Chapter 5: The Anomaly Of Mercy
Why was it hesitating?
The question hammered at the inside of Raveene's skull with more force than the terror itself. She remained curled in a defensive ball on the cold, grit-strewn floor, the perception of the creature's proximity vibrating through her skin.
It was close enough to crush her with a single, indifferent shift of its weight; close enough to reach down with those massive, metallic hands and snap her spine like a dry twig. She had braced herself for the impact, for the inescapable, blinding agony that would bridge the gap between this life and the abyss.
But the strike never came. The air remained still, the silence growing so absolute it felt like a physical pressure against her eardrums.
The confusion began to eclipse her fear, a frantic agitation rising in her chest that made the wait feel like a slow form of torture.
Is it waiting for me to move? she wondered, her mind a jagged landscape of high-alert instincts. Is it playing with me, waiting for the perfect second to take me off guard?
Then, the details of her investigation surged back to the surface—the anomalies in the Frey report, the gashes that looked more like the work of a blade than a claw, and the persistent, nagging theory that the world was looking at this tragedy through the wrong lens.
Had I actually been right? The thought was a spark in the dark. Driven by a reckless, sudden need for the truth, she dared herself to move. Her hands, which had been shielding her face, trembled as she slowly lowered them, her ears straining for the slightest sound of shifting metal or grinding stone. She half-expected the thing to have vanished into the ether, but as she tilted her head back to the side, her breath caught in her throat.
The blazing, silver-violet eyes were still there. They towered high above her, fixed in that terrifying, eight-foot-high orbit, gazing down at her with a stagnant, unblinking intensity. There was no movement. The jagged silhouette of the titan remained a few feet away, a monument of shadow and moonlight, watching her with a stillness that felt deliberate.
Raveene swallowed hard, her detective's brain overriding the frantic pulse of her heart. Every piece of data she had ever collected on Nightfall began to click into place, creating a picture that made her reality feel like it was dissolving into static. This can't be real, she muttered under her breath. She began to crawl backward, her palms scraping against the rough floor as she tried to put a sliver of distance between herself and the entity.
It remained paused, as though someone had pressed a thumb against the very fabric of time, holding it in a state of impossible stasis.
In three years of documenting Nightfall's trail of blood—the mutilated remains, the shattered buildings, the sheer, senseless brutality that had paralyzed Valeria—there had never been a single mention of hesitation. Nightfall left no survivors and allowed no witnesses. Its presence was synonymous with a total, sudden transition from life to absolute darkness.
Curiosity had claimed dozens; even those who had tried to peek from behind curtains or through cracked doors had been added to the tally of the maimed and the dead. No one ever got a second look. No one ever got to walk away.
So why was she still breathing? Why was it just standing there, its gaze locked onto her like a heat-seeking laser, yet refusing to strike?
She remained on the floor, her eyebrows drawing together in a mixture of fear and growing incredulity. Her mind felt like it was in a scramble, attempting to process the biology of a nightmare that refused to follow its own rules.
That strange, intrusive feeling she'd had since Daniel Frey's murder began to swell—the radical, dangerous suspicion that Valeria wasn't dealing with a beast at all. Perhaps they were dealing with an enraged human, transformed into something so terrifyingly alien that the human mind simply couldn't categorize it as anything other than a monster.
She blinked rapidly, her heart doing a slow, heavy roll in her chest.
Oh, you are seriously not about to do this, Raveene, she told herself. The rational side of her brain was screaming for her to stay down, to play dead, to do anything but attract further attention.
If you get up, it will move. It's just stalling, waiting for you to give it a reason to finish the job. But the detective in her pushed the fear aside. There was no harm in trying to understand—death was already standing three feet away; she didn't have much left to lose. She could almost hear Clara's voice echoing in the back of her mind:
"You're making a catastrophic mistake. This idea is going to get you killed."
"Not now, Clara," she whispered to the empty air. "You're not getting in my head this time."
The choice settled into her mind with a devastating weight. Her detective brain, cold and analytical, finally overrode the primal terror. Raveene took a long, shaky exhale and straightened her back. With agonizing slowness, she began to stand up. Her eyes never left those glowing violet orbs, her gaze fixed on the only light in the room as she rose to her full height. She took a deep breath, her boots crunching softly against the gravel, waiting for the split second where the thing would lung and tear her apart.
It didn't.
She stood within a few feet of the titan, maintaining a safe, yet intimate distance. It remained a pillar of obsidian and moonlight, glaring down at her with an intensity that felt like a physical weight on her shoulders. Her mind raced, searching for a protocol that didn't exist.
Think, Raveene. Think. How do you even start a conversation with a nightmare? She didn't know how it happened, or what possessed her to do it. The sheer absurdity of the situation seemed to strip away her filters. Her right hand lifted slowly, moving through the air in a stiff, awkward wave.
"Hi," she said, her voice small and brittle in the vast silence.