July 22-23
Most of the team continued doing their Cairo thing—scouting locations, coordinating media ops, pretending they weren’t melting in the sun. The simfluencers scattered across the city, doing what they do best: manufacturing meaning from ambiance. Meanwhile, Halo delivered a performance worthy of the old gods.
Taking on the persona of Isis, she preached a gospel of difference and unity, past and future, death and rebirth. It hit harder than expected, the crowd swept up in something both ancient and very modern. Even I felt it. For a moment.
But I excused myself and left the sacred for the profane.
Vanya and I took a suborbital to Seattle.
Why now? Wizkid’s been digging, and we’ve got another lead on the Hope Springs killer. Not Maria this time. An elf calling himself James Rivers—a fake SIN, naturally. We’d ID’d him from old footage and triangulated recent movement patterns. And... I’ve been having dreams. The yellow eye again. Always watching.
We landed at dusk. Swung by my old place in Tacoma, changed clothes, armed up, and took the bike to Redmond.
James wasn’t too hard to find. We caught him at a Stuffer Shack, of all places. He was... twitchy, sure. But not hostile. He confessed to being part of “something larger,” that the killings were part of a ritual, and that he wasn’t working alone. He confired what I already suspected, including a location—an abandoned mall—and we let him go. He’s Redmond’s problem, not mine. We had bigger fish to fry.
What we found beneath the mall was... a descent.
Someone had dug a shaft, straight into the earth. A troll—badly mutated but lucid—offered us “worm repellent.” We took it. Smart move. Without it, the rock worms that stalked the tunnels might’ve torn us apart.
The caves below were a mix of natural erosion and ancient excavation. We were attacked once—three hook horrors, fast and mean. But we handled it.
And then we found it. The claw. Embedded in obsidian like a relic from myth. I knew what it meant. The dreams. The pull. Just like the scale in the Lost Continent lab—but stronger. There was power in that claw.
I told Vanya what would happen. That I might not wake up. She rolled her eyes and said she’d watch me “for a while,” but she wasn’t dragging my corpse home. Fair enough.
I touched the claw.
Lightning. Pain. Death.
I woke up in the astral plane.
Physical adepts don’t do astral travel. Which is how I knew I was dead.
On the other side of a vast crystal wall, a Great Eye blinked. Then a thousand more. Each refracted, reflected. A Great Dragon stared through the wall. It spoke without moving. Claimed to be beyond names.
We talked. Or circled each other in words. I claimed his power. He threatened to eat me. The crystal kept us separate. I deduced he was imprisoned—he insisted otherwise. But he admitted I was “vigorous,” “cunning,” and “surprisingly dragon-like.” Which I’ll take as a compliment.
In the end, we struck a vague accord. I’d help “free” him (no timeline, no specifics), and he’d grant me draconic sight—a power boost, like before. Then he slammed my spirit back into my body.
I woke up with Vanya glaring at me, calling me an idiot. Apparently, I’d been clinically dead for a while. She hadn’t left.
We climbed out.
Outside, we found James, the troll, and two more cultists preparing a blood sacrifice. I didn't interefere. Again, not my problem. But I did swear them to secrecy and service. Appointed them Wardens of the Pit. No one else goes down. Not without my say-so.
We burned our gear, bought new clothes at a thrift shop, and made it back to Tacoma. Then caught the suborbital back to Cairo, just in time for the Giza concert on the 23rd.
Because that’s how you do brand management and spiritual apocalypse in the same 48 hours.
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