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The air in the library was different after Mephistos's departure. The defensive preparations felt like child's play against the scale of what was coming. They weren't just waiting for an attack; they were waiting for a global symphony of annihilation to reach its crescendo, with their home as the main stage.
Elsa and Morbius worked with a frantic, focused energy, deconstructing the obsidian dagger. It was a race against a clock they couldn't see. Lissa assisted, her knowledge of the ritual's structure proving invaluable, but a new tension had settled between the siblings. The immediate crisis had forced a partnership, but the deeper implications of her role in this war remained unspoken.
It was Lissa who broke the silence two days later. She found Jack staring out the window, his posture rigid with the effort of maintaining his "fractured" facade.
"It's not just about your power, is it?" she asked, her voice quiet. "This ritual. It needed a 'spark.' My spark. Because our bloodline carries the curse, but it manifests differently. You got the strength, the transformation..." She hugged herself, as if cold. "What did I get, Jack? What did Mom pass down to me that they wanted to use?"
Jack turned from the window. This was the conversation he had dreaded for years. He had hoped the latent potential in her would remain dormant, a silent passenger for her entire life.
"The curse isn't just physical, Lissa," he said, his voice low. "It's a connection to something primal. An affinity. For me, it's the moon, the hunt, the beast. For others in our line... it can be different. A sensitivity. An empathy for things that aren't human. A ability to... hear the world's deeper frequencies."
He saw the understanding dawn in her eyes, followed by fear. "The things I've always felt," she whispered. "The whispers in old places. The feeling of being watched by the shadows. I thought it was anxiety. An overactive imagination."
"It was your spark," Jack said gently. "Dormant. Safe. Until they tried to use it as a fuse." He looked at her, his own fear for her a constant, cold stone in his gut. "They failed then. But if they get their hands on you again, in the middle of a ritual of this magnitude..."
He didn't need to finish. She understood. She wasn't just his sister; she was a component. A uniquely vulnerable one.
Before she could respond, the world outside the window changed.
The familiar city lights of Los Angeles didn't flicker and die. Instead, they dimmed, as if a vast, silent lens of shadow had been placed over the entire basin. The hum of the city—the distant traffic, the pervasive electronic buzz—didn't stop. It was smothered, swallowed by a profound, unnatural silence.
No alarm blared. No ward was triggered.
But high above the city, the moon, hanging full and heavy in the sky, began to change. Its silver light didn't vanish. It bled, staining a deep, bruised violet. Jagged, black cracks, like a pane of shattered glass, spread across its luminous face.
The Chorus of Ruin had begun. And its opening note was to shatter the sky.
The violet, cracked moon cast a sickly, pulsating light over Los Angeles, warping colors and stretching shadows into grasping, unnatural shapes. The profound silence was worse than any sound; it was the silence of a held breath, a universe waiting to be unmade.
Inside the library, the air grew thick and heavy. The scent of the Darkhold was no longer a distant threat; it was the very atmosphere, a cold, dry pressure that made it hard to breathe.
"It's starting," Elsa said, her voice tight. She held up the dismantled components of the obsidian dagger. "I've isolated the frequency. It's a cancelling wave, just like he said. Morbius, can we replicate it?"
The vampire was already at a workbench, his hands moving with preternatural speed as he inlaid minute silver wires into a polished bone-white disc—the petrified femur of a long-extinct, magical creature from the Bloodstone vaults. "The principle is sound. We can create a dampener. But its power source..." His dark eyes lifted to Jack. "It must be you. Your will must be the battery that projects the frequency."
"Then we're ready," Jack said. But as he spoke, a wave of dizziness washed over him. It wasn't physical. It was a sudden, violent tugging sensation deep within his mind, as if a psychic fishhook had been set in his soul and was now being pulled taut.
He staggered, bracing himself against the desk. The beast within roared, not in rage, but in startled pain, its consciousness yanked toward an unseen void.
"They're starting the siphon," he gritted out, his knuckles white. "They're not even here yet, and they're already trying to pull me in."
Lissa cried out, clutching her own head. "I can hear it... a thousand voices... all chanting the same awful words... it's so loud..."
She wasn't being targeted by the siphon, but her latent sensitivity was being violently overloaded by the global ritual. The "spark" they had tried to ignite was now being flooded with raw, apocalyptic energy.
"The ritual is using the corrupted moon as an amplifier!" Morbius realized. "They are connecting to him through the very symbol of his curse! They are turning his own power against him!"
The walls of the library began to vibrate. The symbols Elsa had carved into the doors and windows glowed brighter, straining under an invisible assault. They weren't being attacked by soldiers or monsters. They were being attacked by a concept. By a song of un-being that was seeking its lead singer.
Jack fought to anchor himself, to push back against the psychic pull. The fracture in his soul, which he had been using as a disguise, now became a dire vulnerability. The siphon was trying to exploit the divide, to tear the man from the beast and consume them separately.
He looked at Lissa, who was shaking, tears of pain and terror streaming down her face. He looked at Elsa and Morbius, readying their last-ditch weapon.
The trap was sprung. The enemy wasn't at the gate.
They were in the sky. And they were in his blood.
The Kindling was igniting. And he was the fuel.
The psychic pull was a riptide, threatening to drag Jack's consciousness into the swirling, discordant chorus of the ritual. He could feel the individual threads of the global network—the cold precision of the Prague cell, the feverish fervor of one in Jakarta, the ancient, grinding patience of another in a Scottish moor. They were all singing the same note of oblivion, and they were using the shattered moon as a tuning fork to find him.
The beast thrashed against the pull, its raw power a chaotic counterweight to the ritual's ordered hunger. But the divide between them was a weakness the siphon exploited, trying to peel them apart.
"Jack, the dampener!" Elsa shouted, holding out the bone-white disc. It now glowed with a soft, silver light, the replicated frequency ready. "You have to channel your will into it! It's the only thing that can break the connection!"
But Jack wasn't looking at the dampener. His gaze was locked on Lissa. She was on her knees, hands clamped over her ears, her face a mask of agony. She wasn't just hearing the chorus; her latent spark was resonating with it, amplifying it inside her own mind. She was being burned from the inside out by the very power they had tried to use to ignite her.
The plan to use the dampener, to simply sever the connection, was a defensive move. It was playing not to lose.
But Jack was done playing defense.
He made a choice.
He stopped resisting the siphon.
Instead, he grabbed Lissa's hand. Her eyes, wide with terror, met his. "Trust me," he growled, the words a blend of man and beast.
He didn't try to shield her spark. He did the opposite. He focused all his will, not on breaking the connection, but on guiding it. He funneled the raging torrent of the Chorus of Ruin away from his own fractured soul and directly into his sister.
But he didn't let it consume her. He became a conduit, a regulator. He used the beast's raw power to buffer the flow, and the man's will to shape it.
Lissa gasped. The pain on her face didn't vanish, but it transformed. The chaotic, destructive energy flooding her suddenly had a direction. A purpose.
"Use it," Jack commanded, his voice straining with the immense effort. "You can hear them all, can't you? Every single one. Their doubt, their fear underneath the fanaticism. Find the flaw."
Understanding flashed in Lissa's eyes. She wasn't a victim anymore. She was a weapon. Jack was giving her the very power that was meant to destroy them, and trusting her to wield it.
She closed her eyes, her body trembling not with pain, but with concentration. The chaotic chorus resolved in her mind into a thousand individual voices. And within that cacophony, she listened not for the song, but for the mistakes. The cell in Rio that was slightly out of sync. The one in Cairo where the hierophant's faith was wavering.
She found it. A hairline fracture in the global matrix, a single note of dissonance created by a moment of human weakness in a bunker beneath Berlin.
She focused the amplified power Jack was channeling into her, and she sang back.
Not a note of ruin. A note of pure, simple, devastating doubt.
The reaction was instantaneous. The psychic riptide pulling at Jack faltered. The violet light of the cracked moon flickered.
The Kindling hadn't been used to start their fire.
It had been used to find the water to douse it.
To Be Continue...