They don’t look down. They never look down.
In millennia of watching humans hunt what they fear, I have never once seen them think to check the ground beneath their own feet.
So I listen.
Dr. Voss’s voice carries through the stone with the clarity that deep shadow provides — not the words themselves but the vibrations, the patterns of speech that my ancient darkness translates into meaning the way a bat translates echoes into shapes.
She is speaking to someone via a secure channel. Council authorization.
The conversation has the clipped, efficient rhythm of professionals discussing a procedure they have performed many times and expect to perform again.
They are not discussing detection. The detection is already underway — forty-eight hours into the seventy-two-hour window, the grid narrowing its focus with each passing hour as Constantine’s noise interference delays but does not prevent the inevitable identification.
Voss is thorough. She has already noted the anomalies in the data and filed them as requiring further analysis rather than dismissing them as Constantine intended.
What she is discussing now is what comes after.
A shadow-binding ritual.
I go still in the dark.
The kind of stillness that only something very old can achieve — a complete cessation of movement that makes the shadow layer around me solidify into something that feels less like darkness and more like stone.
Not because I’m hiding. Because the information I’m receiving requires the full attention of a mind that has spent millennia studying shadow manipulation and has just heard something that makes the study feel like counting grains of sand on a beach while the tide comes in.
Shadow-binding.
The practice is ancient — older than the Hunter system, older than the academy, older than the division between light and dark.
I know it because I was alive when it was invented.
I watched the first binding performed on a shadow wielder whose darkness had become too strong for the wielders who feared him, and I remember the sound the shadows made when the binding took hold.
Not a sound you hear with ears.
A sound you feel in the darkness itself — the scream of living shadow being forced into stillness, the intelligence being stripped out layer by layer until what remains is darkness without will.
Shadow without life.
The corpse of something that used to think and choose and love.
They want to do this to Ashley.
Not immediately. Voss is careful — she wants confirmation before she deploys the binding team.
But the ritual components are already being assembled. The conversation I’m listening to involves logistics: when the specialists arrive, where the binding will be performed, what containment measures are necessary for a shadow wielder whose living darkness has reached the level that Ashley’s has.
They are discussing the logistics of murdering her shadows while keeping her body alive.
Because that is what a binding does — it doesn’t kill the wielder. It kills the darkness.
It strips the living quality from the shadows and leaves behind a person who can still breathe and eat and walk through the world carrying dead darkness that follows them like a corpse dragging behind a living body on a chain.
I have seen what happens to wielders after a binding.
The hollow eyes. The way they move through the world like ghosts inhabiting their own bodies. The specific quality of someone whose essential self has been removed while the shell remains functional enough to serve as a warning to others.
They will not do this to her.
