Dacey smiled. That was exactly the reaction he'd been hoping for. "That's a magical script—the written language of an arcane tradition. I found that parchment in a private collection that ended up on the market after the Rockefeller family liquidated part of their library. I don't know why families like that let treasures like these slip out into the world, but I know what's written there: the scattered notes of the Grand Alchemist Magnus. Worthless to most people. To me, it was the key that unlocked my ancestor's records—and the path to everything waiting here."
He held up both the notebook and the parchment. "Three things came together: my ancestor's records, the decoded script, and everything Diana told us today. That combination brought us here. This is fate working through us. You shouldn't fight it."
The words had been bottled up in him for a long time. His eyes shone with something that edged past conviction into mania.
Cassie didn't understand when he'd become this person. Just a month ago they'd been quietly planning their future—talking timelines for getting married, running the numbers on a mortgage. Alien trade routes might as well have been on another planet for how distant they felt from her life. She had no idea what the Rockefellers had to do with any of this. She only wanted to know how her normal, happy little life had become whatever this was.
"Follow me." Dacey glanced up at the sickly sky. He was afraid—genuinely—but he crushed it down, cross-referenced the notebook against the landmarks around them, and jerked his head for her to follow.
"What about the Lawrence siblings?"
"What about them." His tone was flat. Final. As though she'd said something stupid.
Cassie's face fell. She had no answer. She followed him across the crimson ground, stumbling with nearly every step.
Dacey moved faster and faster, checking his notes against the landscape. If Cassie hadn't had something inside her—a strength she didn't know she possessed—she would have been left behind long ago.
"Here. This has to be here." He stopped at a sunken pit ringed by five stone pillars. He compared the carvings on each column to his notes, and his face transformed—lit up like a man who'd found buried treasure. He put his shoulder into the first pillar and toppled it, then did the same to the next, and the next, until all five lay broken on the ground.
He didn't bother with the steps. He launched himself in, tripped on a loose stone, and didn't even slow down. He went in face-first and barely noticed.
"Dacey!" Cassie stood at the edge and shouted down. Her internal alarm had blown past every threshold she had words for. She couldn't make herself go any closer.
Dacey wasn't listening. He scrambled to the center of the pit and started digging with both hands, fast and mechanical, murmuring to himself: "Mine. Mine. My treasure. I'm here..."
He was fast. His fingers hit something solid.
A crimson gemstone—roughly the size of a watermelon—came free of the earth. Its surface was rough and irregular, but every facet caught the dim light and scattered it into crystalline sparks. Inside the stone, something churned and swelled like fire-clouds trapped in glass. Dacey lifted it with both hands, his expression rapt and reverent, like a man gazing upon something sacred.
Neither of them noticed: the moment the gemstone was lifted, a black mist seeped up from somewhere deep beneath the pit. It rose slowly. Silently. And it began to coil around Dacey.
"Ah—!"
Dacey was still dreaming—billionaire, president, king, emperor, take your pick—when a spike shot from the gem's surface with a wet, quiet thunk and drove straight through his palm. It shattered every dream with it.
The pain was blinding. He dropped the stone. The spike retracted.
And the gem did not fall.
It floated.
The fire-clouds inside began to churn faster, deeper, richer—like a single drop of red ink spreading through water in zero gravity.
Dacey's blood had fed it. The crimson gemstone blazed brighter, throwing out shards of light that illuminated the pit for roughly two hundred meters (about 650 feet) in every direction.
"No—!" Dacey watched helplessly as the gem ignored him entirely and drifted upward toward Cassie.
In that instant, everything clicked—and the jealousy and regret that hit him felt like something tearing loose inside his chest.
The gemstone disintegrated in mid-air.
It reassembled itself into a full suit of deep crimson armor. Every surface bristled with razor-edged spikes. Even from a distance, it radiated something dark and magnetic—a sinister beauty that pulled at the eye. The armor broke apart into more than ten separate pieces, and in Dacey's hateful gaze, they shot through the air toward Cassie.
"Cassie, run!"
"Cassie, get back!"
Dacey and Diana—arriving at last, out of breath—shouted at the same moment. Different intentions. Identical words.
Cassie was a half-second too slow. By the time she thought to move, the crimson fragments had already found her.
"Ah—!" The scream cut off halfway. Pain drowned the rest. The last thing she registered before the darkness took her was the look on Dacey's face—fury, covetousness, betrayal—and then nothing.
"No!" Diana lunged forward. She'd already seen it: those spikes on the outside matched spikes on the inside. The armor didn't just threaten others. It hurt its wearer first.
It reminded her of the ancient flagellants—those who bound strips of thorned leather to their own flesh as a constant reminder that strength came through suffering.
She was too far away. She was too late.
Pauldrons, vambraces, greaves, a breastplate, a flowing cape, and finally the helmet—all assembled in under a third of a second. The deep crimson armor locked itself into place around Cassie's body. Blood poured from every gap where the internal spikes found skin. The armor, which had seemed slightly dim moments before, drank it in eagerly. Its color deepened and glowed—like lacquered darkness lit from within.
"Cassie, hold on—I'll get you out!" Diana threw herself forward without hesitation and reached for the armor.
Her arm had barely extended when the crimson vambrace intercepted it.
Two beams of eerie light blazed from behind the helmet visor. Diana's aura surged. Cassie was completely unconscious—the armor was running the body now. Diana didn't give the armor enough credit to back down. She brought her power to thirty percent. She was going to rip the girl free by force.
She got her hand on the pauldron. She set her stance. She was ready to tear.
The crimson armor was faster than she expected. It dropped a shoulder, stepped back, and threw a right hook simultaneously.
Diana didn't flinch. Her hand—pale as marble, fast as lightning—landed on the pauldron and began to twist—
A deep red lasso shot from the armor's left hand, serpentine and flickering with energy. It looped around a distant boulder and yanked the armor sideways, barely slipping free of Diana's grip.
"Mine. It's mine. It has to be mine. I searched so long..." Dacey hauled himself out of the pit on ruined hands, hunched and wreathed in black miasma. His eyes were glassy, fixed on the crimson armor, oblivious to the wrongness radiating off him. He stared at it the way a man stares at the one thing he's devoted his entire life to.
Diana stopped mid-pursuit.
This young man wasn't right. He was very wrong. That level of demonic energy wasn't something any ordinary human being could generate, let alone sustain.
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