The rain didn't yield through the entirety of the following day and continued into the next. It bothered me little, as I was not inclined to go outdoors. I spent much of my time sitting alone in the bedroom that had once belonged to Sara, lost to my muddled thoughts. 

My seclusion had nothing to do with my recent maudlin mood and everything to do with me being a man of introspection and reserve. Being immortal for so long meant learning to sink oneself into quiet contemplation, learning to wait even if one didn't know what to wait for—and I surely didn't know what I was waiting for, only that I was waiting. Waiting for something that wouldn't come.

I sat upon the floor with my head propped on the mattress's edge and my unfocused gaze drifting over the ceiling. The rain was a constant white noise filling the drudgery of my day and night while sounds of bubbling and grinding metal emanated from the living room. Much to my consternation, the black mage was still here, and I had yet to discover just what he was really after. 

"Crafty bastard," I murmured as my eyes dropped to the door and the thin bar of light seeping in over the threshold. I wished he would leave, but—being unable to expel the curiously strong man by force—I had no other option but to wait for him to leave by choice. I knew I'd awaken one morning and find the house vacant once more, the black mage and his dubious experiments gone, Cage having fled the city before his jailers could catch up. 

I could only wait for that day to come. 

Turning my mind from the living room, I instead considered the flat, empty cardboard box, the duffle bag, and the task I'd assigned myself. As the new permanent resident of this house, it was foolish for me to keep what meager belongings I had inside a bag and to live out of it like a vagabond. I'd lived that way for all of my life—drifting from place to place, never settling for long for fear of what may come haunting my doorstep—and it was idiotic for me to continue in the same manner. 

I needed to unpack that bag, and to do so I needed to store part of Sara's things.

Exhaling, I stretched muscles rendered tense by my languor and rose, opening the closet by hooking my fingers between the sliding door and the wall. Sara's clothes were hung on hangers inside, each piece less tidy than the previous, as if Sara had stowed them away without thought or care.

I set up the box and then began to pull one shirt off its hanger at a time and toss it into the box. None of the items held any sentimental value to me, though I wasn't sure if it was possible for me to form such an attachment—until my hand landed on a sweater near the back. A thin spark of recognition lit through my fingertips as they slid over the worn threads of a gray, ribbed sweater.

"You're the same as all the sniveling humans who came before you," my own voice snarled in my memory. "They all looked at me like that, with disappointment, and they tried to kill me—!"

We'd stood in a courtyard before a church as the choir inside had sung praise and worship in the name of their god, their voices intertwined in the melody of a late fall rain shower. I remembered this sweater on its owner, streaked by the water with its sleeves encircling her thin, narrow hands.

Her fingers had worked at the loose threads as she'd lifted her head, black hair plastered to her pale skin, and said, "I don't want to kill you....I would rather have you as my Sin than Amoroth, Darius."

I'd stared at her. I'd thought to tell the girl then about those who had come before her, about the men and women—the humans—who'd used me as a shield, had sought to lure me into the confidence only to betray my trust and abuse my power. There'd been many in my life, many I'd killed without remorse because they were filth who desired naught but my utter devotion in all things.

I'd killed them gladly. Joyfully. But I didn't tell my shadeborn.

Though Sara had sought to use me, she did so within the parameters of my own tolerance and had never wanted to abuse my abilities. She'd pushed me to complete the contract I'd agreed to, and she hadn't demanded anything beyond that, though I knew Sara had wanted to live to study magic and all that was new and fascinating in her eyes.

For such a staunch and arrogant woman, Sara had been oddly selfless.

I let the sweater remain and instead tossed a few more blouses and t-shirts into the box. Satisfied I had enough space for my own items in the closet now, I folded the top of the box shut and retrieved the roll of duct tape I'd left on the carpet to tape the top shut. I used a permanent marker to write Sara's name on the side, then lifted the box to carry it out of the room.

The mage had set up a small, dysfunctional laboratory on the coffee table and part of the breakfast bar. The smell of burnt metal was overpowering as I crossed the living room with the box under my arm, and I wrinkled my nose with revulsion at all the strange implements the man had scattered over the house.

Cage sat cross-legged on the floor before a silver set of scales and an open notebook, scribbling a diagram onto a fresh page as he balanced a series of translucent stones. Each was marked with a rune and smelled heavily of his magic.

"Is that—?!" I paused to gesture as the runes and diagrams etched on the table itself. "Are those carved into the table? My coffee table?!"

The mage glanced at me, blinked, then prodded his notebook forward until it covered the offending marks. "No! Naturally I wouldn't do that!"

Furious and at a loss for words, I continued into the dark garage, where I slammed the box onto a similar stack of dusty cardboard vessels and sucked air through my teeth. The rest of the boxes were marked in the same fashion, with a name and brief label of what was contained within. Sara's untidy hand had scrawled Papy or Memere a dozen or more times, and as I set a box of her possession atop the others, I felt as if I were adding another brick to the Gaspard mausoleum.

How can mortals survive like this? My mind turned over thought after thought in a quest to discover how to expel Cage from the house. Physically, I believed we were a match in strength—but the man was a black mage capable of ripping my heart out with a mere twitch of his treacherous fingers. I couldn't overpower him. If he left, it'd be by his own choice.

How do they cope with such insufferable inability?

"He will leave," I swore to myself as I went to return indoors. "He will grow bored and leave...eventually."

The mage was back to scribbling, though he'd moved a book over the etching and had set a brass mechanism on top of it. When I entered the house and shut the garage door, he snapped his notebook shut and rose with a flourish, dropping the pen somewhere out of sight. My brow rose. 

"Putting away some of Sara's things then, are we?" he asked with a decisive look toward the garage wall. "Beginning to settle in now that you're done moping?"

I hadn't been moping, but I didn't bother to correct the man. I instead turned my attention to his magical instruments and, with an out swept arm, asked, "What is all this garbage for?"

"Does it matter?" The mage plopped another stone onto the scales, and though it should have unbalanced the other side, it remained in the same position as the runes marking their faces glittered with an eerie green light. "You don't truly care."

"I wouldn't have asked if I didn't care." Though, in truth, I cared little about their actual use as opposed to the reason for their being in my house. I was wary of magic—mages in particular—after so many years of ducking and hiding from Cage's brethren.

As if reading my mind, the mage only harrumphed as he stashed his notebook into that voluminous coat of his. "Tell me, Darius. I've been pondering a question over the last month or so and can't come to a satisfactory conclusion. Maybe your thoughts will make my own clearer. Tell me, oh Pride: what will become of the Sins now?"

I frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I mean exactly what I said. Are you deaf?" He lowered himself onto the couch's arm and crossed his legs at the ankle. "So many lie dead. Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Gluttony, and—in essence—Pride. Only Lust and Greed live, and let's face it—Greed isn't going to survive long. He never recognized the protection you and the others provided him against the less...savory elements haunting the world."

"Your question is vague." I leaned on the edge of the dining table. "The Sins will go on. The Seats are vacant and must be filled—and they will be filled, regardless of what anyone thinks about it. The Seats are anchors of raw energy and power that require a soul to silence the vacuum of their existence. Someone will be pulled forth for each vacancy and, as I said, the Sins will go on." Without me.

"So you say." Something chimed in Cage's mess and a fresh cloud of that acrid, scorched smell wafted into the air as a peal of thunder broke over the house.

"So I know." Who was he to insinuate that I was wrong? I had been a Sin and had lived through the creation of numerous second-borns. I knew what was going to happen.

"I have my doubts." A soft chuckle began in his chest as the mage laid a hand across his chin and gently sank his teeth into the side of his index finger. "It's naïve to believe events will unfold as they have in the past in an indefinite manner. There are fulcrums to time's relentless momentum, points that divert and change the very nature of history's impetus and we are powerless to understand where we will be swept in the undertow."

My eyes narrowed and I crossed my arms as the mage continued. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

"Five Sins are dead. The two who remain are untried, one little more than a spoiled child, and the other a grieving woman. Your kind has long held check against and been the cause of cataclysmic events involving the others of Terrestria. Your fulcrum has been removed from time's march and it will divert in a new direction, changing everything we have come to know and understand. The stone has already been cast into the waters and the ripples are stretching outward to become waves."

The storm raged. The rain lashed at the window.

Cage removed his hand to reveal a wide, savage grin. "Will the Sin survive? Will you? Tell me, Darius: how well can you swim?"

An ill feeling had begun to slink through my veins as he spoke, and yet it had nothing to do with Cage or his power. It was born in my middle and crept toward my heart, a slow and insidious unease that came to fruition like the first blow of battle. My head jerked toward the front window as Cage began to laugh in earnest and a cold sweat formed on my brow. It couldn't be—

I had felt this sensation before.

The runes upon Cage's stones began to glow red and toppled from the scale.

I was out the door in an instant, moving faster than I would have thought possible to move past the mage and across the yard. My shoes slid on the wet concrete as I hopped from the curb and ran on the asphalt, heedless of who saw me run like a man possessed in the torrential downpour.

Images reeled in my head and overpowered my vision as I darted through a neighbor's yard and hopped their fence. In mere seconds I was through their garden and over the back wall, landing on a muddy hillside with little regard to the dirt I splattered over myself.

The vision solidified. I saw again my own temple in flames while men of Mithras fled into the night. The energy had overcome the city in an instant—a veritable hurricane of theurgy unleashed before its monstrous holder. My temple had burned, men had screamed, I'd felt terror in my heart that day and every day the sensation deigned to return.

Cresting the hill, I spun atop its pinnacle without catching my breath as my eyes searched the sky. Though nothing but dark, surly clouds greeted my sight, I knew the evil rampaging in my veins wasn't my imagination. Mortal or not, I knew this feeling and knew what came with it. So did Cage. I recognized those runes and had seen them slipped into the pockets of mages before or tied about their necks.

All over the country—the world—those runes would be glowing a stark, bloody red.

Unbidden, my eye was drawn toward the east, where the city proper lay beyond the swell of hills and I beheld the exact horror I had been searching for. The clouds above Verweald roiled and twisted upon each other, then began to peel back like flesh split from muscle and bone. A bare sliver of sky was revealed, and as the thunder roared its fury, naked moonlight spilled forth in a veil of gossamer.

"Shit!"

The light only lasted for a moment, disappearing before most would even note its presence, but it was enough. I knew what had come.

An Absolian had descended.