Chapter 43 Rhaz
TWO WEEKS AGO
I still remember the Black Shrine before I ever walked its halls. Not just the memory of stone or silence, but the weight of it. The place was like an open wound in space, built into a void where reality had folded in on itself. The air buzzed with cursed magic, the walls pulsing with whispers that felt alive beneath my skin.
Two weeks ago, I entered the shrine in full gargoyle form. My wings were folded against my back, muscles tense under stone‑like skin. Every step felt heavy, not from the weight of the journey, but from knowing I was close to something old and terrible.
The shrine didn’t have light. It didn’t need it. The darkness there was ancient, like a record of every curse ever spoken. I could feel old power in every echo, in every groan of stone settling into itself.
At the center of the Black Shrine, there was a shape wrapped in layers of shifting illusion. No face. Just shifting shadows under cloaks of magic. They called him Orryx the Black — the only gargoyle to have ever been born human.
No one had seen his face. Even telling stories of it was said to draw death. Gods would fall blind and broken before his true visage.
Not even shapeshifters could survive what Orryx was. He didn’t reshape by killing his targets, like other beasts of mimicry. He absorbed them. Their form. Their identity. Their soul. And he walked away unchanged.
And yet he was imprisoned here, trapped for decades by a curse laid deep into the bones of the world. A binding no one had cracked. A curse sealed by a Kyro long dead. The key to his freedom was something few had ever seen — the blood of a living Kyro.
I knelt before him, talons on cold stone, and I didn’t hesitate.
“Let me go, my lord,” I said, voice steady even as the magic around me stirred. “I will find the Kyro. I will bring you what you need.”
His voice slithered into my mind like smoke through cracked stone. “Infiltrating the human world is dangerous now,” he warned. “You may not come back.”
Then I did the only thing I could.
I said it without fear. “Then I’ll die in your name.”
The illusion flickered then, softer. His talon pressed to my brow. I felt it like a brand, a blessing. A power that slammed into my spine and reshaped me from bone outward.
“Go,” he said. “And when I rise… the world will crumble at my feet.”
That was all he needed to say.
I crossed through a fracture in the magical veil near Phoenix Academy, slipping out of nothing and into a world that hummed with living magic. I felt it like static under my skin — raw, loud, unfiltered.
The pull led me to a house not far from campus. A place where someone with power lived alone. I smelled it in the air, faint like a heartbeat under water.
I didn’t announce myself. Hunters don’t give warnings.
Inside, there was a young man who wasn’t prepared for the shape of me.
He saw me. Then he ran.
I didn’t have to warn him twice.
He darted through streets and woods, trying to get away. It was a test, really — and he had a trick. He could turn invisible for ten seconds at a time. Clever. Hard to catch. But not impossible.
Every time he vanished, I waited. I learned his pattern. I read the pulse of his magic as it flickered like a dying light.
On the third vanish, I was already waiting for him when he reappeared. I struck without hesitation and slammed him face‑first to the ground. Hard enough to steal breath and steal thought.
He whimpered as I pressed my claws to his throat.
“What’s your name, boy?” I asked.
His voice shook like wind through dry reeds. “C‑Caleb,” he stammered. "Caleb Sutton,"
I smiled. Not the friendly kind. The kind that tasted like promise and danger at the same time.
“You and I are going to do great things together,” I said.
And then I took what I needed.
I drove my talons into his chest. Not to rip him apart. That wasn’t the point. I didn’t need blood. I didn’t need gore. I needed what was under it.
My claws slid through skin, through bone, like it wasn’t even solid. He screamed the second I touched it—his essence.
It wasn’t something most people ever felt being taken. But he wasn’t most people. He was powered. Marked. That made it louder.
The sound he made—high, sharp, desperate—cut through the trees. His back arched, muscles jerking.
Then it started.
A light pushed out of him. Not bright, not warm. Pale. Cold. It bled from the wound where my claws were buried, slow at first, then steady.
That was his essence. His magic. His soul. The core of everything he was.
I felt it move into me. I didn’t have to pull. My body knew what to do. It drank him in like water after a long drought.
His body began to slow—jerks turning to shudders, then stillness. The light that poured from him left nothing behind.
As he sank toward death, the air around me changed. The light curled around my arms, around my neck, around my face.
Then it started reshaping me.
His face—his exact skin, muscle, build—slid over mine like a second skin being painted in real time. My bones shifted. My voice adjusted in my throat. My body rewrote itself with his image.
When it was done, I looked down.
Caleb lay at my feet, empty.
And I stood in his place.
Where Caleb’s body lay lifeless, I stood up — skin and bone shifting until I wore him like a borrowed mask. I walked to a window and raised my hand. It flared into nothing and back again, proof of control. Proof that I now was Caleb Sutton.
I smirked.
I was him. And no one suspected.
PRESENT DAY
Time passed. Days bled into each other. And now it had brought me here.
A dark room. Bare walls. One light hanging overhead like a judge’s eye.
And there she was.
Kristen Lockwood.
Unconscious. Bound to a chair.
Her breathing was shallow, tender, unaware — like an untouched flame flickering before a storm.
I stayed in the shadows, watching. Watching her chest rise, rise again. Listening to the soft cadence of life that hadn’t yet registered the danger in the room.
Then she stirred. A flicker of movement. A breath caught halfway between sleep and panic.
Her eyes cracked open. Groggy at first, hazy, confused.
Then her gaze sharpened as reality pulled itself around her.
And I stepped forward.
Feet silent, shadows clinging. I did not rush her. I did not intimidate with fury. I spoke with a calm that made her heart quake anyway.
“Hello, Kristen.”