Kiqueo - Preydrus

The new inhabitants of the Blackaxel safehouse in Ellisbeth had, at last, settled into something resembling peace. After days of wearisome travel—feet aching, nerves frayed—they surrendered to the comforts of security and silence. The air was still. The doors were sealed. And for a fleeting moment, the world beyond their walls no longer existed. Yet even in this cradle of protection, sleep eluded one. Xhoya, the sharp-eyed drow with a spirit shackled in shadows, lay awake—her body at rest but her mind caught in the grip of phantoms. She saw them again: spindly arms of ink-black shadow slithering through walls that should have been solid, reaching for her companion. A curse. Not for her. For Gidget. The image clung to her waking thoughts like oil on water. When dawn finally crept through the cracks in the heavy curtains, Xhoya could bear her silence no longer. She locked eyes with Gidget and begged her—pleaded—not to sleep near any windows from now on. Not in this place. The Eladrin agreed, worried but wiling to offer the comfort to the haunted girl with a promise that she too would rest in an actual bed for the following nights. An agreement was made.   Only Silas knew what the coming days might bring.   The others, for now, saw the safehouse as a lull in the storm. They passed the morning in something close to calm. Over cups of fragrant tea and plates of finger sandwiches they began the slow and unfamiliar work of becoming a group. B-YU, the house's robotic steward, served them diligently—his movements a polite ballet of steam and precision. Despite his cold chassis and outdated speech modulator, B-YU quickly endeared himself to the house’s weary guests, offering mechanical solace in a world unraveling at its seams. But serenity was short-lived. The telecaster flickered, casting the room in a pale electric glow. Static gave way to news. Then panic. War had been declared. The Blackaxel Cartel had officially blamed the destruction of The Starfall on the Beaumont Royal Navy. Worse still, as the group had crossed borders and rediscovered civilization a passenger train was hijacked—uniforms on scene suggesting Blackaxel itself was behind the attack, a feat Silas knew was impossible. Then came the horror in Alcyon. Footage replayed again and again, showing three skyscrapers collapsing in cataclysmic succession. The death toll stretched into the tens of thousands.   Among the chaos, one image surfaced that paralyzed the room. A blur at first. Then unmistakable: The Gazelle. Silas and Xhoya recognized the warforged immediately, dissecting the replay like surgeons—frame by frame. Their shared conclusion turned the room to ice: The Gazelle had been there. It wasn’t hearsay or theory. It was fact. The warforged was responsible.   A knock at the door broke the trance, but no one moved. When the knock became a dull thud—still no reaction. The conversation turned inward again, their voices low and grim. Silas, ever the skeptic of official narratives, questioned both factions. Neither Blackaxel nor the BRN seemed truly accountable, he reasoned. And with the Coalition conspicuously absent from the public discourse, a darker theory began to settle in: There was a fourth faction at play. One powerful enough to manipulate truth itself.   Eventually, Silas opened the door as conversations came to their natural conclusions. There on the doorstep, caught in a cold shaft of light, lay The Artemis Post—its headline as stark as a gunshot: WAR! Holding the ink-smudged paper, the weight of it real and undeniable, made the truth hit differently. What had felt like cascading terror through a screen now became tangible. Concrete. Unforgiving. The stories in the paper mirrored those from the telecaster, though some key details—those the group knew firsthand—had been altered. Whitewashed.   Next to the paper was a box. Unmarked. Medium-sized. Hefty. Nestled inside was a second container, wrapped with meticulous care. A small, unassuming tag hung from its corner. It was signed hauntingly by a single letter: –G.   The room bristled with alarm.   Silas opened the inner box slowly, fingers trembling—not from fear, but from the weight of recognition. Inside lay the black box. The very one he had nearly died retrieving. The same one he’d lost. It was still damaged, still marked with dried blood—his blood. And yet, according to every major news outlet and official report, the black box had already been recovered by authorities and was instrumental in confirming the events that led to The Starfall’s demise.   But here it was.   This was the real one. Which meant the authorities had lied. Or someone had given them a decoy. Or worse, someone had rewritten history before it could be questioned. And most damning of all—someone had gotten it back to Silas. The gift tag, the method of delivery… it didn’t make sense. Not yet. Silas rushed to the house’s surveillance console, spooling back the camera feeds in reverse, frame by frame, in search of the box’s courier. There was no name. No face. No answers, only more questions surrounding the short man who seemed to appear out of nowhere and disappear just as quickly. There was no was to track him, to identify him or to question him. But there was a task.   Agent Silas went to work immediately, his claws gliding across keys of the house piano as he extracted the entire contents of the black box. Audio logs. Sensor data. Communications. System overrides. His mind raced with the speed of panic. Finally, he arrived at the moment The Gazelle escaped his chamber aboard the doomed ship—and there it was. The warforged was in control of everything: the doors, the pods, the locks, the engines. The Starfall had not been hijacked from without. It had been taken from within. But that was just the beginning. When the box's data was rendered as a visual symphony—patterns, codes, and pulses playing like a digital composition—something horrific emerged. A pattern. Repeated across the data's architecture, too subtle to see without zooming out beyond comprehension: a cube. A simple shape, and yet laden with haunting implications. Within one of the data towers, obscured in symbols of crescent moons and machine runes, lay a blueprint. Highly magical. Terrifyingly advanced.   Xhoya, moved by instinct and familiarity, sketched the object in her journal. The crescent-wrapped cube stirred something in her mind. She did not know what it was—but she felt it. She could learn it. In time, perhaps, even replicate it.   Silas made backup after backup, seeding copies of the blueprint across his person, the safehouse, and a string of private servers connected only to Z3R0. The stakes had changed. Something ancient and mechanical had been awakened. And with that, Silas changed too. A new steadiness entered his voice. His eyes sharpened. With calm authority, he told the others they would be traveling soon, and they would need to arm themselves. Without another word, he vanished into the vault hidden behind a false wall and returned with a weapon that looked like it belonged to another era entirely—a shotgun large enough to eclipse Xhoya’s silhouette. He offered it to her with solemn gravity.   She accepted it. Both of them, silently, hoping she would never need to use it. But hope, like peace, was growing short.   The safehouse hummed suddenly. Locks clamped down. Lights dimmed to emergency levels and the stifling silence and detachment from the outside world confirmed what none wanted to hear: the house had entered unrequested lockdown—a final, irreversible measure. They weren’t going anywhere.