Clock pushed off the wall, his boots scuffing the floor. "She’s still in the tank. The Syndicate’s perfect little weapon." His voice dropped. "They just need the right fuel."

  Butter’s stomach turned. Fuel. Their bones. Their magic. She swayed, the room tilting. Clock’s hand shot out, steadying her elbow, then yanked back like he’d been burned.

  They stood there in the wreckage of their shared truth, two broken experiments, two mistakes that refused to die quietly. Butter's pacing stopped dead.

  Her eyes narrowed, sharp, sudden. "Wait." A breath. "How do you know all this? How do you know the Syndicate sent you to die?" Her fingers twitched at her sides.

  Clock smirked. A slow, knowing thing. "I saw it."

  "Saw what?" Butter’s voice pitched higher. The air between them hummed, thick with the unspoken. Butter’s gaze, sharp with panic, locked onto his face. Not just his mouth, waiting for the answer, but his eyes. Those violet pools, usually gleaming with mockery or detached interest, now held a weary, haunted depth. "You can see the future?"

  Butter saw the faint tension in his jaw, the way he held himself, not like a braggart revealing a cool power, but like a boy burdened by a terrible library of stolen moments.

  Clock nodded.

  Butter’s hands flew up, her breath coming too fast. "You can SEE THE FUTURE?!"

  Clock raised his palms, stepping back like she might strike him. "Just glimpses," he admitted. "Like shards of a broken mirror. My dimension, it holds pieces of time. Past, future, sometimes the present." He tilted his head. "Never the full picture."

  Butter stared. The weight of it crashed into her, his power, his knowledge, the sheer impossibility of it.

  Clock’s smirk widened. "It’s also why the Syndicate wants me dead." Wind clawed at the window.

  Butter’s fingers curled. "What did you see?" The air in the bedroom vanished.

  One moment, Butter stood trembling, demanding answers. The next, Clock’s icy fingers clamped around her wrist with surprising gentleness. "I can show you," he murmured, the words barely a breath against the sudden roar in her ears.

  Before she could flinch, the world dissolved. No transition. No fade. Reality shattered.

  ///

  Brad scrolled further, his thumb moving on autopilot. One glaring pattern emerged, solidifying into a cold, hard fact: Lucien was never in the videos. Never.

  He’d appear in the periphery of a description, a shadow mentioned in a terrified witness account. But in the visual record? There was nothing. The scenes always cut to static, the camera always malfunctioned, or the footage simply ended a heartbeat before he would have entered the frame. The internet knew of a ‘Goth Feline,’ a ‘Ghost-girl,’ a ‘Purple-flame,’ and now a ‘Fruit-demon.’ But the architect, the engineer, the man in the burgundy suit… he was a ghost. A deliberate, meticulously curated blank space. Why? Brad wondered. Was it arrogance? A deeper game? Or was Lucien’s very existence a piece of information too dangerous to let slip into the wild? His search led him to a newer upload. The timestamp placed it during the attack on the mansion, the day Winter died. His heart clenched. The uploader’s handle was @LeR?deurNumérique—The Digital Prowler. The video was titled: “GHOST vs FRUIT downtown?? Insane CQB!!”

  Mango, having polished off her sorbet, waddled over and climbed onto the stool next to him. “What’s that?” she asked, peering at the screen.

  “Just... something that happened,” Brad muttered, his voice tight.

  He hit play.

  The footage was stunning and shaky, shot from a car on the thorn bridge. The sky behind it was a furnace of dying sunset: blood-orange, deep purple, and bruised gold.

  And on that bridge, backlit by the apocalyptic sky, two figures clashed.

  Brad watched, mesmerized and horrified. Butter, her white curls lit like a halo by the setting sun, wielded Harmony with a desperate, furious grace. And Mango... Mango was a sundress-clad silhouette against the fire, a hurricane of petals and motion.

  “Ohhh! That’s me!” Mango yelled, pointing a sticky finger at the screen.

  Brad watched, mesmerized and horrified. He’d seen Mango fight Lóng Yán, but that had been playful, almost sportive. This was different. This was war.

  Mango’s movements were a series of unpredictable, jerky teleports—Petalsteps—that made her seem like a glitching video game character. One moment she was ducking a swing from Harmony, the next she was three feet to the left, her slingshot already releasing a pellet that Butter barely deflected with a metallic CLANG. Her sundress fluttered around the violence, a bizarre contrast to the brutal efficiency of her throws and kicks. The most chilling moment was when she launched her dagger in a spinning arc. Butter, mid-pivot, caught the blade between her teeth with a feral snarl before spitting it out.

  It was chaos rendered in epic, tragic scale, a personal war fought on a stage fit for legends. Brad immediately scrolled to the comments, a digital ecosystem thriving in the shadow of the impossible.

  · @FightAnalyst: Damn. Fruit-demon’s operational tempo is insane. Her fighting style feels like different people controlling different limbs. No readable rhythm.

  · @AestheticEnjoyer replied: In a sundress too. With a slingshot. It’s so random yet it works. She seems like she’d be fun to hang out with.

  · @PhysicsIsDead: Okay theory: Petal-step isn’t true teleportation. She doesn’t transform her entire body into petals and re-create them somewhere else. She uses the petals as a translocation path, a brief, stabilized corridor through a floral dimension. That’s why there’s always petal-fall at origin and destination.

  · @JustCurious replied: I wonder if it hurts.

  · @GhostGangCaptain: This fight made me a Ghost-girl STAN. Her skill with Harmony is unreal. The way she parried the dagger with her teeth? Iconic.

  · @MetaObserver: How does everyone just know its name is Harmony, lmao? That’s so strange. One look at it and I was like ‘yep, that’s Harmony.’

  · @DivineJudgementBot replied: Because they’re demons. They’re getting in your head. Repent before it’s too late. The floral one is clearly a pagan dryad spirit.

  · @TiredUser: ^ Stop spreading your religion in the comments. I hate you guys. Can we just appreciate the technically brilliant close-quarters combat?

  · @PedanticKing: Technically brilliant? She caught a knife with her teeth. That’s not technical, that’s just being a feral gremlin. A cool feral gremlin.

  · @LoreDigger replied to @DivineJudgementBot: I just know you get zero hoes bruh.

  Brad read them all, a lump in his throat. The world was watching, dissecting, mythologizing their most traumatic moments. He glanced at Mango. She was leaning close to the screen, not reading the text, but staring intently at the memes and reaction GIFs people had posted: a crying cat face, a spinning ‘bruh’ sticker. She giggled, pointing at a poorly edited image of her own face on a dancing pineapple.

  Oh. The realization dawned, bittersweet and strange. She couldn’t read.

  He didn’t know if that was funny or tragic. Here was a being of incalculable power, a subject of global online debate and awe, and she was just staring at the pretty pictures, completely oblivious to the sermons and strategic analyses being written about her existence. She was a god, laughing at cartoon stickers.

  In that moment, the sheer, layered absurdity of his life: the gold-veined marble, the cosmic child, the internet theorists, the ghost of Winter in the stone, threatened to overwhelm him. He put the phone down, screen facing the cold quartz.

  ///

  The air in Clock’s dimension still vibrated with the aftershocks of Butter’s panic. She knelt on the intangible ground, trembling, tears carving hot paths through the dust of revelation on her cheeks. The shard showing Brad and Clock playing music had shifted, dissolving back into the fractured mosaic of time.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  His gaze followed by as it drifted away like a fading echo. There was more. So much more he’d seen in the fractured glass of time. Truths that were not his to tell.

  He thought of the rune on Brad’s chest, a lock placed there by the Syndicate. But it was also a cage for something else. Brad wasn’t like them. He wasn’t a battery of raw, magical power. His gift was colder, sharper. A mind that could calculate the impossible. A durability that was just... more than human.

  Clock had seen the source. A shard of a man in magpie-blue armor, a ghost with Brad’s same sad blue eyes and jet-black hair. Vithon. A Syndicate operative. An experiment in his own right. And Brad’s biological father.

  The genetics were a sick joke. The physical prowess, the enhanced durability, a meager inheritance from Vithon. But the mind... the terrifying, brilliant, analytical engine in Brad’s head... that came from elsewhere.

  His mother. From her. Dr. Isolde Vex.

  The sharp cheekbones, the fierce intelligence, the way he could dissect a problem and see the gears of the universe, it was all her. Brad was Isolde’s son. W-9’s half-brother.

  The thought was so profoundly strange and uncomfortable it made Clock’s skin crawl. The family tree of the Syndicate was a gnarled, incestuous knot of creators and their creations, and Brad was tangled in the center of it, completely unaware.

  He’s a genius, Clock thought, watching the ghost of Brad’s laughing face fade from the psychic air. He’ll probably put it together himself eventually.

  But unspooling that particular thread of fate? Telling Brad that the cold, calculating architect of so much of his pain was his mother? That the woman he watched die was his sister?

  No. That wasn’t a message. That was a weapon. And it would absolutely fry what was left of Brad’s mind after the memory wipe.

  Some truths were like live wires. Best left untouched. He made a decision, as silent and final as the move of the Bishop on the board below. He would let that truth die here, in this dimension, with him. It was a burden he’d carry alone.

  Brad’s path to that revelation would have to be his own. Clock’s introspection was shattered by a choked, guttural sound from Butter.

  He flinched, startled. Her pink eyes weren't on him or the chessboard anymore. They were locked on a new shard that had pulsed to life without his command, drawn by the raw vortex of her grief.

  He followed her gaze. Sunlight. Ocean. The sigh of waves. And him.

  The shard pulsed.

  Perched on sun-warmed rock, overlooking turquoise infinity, sat a young man. Brown skin glowing like amber under the afternoon sun. Long, impossibly dark curls, wild and free, lifted by a salt breeze. Loose linen trousers rippling softly. A profile of serene, breathtaking beauty, almost ethereal in its grace.

  Butter stopped breathing. Her gaze zeroed in, bypassing the whole dimension, homing in on the intimate details branded into her soul. The specific curve of his jawline she’d traced with small fingers. The way his long lashes rested against his cheekbones when he looked down. The precise angle of his shoulders, relaxed yet holding a quiet strength.

  Then, the eyes lifted slightly, gazing at the horizon. Gray. Deep, fathomless, storm-cloud gray. Eyes that had held galaxies of warmth, patience, and secrets only she shared.

  And beneath them. The birthmarks. Twin smudges of darkness, like permanent, gentle tears kissed by the sun. One perfectly placed beneath each storm-gray eye. Unique. Beloved. His.

  A choked, guttural sound ripped from Butter’s throat. It wasn’t a word. It was the sound of a heart tearing open.

  "DAD!"

  The scream shattered the dimension’s oppressive silence. It was pure, unfiltered agony and recognition. She surged forward on her knees, not towards Clock, but towards the shard, hands outstretched like a child reaching for a parent snatched away. Her prosthetic leg scraped against nothingness, sending sparks skittering.

  The image of Paris on the rock didn't just pull her, it dragged a ghost of a memory to the surface, so vivid and warm it was a physical pain.

  Her sixth birthday. He’d covered her eyes, his large, warm hands gentle, leading her through the garden. "No peeking, Firefly." The scent of blooming jasmine and freshly cut wood. Then, his hands dropped.

  There it was. In the sprawling branches of the old oak tree he’d planted on her second birthday, a perfect treehouse. He’d built it with his own hands, he told her later, no magic, just sweat and love for her. She’d screamed, leaping and spinning in a circle of pure, unfiltered joy. His grin was a sunbeam. "Alright, Firefly, let's check it out."

  He lifted her up, and she scrambled inside.

  The air smelled of cedar and possibility. Her entire world was here, curated with a painstaking love that noticed everything. Sunlight streamed through the circular window, illuminating a soft, thick rug the color of crushed grapes, its pile so deep her small feet sank into it. To one side stood a child-sized easel, a blank canvas waiting, beside a low table where a rainbow spill of paints, pastels, and crayons fanned out from a hand-painted mason jar.

  A repurposed barrel, its top sanded smooth, served as a treasure chest, overflowing with every candy she loved: shiny wrappers of chocolate, hard candies like stained glass, and gummy worms spilling over the edge. Beside it, a miniature, humming fridge was stocked with frosty glass bottles of strawberry yogurt drink.

  Under the window, a built-in seat was piled high with new, impossibly soft plushies: a fox with wise eyes, a dragon with iridescent scales, a whale that looked like it had swam straight out of his stories. The walls themselves were her favorite: a vibrant, buttery yellow, hand-painted with lopsided, joyful purple polka dots.

  And in the center of it all, suspended from a beam by a delicate chain, was the octopus-shaped lamp. Its body was a milky, blown glass, and its tentacles, wrought from polished brass, curled gently downward. When he clicked the switch, it cast a warm, dappled, gentle glow across the entire room, making the purple rug seem to shimmer and the polka dots on the walls dance.

  She had burst into tears, throwing her arms around his neck. He’d held her, chuckling softly, and kissed her forehead. "There there, it's supposed to make you happy, Firefly... not sad."

  Now, kneeling in this cold, broken dimension, the memory was a blade. The warmth of that sunbeam grin, the safety of that treehouse, the pet name he’d called her, it all made the cold, silent shard in front of her a monument to everything she had lost.

  Clock flinched, startled by the raw power of her reaction. "Butter—" he began, his voice wary, confused.

  Butter didn’t hear him. She was lost. Her whole body convulsed, wracked by sobs so violent they seemed like they might break her ribs. She clawed at the space before the shard, fingers grasping only cold, dead glass.

  "His eyes! His birthmarks!" she gasped between wrenching sobs, pointing frantically, tears blurring the precious image. "Look! LOOK! That’s him! That’s PARIS!" Her voice cracked, raw and desperate. "My father!"

  Clock stared, his violet eyes wide with genuine, uncomprehending shock. He looked at the man in the shard – the impossible gray eyes, the distinctive birthmarks Butter was fixated on – then back at Butter’s utterly shattered form. He saw the absolute, bone-deep certainty in her tear-drowned eyes. This wasn't a guess. This was knowledge, carved into her being by years of love and presence.

  "He... he raised you?" Clock asked, his voice uncharacteristically soft, devoid of its usual edge. He took a hesitant step closer, not to comfort, but to see, to understand the chasm suddenly yawning between them. "This man? Paris?"

  Butter nodded frantically, unable to speak past the sobs. She pressed her forehead against the cold surface of the shard, as if she could push through to that sun-warmed rock. Her shoulders shook violently. The need to be there, to touch him, to smell the salt and sun on his skin, was a physical pain, sharper than any wound. It obliterated everything else, the Syndicate, Lucien, Brad’s betrayal, her own terror. There was only the shard and the crushing, suffocating distance.

  "He... he used to tell me stories..." she choked out, her voice a broken whisper against the glass. "Right there! By the water! About fireflies that were really fallen stars... and whales that sang the ocean to sleep..." A fresh wave of sobs hit her. "I need to find him, Clock! I NEED HIM!"

  She slammed her fist weakly against the unyielding shard. "Please! Make it real! Take me there! I’ll do anything! Anything!"

  Clock watched her, the truth settling over him like cold ash. This wasn't just a target or a mission objective. This man, Paris, was Butter’s entire world. The source of her pain, her desperate quest, her raw, bleeding love.

  And Clock... he had no memory of him. The name had echoed in the Syndicate's halls, of course. Paris. The Gloom Dweller. A legend, a cautionary tale, a figure from a history book. Hearing the name was like hearing about a great, long-dead actor or a mythical king: powerful, but ultimately imaginary, separated from him by the unbridgeable gap of time and story. He had only ever known the God Paris was rumored to be, never the man.

  Now, he saw only a stranger in a stolen moment, while the girl before him was being flayed alive by the sight. To see someone have a complete breakdown over this historical figure felt surreal, like watching a person weep at the sight of a statue of Alexander the Great. The chasm between Butter's lived, breathing love and his own clinical, distant knowledge of a myth was absolute.

  The panic attack slammed into her like a physical wave. Her vision tunneled, narrowing to only him in the shard. Her lungs seized. She clawed at her throat, her chest heaving, but no air came. Gasping, choking sounds ripped from her. Tears, hot and furious, streamed down her face.

  The chessboard below seemed to groan. The Black Bishop, standing sentinel over the shattered pawn, gleamed with ominous finality. Clock saw the impossible weight of Butter’s need, the terrifying singularity of her focus. He saw the future written on the board, a collision course with forces that would exploit this vulnerability ruthlessly. And he saw the chilling void within himself where a father's memory should have been.

  Butter wasn't just broken. She was a lit fuse, and the shard of Paris was the spark. The urge to find him wasn't just intensified; it had become her only compass, her only reason to draw breath in a world designed to crush her. And Clock, staring at the face of a man who was his father too but felt like a ghost, realized the magnitude of the storm he’d inadvertently unleashed.

  He didn't speak. He didn't move. He simply watched as her weeping escalated, the raw, guttural sobs shaking her frame until a thin, shocking trickle of fresh blood leaked from the corner of her eye, mingling with the tears. It was as if her grief had become so potent it was rupturing her from the inside.

  Her prosthetic leg, usually a steady, soft blue glow, began to flicker through colors erratically. And her magic, the tendrils of yellow and slight crimson that usually danced around her like a flame made of dreams, began to churn and mutate. A new color bled into the chaos: a deep, venomous violet, the color of a bruise, of a storm that promised only destruction.

  It moved not with her usual chaotic joy, but with a predatory, intelligent slither. Clock had to shut his eyes against the sight. It was no longer like looking at magic. It was like staring into the den of a beast, feeling its hot, possessive breath.

  Looking at Butter, broken and yet burning with a fire that threatened to consume everything, including herself, he knew one thing for certain: the Magpies weren't the only predators drawn to the glint of something precious. Butter had just become one herself. And her prey was a ghost.