I exhaled slowly, my fists clenching at my sides.The hunt had just changed.
Turning, I found them framed in the doorway, black garb stark against the dim light, their expressions taut with trepidation.Their loyalty was unwavering, yet they could sense the wrongness of what lay before us.One of them staggered forward, dropped to his knees, and retched.When he had emptied his gut, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, cheeks flushed with both revulsion and shame.
I cast him a fleeting look of sympathy before addressing the five of them.
“Do you want the good news or the bad?”
A beat of silence.Then one of them answered.“The good.”
I nodded.“The good news is that someone took care of our job for us.”The words felt hollow as I spoke them, my mind churning with questions that had no answers.“The bad news is we don’t know who did this.”
My gaze shifted past them, just in time to catch a flicker of movement in the hallway—a shadow, clad in black garb eerily identical to mine, a mask that mirrored my own.
A phantom.A reflection.Or another harbinger of doom.
“Get out of here.”My command came swiftly, clipped.I gestured toward the macabre ruin before us.“Burn it.End their suffering.I will return.”
They hesitated only for a breath, then moved to obey.Their masks slipped into place, the faceless executioners they had been trained to be.The air grew thick with the scent of oil and smoke as they set to work while I stepped away from the dying embers of our mission and toward something far more dangerous.
The hunt was not over.It had merely veered into unknown terrain.
I pursued the enigmatic figure down the dimly lit corridor, my boots whispering against the polished marble.The manor’s grandeur loomed around us, a mockery of civility against the darkness we both carried—me, the hunter of shadows, him, a phantom clad in the same guise.
Then, without breaking stride, he moved.A hand emerged from his cloak, swiftly uncapping a vial.He flung its contents behind him, and in an instant, the air thickened with a rolling, choking vapor.
The moment it touched my lungs, I knew.
Poison.The kind only known in Solaris.
It seared like fire, scorching through my veins, setting every muscle ablaze.I staggered, doubling over as my body rebelled against itself—bones twisting, muscles coiling like serpents beneath my skin.
When I looked up, my quarry had vanished, swallowed by the darkness we both wielded.
The only proof he had ever been there was the lingering black cloud curling in the space where he had stood.
And the agony that was tearing me apart from the inside.
“Can’t… breathe…” The words scraped from my throat, raw and ragged, as I clawed at the stone floor.My limbs warped, grotesquely reshaped, betraying their human form.Every nerve blistered, and every muscle rebelled.
Then, from somewhere beyond my spiraling senses, a voice bellowed?—
“Pasha Hassan!”
My men.They had fulfilled my command and torched the manor and its wretched inhabitants to the ground.Now, they had returned to find their master undone.
“Can’t… breathe…” I grated again as they came closer, their faces blurring into a shifting haze of shadow and firelight.Every word felt like a battle waged against the poison devouring me from within.“This has no cure… Made on Solaris.”
No cure.Only death.
They wasted no time.Strong hands gripped me, dragging me from the ruins of that cursed place.The cool night air hit my sweltering skin like ice, but it was a hollow relief against the torment searing through my veins.
“Get him to Lazarus immediately!We return to Anatolia at once!”The urgency in their voices was ironclad, an order carried by desperation.
Through the haze, through the writhing agony, one thought prevailed, sharp and insidious?—
Who was this man?
And how did he possess a poison that should not exist outside Solaris?
