Gideon reached for the power, and the power answered.
He stood in the center of the forgotten sanctuary, the runes he had painstakingly etched glowing with the sick, amethyst light of forbidden ambition. He had done everything right: the rituals were precise, the sacrifices—small, necessary sins—were complete. He needed the strength to crush the academy, to bind the Chaos-wielding girl, to become the ultimate authority.
He expected a surge. A torrent of raw energy to bend to his will.
What came was a silence so profound it was deafening.
Then, the cold. Not the simple cold of a draft, but the infinite cold of deep space, vast and empty, pressing against the meager warmth of his soul.
It was not a power to be wielded; it was a consciousness to be worn.
You seek dominion, the thought came, not in sound but in a colossal, intrusive pressure behind his eyes. I offer eternity.
Panic, sharp and visceral, flared in his chest. This was not the deal he'd brokered. He tried to pull back, to tear his hands from the nexus of the ritual, but his body wouldn't obey. His muscles were stone, his will a fluttering moth pinned beneath a mountain.
The ancient thing—the Shadow on a soul, older than the academy's oldest stones, vaster than the collective magic of the Council—didn't need a host; it simply needed a doorway. And Gideon, in his arrogance, had just thrown the locks away.
The entity slipped into him like water into sand.
First, it muted his rage, flattening the familiar, human fire of his jealousy into a distant, academic point of interest. Then, it swallowed his memories, not deleting them, but archiving them—his entire life filed away as a minor text in a cosmic library. Finally, it usurped his perception. Gideon saw the sanctuary, but the entity saw the weak seams in the fabric of reality, the silver threads of the girl's magic, and the beacon of the farm waiting to be extinguished.
His mouth moved, drawing a breath he hadn't commanded.
"I am Gideon," he tried to scream, but the word was only a hollow, buzzing echo inside the new, shared space of his mind.
A slow, terrible smile stretched across his lips—a smile he was not making. The cold receded, replaced by a terrible, serene purpose. The last vestige of the man who had sought power vanished, leaving only a vessel perfectly attuned to its new master.
Gideon the man was gone. Only the Herald remained. His task was clear: Go to the academy. Deliver the ancient darkness's gift.
And shatter the gate.