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He rises, he calls. In dreams, we rise to his call. The nightmare before, the nightmare to come. We serve the return.

The omens are everywhere: written in the words of secret tomes, painted on walls, carved into skin.

In the end, the Nightmare comes, and his vessel will do anything to do the one thing he has always done best.


Serve.

Reese

Leaning toward the wall, Reese inspected the the writing for a long while before carefully swiping a finger across it. Sniffed, tasted, there was that which suggested it was something's blood. The ghost wondered what it would be like to become writing, and for a brief moment mourned the fact that she could not bleed.

Leslie

He turns tail faster than nearly anyone, scampering away with it between his legs, loss admitted. He runs for what feels like forever, cowering and hiding and hiding and hiding, and Leslie's never been so relieved to be completely and utterly insignificant. He hides in Egypt then in Qatar, and doesn't speak the language but no one does much besides panic these days, and on clips in hole-in-the-wall joints that play news, he sees a face he used to know and it terrifies him.

Leslie avoids looking at the screens and stays out of their sight, too, because it's like he can see through them, with all-black eyes that run red with flashing binary and hex and a dozen other codes he doesn't know or recognise, and he's so scared.

The world is scared, but they don't know what he's capable of. The internet postulates and anonymous groups love him or revile him, the governments cannot contain him or destroy him, and every day, they grow more and more--

Afraid.

They are afraid, and Leslie is too, like he's just waiting for them to catch up as he goes further and further into the wilderness where it's safe, abandoning technology save for Aleria's totem and a dead hunter pendant because the island is gone and his sense of home with it, and.

Kostya is no longer himself, no longer human, no longer a hunter. He is a vessel for something black and insidious, something that reaches through technology and rewrites it at every turn, infecting it down to the electrical engineering and he doesn't know how he knows but he does, Leslie just does, and it's awful.

Life Division had been his favourite-- Sunny had been good to him, Stephen, the handful of assistants. They had leant him their knowledge and he'd learned through constant presence and immersion, just enough to be dangerous, just enough to know.

If he was braver, he'd tell someone, but he isn't, not at all. All Bashmet left behind was scorched earth and fissures, bodies and destroyed metal, twisted and heated and warped, technology turned against its wielders, power plants gone dark and water supplies tainted-- they kept playing it, no matter where he went, no matter how far out he got.

Everywhere he went, the news shows his face and speaks his name, and it does nothing but make Leslie hysterical, because there's no point: it's over. Everything from here on out is just going to make him stronger.

All the planes and nukes and containment facilities, all the spy agencies and hunters and monsters, all the beings from this world and every other--

They just won't be enough.

Nothing will ever, ever be enough.