolded like a blasphemous origami, its form shifting between a dozen impossible configurations: a many-armed deity, a nest of luminous serpents, a writhing mass of eyes and talons. The air screamed where it moved, reality itself hemorrhaging at its touch.
Kura's knees buckled as his ring turned molten. The creature moved—
no, it didn't move, it simply was where it needed to be.
its essence wrapped around the fleeing shadow. There was no struggle, only consumption. The shadow's dying shriek wasn't sound but pure fear injected directly into Kura's nervous system, flooding his mouth with the taste of battery acid and rotting roses.
When the vision cleared, Calestia stood alone in the alley, the soul creature gone as if it had never been. The only evidence—every reflective surface in the vicinity now showed not their current surroundings, but some impossible cityscape of twisted spires and bleeding skies.
Kura looked down at his hand. The ring had cooled.
It was now permanently fused to his flesh.
Calestia's gloved hand closed around Kura's wrist. "Let's go," she murmured, her breath fogging in the chilled air. "We've made enough of a spectacle tonight."
The city blurred past them - a smear of neon and shadow - until they stood before an unassuming brownstone. The moment Calestia's key turned in the lock, the air changed, becoming thick with the scent of aged paper and bergamot.
Kura's boots sank into plush carpet as he took in the study. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves groaned under the weight of leather-bound tomes, their spines embossed with glyphs that seemed to shift when not observed directly. Moonlight streamed through leaded glass windows, casting geometric shadows across the mahogany desk where two wingback chairs waited.
"Hah." Calestia collapsed into one chair, the red strands of her hair catching the firelight as she kicked her boots onto the desk. "You saw that, right? Lucky to have a sister like me." Her smirk was all sharp edges, but her fingers tapped an uneven rhythm against the armrest - the only betrayal of lingering adrenaline.
Kura sank into the opposite chair, his ring hand twitching. "Whatever." The word came out flat, but his eyes kept darting to the windows where the moon's reflection had taken on an unnatural copper hue.
Calestia's playful demeanor shifted as she leaned forward, the firelight carving hollows beneath her eyes. "So?" She plucked a dagger from her boot and began cleaning her nails with exaggerated nonchalance. "Still dead set on becoming a Temporal Enforcer?"
When Kura didn't answer immediately, she pressed on, the dagger stilling. "It's harder than they show in the recruitment pamphlets. The pay?" She barked a laugh that held no humor. "Hardly covers the dry cleaning after cultist blood baths."
Calestia produced the twin spheres again, one blood-red, one bone-white—rolling them between her fingers with practiced ease. Their surfaces caught the moonlight, casting faint, pulsating reflections across the mahogany desk.
"I wouldn't force you," she said, the spheres clicking softly. "It's your choice to make." Her voice carried the weight of centuries-old warnings, the kind etched into Vertica City's very foundations.
Kura watched as the strange orbs left afterimages in their wake, their movement hypnotic. The red one seemed to drink the light around it, while the white emitted a faint, sickly glow.
Calestia turned toward the arched windows where the eternal moon hung, a silver scar against the velvet blackness. "No dawn here," she murmured. "there never was, and there never will be."
Vertica City existed in perpetual night, a pocket dimension where darkness wasn't just absence of light but a living, breathing entity. The skyscrapers stretched like obsidian fangs toward a starless sky, their surfaces shimmering with bioluminescent runes. Here, Dark Users thrived—their powers waxing eternal under the unblinking moon.
A shadow detached itself from the bookshelf and slithered across the floor toward Calestia's boots. She absently kicked it away like an annoying pet.
"This city is a wound in the world's fabric," she continued, catching the white sphere mid-roll. "But beyond the Veil..." Her eyes took on a faraway look. "There are continents bathed in eternal dawn, realms of endless twilight. All connected, all separate."
The red sphere pulsed in her palm as if in agreement. Outside, something vast moved between the towers, a shape too large, too wrong, momentarily blotting out clusters of windows before vanishing into the urban canyon.
Kura's fused ring throbbed in response.
"Point is," Calestia snapped back to the present, the spheres vanishing into her coat, "you've got options. The Temporal Corps will chew you up and spit you out. But if you're determined..." She leaned forward, her eyes reflecting twin silver moons. "Just remember, some doors lock behind you."
Kura's fingers drummed against the armrest of the chair, the only sound in the heavy silence between them. The dim glow of the moon seeped through the windows, painting the study in shades of silver and ink. His sister sat across from him, flipping through an ancient tome with deliberate calm, as if the night hadn't just shattered into something unrecognizable.
He watched her—this woman who was supposed to be his sister, yet moved through the world like something far older. A Temporal Enforcer's strength wasn't surprising, but the way she had torn through the dark tonight… It wasn't just power. It was something deeper, something that made his skin prickle with unease.
The ring on his finger pulsed, a slow, insistent throb.
"Convenient," Kura finally said, his voice low. "You just happen to be there when I wake up in some hellhole building. You just happen to have enough power to rip shadows apart like paper." His fingers curled into a fist. "And now you're sitting here like this was all some casual reunion?"
Calestia didn't look up from her book, but the air in the room shifted. The shadows along the walls stretched unnaturally, as if leaning in to listen.
"You always did overthink things," she mused, her tone light, but her fingers had gone still on the page. "Even when we were kids, you'd take apart every little detail until it drove you mad."
Kura's jaw tightened. "And you always dodged the real questions."
For the first time, she looked up. Her eyes—too bright, too knowing, locked onto his. The playful edge in her voice was gone.
"You're asking the wrong one."
Outside, the moon flickered.
Just for a second, the light warped, stretching, twisting, before snapping back into place.
Kura's ring burned.
Calestia closed the book with a soft thud. The sound was final, like a judge's gavel.
"The question isn't why you were in that building," she said, her voice dropping into something colder. "It's what they did to you while you were there."
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
Because the truth was, Kura didn't remember. Not the building. Not how he got there. And certainly not what might have happened in those missing hours.
And from the way the shadows coiled around Calestia's wrists like serpents, neither did she.