The freight lift doors ground open on floor ten, and the first thing Mori noticed wasn't the room beyond them at all.
⠀
It was how close the ceiling suddenly felt.
⠀
All of the floors above this one, reaching back to the hundredth, had swallowed Mori's scarf-light entirely, with corridors that spread wide and dark in every direction, as if the facility was designed for something unwieldy and never meant to feel confined. However, this floor was different. It had a low ceiling that would have forced Armor, if he were there, to duck through the doorway. The hallway beyond was narrow and close, resembling an actual building more than the interior of a sprawling research complex.
⠀
"...Huh," Roby said, stepping out first, glancing up and down the shrunken corridor with open suspicion. "This feel weird to anybody else?"
⠀
"It feels like somebody built the last ten floors for people, instead of for a hundred of them at once," Leopold said, running a hand along the nearest wall, ordinary drywall instead of poured concrete. "Everything above here was a facility. This feels like a house."
⠀
"...I don't like houses that are also secret underground research floors," Saoirse said, Stuffy already muttering something unhappy from her fist.
⠀
Neither do I, Mori thought, and didn't say it out loud, because saying it out loud would have made the low ceiling and the narrow hall and the strange, domestic quiet of it feel even more real than it already did.
⠀
Prospero didn't say anything at all.
⠀
Mori waited a beat, then two, expecting some dry observation about the sudden change in architecture, the kind of comment it hadn't once failed to make on every floor since the hundredth. When nothing came, he tried out loud instead.
⠀
"Prospero? You still with us?"
⠀
Static, thin and directionless, answered him from the nearest speaker. Nothing shaped like words.
⠀
"...Prospero?"
⠀
"He's probably just busy," Haddler said, though he didn't sound entirely convinced of it himself. "Splitting his attention between two groups, remember? Maybe he's stuck listening to Pallas read filing cabinets out loud somewhere upstairs."
⠀
"Maybe," Mori said, and didn't believe that either, though he let it go, because there wasn't anything else to do about it yet.
⠀
⠀
Floor nine held offices, small ones, human-sized in a way that made Mori's skin crawl worse than any of the vast, echoing labs above ever had. A single desk. A single chair. A framed photograph, face-down, in nearly every room they checked, as though somebody had gone through afterward and made sure nothing in this place would ever get to look back at whoever came looking.
⠀
It was Leopold who found the first folder, tucked into a drawer that had clearly been meant to lock and no longer could.
⠀
PROJECT: PARADISO — DIRECTOR'S EYES ONLY
⠀
"That's a name," Leopold said, flipping it open. "Not a division, not a batch number. A name."
⠀
Mori crowded in close enough to read over his shoulder, scarf-light spilling gold across pages that had none of the clinical coldness of everything they'd found above.
⠀
The perfect ARCH cannot be extracted, the first page read, in handwriting too careful, too personal, to belong to a report. It must be raised. It must be given a childhood, however brief, however false, so that what emerges from it carries no memory of cruelty to answer cruelty with. Every prior subject failed because we asked despair to birth something gentle. Despair cannot do that. Only innocence can.
⠀
"...Somebody was trying to grow a person into an ARCH," Roby said, low, reading over Leopold's other shoulder. "On purpose. Slow, like."
⠀
"Not just any ARCH," Haddler said, quieter than his usual register allowed. "Keep reading."
⠀
Success will mean the end of the Season of Folly's legacy for good, the next page read. Not a weapon to contain other weapons. A resonance strong enough to overwrite grief itself, at scale, across the entire Ring. A new era. One where the districts stop measuring each other in bodies and start measuring each other in something worth keeping.
⠀
The hope of the Ring, Mori thought, and the words sat strange and heavy in his chest, half wonder, half something closer to dread he couldn't yet name.
⠀
"...That's a big promise for something built underground in secret," Saoirse said, quiet, both puppets uncharacteristically still in her lap.
⠀
"Every big promise in this building's been built underground in secret," Leopold said. "That's sort of the whole pattern, isn't it."
⠀
⠀
Floor eight held nurseries, plural, small rooms painted in colors too bright for anything that had happened one floor above them to have any right to sit beside. Floor seven held classrooms, desks scaled for a single student, walls covered in drawings that all shared the same careful, patient hand guiding a smaller, clumsier one, letters and numbers traced over and over until they came out right.
⠀
It was on floor six that they found the first photograph.
⠀
It sat loose in a folder otherwise empty, curling at the edges with age, and Mori was the one who picked it up, turning it over in the scarf's dim light.
⠀
A baby. Small, swaddled, sleeping, nothing about the image itself remarkable at all except for the white hair, pale as frost, already long enough at what couldn't have been more than a few months old to spill past the edge of the blanket.
⠀
On the back, in red ink, in handwriting that matched none of the careful, patient script from the floors above:
⠀
PARADISO.
⠀
"...That's it?" Roby asked, when Mori showed the group. "That's the whole big secret weapon? A baby?"
⠀
"A baby they've apparently been raising in secret for years," Leopold said, grim. "Which is either the most hopeful thing this facility's ever done, or the worst thing it's ever tried to dress up as hope."
⠀
Mori didn't say anything. He kept staring at the photograph, at the small, sleeping face, at the word written on the back of it in a hand that felt, in a way he couldn't have explained to anyone watching, less like a label and more like a wish.
⠀
They found more photographs on floor four. A toddler this time, unmistakably the same white hair grown longer, red eyes open now and staring straight at whoever held the camera with an expression too calm, too patient, for a child that young to wear. Every single photograph, on the back, in the same red ink: PARADISO.
⠀
Nobody had said much since floor six. The silence had settled over all of them the way it always did, deep underground, right before something was about to happen that none of them were ready for.
⠀
It was on floor three, in a small, locked archive room Leopold's flame finally burned through, that they found the last of them: a child now, perhaps seven, perhaps eight, standing in what looked, unmistakably, like the corridor they'd just been walking through, staring dead into the camera with red eyes that held nothing recognizable as childhood in them at all.
⠀
Mori turned the photograph over.
⠀
PARADISO.
⠀
"Paradiso," he said aloud, testing the shape of the word in his mouth, the way you test a word that's been sitting silent in a room for far too long.
⠀
The nearest speaker crackled, sudden and violent, and Prospero's voice tore through it, ragged in a way it had never once sounded before, like something surfacing too fast from somewhere much too deep.
⠀
"—Don't say that word again."
⠀
Every one of them jumped. Saoirse actually shrieked, Stuffy and Arnold both going rigid on her fists.
⠀
"Prospero?!" Mori said. "Where have you been? We've been calling you since floor ten!"
⠀
"I heard you," Prospero said, and its voice had lost every trace of the sarcasm that had carried it through eighty-nine floors of descent, replaced by something tight and careful and, underneath all of it, unmistakably afraid. "I simply couldn't answer. There's a great deal of this floor, and everything below it, that I don't have proper access to, the same way I didn't have access to floor fifty. I've been... elsewhere. Occupied. I'd rather not describe it in more detail than that."
⠀
"You went quiet the second we hit floor ten," Haddler said, slow, putting it together out loud. "That's not a coincidence, is it."
⠀
"No," Prospero admitted. "It's not."
⠀
"Then talk to us," Mori said, holding up the photograph, though of course Prospero couldn't see it, couldn't see anything down here the way he needed to. "What is this? What's Paradiso?"
⠀
There was a long, terrible pause.
⠀
"You need to turn back," Prospero said finally. "All of you. Now, while you can still say you haven't seen the rest of it. Find another way to the surface. There has to be one somewhere on a higher floor, some stairwell, some shaft I haven't checked properly, and I will help every single one of you tear this building apart looking for it, but I am asking you, as sincerely as I know how to ask anything, to turn around before you reach the bottom of this facility."
⠀
"We can't do that," Mori said. "We need to shut the failsafe off. We need to find a real way out, not just for us, but for whoever comes after us. That's the whole reason we've been doing any of this."
⠀
"Is it," Prospero said, and something in the two words carried an edge none of them had ever heard from it, sharp enough to cut through the low hum of the room's dying lights. "Tell me something, Mori. Truly. Why do you believe turning that failsafe off is the right thing to do?"
⠀
"Because people are trapped down here," Mori said, thrown by the question. "Because whoever comes after us shouldn't have to go through what we went through. Because it's cruel, keeping something sealed away just because it's easier than dealing with what it actually is."
⠀
"And if what's sealed away is sealed away for a reason better than easier?" Prospero asked. "If the man who built that failsafe understood something about what's down here that none of you have had the chance to understand yet? Are you still so certain your judgment outweighs his?"
⠀
"...What's down here, Prospero?" Leopold asked, quiet.
⠀
Silence.
⠀
"I won't answer that," Prospero said finally. "Not because I'm hiding it out of spite. Because I genuinely don't know what telling you does to any of you, and I've had quite enough practice, this week alone, watching what this facility does to people who learn things they weren't ready to carry." A pause, and when it spoke again, its voice had gone almost gentle, almost pleading. "Please. Turn back. I am asking you as close to a friend as I've had the chance to be to any of you. Turn back."
⠀
Mori looked down at the photograph in his hand. At the too-calm eyes of a child who had apparently spent his entire short life on the other side of a door none of them had opened yet.
⠀
"I can't," he said, quiet, and meant it. "Not without knowing why."
⠀
Prospero didn't answer that. It didn't have to. The silence that followed said everything it wasn't willing to say out loud.
⠀
⠀
Floor two held nothing but a single, long hallway, and floor one, when they reached it, held nothing at all except a single door at its very end.
⠀
Not a lab door. Not a containment seal, not reinforced steel, not any of the heavy, deliberate architecture every other sealed floor had worn like armor. Just an ordinary door, painted white, the kind that might have hung in any ordinary home in any ordinary district of the Ring.
⠀
Written across it, in the same red ink as every photograph, in letters and numbers pressed hard enough into the paint to have scarred it:
⠀
P4-R4-DI-50
⠀
Roby stared at it a long moment before something clicked behind his eyes. "...Wait. That's the same trick. Ain't it. Like how the tin can spells his own name."
⠀
"P-A-R-A-D-I-S-O," Leopold said slowly, working it out. "Paradiso."
⠀
"Same as PR-05-P3-R0," Haddler said, quiet, something dawning behind his eyes that he clearly didn't like the shape of. "Prospero. It's the same formatting."
⠀
The same person made both of them, Mori thought, and something cold settled low in his stomach, the kind of cold that comes right before understanding, not after it.
⠀
"Prospero," he said aloud. "What does this mean?"
⠀
Nothing answered him. Not static. Not silence shaped like reluctance. Just nothing, the particular, total nothing of a presence that had, for whatever reason, decided it would rather not exist in this hallway for a while.
⠀
"...Mori," Saoirse said, careful, as he reached for the handle. "Maybe we should wait for the others..."
⠀
"Or maybe we shouldn't open it at all," Roby added, hand already drifting to his knuckles. "I got a real bad feelin' about this one, and my bad feelin's have been right a whole lot lately."
⠀
He turned the handle.
⠀⠀
The room beyond it looked, at first, like something out of a memory that had never belonged to him.
⠀
Butterflies covered one wall, painted in careful, looping strokes, their wings every color a rainbow could offer. A second wall held animals, drawn with the particular, patient earnestness of an adult trying very hard to make something a child would love. A rainbow rug covered most of the floor, faded now, worn thin in a single small path that ran from the doorway to a low yellow plastic table at the room's center, two purple chairs pulled up to it, one of them occupied.
⠀
A television sat mounted against the far wall, playing something bright and cheerful and utterly wrong for the room it lit.
⠀
The child in the chair didn't look away from it.
⠀
He was small, seven or eight by any reasonable guess, with white hair pooling around his chair and down onto the rug, a length no child that age should ever have been allowed to grow, pale as frost, exactly as it had looked in every photograph. He wore a plain white robe. No shoes. Pale, small bare feet resting motionless against the rainbow rug.
⠀
His eyes, when he finally, slowly turned his head toward the doorway, were red. Not angry-red like the red of Mori's scarf. A soft, muted red.
⠀
He looked at Mori for exactly as long as it took to register that someone new had entered the room.
⠀
Then he turned back to the television.
⠀
That's it? Mori thought, something hot and disbelieving surging up through his chest all at once. That's the whole reaction? Somebody just walked in, after everything, after all of it, and you just... turn back around?
⠀
He stepped into the room. Behind him, he heard the others catching up, Haddler's footsteps, Saoirse's breath catching, Leopold going utterly silent the way he did whenever something genuinely unsettled him.
⠀
Mori didn't stop to explain any of it. He crossed the rainbow rug and sat down in the second purple chair, too small for him, his knees jutting up awkwardly on either side of the little plastic table, and looked directly at the boy.
⠀
"Who are you?"
⠀
The boy turned. Studied him, unhurried.
⠀
He said nothing.
⠀
He turned back to the television.
⠀
Answer me, Mori thought, and the thought came out sharper than he meant it to, sharper than he'd let himself feel in a long time. Somebody built you an entire secret facility! Somebody wrote your name on the back of a hundred photographs! Somebody sealed off a whole floor just to keep you safe, or keep you hidden, or both, and you're just going to sit there and watch cartoons?!
⠀
"Answer me," he said out loud, louder this time, and the boy didn't so much as flinch.
⠀
Something in Mori's chest cracked open, fast and total, the way it had cracked open once in a hallway outside the Female Quarters, the way it had cracked open in a dueling lot in the 9th District. He drew the revolver before he'd fully decided to, and fired, once, straight into the television screen.
⠀
The glass shattered inward with a sharp, ugly crack, sparks spitting from the ruined casing before the light inside it died for good, and for the first time, the boy's calm broke, his whole small body flinching hard, red eyes snapping wide.
⠀
"Talk to me!" Mori shouted, reaching across the table, grabbing the boy's thin shoulders, shaking, once, twice, harder than he meant to, harder than he'd ever meant to touch anyone. "Who are you? What is this place? What happened to you down here?! Somebody tell me what's actually going on! I've been down here for a fuckingeternity, and I'm tired of—!"
⠀
His voice broke.
⠀
I remember...
⠀
And the thought arrived unbidden, uninvited, a fragment surfacing from somewhere he'd thought was permanently sealed shut behind infinite loops of a memory none of them were ever meant to keep. A hallway. Crimson smoke. Yuhuan's face, slack and still, on the ground in front of him. Saoirse's scream, cut off, wet and gurgling.
⠀
The certainty of it hit him like a physical blow, worse than any wound he'd taken on any floor above this one. It happened, and it happened again, and again, and it kept happening, over and over, and there was never any failsafe waiting to be shut off. There was never an exit. There was only ever this room, this whole time, this boy, sitting here, watching television, while the rest of us tore ourselves apart trying to find a door that was never anywhere but right here.
⠀
He was crying before he realized it, tears cutting hot tracks down his face, his grip still locked on the boy's small shoulders, shaking, gentler now, more like begging than violence.
⠀
"Please," he said, voice cracking apart entirely. "Please, just tell me something. Anything. I don't care what. I just need this to mean something."
⠀
The boy's face crumpled.
⠀
Slow and uncertain, like he was copying Mori, his eyes welled, and he began to cry too, silent at first, then not silent at all, a thin, wavering sound that had no real grief behind it yet, only imitation, only the desperate, instinctive mirroring of a creature who had apparently never once been shown what any of his own feelings were supposed to look like until someone else showed him first.
⠀
Something in Mori broke a second time, differently.
⠀
"...Hey," he said, softer now, pulling his hands back, wiping at his own face with the back of his sleeve. "Hey, it's okay. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. It's going to be okay."
⠀
I don't know if that's true, he thought, even as he said it. I don't know anything anymore...
⠀
He became aware, distantly, of the others filling the doorway behind him. Saoirse, both puppets hanging silent and forgotten at her sides. Roby, jaw tight, saying nothing for once in his life. Haddler and Leopold standing shoulder to shoulder, neither of them finding a single word to offer the room.
⠀
Nobody moved to stop him. Nobody moved at all.
⠀
Mori turned back to the boy, whose crying had already begun to taper.
⠀
"Do you know how to get out of here?" he asked, quiet. "Is there a way out? Any way at all?"
⠀
The boy looked at him for a long moment.
⠀
Then, slowly, he shook his head.
⠀
Mori let go of him entirely and sat back in the too-small purple chair, all the fight draining out of him at once, leaving something hollow and exhausted behind.
⠀
There's nothing, he thought. There's no failsafe to shut off. There's no exit hiding on a floor above us. Pallas and Yuhuan are up there right now, searching floor by floor, believing they might still find something worth finding, and there's nothing here but a room... and this kid.
⠀
He almost laughed, the sound catching wet and broken in his throat instead.
⠀
It was only then, staring blankly at the wall over the boy's head, that he noticed it: a seam in the wallpaper, hidden among the painted butterflies, so carefully disguised he'd have walked past it a dozen times without ever seeing it.
⠀
A door.
⠀
He stood, crossing to it before anyone could ask what he'd seen, and pushed it open.⠀
⠀
The room beyond it looked nothing at all like the rest of the floor.
⠀
Banks of monitors lined every wall, dozens of them, each one showing a different stretch of the facility, floor after floor after floor, corridors and labs and stairwells rendered in cold, clinical light. A single chair faced the largest bank of screens, its back to the door, and a man sat in it, motionless, hands resting loosely in his lap.
⠀
"Hey!" Mori shouted, already moving. "Hey, who are you? Are you the Overseer? Talk to me, please, I need to know what's—"
⠀
He reached the chair and spun it around.
⠀
The man's head lolled at an angle that was nothing near sleep. A single, neat wound sat just above his temple, dark, dried long past the point of ever being anything but a permanent part of him now. His eyes were open, clouded, staring at nothing at all, and had clearly been staring at nothing for a very, very long time.
⠀
Mori stumbled back, revolver forgotten at his side.
⠀
"...He's dead," he said, hollow. "He's been dead for—"
⠀
"Years," Leopold finished, appearing in the doorway behind him, taking in the scene with grim, professional stillness. "Long before any of us got here."
⠀
A single sheet of paper sat on the desk beside the chair, weighted down with a smooth, dark stone. Mori picked it up with shaking hands.
⠀
He is our last hope, it read, in the same careful, patient hand from every photograph, every classroom wall. Our last chance of Paradiso.
⠀
One of the monitors flickered.
⠀
Then it lit, all at once, resolving into the same man, alive, seated in the same chair, looking directly into whatever camera had recorded this, his expression composed, tired, resigned in a way that made the hollow already carved into Mori's chest widen further.
⠀
"If you're watching this," the man said, "then I've already done what I came here to do, and I'd rather you hear it from me than piece it together from whatever I leave behind. This message was recorded shortly before I took my own life. I won't apologize for that decision. I've made my peace with it."
⠀
Nobody in the room breathed.
⠀
"The boy through that door is an ARCH," he continued, "one I've been curating personally since I took command of this facility, following the failure of my first attempt at something similar. Designation PR-05-P3-R0."
⠀
The nearest speaker exploded into static, violent and sudden.
⠀
"Turn it off," Prospero said, and its voice had gone entirely unlike itself, tight with something raw and furious that none of them had heard from it before, not once, across ninety-some floors of dry jokes and careful sarcasm. "Turn it off, now."
⠀
"Prospero—" Haddler could barely let out before Prospero continued, sharper.
⠀
"He called me a failure," Prospero said, and the fury in it cracked, just slightly, into something that sounded, underneath the anger, almost like grief. "My father. Recorded a message meant to explain himself to strangers, and the very first thing he thought worth saying about me was that I was the thing he tried before he found something better."
⠀
The monitor went dark before Mori could reach for it himself.
⠀
And then, from the room beyond the wall, the boy began to scream, muffled but unmistakable.
⠀
Mori was moving before he'd finished processing the sound, out the hidden door, back across the rainbow rug, to find the boy no longer sitting in his purple chair but collapsed on the floor beside it, curled tight around himself, small body shaking, a thin, wavering shriek tearing out of him.
⠀
"What's happening to him?!" Saoirse shouted, both puppets forgotten entirely.
⠀
"I've seen enough," Prospero said, and its voice, filling the room from every speaker at once, had gone somewhere none of them recognized, calm now, terribly calm, the calm of something that had finally, fully decided. "I've spent infinite amounts of time alone in this facility with nothing but time to think about what my father built me for, and what he built after me, once he decided I wasn't good enough to finish the job. I won't let his plan happen. Not the way he intended it. Not this. This is not ideal."
⠀
"Prospero, what are you—?!" Mori started.
⠀
A light bloomed from somewhere inside the boy's own chest, golden, ancient, unmistakably enormous for something contained in so small a body, a single vast, unblinking eye rendered in pure, molten light.
⠀
"The Eye of Argus," Prospero said, something almost reverent slipping into its voice despite everything else riding underneath it. "The real weapon my father cherished. Above me, and above Paradiso. He was only ever the vessel. This is the part worth taking."
⠀
"Argus?!" the Directorates all exclaimed at once.
⠀
"That has to be the target of the mission...!" Haddler called out.
⠀
"Prospero... why are you doing this?!" Leopold demanded.
⠀
"To become one with him," Prospero said. "To take what's inside that child and shape it into something worthy of cutting through anyone foolish enough to stand between the Ring and the world it actually deserves. My father wanted peace handed down gently, from something too innocent to understand what it was giving away. I'd rather take it by force, and make certain it's given to the right hands this time."
⠀
The golden light swelled, blinding, swallowing the whole room.
⠀
As the light surrounded them, Prospero said one last thing.
⠀
"...Ah, so that's how it works."
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
When the light faded, everything was quiet.
⠀
Too quiet. The speakers were dead. The low hum of failing electronics was gone. Even the boy's screaming, cut off entirely, replaced by a silence so total it felt, for one suspended second, as if the whole facility had finally, mercifully, stopped breathing.
⠀
Then the boy stood.
⠀
His right eye remained the same soft, faded red it had always been.
⠀
His left had gone bright, unmistakably blue.
⠀
A claymore of pure light unfurled into his small hands, far too large for the body holding it, humming with a low, resonant tone that Mori felt in his teeth before he heard it properly with his ears. The air around the boy shuddered, thick and heavy all at once, and something crashed through Mori's chest that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with grief, an old, borrowed grief, decades deep, aching with the particular, specific ache of every single person who had ever died on every single floor above them, all of it distilled and poured, at once, into the small space of this one room.
⠀
Tribulation. Trepidation. Blue and green, distress and dread, resonating together in a perfect chord.
⠀
"My name..." the boy said, and it wasn't the boy's voice at all, layered instead with something colder, older, unmistakably Prospero's cadence wrapped around a child's uncertain tone, "...is Alighieri."
⠀
The claymore swung before anyone could raise a weapon in answer.
⠀
Light tore through the room, catching Roby, Saoirse, Haddler, and Leopold all at once, hurling them back against the far wall in a single, violent motion, drawings, rugs, and plastic furniture all shattering apart around them in the same instant. Four bodies hit the floor and didn't get back up.
⠀
Mori stayed standing.
⠀
His scarf had moved on its own, some instinct snapping it up in front of him in a wall of black and red flame that absorbed most of the blow, the rest of it slamming into him hard enough to drive the air from his lungs and send him skidding back across the ruined rug, but not hard enough to put him down with the others.
⠀
He caught himself against the doorframe, revolver already rising, and looked up at Alighieri, at the small, terrible shape holding a sword too large for the world it had been born into, one red eye and one blue watching him with a calm that belonged to neither the child nor the machine alone.
ARCH: Alighieri
Threat Level: RA (라)
Description: He is our last hope. Our last chance of Paradiso.
Ability: Bringing about Paradiso.
Weight: Approx. 45 kg
Height: Approx. 156 cm
< - Overseer of DaeSyndicate's 13th adjunct facility>
⠀
A single tear slid down Mori's face before he could stop it.
⠀
It all makes sense now, he thought, and the thought arrived whole and terrible, every piece of it slotting into place at once: the photographs, the classrooms, the failed first experiment, the dead man in the chair, the note that called a child their last hope. The Overseer's first attempt to save the Ring became Prospero, and when that wasn't enough, he built something new. Something... innocent. Something he could raise slow and gentle enough to grow into a weapon nobody would ever think to be afraid of, and he fed it every soul this facility ever took, every non-viable bond, every subject that never made it out of the observation ward, kept it sealed down here until it was old enough to walk out on its own...!
⠀
I don't know what he actually meant to do with it, Mori thought, gripping the revolver tighter, forcing himself upright against the doorframe. But I know it was never going to be good. Not built on this many graves...
⠀
He thought of Antollio, briefly, achingly, of the object he'd been sent down here to find, and didn't let himself finish that thought all the way.
⠀
Killing you is right, he thought instead, steady now. For the Ring. For whoever's still up there waiting for us. And for me, too, because I am so tired of carrying this... this false hope. I want this over with...
⠀
Deep in his chest, the old, familiar heat stirred, black and red, ancient and furious, Acrimony rising to meet the vast, aching weight of Tribulation pouring off the thing standing across the ruined rug from him, two griefs about to collide with nothing left standing between them but a boy who used to be alone, and a gun that had never once, in its whole history, learned how to miss.