Trial By Fire

Apricot pushed through the automatic doors and into the cool night. The store’s noise cut off behind her, leaving only the hum of streetlamps and the distant throb of neon. The parking lot was mostly deserted—just a few idle cars and the mirrored glow of flickering signs rippling through puddles of oil.

She exhaled hard, raking a hand through her tangled hair. Streetlights bled orange over the sidewalk while a massive holo-billboard across the road washed everything in shifting blue. Skyscrapers loomed above, their screens blinking and dancing like a thousand watchful eyes over a city that felt both vacant and sleepless.

“Finally over,” she muttered, though the words rang hollow. Ahead, the wide staircase leading down to the street waited—too many steps, and not enough patience left in her bones. But Mr. Kyabetsu didn’t tolerate excuses, and rent didn’t pay itself.

Apricot braced herself. Her slacks and once-white shirt were smeared with grease and syrup—uniform of a girl worked past her limit. As she approached the stairs, a dented soda can skittered across the concrete, nudged by a thin night breeze. Its metallic rattle echoed through the empty lot before falling still—like a tiny, mocking laugh fading into the dark.

Apricot let out a dry, crooked smirk. Even the trash had jokes tonight. “Yeah, yeah. Hilarious,” she muttered, giving the can a half-hearted kick. Her voice barely carried beyond the empty lot.

Resigned, she stepped toward the wide concrete staircase. From the top, the city sprawled out in its neon armor—holo-ads flickering along the boulevard, streetlamps stretching into infinity, skyscrapers hemming in the horizon like jagged sentinels. On any other night, she might’ve admired the chaotic mosaic of lights and motion. Tonight, it was just noise—but it still pulled a tiny breath of awe from her before she looked away.

She didn’t see the shadow coming.

Something slammed into her right leg—hard, fast, like steel swung by an angry giant. Pain ripped up her side, stealing her breath. She barely managed a strangled gasp before the world kicked out from under her.

Gravity seized her. She pitched forward off the top step, knees cracking against concrete. The stairs became a blur—light, dark, light—flashing around her as she tumbled. Her limbs flailed for a handhold, catching nothing but cold air.

A raw cry tore from her throat as she bounced and skidded down the flight, each impact sending shockwaves through her ribs and hips. For a heartbeat, she wasn’t falling—she was simply unmade, weightless in the void—before the next brutal step yanked her back into pain.

Apricot’s foot struck a lower step with a sickening jolt, sending a white-hot spike of pain up her ankle. Her thoughts scattered into pure panic—neck snapping, skull cracking open on the concrete, her body folding wrong in some final, ugly shape. Gravity hauled her down too fast for terror to keep up.

She squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t want to see how she died.

But the impact never came.

Everything stopped—abrupt, impossible. Apricot hung suspended inches above the sidewalk, frozen in midair like the world had paused around her. The night went silent except for her own heartbeat hammering in her ears. Cold air brushed her scraped knees. She wasn’t broken, wasn’t bleeding out on the pavement. She just… hung there.

“Wh-what…?” The word rasped out of her as she tried to twist, to lift an arm, anything. Something unseen held every muscle locked in place.

Her eyes flicked downward first. A pair of polished black boots stood directly before her, toes nearly touching her dangling knees. They belonged to someone tall—legs wrapped in striped, old-fashioned trousers cinched with a cluster of belts that made no sense in any era she knew.

Before she could look up, a voice cut through the stillness—a man’s voice, deep and resonant, carrying an archaic cadence that felt out of place in the neon night.

“’Tis time for thee to choose, girl,” he said. Each syllable landed with the weight of ritual. “Wilt thou embrace death… or choose life?”

Apricot’s heart hammered against her ribs. With effort, she tilted her head upward—and froze.

The figure towering over her looked stitched together from nightmares and theater scraps. A long coat of patchwork leather and shredded brocade hung from his frame, equal parts jester and undertaker. His hood sprouted two curved, horn-like shapes—one lilac, one blood-red—giving him a lopsided, uncanny silhouette. But it was the mask that seized her breath: white porcelain shaped into a long, predatory bird’s beak, curved downward as if sniffing for prey. Its eyes were nothing but dark slits. Hollow. Watching without being seen.

Neon light slid over the beak, casting a sharp shadow across her chest like a blade. The metallic claws tipping each of his gloved fingers clicked softly as he folded his hands behind his back, a faint mechanical whirr punctuating the silence.

Apricot’s throat tightened. A hallucination. Has to be. Maybe I’m dying. Maybe I’m already dead. “Wh-who are you?” she forced out, voice trembling. “What do you mean, choose life or death?”

The masked figure inclined his head with an almost gentle slowness, as though pitying her confusion. “Thou standest upon the edge of thy final curtain call,” he said, each word rich and archaic, shaped like verse rather than speech. “Death reached for thee this night. I stayed its hand.”

His voice echoed strangely—too deep, too old for a city drowned in holo-ads and electric hum.

“I grant thee a singular choice,” he continued. “Wilt thou claim life… or surrender to death?”

Apricot trembled, suspended like a puppet in invisible strings. Her thoughts skittered uselessly. “Your speech is… strange,” she whispered, clinging to anything that wasn’t fear. This can’t be real. Maybe I’m unconscious. Dreaming. Something.

Apricot’s voice shook as she tried to force sense out of the madness. “W-what are you saying? That I… I was supposed to die just now?”

The masked figure dipped his beaked head in a slow, solemn nod. “Aye. Thy thread should have ended at the foot of these steps,” he said, tone almost regretful. “Yet fate—or some whim beyond comprehension—placed me here. I stayed the blow. But know this: such gifts demand their due.”

Her head swirled. Her ankle throbbed, her knees burned, but none of it compared to the panic swelling in her chest. “I don’t understand!” she cried, voice cracking. “Please—just put me down!”

His tone shifted, sharper, edged with impatience. “Time wanes, girl. Life or death? My offer stands but a moment more.” The air around them felt taut, the city’s hum fading into a held breath.

Apricot knew—deep in the place instinct lives—that this was no dream. The cold on her skin, the ache in her bones, the terror knotting her stomach… it was all too real.

“I—I choose life!” she screamed, desperation ripping through every word. “I want to live!”

The unseen force vanished.

She dropped the remaining inches and slammed onto the pavement. Air burst from her lungs. Pain flared in her ribs as she crumpled in a heap, vision blotting with bright spots. She coughed, dragging breath back into her chest, and rolled onto her back with a shuddering groan.

Apricot lay staring up at a sky washed purple-black by city glare. No stars—just haze and the afterimage of her own panic. She blinked hard, trying to steady the world. Everything ached, but her limbs obeyed when she touched them. Nothing broken. Just bruised, shaken, alive.

“I must’ve hit my head,” she muttered. It was the only explanation her rattled mind could grasp. Maybe she’d imagined the beaked man in those frantic seconds before impact.

She pushed herself upright with a wince—and froze.

A shape stood at the top of the staircase. Not the masked man. Bigger. Wrongly shaped. Hunched beneath the spill of fluorescent light from the store entrance. As her vision sharpened, two pale, glowing orbs fixed on her—eyes, but glassy and perfectly round, like twin moons set into a shadowed skull.

A cold shiver crawled up her spine. “What the hell is that…?”

“A phantom.”

The voice came from her right.

The masked stranger was suddenly beside her—no footsteps, no displacement of air—simply there, as though reality had remembered to include him a moment too late. Under the shifting neon, he looked even more unreal: a jester stitched from nightmares and old machinery.

“My dear,” he said gently, hands folding behind his back with a faint metallic whirr, “thy trial is not yet concluded.”

He angled his beaked mask toward the figure on the stairs.

“It begins now.”

Apricot’s thoughts snagged on a single word. Phantom.

The thing at the top of the stairs hissed—wet, guttural. Even from below she saw fluid drip from its jaws: saliva, or some thick black ooze that clung to its teeth. The air around it warped, bending inward as though the creature were tugging at the fabric of the world.

Apricot lurched to her feet, legs trembling. Her heart slammed so hard it drowned every other sound. “That’s… that’s not real,” she whispered, shaking her head. “It can’t be real.” She stumbled back a step, eyes flicking desperately between the masked man and the monstrosity. “That thing—”

“Real enough to end thee,” the man cut in, voice smooth as polished stone. He loomed above her, the dark slits of his mask fixed on her like hollow eyes. “But fear not. Thou hast been granted what thou needest to defeat it.”

He raised one arm in a sweeping gesture. The ragged sleeve swayed, stained with something too dark to be anything but blood. He extended a single clawed finger toward the creature. “Act quickly, before the phantom learns thou still drawest breath. I have bestowed power upon thee—power to vanquish such beasts. How it takes shape… that is thine to uncover.”

His words washed over her, barely forming meaning.

The creature began to descend—no footsteps, just a sickening slide, its limbs folding and unfolding in ways that defied anatomy. Its glowing eyes never blinked.

Apricot’s pulse roared. Run. The command rose from someplace primal, older than thought.

She didn’t hesitate.

She spun and sprinted down the sidewalk, her bruised legs screaming—but terror driving her faster than she’d ever moved in her life.

Behind her, a shriek ripped through the night—raw, furious, inhuman. Apricot risked a glance back and nearly stumbled.

The phantom didn’t run so much as pour down the steps, its body a roiling mass of black sludge and thrashing limbs. Those pale, moon-like eyes burned with ravenous intent. As it slipped under a streetlamp, its shape sharpened just enough for a glimpse of its true horror—dozens of segmented appendages unfurling from its back. Too many to count. Too fast to track. Each one ended in something lethal: jagged bone, hooked talon, knife-like shard.

It skittered toward her with a centipede’s impossible speed, a nightmare of tar and joints clicking in frantic rhythm.

Apricot swallowed a scream and ran harder. Her boots hammered the pavement, splashing through puddles. She darted into a narrow side alley, desperate for cover—

Dead end.

A metal wall rose before her, tagged with neon graffiti. No escape.

She spun to flee, but the phantom was already at the alley’s entrance, spilling into the gap like liquid darkness. It blocked her path with ease.

Apricot’s back hit the cold brick. She threw her arms up on instinct, knowing they were useless against the thing closing in. Terror rattled her bones. The phantom crawled forward, savoring her helplessness. Its form shifted constantly—a mass of tar, limbs, and dripping malice. Slithering arms scraped along the concrete, leaving a trail of oily residue. Its “head” drifted out on a serpentine neck, featureless except for those dead, glowing eyes and a jagged maw bristling with broken teeth.

The jaws opened.

A voice spilled out—not one, but many, a garbled chorus scraping directly against her mind.

“Feeeasst… of… flesssh!”

Apricot gagged as the stench rolled over her—rot, sour decay, something fouler beneath. She covered her mouth with one arm, extending the other to keep the creature back even though it meant nothing.

That’s when she felt it.

Her right arm burned. Not the sting of scraped skin—something deeper. Hot. Growing. Crawling from shoulder to fingertips beneath her flesh like fire fighting to surface.

In her panic, it barely broke through the fear—but it was there, undeniable, building.

The phantom coiled in on itself, drawing its many limbs tight like a monstrous spring. Bones—if they were bones—snapped and shifted. Then it lunged.

A dozen bladed limbs shot toward Apricot, enough to carve her apart in a single strike.

“No!” she screamed, throwing her arms up in a useless shield. There was nowhere left to run. No time. No hope. She braced for the tearing bite of claws—

—when the burning in her right arm erupted.

It flared from a spark to a sunburst in an instant. At the peak of her terror, instinct seized her. She thrust her right hand forward, voice breaking as she cried, “STOP!”

The world detonated.

A lance of blazing purple energy exploded from her palm, streaking through the air like a lightning bolt. It struck the phantom dead-on with a blast that cracked like thunder. Neon-violet light swallowed the alley, turning every shadow electric.

The effect was immediate.

The beam tore straight through the phantom’s body, blowing a molten hole through its tar-black mass. Violet fire blossomed across its form, clinging to it—consuming it. The creature reeled back, unleashing a scream that rattled the windows, its limbs spasming and flailing wildly as the flames chewed at its darkness.

Apricot stared at her own hand, stunned. Purple fire curled around her fingers, dancing like living plasma—hot enough to scorch the air, yet she felt no pain at all. It was as if a torch had ignited inside her and the flame had simply chosen her arm as its path.

“What… what is happening?!” she gasped, her voice nearly drowned beneath the phantom’s wailing.

The creature wasn’t dead—not yet—but it was writhing in agony, slamming its flailing limbs against the alley walls. Each impact splattered sizzling chunks of shadow-flesh that evaporated into oily smoke. The violet fire only burned brighter, tightening its grip around the phantom like judgment made manifest.

“Wretch!” the phantom screeched, its voice warping between hatred and panic. What remained of its shredded body convulsed, regenerating a forest of new tendrils. Dozens—hundreds—burst from the burning mass in a frenzy. With a final, desperate lunge, the creature hurled itself upward, a cyclone of blades and limbs descending toward Apricot like a living guillotine.

Adrenaline hit her like a shockwave.

The purple fire in her hand flared, bright enough to sear the air. She didn’t think—thinking would’ve killed her. Instinct roared louder than fear, and she moved with it. She swung her right arm in a wide arc, a cry tearing from her throat—equal parts terror and raw defiance.

The flame obeyed.

A crescent of violet fire swept outward, following her motion like an extension of her own will. It crashed into the airborne phantom in a blinding surge.

The creature never touched the ground.

The moment the inferno struck, the phantom erupted mid-air—cleaved apart in a shower of burning segments. Its scream fractured into a chorus of a hundred fading voices, echoing down the alley before cutting off all at once. Charred remnants disintegrated into glowing motes.

Apricot stood frozen, chest heaving, arm outstretched. Purple fire still raced along her skin in flickering bands, throwing wild light across the brick walls and her stunned expression. Motes of shimmering light—like embers or drifting fireflies—rose from the phantom’s remains. They floated upward, dissolving into the night one by one, as though whatever foul spirit had animated the creature was finally losing its grip on the world.

The alley stank of burnt meat and scorched oil. Ash drifted down like dirty snow, settling into the puddles at Apricot’s feet. She lowered her arm, trembling so hard she could barely keep her balance. The purple fire guttered, then vanished with a soft whoosh, leaving only a faint glow fading beneath her skin.

Her hand—miraculously—was whole. No burns, no cracks, nothing but the lingering shimmer of whatever power had just torn out of her. She flexed her fingers, half expecting them to crumble.

They didn’t.

“I… I can’t believe this,” she whispered, breath hitching. “I… did that?”

The alley answered with blackened walls, the ghostly residue of something inhuman, and the undeniable silence left in the phantom’s absence. She had killed a monster with a blast of energy from her hand. Unreal. Impossible. Unmistakably real.

A slow, deliberate clap broke the silence.

Apricot flinched hard, nearly collapsing as she whipped toward the sound. The masked man stood at the alley’s mouth, applauding with metal-tipped fingers that clicked like tiny blades.

“Splendid,” he purred, voice echoing faintly. “The ritual is complete.”

She pressed back against the wall for support, legs wobbling under her. The adrenaline was bleeding away fast, leaving her hollow and light-headed. “R-ritual?” she managed, barely more than a croak. “This was… a ritual to you?”

The beaked mask angled in a thoughtful tilt. “In a manner of speaking,” he replied. “Thou hast slain the first of many phantoms haunting this city. The power within thee hath awakened—unorthodox in its unveiling, perhaps, but effective all the same.”

Apricot’s vision blurred as if the world were tilting sideways. A dizzy laugh bubbled up in her throat—too close to a sob—and she pressed a shaking hand to her forehead. “No,” she whispered. “No, no… this isn’t happening. I hit my head. I’m hallucinating. I have to be.”

She staggered out of the alley, legs wobbling beneath her. The masked man didn’t follow so much as glide, his head turning to track her like a statue learning to move. Apricot’s voice rose in a thin, desperate pitch. “You’re not real. That thing wasn’t real. None of this is real!”

She half-ran, half-stumbled into the street.

And suddenly the world snapped back into its usual, indifferent rhythm. The city hummed around her—LED billboards flashing, neon signs buzzing, a cartoon beer mascot grinning down with oblivious cheer. Papers fluttered across the empty intersection, pushed by a lazy breeze. Everything looked painfully normal, like the universe had shrugged off her nightmare as if it had never happened at all.

Apricot realized she was babbling aloud and clamped a hand over her mouth, choking back a hysterical laugh. She was a wreck—bruised, soaked, streaked with ash, trembling from head to toe. “I just want to go home,” she croaked to no one in particular. “I just… want to go home. Pretend this day never happened. Please.”

A shadow drifted beside her.

She turned—and her breath hitched. The stranger wasn’t walking. He floated a few inches above the pavement, weightless, the tattered edges of his patchwork coat swaying as if caught in a current she couldn’t feel.

Of course he wasn’t bound by gravity.

Why would he be?

Nothing about tonight had obeyed the rules of the world she thought she lived in.

Apricot’s voice shook, frayed and thin. “You expect me to believe any of this is real? I just killed a monster by—by firing laser fire out of my hand! I should be hysterical. I should be unconscious. Oh God…” She pressed her fingers to her mouth as a sob clawed its way up her throat. “Oh God, I’m crazy. I’m actually crazy. I must’ve knocked something loose because now I’m talking to a nightmare clown in the middle of an empty street at midnight.”
A desperate, unhinged giggle slipped out before she could stop it.

In the space of a blink, the masked man was suddenly in front of her.

One moment he was drifting behind her, weightless; the next, he landed directly in her path with a soft, decisive thud. Apricot stumbled back, almost falling, but his hands shot out and clamped onto her shoulders. His grip was cold—freezing—and impossibly strong.

She gasped.

He leaned low, the long beak of his mask gliding close enough to brush her cheek. Through the slits of the mask, she glimpsed something behind the darkness—a flash of reflected light, maybe eyes, maybe lenses—whatever it was, it rooted her to the spot.

“Thou dost babble like a madwoman,” he said, the archaic cadence turning sharp as a blade. “Compose thyself. What thou hast witnessed is reality—my reality, which hath now entwined with thine.”

His grip tightened just enough to hold her still.

“Listen well, Apricot. The power I granted thee is not without its price. I did not spare thy life from benevolence.”

Her stomach dropped. The adrenaline haze lifted just enough for his meaning to strike home.

“P… price?” she echoed, voice barely a ghost.

Of course there was a price. Nothing in this city came free. And nothing as impossible as tonight ever came without a cost.

He released her so suddenly she swayed, then rose to his full height—tall enough to blot out the streetlights behind him.

“I have a task for thee,” he said, tone calm but heavy as a falling curtain. “By accepting my gift of life, thou hast entered a pact. Thou shalt wield the power I bestowed to purge this city of the phantoms that plague it.”

Apricot’s breath caught. “You… want me to fight more of those things?” The memory of churning limbs and glowing eyes flashed behind her eyelids. She shook her head hard, panic spiking. “No. No way. I can’t do that. I’m not— I’m not an exorcist or a soldier! I’m a journalism student! I didn’t ask for any of this! You can’t just—just draft me into some monster-hunting nightmare!”

She lunged sideways, pure instinct propelling her.

But he was faster.

In the span of a blink, the path she’d chosen closed—he was simply there, blocking her way. Before she could react, his clawed hand lashed out. The blow wasn’t meant to maim, but it carried inhuman strength.

Apricot cried out as she was thrown backward. She hit the sidewalk hard, palms scraping raw on the concrete. Pain sparked up her arms.

When she looked up, her stomach iced over.

He stood exactly where he had been—as if he hadn’t moved at all to send her flying. A towering silhouette against the neon, his shadow stretched long across the pavement, swallowing her whole.

“Dost thou still doubt this is real?” he snarled.

His voice shook the air—layered, reverberating, like two or three voices speaking in perfect, terrible unison. The hint of amusement he’d shown earlier was gone, replaced by something cold, absolute, and unyielding.

Apricot’s blood iced over. She scrambled back on her hands, breath hitching, vision blurring with tears. “P-please,” she choked out, hating how small she sounded. “I don’t know what you want! Just leave me alone!”

He shook his head slowly—almost mournfully. His stillness held the weight of someone disappointed, not enraged. “I have been clear,” he said, voice soft but unyielding. “The power I granted thee exists for one purpose: to battle the phantoms. ’Tis my duty—my curse—to purge them from this realm. Yet I cannot do so directly, not as I am. Thus I require an agent, one bound to my cause.”

His mask tilted, empty slits staring straight through her.

“That mantle falls to thee, Apricot. Thou hast no choice.”

She wiped her tears with a shaky hand. A flash of anger—thin, desperate—cut through the fear. “And what if I refuse?” she rasped. “What if I walk away and never do anything for you?”

Clinging to a nearby wall, she forced herself upright. Her knees trembled, but she made herself stand. Made herself meet that void-black gaze.

The masked man stilled.

Then, in one swift motion, he closed the distance.

His clawed hand seized the front of her shirt and hauled her up onto her toes. Apricot gasped, hands flying to his wrist, but she couldn’t pry him off. He pulled her close until the wooden beak nearly touched her nose. Cold metal claws grazed her collarbone through the thin fabric.

When he spoke, it was a whisper sharpened to a blade.

“If thou refusest,” he said, voice dark enough to chill bone, “I shall take thy soul as payment for the power I have already bestowed.”

Apricot’s heart lurched so violently it hurt. Take her soul? Her breath snagged in her throat. “You… you can’t do that,” she managed, but the words were thin, hollow. A lie meant only to comfort herself. Some instinct older than reason whispered that he absolutely could.

He didn’t bother answering.

Reality simply broke.

Everything flipped—no, collapsed. The world vanished so abruptly it felt like a trapdoor had opened beneath existence itself. One moment Apricot was pinned against the wall; the next there was nothing. Not darkness—darkness still had texture, depth, air. This was the absence of all things. No light. No sound. No body. No Apricot.

She couldn’t feel his grip. She couldn’t feel the ground. She couldn’t even tell whether she had eyes anymore.

She hung suspended in a void so total it annihilated thought.

For a horrifying second, Apricot believed—knew—she had died.

Then, faintly, a sound emerged. A muffled thumping. Slow. Distant. Struggling.

My heartbeat?

It echoed as if from behind thick glass or deep water—something separating her from herself. She tried to scream, but she had no mouth, no throat. Only her mind, trembling and small against the endless nothing.

A point of light appeared.

It swelled, hovering in the void—then widened into a window of reality. Apricot stared, wide-eyed in a body she no longer inhabited, as she saw herself lying crumpled on the sidewalk where she’d stood moments before.

Her own face stared back—ashen, slack, terrifyingly empty. Her eyes were rolled back to white slivers. Her mouth twitched open and closed in a strangled, silent gasp. Her limbs convulsed violently, heels drumming the pavement in a grotesque rhythm. Foam flecked her lips.

It wasn’t a vision.

It was her death, unfolding in real time. A life severed. A soul torn free.

And she was watching it from the wrong side of her own body.

Floating above the awful scene was the masked man, hovering like a funeral omen. He stood over her convulsing body, one clawed hand extended. Resting in his palm was a small orb of golden light, pulsing gently—as if breathing.

Apricot didn’t hear the truth. She felt it.

That orb was her. Or the part of her that mattered. Her soul.

A thin, invisible thread stretched from the glowing sphere back to her twitching body, taut with unbearable tension. Even in disembodied form, she felt it—like a cord cinched around her very existence.

The reaper—because nothing else fit—studied the orb with an eerie gentleness, tilting it as though examining a jewel. Apricot’s consciousness quivered in terror. She tried to scream, to plead, but she had no voice, no lungs, no body to give shape to her fear.

His claws tightened.

The tether snapped tight, and agony ripped through her—a cold, cosmic pain that went deeper than marrow, past flesh and spirit. If he crushed that orb, she knew—knew—she would simply cease.

Then, mercifully, his hand opened.

The orb streaked away from him in a flash of gold, shooting back toward her collapsed form like a falling star.

Apricot slammed into herself.

Her senses detonated: blinding pain, freezing air scraping across her skin, the bitter taste of bile on her tongue. She was on the ground, curled on her side, chest heaving. Reality surged back in fragments—the echo of a distant horn, the rough grit of wet pavement, the flickering streetlamp overhead.

She gagged, rolled onto her hands and knees, and vomited onto the concrete. Her whole body convulsed, purging the terror that still clung to her like poison.

Bootsteps scraped the pavement behind her.

A clawed hand fisted in Apricot’s hair and yanked her head up. She cried out, fingers clawing helplessly at the ground as the reaper forced her to face him. He didn’t pull hard enough to tear hair free—but enough to hold her like prey. Through tear-blurred eyes, she saw that white beaked mask only inches from her own. Her throat burned raw from retching; drool and bile dripped down her chin.

“Thou shalt perform the task I have given,” the reaper intoned, each word heavy as iron. “Thou didst choose life. Now pay the toll for thy salvation.”

He let go.

Her head fell forward, and she sagged onto her rear, shaking violently, arms hugging her ribs as if she could warm her soul back into her body. A coldness lingered deep within her—echoes of the void, of that severed tether—and she knew none of this had been a hallucination.

Somehow she found her voice. “H-how… do you know my name?” she rasped. She’d never told him. Yet he’d spoken it with absolute certainty.

The masked figure paused above her. When he finally spoke, his tone carried a strange, solemn softness. “A reaper knows the name of every soul he touches. From the moment I beheld thee… I knew thee, Apricot Signa.”

Reaper. The word landed with terrible clarity. Whatever he was—whatever rules governed him—she believed him now. Completely.

Apricot curled in on herself, small and trembling. “Okay,” she whispered, throat raw. “Okay… I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want. Just… please… no more.”

The night seemed to lean in, listening to her surrender.

The reaper said nothing more. He stepped back, and his outline blurred—edges dissolving as the shadows swallowed him. “Go home, child,” he murmured. “Rest while thou canst. I shall call on thee soon. The city’s phantoms will not slay themselves.”

Apricot blinked.

He vanished between one heartbeat and the next. A moment ago he’d stood tall and terrible before her; now the sidewalk was empty, the only movement the faint cloud of her breath drifting in the cold air.

She spun in a frantic circle, searching the dark for any trace of him. Nothing. Just the late-night quiet, the neon glow bleeding across storefronts, and the distant buzz of signage. It was as if he had never existed.

Her hand pressed hard to her chest. Her heart hammered so violently she felt faint. Everything looked normal again—or as normal as Blue Ash City ever got near midnight. The same empty stretch of sidewalk. The same skittering breeze nudging an old can along the asphalt. The only signs of what had happened were a few scorched, unidentifiable smears on the pavement where the phantom had died.

“There’s… no way that was real,” she whispered. The words sounded weak even to her.

She looked up. The sky was a hazy sheet of purple-black, starless and empty beneath the city’s light. Vast. Uncaring. It made her feel impossibly small, a lone speck holding a truth no one else would ever believe.

Apricot wrapped her arms around herself, shivering as the adrenaline drain left her hollow and aching. She needed something familiar—anything. Somewhere to collapse and breathe and try to hold herself together.

Home.

She needed to go home.

She took a shaky step, then another. Her ankle throbbed, every bruise screaming, but she could move—and movement meant survival. She limped away from the alley, the stairs, and whatever was left of the life she’d had an hour ago.

At the corner, she stopped and looked back.

Is he still watching?
From a rooftop? A shadow?
The thought hollowed her out, made the night feel too wide and too tight all at once.

Apricot hugged her coat close and forced herself onward, limping into the neon-dark. The city blinked and buzzed around her, uncaring—just as it always had—while she trembled alone within it.

She wasn’t sure what terrified her more: the phantoms lurking in those shadows… or the cold, merciless reaper who’d claimed her fate as his own.

Either way, one truth pressed down on her with every painful step:

Her life—whatever it had been—was over.

And something far stranger had begun.