Chapter Nine: Echoes
Winter came quiet.
Snow muffled Gotham's distant roar, and even in the countryside where Nelson lived, it blanketed the world like a hush. Kane watched flakes fall from the attic window, breath fogging the glass, his thoughts turning heavier each day.
Something had changed since Desire's visit.
Not instantly. Not violently. But the silence felt thinner now, stretched like old skin.
The sigils around the house held firm. The runes Nelson refreshed weekly hummed with subtle energy. Kane could still shield himself, compress his aura, anchor his presence in the mundane—but the pressure was building. Not from within.
From outside.
It started with the birds.
They stopped coming.
Then the static. The radio in the study began hissing during stormless nights. The sound carried words too warped to understand, like a voice underwater trying to scream.
Nelson noticed.
He didn't comment at first. But one evening, over tea, he finally said it.
"They're looking."
Kane didn't need clarification.
"Who?"
"Hard to say. Something with reach," Nelson murmured, staring into his cup. "The kind of reach that leaves echoes across dimensions when it stirs."
"Should I run?"
"And go where?" Nelson asked, not unkindly. "You can hide your light here. I've anchored the house in six planes. You're safer than most. But nothing's foolproof."
Kane's jaw clenched. "Then what do I do?"
"You prepare."
---
So Kane trained.
Less about spellcraft now, more about feel—learning to read intent through vibrations, learning when to let power hum through his bones and when to silence it. Nelson taught him focus drills, shielding exercises, rituals from the old Orders of the Shadow and Flame.
But nothing prepared him for the dreams.
They started one week into the training.
He'd dream of vast halls filled with nothing but eyes.
Of stars that bled.
Of a throne made of orbiting moons, and a figure that didn't move, but felt like gravity.
He woke with his sheets soaked in sweat and his hands pulsing with heat.
---
Then came the cracks.
Small ones. In mirrors. In glass. In moments of too much focus.
He tried to meditate one morning and accidentally peeled a layer of reality back like cheap wallpaper. The wind that blew through wasn't cold. It whispered in a language he didn't know but somehow recognized.
Nelson patched it.
He said nothing.
But he watched Kane more closely now.
---
And then, it happened.
One evening, the wind stopped.
Not calmed. Stopped.
The fire in the hearth went out, not with a puff, but like it had been forgotten.
The runes on the walls dimmed.
And Kane felt it.
A presence.
Not loud. Not dramatic. Just… wrong. Like a note off-key in the fabric of space.
It stood at the edge of the forest. Not visible to the naked eye, not yet. But Kane saw it—through the veil. A shape stitched from shadow and silence. Tall. Thin. Wrapped in entropy.
It did not knock.
It did not speak.
It watched.
For hours.
And then it was gone.
But the message was clear.
They'd found him.
---
That night, Kane couldn't sleep.
He stood in the hallway, staring at his reflection again. White hair, pale golden glow to the eyes, face too clean, too perfect. He looked engineered, not born.
He pressed his palm to the mirror.
The image shimmered.
And for a split second, something else looked back.
A version of him—withered, burning, cloaked in lightning and blood, eyes aflame with cosmic light.
He stumbled back, gasping.
The mirror went still.
Nelson appeared behind him, silent.
"You saw it?" Kane asked.
"I did."
"What was that?"
Nelson didn't answer right away.
Then, softly: "A possible future."
Kane closed his eyes. "Am I going to become that?"
"You're going to face that," Nelson said. "Not today. But soon."
Kane looked down at his hands. They didn't shake. They should've.
He nodded.
"Then teach me how to fight."
---