*Clack* *Clack* *Clack*
Once again, the boots on metal sounded. A rhythm so unnatural and jerky, as if someone were dragging a marionette.
The footsteps stopped directly behind Vincard's head. He didn't need to see the stranger to know he was there, the air thickened with the scent of burnt ozone and something older, something that shouldn't exist. A cold fingertip traced the line of Vincard's jaw, lingering just beneath his earlobe. The touch was clinical, almost tender, if tenderness could feel like a scalpel hovering over an open wound.
"Ah," the stranger mused, his voice fractured into three overlapping tones, a man's baritone, a woman's whisper, and something else, something insectile. "Still intact. Mostly." His breath smelled of clove and formaldehyde. "You're fighting it. How quaint."
Vincard's scar pulsed faintly, the dark threads beneath his skin writhing in response to the stranger's proximity. "It wasn't easy," the stranger murmured, circling the stretcher with slow, deliberate steps. His boots clicked against the iron grating beneath them.
*Clack* *Clack* *Clack*
Like a clockwork pendulum counting down. "No, not easy at all." He paused, tilting his head as if listening to some distant frequency. "But then, nothing worthwhile ever is."
The stranger's fingers hovered over Vincard's exposed scar. The threads beneath his skin twisted eagerly toward the touch, as if recognizing their source. "Do you know who you are?" the stranger asked, not unkindly. His voice slipped into a child's cadence, lilting and curious. "Who touched this scar?"
Vincard exhaled through clenched teeth, a thin, controlled sound, as the stranger's fingers hovered millimeters above his scar. "No idea... what you're talking about," he rasped, throat raw from whatever toxins still swam in his veins.
The stranger's chuckle slithered through the chamber, a sound like wet pages turning. "Liar," he murmured, dragging a single, claw-like nail along the perimeter of Vincard's scar.
"Whoever worked on the scar did a good job." His voice fractured again, this time into a chorus of whispers, each layered atop the other like strata of sediment. "But it blocked your potential to be... so much more."
The stranger's nail traced the scar's perimeter one last time before withdrawing with the precision of a surgeon. Vincard's breath came ragged, each inhalation scraping against his ribs like a dull blade.
"You see," the stranger murmured, his voice sliding between tones like a broken music box, "you've been sealed. Like a letter never meant to be opened." His cracked lips stretched into a grin, revealing teeth that shimmered unnaturally. "But I've always been... curious."
Vincard's pulse thundered in his ears, yet his face remained slack, as if carved from the same cold stone as the chamber walls.
"But don't worry," added the stranger with a crooked smile. "I've opened it up. Now your potential is limitless, you'll become so much more!" He raised both arms in the air, almost theatrical, like a conductor summoning the finale.
"The seal," he said, voice splintering into layered echoes, "was never meant to last forever. It bought you time, yes. Years of borrowed breath. But every seal has a price. Yours has been quietly collecting interest."
He traced the edge of the operating table with one long, trembling finger. The iron groaned softly under the touch, rust blooming in delicate fractal patterns where he passed.
"Without me," he continued, "that little gift would have eaten you from the inside. Slowly. Patiently."
Vincard's throat worked, but no sound came. The threads in his scar pulsed faster, almost eagerly, as though nodding in agreement.
"When I opened it," the stranger said, "it was starving. Ravenous. You nearly lost yourself in that first rush... did you feel it?"
He tilted his head, hat brim casting a crescent shadow across his face. "I fed it," he said simply. "A few small pieces. A few drops of myself. Just enough to quiet the hunger. Consider it... a personal gift. The beginning of something larger."
Vincard's skull throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Not pain, exactly. Pressure. As though something behind his eyes was trying to unfold wings too wide for the space. Voices, fragments, really, brushed against the inside of his thoughts. Not words, just impressions. They weren't loud, they were patient.
The stranger reached into the folds of his tattered cloak and produced Vincard's pocket watch. The brass casing caught the lamplight and threw it back in warped, liquid patterns. He turned it slowly between his fingers, as though weighing a rare coin.
"This," he murmured, "intrigues me. Not the mechanism, and not the engravings. Something... deeper. The same thing that intrigues me about you."
He pressed the watch briefly to his own cracked lips, almost a kiss, then set it carefully on the table beside the bandolier.
"I don't yet know what it is," he admitted, sounding genuinely puzzled, almost delighted by his own ignorance. "But I will. In time."
He straightened, cloak rustling like dry leaves "One last gift before I leave you to your thoughts."
He leaned down until his galaxy eyes filled Vincard's field of vision, twin red spirals that seemed to pull light inward instead of reflecting it. "The hunter you sought, Bartho. He's already dead. The one you watched die in the yard. I looked through the notes while you slept. His last trail ends there. No more searching. No more wasted nights."
A small, almost paternal smile curved the reforming lips. "You're welcome."
The stranger stepped back. His form blurred at the edges, not dissolving into mist, but simply... receding, as though distance had suddenly stretched between them without movement.
"Go to the old house," he said, voice now a soft, overlapping chorus. "When you can stand again. Something waits for you there. Something that has waited a very long time."
He lifted his hand in a lazy salute. „Until next time, my—" He paused briefly, as if surprised. And then he was gone. Not vanished, not walked away. Simply... absent.
Vincard lay very still, listening to his own ragged breathing and the slow drip of condensation from the ceiling chains. The threads in his scar had disappeared.
His head still rang with half-formed voices. The pocket watch lay silent on the table, its face turned toward him.
Then he closed his eyes again. The darkness calmed him a little and made the unknown voices seem quieter.
....