"You may enter," Raphael called out, his voice smooth and dangerous, like silk over a blade.
The heavy oak doors groaned open. Gordon walked in, his footsteps slow and deliberate. He was an old man, his skin the color of parchment, his eyes holding the weary weight of a century spent in the shadows of his own children.
"Gordon? To what do we owe the honor?" Raphael asked, leaning back and swirling his glass. "Solitude finally rotting your brain? Come, sit. Drink. It's better than talking to the walls."
"I'll pass on the vintage, Raphael," Gordon replied, pulling out a heavy chair. "I just wanted to see my sons. Is a father not allowed a moment of sentiment?"
Raphael laughed, a sharp, barking sound. "Sentiment. That's a new one." He turned back to Darion, his eyes dancing with a cruel light. "Anyway, as I was saying—Darion, you really do have a 'way' with women. Most men give flowers; you give psychological trauma and a body count. It's a bold strategy."
Darion's grip tightened on his glass until the crystal creaked. He stared out the window at the dark, weeping city. "It was... a complicated situation," he muttered, the guilt flickering in his eyes like a dying candle.
"Complicated?" Jay chimed in, grinning as he licked a drop of blood from his thumb. "You're the 'Vile' for a reason, brother. You're the only one of us who makes the shadows look friendly."
"Can we move on?" Darion snapped, his voice cracking.
The brothers shared a look, then erupted into mocking laughter. Gordon watched them, his face a mask of stony silence.
Lineage ends with you, does it? Gordon thought, watching Raphael's arrogant smirk. If you weren't strong enough to snap my neck with a thought, I'd beat that pride right out of you. For a few hours, they sat there—a family of monsters playing at being human. To Gordon, it was a bittersweet tableau. They were murderers, tyrants, and thieves, but in the low light of the chamber, they were still his boys.
The Carpenter's Prayer
The hovel in Fluxton reeked of iron and wet ash.
Kennedy had scrubbed the floor three times, but the scent of Ezekiel's blood seemed to have soaked into the very stone. He looked down at his son. The boy was a ruin of charred flesh and jagged bone, the Abyssal brand on his chest glowing with a dull, rhythmic violet light.
"I told you," Kennedy whispered, his voice thick with tears. "I told you this path only leads to the grave. But you had to have your vengeance. You had to be the hero."
He reached out, his calloused fingers trembling as they hovered over the brand. "Now look at you. You've traded your soul for a mark. You belong to the very man who killed your mother."
Kennedy did what he could with the meager supplies he had—clean rags, boiled water, and a prayer to a Sovereign who seemed to have turned His back on Fluxton long ago. He watched the boy's chest heave, the skin already beginning to knit itself back together with an unnatural, twitching speed.
He's a mutant, Kennedy realized with a shudder. He heals like a demon. But can he heal a broken spirit?
The next morning, Kennedy dragged himself to the carpentry shop. His body felt like lead, but the Darkhavens didn't care about a father's grief; they cared about their crates and their furniture.
He worked in a daze. The scream of the saws and the scent of cedar usually calmed him, but today, they felt like an assault. He watched his fellow workers—men he had known for decades—laughing and sharing stories of their families. He used to be one of them. Now, he felt like a ghost haunting his own life.
He thought about stopping to talk to Ron, his oldest friend. He wanted to tell someone. He wanted to scream. But the shame was a shroud. How do you tell your friend that your son is now a branded hound for the Abyssal Gang?
He finished his shift, took his pittance of coin, and hurried back through the squalid streets. He passed the shadow-beasts and the brawling drunks, his heart hammering against his ribs.
When he pushed open the door to the hovel, Ezekiel was still exactly where he had left him.
Kennedy fell to his knees beside the boy and finally broke. The silence of the room was heavy, but in the back of his mind, he heard a voice—soft, melodic, and full of a love that had been buried ten years ago.
'Kennedy, my love... don't cry. You know I can't stand it.'
"What am I supposed to do, Samantha?" he choked out, striking the dirt floor with his fist. "I'm losing him. I'm losing our boy to the monsters."
He remembered Ezekiel as a child, coming home with a split lip and a bruised ego, crying in the dirt. Back then, Kennedy could pick him up and make the world right again. Now, the bullies wore crowns and brands, and all the carpentry skill in the world couldn't fix what was broken.
This revamp focuses on the physical and spiritual hangover of trauma and the crushing realization that Ezekiel's "rebirth" comes at the cost of his autonomy.
The hours in Fluxton didn't pass; they dragged like a blade across stone.
Kennedy had returned to the carpentry shop because the alternative was starving alongside his unconscious son. Every few hours, he would slip away, heart hammering against his ribs, to check the hovel. He felt like a parent watching a feverish infant, a role reversal that tasted like ash in his mouth.
He's still breathing, Kennedy would tell himself, pressing a calloused hand to Ezekiel's chest. The external wounds—the punctures from the scavengers' stakes and the lacerations from Raphael's kinetic blasts—had vanished. Ezekiel's "gift" had woven the flesh back together, leaving him smooth and pale.
But the brand remained. It was a jagged, violet eye that seemed to pulse with a life of its own.
Kennedy ground his teeth as he remembered the street-dwellers he'd fought off. They were desperate, starving vampires—people he'd known for years. Had Ezekiel really pushed them so far that they saw a wounded boy and thought of him only as a monster to be put down?
"You did this," Kennedy whispered to the empty room before heading back to work. "You hunted them until they stopped seeing you as a neighbor. Now you're both just animals in the dark."
Inside the cold cage of his ribs, Ezekiel's soul was a fractured thing. Raphael's blood-lightning hadn't just burned his skin; it had scorched his spiritual core. The "Voice" in his head had spent the last twelve hours acting as a psychic mason, desperately mortar-ing the cracks in Ezekiel's consciousness to keep his mind from leaking out.
Finally, Ezekiel's eyes snapped open.
The first thing he felt wasn't pain—it was the smell. The hovel reeked of old blood and the sour tang of his own cauterized flesh. He bolted upright, hands clutching his throat as he gagged on the stagnant air.
He ran his hands over his chest. Smooth. Unbroken. He felt a surge of manic triumph. I survived. I took the Red Death's best shot and I'm still standing. He flexed his fingers, hearing the satisfying pop of rejuvenated joints.
"I feel... incredible," Ezekiel whispered. "If I can heal like this, Darion can't kill me. I'll just keep coming back until I tear his throat out."
"Don't be a fool," the Voice hissed, sounding strained and irritable. "You didn't 'survive.' I held your soul together with spit and willpower. You are a glass jar that has been glued back together, boy. Don't go looking for a hammer just yet."
Ezekiel's smile vanished. "You keep saying I owe you. Explain it. What are you? Why are you in my head?"
"You are too weak for the truth," the Voice replied, its tone dropping into a hollow resonance. "Honesty has weight, Ezekiel. If I told you the nature of our bond now, the revelation would shatter what's left of your mind. Grow. Survive. Perhaps then you'll earn the right to know your own name."
"Vague as always," Ezekiel spat, his fists clenching. "Fine. Stay a mystery. I have bigger problems."
He looked around the empty hovel. His father had left a bowl of cold, grey mash on the table. Ezekiel stared at it, feeling a sudden, sharp pang of guilt. He thought of the way he'd spoken to Kennedy—the arrogance, the coldness. He wanted to wait, to apologize, to tell the old man he was sorry for the brand on his chest.
Then, he felt a phantom heat in his marrow. The brand.
"Meet us at the base once you're well-rested."
Raphael's voice echoed in his skull, backed by the memory of the lightning. It wasn't an invitation; it was a leash being tugged. If he stayed here, if he waited for his father, he was putting a target on the only person who loved him.
Ezekiel stood up, his legs feeling heavy and strange. He looked at the Abyssal Mark in a shard of broken mirror. It was a badge of slavery, a jagged violet scar that reminded him he was no longer the master of his own fate.
"For Mother," he whispered, though the words felt hollower than they used to. "And for him."
He stepped out of the enclosure. The air of Fluxton was thick with the usual smog of the blood-vats, but as he looked toward the center of town, his eyes locked onto the tallest structure—the Abyssal Lair. It loomed over the hovels like a jagged tooth.
Ezekiel began to walk. Every step away from his father's house felt like a betrayal, but every step toward the tower felt like a necessity. He had entered the devils' game, and the only way out was straight through the heart of the monsters who ran it.