Episode 7: Fractured Seal
The warehouse was still dripping with fruit pulp and blood when the air tore open.
A jagged violet rift split the space near Applehead's scattered remains. Golden light poured through, and a tall, imposing figure stepped out. He wore flowing silver robes etched with glowing runes, a featureless helmet that pulsed with ethereal energy, and carried a long staff crowned with a half-shattered seal. This was the Aether Guard — warden of the unstable realities.
Without a word, he raised his staff. Applehead's pulp twitched, then violently reassembled into her battered, limbless form. She screamed as invisible chains of light wrapped around her.
Kevin and Wyatt froze in pure shock, eyes wide.
"What the hell is that?!" Wyatt whispered.
The Aether Guard turned toward the crew, his voice calm and resonant, echoing from within the helmet. "I am Aether Guard, keeper of the Half-Seal. A prison between worlds for the mad and the monstrous Wrathborn who cannot be allowed to roam free. You have my thanks for neutralizing this one. Applehead has escaped the Half too many times."
He glanced at the stunned Kevin and Wyatt. "The Rampager and his companion… your fear is understandable. Few mortals witness a seal tear."
Applehead thrashed wildly. "Let me go! I just wanted to play!"
The Aether Guard ignored her pleas and dragged her struggling form back toward the glowing portal. "She will be secured once more."
Before he could fully vanish into the rift, alarms seemed to blare from the other side. The portal flickered violently.
Inside the Half-Seal Prison — Moments Earlier
Deep within the fractured dimension known as the Half — a nightmarish maze of floating cells and broken timelines — chaos erupted.
Khaos Hyde, an eight-foot-tall monstrosity with jet-black and dark-gold marbled skin, glowing red eyes, and short, wild dreadlocks, laughed maniacally. Pure destruction energy crackled around his massive fists as he smashed through reinforced reality-barriers.
"Finally… a tear!" he roared, voice layered with overlapping screams.
Beside him moved his ruthless best friend — Poison — a seven-foot-tall figure with smooth gray and royal-blue skin, completely with two glowing white slits for eyes. Toxic green mist leaked from his pores as he dissolved the locks on their cell with a touch.
"Time to stretch our legs," Poison hissed, voice smooth and venomous. "The Half-Seal grows boring."
The two mad Wrathborn tore through the prison corridors, leaving trails of chaotic explosions and melting reality in their wake. They found the exact tear the Aether Guard had opened — a weak point caused by pulling Applehead back in.
Khaos Hyde punched the rift wider with a blast of raw chaos energy. Poison slipped through first, followed by his towering partner.
Back in the Warehouse
The Aether Guard cursed under his breath as he sensed the breach. He shoved Applehead's chained form fully into the portal and turned to the crew.
"Stay vigilant. The Half is leaking—"
He never finished.
A barrage of small, silent darts whistled through the air from the shadows outside the warehouse. One hit Kevin in the neck.
Another caught Wyatt. Peter, Nathan, Derek (Volt), and Ferrum (who the group sometimes called Zach in quieter moments) were all struck in rapid succession.
Peter growled, trying to activate his super durability, but the sedative was potent — Glimmer-engineered. "Ambush…!"
One by one they dropped.
Kevin's vision blurred as he collapsed to his knees, the Mythical Matrix flickering weakly. The last thing he saw was the Aether Guard stepping back into the unstable portal, Applehead in tow, while two massive silhouettes — one chaotic and towering, the other faceless and poisonous — emerged from the rift behind him.
Then darkness took him.
The crew lay unconscious on the pulp-covered floor as the portal snapped shut, leaving only an eerie silence… and the distant sound of mad laughter echoing from somewhere beyond reality.
---
**New York City, the collapsed dead zone, that same night**
The tear Eli had tracked wasn't fresh. It was old, scarred over, a wound in reality that had healed wrong — and crouched in the center of it, chained to a slab of concrete with rusted rebar driven through its forepaws, was a second Psoglav.
This one wasn't attacking anyone.
It was starving.
"Okay," Elise said slowly, stopping at the edge of the dead zone. "That's — it's chained up. Someone did this on purpose."
The creature's iron-black plating was cracked in a dozen places, smoke-flesh flickering weak and thin, like a candle about to gutter out. Its single burning eye rolled toward them, dimmer than the one they'd killed, and instead of lunging, it simply... watched. Waited. Too exhausted, or too something else, to do anything more.
"Pillar collar," Eli said, crouching at a careful distance, studying the rune-scored cuffs welded around its hind legs. "Someone caught this thing and left it here to rot. Probably testing how long it could survive starved before they came back to harvest whatever's left."
Nick's jaw tightened. He'd died enough times, in enough places, to recognize cruelty dressed up as research when he saw it. "Kill it clean, or leave it."
"No." Elise was already moving closer, ignoring Nick's hand reaching for her arm. "Look at it. It's not attacking. It's not even trying." She crouched, slow, non-threatening, the way you'd approach an animal that had already given up. "I don't think it wants to hurt us."
The Psoglav's burning eye fixed on her, and something passed through it — not malice, not hunger. Recognition.
*It speaks,* something ancient in the back of Elise's skull supplied, the same unbidden certainty that had handed Ignis and Nick their knowledge before. *Not with a mouth. With the eye.*
"Its name," Nick said slowly, the word surfacing from somewhere he didn't remember learning it. "It has one. Vessel-of-the-Unlying-Eye. The old tongues called them Truth Hounds, before men shortened it into something uglier."
The burning eye pulsed once, in something that might have been confirmation.
"Truth Hounds," Eli repeated, working fast at the rune-cuffs with careful, gravity-precise fingers. "That eye — it doesn't just burn. It *sees.* Lies, truth, the exact shape of an intention before it's acted on. That's why the Pillar chained it instead of killing it. A living lie detector's worth more to them starved and obedient than dead."
The last cuff came free with a wet, grinding snap. The Psoglav didn't lunge, didn't flee. It simply rose, unsteady, smoke-flesh thickening slowly as strength returned, and turned its burning eye on each of them in turn — Nick, then Elise, then Eli — weighing something none of them could see.
Whatever it found, it seemed to accept.
It lowered its long skull, once, toward Elise — not a bow, exactly, but close enough to one that her breath caught.
"I think," she said quietly, "it just decided we're not lying to it."
"Good," Eli said, standing, brushing rust off his knees, already thinking three steps ahead the way he always did. "Because we're about to walk into a city crawling with a death cult obsessed with a teenage Rampager, and a living lie detector that owes us one is possibly the single most useful ally in this entire ridiculous war."
Nick studied the creature for a long moment — this thing he'd been ready to curse into pieces twenty minutes ago — and felt something shift in his chest that he hadn't felt since his sister died, something almost like hope, badly out of practice.
"East Hollow," he said. "That's where the Rampager kid is. That's where this all seems to be converging."
Eli nodded slowly, gravity humming faint and restless around his shoulders like a held breath. "Then that's where we go. All four of us."
The Psoglav's burning eye flared once, bright and certain, and for the first time since they'd found it starving in the dark, it let out a sound that wasn't a scream at all.
It was closer to a promise.
---
**East Hollow, Kurogane's sister campus — the training yard, that same afternoon**
"Okay, so, backstory time, because you're gonna hear it eventually and I'd rather you hear it from me before someone weird makes it sound cooler than it is," Wing announced, walking backward across the yard with the easy confidence of a boy who'd never once tripped over anything in his life. "Me, Bandile, and Lloyd — we've been best friends since literally the day we were born. Same hospital. Same wing of the hospital, actually, which is either fate or just really bad hospital planning."
"That's not backstory, that's a coincidence," Lancelot said flatly.
"It's a *cursed* coincidence." Wing held up three fingers, grinning. "All three of us. Born on the third. Different months, same day. Bandile's September third. Lloyd's December third. Mine's January third. Our moms still send each other cards about it every year, it's honestly kind of unhinged."
"That's genuinely strange," Ignis admitted.
"Right?! Thank you! Nobody else finds that as weird as I do." Wing pointed across the yard, where two figures were visible near the sparring rings — one crouched utterly still on a low wall, watching the world with the patient stillness of something deciding whether it was worth moving for; the other standing in the center of a shallow fountain, admiring his own reflection with unashamed, open delight. "There. That's them. Fair warning on both counts."
The one on the wall unfolded upright without seeming to use his legs at all — just rose, smooth and silent, objects around him (a stray bottle cap, a loose stone, a fallen leaf) lifting a half-inch off the ground in sympathetic response to whatever quiet current moved through him. He was lean, sharp-eyed, with a stillness that made the hair on Ignis's arms rise before the boy had said a single word.
"Bandile Hardere," Wing said. "Telekinesis. Zimbabwean. Genuinely one of the smartest people I know, also genuinely terrifies most of the staff, don't ask him about the incident with the vice principal's car, it's a whole thing, he's not even sorry."
"I am a little sorry," Bandile said, voice quiet, almost gentle, entirely unbothered as the bottle cap orbited lazily around his knuckles. His eyes moved over Ignis, then Lancelot, unhurried, cataloguing. "The fire one and the cold one. Wing said you were coming." A faint, thin smile. "He talks about new students the way other people talk about weather. Constantly, and with no real authority."
"Rude but accurate," Wing said cheerfully.
The boy in the fountain hadn't moved yet, still studying his own rippled reflection with an expression of profound, uncomplicated satisfaction, water curling obediently around his ankles in slow, admiring spirals that mirrored his own preening.
"And that," Wing said, lowering his voice just slightly, like introducing a force of nature, "is Lloyd Ludwig. Water control. Also the single most in-love-with-himself person either of us have ever met, and Bandile once dated a mirror for a week as a joke, so that's saying something."
"I did not date a mirror," Bandile said mildly. "I simply found it more emotionally available than most people."
Lloyd finally looked up, flicking wet hair out of his eyes with a motion so practiced it looked choreographed, and the water around his ankles rose with him, curling into a slow, glittering halo that seemed to exist purely for the aesthetic.
"New blood." His eyes swept over Lancelot first, assessing, faintly territorial. "Blue fire. Cute. Derivative, but cute." Then to Ignis, dismissive in a single glance. "Orange. How original."
Heat cracked audibly along Ignis's knuckles before he could stop it. "You want to say that again?"
"I'll say it as many times as it takes to be true." Lloyd smiled, easy and infuriating, water rising a fraction higher around him like a crown settling into place. "I've had four years to perfect my control. You've had — what, a month? Two? Let me know when you're actually worth sparring."
"Lloyd," Bandile said, without any real urgency, the bottle cap still lazily orbiting his hand, "you say this to every new student. It has never once gone well for you."
"It's going to go well eventually."
"It has genuinely never gone well," Wing stage-whispered to Ignis and Lancelot, delighted. "One time a exchange student from Norway put him through a wall. He still brings it up like *he* won."
"I did technically get up faster than he expected," Lloyd said, entirely unbothered, water swirling a little faster around his ankles.
Lancelot studied the fountain, the boy standing in it like a throne, and something cold and amused flickered behind his usual boredom — the specific, patient look of a predator finding a second interesting animal in the herd.
"Water," he said quietly, almost to himself. "How convenient."
Above them, unnoticed by everyone except Ignis, two familiar shapes — one black, one white — settled silently onto the edge of the training yard's rooftop, watching the four of them with patient, ancient interest.
The war hadn't reached East Hollow yet.
But every piece it needed was already standing in the same courtyard, and something in the sky above them had already started counting.
---
End Of Episode 7