“We can resolve this peacefully,” he says. “All you have to do is come with us. Answer some questions. Cooperate.”
The trap crystallizes in my mind, sharp and clear.
If I go, they take the sanctuary. They erase everything we’ve built, again. It goes back to how it was—a labor camp, forcing them to mine Ether, giving up their freedom, their lives.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
The words come out as hard as I intend. Final.
The Ether pulses once, sharp and deliberate. I reach through it, calling.
Shadows darken as the fox materializes first—smoke and silver, eyes like stars. The snake follows, winding through the air like living shadow.
Find Seth,I send through the connection.Protect him.
They vanish without sound, slipping between realms like they were never here.
Phil’s expression shifts—just slightly. The mock-gentleness falls away, replaced by something colder.
He steps back. The Council moves with him, forming a line. Behind them, the army begins to ready—not weapons, butmagic. I can feel it building, pressure mounting in the air.
Phil’s smile returns, sharper than before.
“Then perhaps it’s time you meet Daddy,” he says softly.
And his voicefolds.
The word echoes—once in Phil’s familiar slur, once in something impossibly older. The air bends, sound warps; colors flatten into silver and black.
My breath stops.
“Or perhaps,” he continues, and now the second voice is stronger, layered beneath like a current pulling me under, “you remember me by another name.”
The world tilts.
His face doesn’t change—still Phil, still human—but the thing beneath surfaces. Not transformation.Revelation.
The voice in the Void. The whispers in my dreams. The presence that wrapped around me and called mehis.
The second voice shapes a word I once heard in the dark—Ethos.
Daddy.
Not Kevin. Not my father.
Him.
My pulse fractures. The mist recoils violently, silver light snapping back toward me like I’ve been struck.
“No.” The word scrapes out of my throat.
Phil—Ethos—tilts his head, and for the first time I see it. The way he moves. The way he watches. The calm, predatory patience that has nothing to do with being drunk or human or anything I convinced myself he was.
He’s been here the entire time.
“You’ve been so close,” he murmurs, his voice fully his now—no more Phil, no more pretense. Smooth and deliberate and wrong. “So brave. So determined to protect them all.”
He gestures to the people behind me, the Feeders who came because they felt my call. The families. The broken.
