By the time Eon reached the dark border of Cragvel, the sun had dimmed behind a curtain of cloud, painting the crooked rooftops in pale shades. Here, even the wind smelled like rust and burnt oil. Moss crept between cobbles, and half the buildings leaned like sleepy drunks waiting to collapse.
This part of the city wasn't dead, but it was no longer alive in the way cities should be.
No vendors lined the cracked walkways. No children played in the alleys, only the hushed voices behind smashed windows and the sounds of dripping water from fractured drainpipes.
Eon walked with his hands in his coat pockets, eyes sweeping. He wasn't looking for signs. Not yet. Just… traces.
The kind of that man might leave behind.
The walls answered as if one knew how to listen. Not with words, but with signs.
Graffiti layered upon each other, not gang signs, not rebel markers.
Just a mark.
Carefully placed chalk lines. A small symbol carved subtly into stone. A smudge of blue wax on a doorframe—almost invisible unless you looked for it. Patterns are too intended to be random, too clean to be vandalism.
Code? Field signals?
Eon tilted his head, recognizing the symmetry, the repetition. He'd seen something like this before—on the ruins where he'd first found the formula. The man wore a badge similar to this.
They were a territorial warning for others. There is also something on the ground. It was a breadcrumb. But a path to some. In this kind of part of the city, notes were meant to be read only by those who knew the language. The kind of system used by people working in dangerous areas, in places where official hands could barely reach.
Yet.
Then he saw the scar.
A long groove down the stone alley, cutting through wood and broken crates like something had been dragged—or slashed—through with force exceeding human strength. Not wide enough for a cart. Not messy enough for animals.
Something had happened here. Something recent.
He walked around past a corner into what might've once been a courtyard. It was half-sunken, the ground lower than the street, lined with archways covered in vines and mold. A shattered statue stood at the center, headless and half-submerged in water.
Eon's footsteps slowed.
Not because he was afraid. But because the air changed.
Heavy. Still. Not cold, but he felt someone observing.
He scanned rooftops. Empty. Scanned the streets. Still. Then—a single footstep. Not his.
It came from behind him.
He spun, hand reaching for his coat, but nothing was there. Only silence and the low rustle of garbage shifting in the wind.
He waited.
Nothing.
Then, a breath, just at the edge of hearing.
But again, no one.
Is this where they operate?
He crouched behind a stack of worn crates and waited. Watched. Hoping,
hoping to see the man with frost-chained gauntlets again. Hoping for a sign.
And just as he began to doubt—
The sky glowed faintly.
A touch.
A distortion in the alley across the courtyard. Like heat rising, but colder.
A figure stepped out.
Not the man he was looking for. Not someone he recognized.
But their coat was long, dark, lined with symbols stitched in glimmering threads.
They did not look at him.
But Eon stayed frozen, unmoving.
The figure passed through the arch and vanished behind the place.
And just like that, the tension in the air… snapped. As if Cragvel exhaled all at once.
He waited a full minute before moving again. Heart hammering. The body is going numb in fear.
That wasn't just some outlaw. That was one of them, a waybound.
Eon rose to his feet slowly, brushing dust from his knees.
Eon followed the man deeper into the arch.
The air here had a thickness to it, humid but cold, like walking through the inside of a damp breath. The buildings leaned toward one another in unnatural ways, wooden spines and rusted iron ribs almost merging like they were trying to swallow the narrow alleys whole. Time had gone crooked here.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Eon remembered this part of the city used to be a manufacturing ward, and was suddenly long abandoned. Factories sealed shut with rust and silence. Now it was something of a place for an outlaw.
He paused in front of a crumbling wall. He saw another mark.
It looked like an investigator's trace—a triangle nested inside a broken circle, chalked near the frame of a collapsed archway.
But it was too fresh.
Too clean.
And it wasn't quite right.
Still, curiosity had already sunk its teeth in. He went through.
He passed by a rust-wrecked water tower, vines clinging to its bent legs like overgrown veins. Something slips at the edge of hearing—whispers maybe. Or just wind scraping glass.
Eon didn't stop.
He began to notice more symbols—circular carvings like mouths, lines like ribs, and eyes that seemed to follow. He tried to pretend they were more Lawbound signs. But deep down, he knew better.
There weren't signs left for Lawbound.
They were signs left for bait. He once heard from a group of people that this type of trap is used in this kind of place.
Later, deeper in the zone...
He rounded the corner of a collapsed walkway and nearly stepped onto a strange figure, kneeling in the dust. Hooded. Still.
Eon froze, hand twitching toward the concealed revolver beneath his jacket.
The figure twitched.
Then laughed.
Not a hearty laugh—but a crackling one, like air hissing through torn lungs.
"The bait was meant for a predator, not for filthy rats."
Before he could respond, the ground beneath him cracked.
Not from magic.
From weight.
Something huge was moving below—he could feel the soft thuds through the bones of the alley. Pulsing, like breath. Like hunger.
Then—
From the walls around him, shadows straightened.
Not shadows.
Flesh.
It slithered like wet muscle, forming a hand, then a face that didn't belong to any man. The features were vague. Familiar and not. Like a sketch of a human wearing a smile it didn't own.
Eon's breath caught.
He stepped back.
"Coming here is a mistake," the cultist whispered again. "You followed a sign not meant for you. The Lawbound were to bleed here tonight. But… perhaps you, as an offering, will be enough."
The wall bubbled—slowly, disorder—like wax melting in a way that doesn't follow the norms, a thousand faces pressing through the stone, shifting and blending in an endless kind of features, mouths agape, eyes empty, some weeping, some grinning, some halfway between. It wasn't stone anymore, it was flesh—sculpted but alive, and watching.