The hours between the decision and departure were a blur of tense preparation. Elena was given a dark, hooded jacket that smelled of herbs and damp earth—Mara called it a "shadow-cloak," claiming it would help blur her outline in the Gloom. She was also given a small, smooth stone, warm to the touch. "Anchor-stone," Rourke grunted, tying a leather cord around her wrist to secure it. "Focus on it if you start to feel… unraveled. Reminds you what solid feels like."
Sebastian watched the proceedings from a distance, his disapproval a palpable chill in the air. "Taking a novice into the deep Gloom on the eve of a DPAC crackdown. A masterstroke of risk assessment, Alpha."
Kaelen, checking the straps on a compact pack, didn't look up. "The DPAC won't follow us where we're going. And she needs to see what she's a part of. Theory only goes so far."
"And if she gets lost, or attracts a Gloom-walker? Or worse, a Warden?"
"Then I'll deal with it." Kaelen's tone ended the discussion.
They left the warehouse not through the garage, but through a heavy service door that led down a narrow, damp staircase into the building's sub-basement. The air grew cold and thick. The concrete walls gave way to older, crumbling brick, then to naked earth reinforced by rotting timber. They were in the city's forgotten bones.
Kaelen stopped before a section of earth wall that looked no different from any other. He placed his palm flat against it, closed his eyes, and breathed out slowly. Elena felt it then—a shift in pressure, a subtle vibration through the soles of her feet. The earth under his hand seemed to shimmer, not visually, but in her other senses. The warm pulse of her old blood stirred in response, a low hum of recognition.
"The Veil is thin here," Kaelen said, his voice echoing oddly in the cramped space. "A old seepage point, mostly healed. We'll use it. Hold onto your anchor. And whatever you do, don't let go of my hand."
He offered his hand. After a heartbeat's hesitation, Elena took it. His grip was firm, calloused, radiating a steady, vital heat that contrasted with the growing chill.
He stepped forward, pulling her with him, directly toward the wall.
Elena's instinct was to resist, to brace for impact. But there was no impact. The world didn't go black. It… blurred.
Sound drained away first—the drip of water, their breathing—replaced by a high, thin ringing. Then sight fragmented. The solid earth wall became a kaleidoscope of translucent layers: she saw the ghostly outlines of bricks, then older stones, then tree roots, then nothing but swirling, dark particulate matter. Smell was the most violent change. The damp earth scent exploded into a riot of impressions: ozone and decay (familiar), but also the perfume of unknown flowers, the acrid bite of lightning-struck stone, the salty tang of a vast, dark ocean.
Her stomach lurched. The sense of up and down dissolved. She was falling, but also standing still. The warm anchor-stone on her wrist was the only point of reality, and Kaelen's hand was a lifeline tethering her to a body she could no longer feel.
Just as disorientation threatened to become panic, it stopped.
The world coalesced. Sort of.
They were standing on a street. It was recognizably a version of the old district, but… wrong. The cobblestones underfoot were the same, but they were a deep, lustrous black, veined with faint silver lines that pulsed with a slow, sleepy light. The buildings were there, but their architecture was exaggerated—Victorian facades stretched taller, adorned with gargoyles that seemed to track their movement with empty stone eyes. Windows were dark, or showed impossible interiors: forests of crystal, rooms filled with slow-moving liquid shadow.
The sky was the deepest indigo, devoid of stars or moon, but illuminated by a sourceless, twilight glow that cast long, sharp shadows. The air was still and cool, carrying a mélange of the strange smells from the crossing, now settled into a background hum. Silence reigned, but it was a thick silence, pregnant with whispers just below the threshold of hearing.
This was the Gloom. Havenport's twisted reflection.
Elena sucked in a breath, and the air tasted like cold metal and old books. Her grip on Kaelen's hand tightened involuntarily.
"Breathe slowly," he said, his voice muted, as if absorbed by the strange atmosphere. "Your senses will adjust. Don't stare too long at any one thing. The Gloom feeds on attention."
He began to walk, pulling her along. Their footsteps made no sound on the glowing cobbles. The familiar shops of her neighborhood were replaced by eerie equivalents: where her bookstore should have been stood a structure of fused, leather-bound tomes, its door a yawning mouth of parchment. A cold dread washed over her looking at it.
"This place… it's made of memory? Or fear?" she whispered.
"Both. And desire. And forgotten things," Kaelen said, his eyes constantly scanning the alleys and rooftops. "It's a psychic echo, shaped by the collective unconscious of the city above, filtered through the energy of the Gloom. It's not entirely stable. And we're not alone."
As if on cue, a shape detached itself from the deeper shadow of an alley. It was vaguely humanoid, but composed of swirling grey mist and discarded, ghostly impressions—a child's laughter that turned into a sob, the scent of burnt toast, the fleeting image of a broken pocket watch. It drifted toward them, formless and curious.
Kaelen didn't break stride. He simply turned his head and looked at it. Not a glance, but a focused, deliberate stare, his eyes flashing with that subdued gold light. A low growl rumbled in his chest, a sound that carried physical weight here.
The mist-being flinched, its form rippling with distress, and dissipated like smoke in a breeze.
"Echo-ghosts," Kaelen said. "Harmless mostly, but they can cluster, confuse you. Draw you off the path if you listen to their whispers."
They moved deeper. Elena saw other things. Glowing moss that crawled like a slow tide up walls. Puddles of iridescent liquid that reflected scenes from other parts of the city (she saw the DPAC checkpoint, the flashing lights). Once, she looked up and saw the massive, spectral outline of a leviathan-like creature drifting soundlessly between the rooftops, miles above.
Her initial terror was gradually tempered by a dreadful fascination. The equilibrium she'd practiced—the quiet forest and the passing storm—felt different here. The "storm" within her, the Breach-taint, felt… quieter, somehow more at home. The "old blood" hummed with a resonant energy, as if drinking from the atmosphere.
"We're going to a safe point," Kaelen explained. "A den my pack maintains here. Few know of it. We can plan our next move away from DPAC ears and Sebastian's scrutiny."
As they turned down a wider avenue—a distorted mirror of Havenport's main commercial street—the ambient whispers suddenly rose in pitch. The hair on Elena's neck stood up. Kaelen froze, his body going taut.
Ahead, the street was blocked.
Not by a structure, but by a rift in the scene itself. It was a jagged tear in the fabric of the Gloom, about ten feet tall and shimmering with unstable, sickly green light. Through it, she could see not another part of the Gloom, but a chaotic, swirling vortex of raw energy and fragmented, nightmarish imagery—flashing teeth, screaming faces, the twisted wreckage of machinery. A foul, hot wind blew from it, carrying the smell of scorched metal and ozone gone rancid.
"A unstable Bleed," Kaelen muttered, pulling her back a step. "A wound between here and… somewhere worse. They've been appearing more often."
From within the rift, something stirred. A long, multi-jointed limb, chitinous and dripping with viscous fluid, groped out, feeling the air. Then another. A distorted, buzzing chitter echoed from the hole.
Kaelen pushed Elena behind him. "This is not our fight. We go around."
But as they backed away, Elena's foot caught on an uneven stone. She stumbled, her hand wrenching from Kaelen's grip for a single, crucial second.
In that second, the thing in the rift focused. The buzzing intensified. It sensed her. Not Kaelen, with his contained, dominant power, but her—the chaotic, resonant energy of the Breach-taint. A beacon.
The limbs scrabbled faster, and a grotesque, bulbous head pushed partway through the tear. It had no eyes, only a mass of twitching, hair-like sensors all pointed at her. It let out a piercing shriek.
"Run!" Kaelen roared, but it was too late for just running.
The creature, a Gloom-scuttler from some deeper, fouler layer, heaved more of its body through the rift. It was fast, skittering across the glowing cobbles on too many legs, its maw opening to reveal a spiraling rows of needle-teeth.
Kaelen met its charge. He didn't transform into some Hollywood wolf-man. He simply… unleashed. His form seemed to blur at the edges. He moved with a speed that left afterimages, his hands now ending in claws that raked across the scuttler's chitin with a sound like tearing metal. The fight was brutal, silent except for the impacts and the creature's shrieks. He was stronger, but the thing was tenacious and bled acidic ichor.
Elena stood paralyzed, the anchor-stone burning against her wrist. The forest inside her was screaming with panic, the storm raging. But amidst the chaos, a new impulse emerged. Not fear, not the taint's defensive rage. It was the old blood. It hummed in resonance with the Gloom itself, and it focused on the unstable, weeping energy of the rift.
Not the creature. The door.
The thought wasn't hers. It was an instinct, ancient and sure.
She didn't know how to fight. But she remembered the mug. The tiny, controlled spark.
She closed her eyes, blocking out the nightmare fight. She found the quiet, not to calm the storm, but to ask the old blood for guidance. She focused on the rift's violent, discordant energy—a wrongness in the fabric of this already-wrong place.
She imagined not a push, but a… weave. Taking the ragged, green energy threads of the rift and gently, firmly, pulling them closed. She poured that intention, fueled by the resonant hum of her lineage, through the pinpoint of control she'd learned.
There was no burst of light. Only a deep, subsonic thrum that vibrated in her teeth.
When she opened her eyes, the rift was gone. Not closed. Healed. The street was whole again, as if the tear had never been. The scuttler, halfway through, was severed cleanly. Its front half collapsed, twitching, before dissolving into black sludge. The back half was gone, cut off from this reality.
Kaelen stood over the dissolving remains, breathing heavily, a long, shallow burn across his forearm smoking slightly. He stared at the now-intact wall where the rift had been, then turned his gaze slowly to Elena. His expression was unreadable—shock, assessment, and something else… a fierce, blazing curiosity.
"What," he said, his voice rough, "did you just do?"
Elena looked at her own hands, still trembling. "I… I mended it. I think."
The thick silence of the Gloom rushed back in, now feeling watchful in a new way. In the distance, from several directions, they heard answering calls—distant, curious, hungry shrieks and chitters. Their little disturbance had drawn attention.
Kaelen was at her side in an instant, grabbing her hand again, his grip vise-like. "No time for questions. Run. Now."
And they ran, leaving the silent, mended street behind, fleeing deeper into the heart of the reflection, with new eyes upon them from the darkened, impossible windows.