It was well past midnight in the fake arbitrary time that the city of Thereafter followed, and Felipe Espino could not sleep. As the athlete tossed listlessly in bed, unbeknownst to him, something Old and Terrible awakened in the depths of the Void. Felipe flipped his laying posture from one to the other, rotating through the expected variants of prone and supine positions in bed but none of them felt quite right, like he was a lock that had come unstuck somehow. As Felipe got into the thought spiral of trying to puzzle out how, exactly one were supposed to ‘think about nothing’ thus allowing sleep to gain purchase in his mind, a brittle, hardened shell of exotic crystals came apart under the lightest of prodding by a group of curious scavengers, and the terror within got unleashed.

Felipe pulled and fretted with his covers, experimenting with various ways he could cover or uncover himself and the ways that made him more or less comfortable. There was, Felipe grew convinced, an ideal ratio of covered to uncovered skin that’d make him the exact level of comfortable that’d make sleep come as naturally as it usually did. Meanwhile, in the Void, the faintly glowing crystals whose many gleaming facets had initially attracted the Scavenger’s attention exploded outward, turning from beautiful albeit somewhat impractical armor into a swarm of missiles. Some, entirely without intention, found homes lodged in throats, eyes or arteries, turning into deadly knives entirely without meaning to.

Felipe rolled his shoulders. Did he have a stiff muscle anywhere that was bothering him? No, he wasn’t quite the well-oiled machine he was during Competition Season, granted, but he was still a fine-tuned instrument of physical prowess. He had worked hard to become who he was, and more work still keeping it all in motion as he had progressed from youth into adulthood. So no, he hadn’t pulled a muscle or anything. If he had, he’d notice, as he took care of the most sanctified temple that was his body. Those of the scavengers that had survived the omnidirectional fan of crystal knives, fled, believing for a moment that the Geode Coffin had been a booby trap of some sort, and not something much worse that, more or less by unfortunate circumstance had become a voidborne claymore mine.

For a little while, Felipe considered perhaps having a wank would solve things. Some times it did, although he generally wasn’t very sleepy in the afterglow. Whether it’d work or not, though, Felipe wasn’t feeling it, it in this case being feeling himself. Solo play could be all manner of fun, but Felipe was, at heart, a team player. He didn’t want just to be fucked, mind, he wanted, needed if he was desperately honest with himself, to be worshiped. It was more than being seen, it was being held in awe. This wasn’t to say the right circumstance and right person couldn’t evoke more animal need in the man, it just took some doing. The fleeing Scavengers made one fatal mistake in their haste to escape the violence of the Geode Coffin, they fled straight towards safety, towards Thereafter. While the thing held no actual ill will towards its accidental quarry, it would also be completely correct to assume it had no good will, or particularly salient esteem for them as well.

The whole ‘going to sleep’-situation had escalated to the point where Felipe seriously considered going to get some water or do a light jog around the Castle or something to that effect. He wasn’t going to, though. He knew himself well enough to know that meant he wouldn’t get any sleep tonight. The thing from the Geode Coffin caught up with the fleeing Scavengers before a minute had passed, approaching their routed group like a spiked disco ball. The passing itself was uneventful, with no air to carry whatever sound the flying creature produced, if it indeed produced any. What came after, however, was far worse.

Felipe did a final heroic attempt at adjusting his pillow to be Just Right, and did some micro-adjustments to his posture. If preparing to go to sleep was an art, Felipe had produced a Masterwork. Now, he only lacked the stillness of mind. It wasn’t like had anything major to worry about, he told himself, no major competitions were upcoming as Thereafter time moved much faster than on Earth so he had plenty of time. There were no pissed-off sponsors and agents who had long since grown immune to Felipe’s boyish charms and good looks, although granted Grand Magus Eltern had stopped greeting him whenever they passed in the hallways. There were no messy breakups or dramatic friends-with-benefits situations that required his attention, although there was always that whole Michael thing…

The scavengers who perished immediately, dying with a scream that wasn’t a scream as much as heat expelling air from their lungs as the direct burn from whatever infernal engine powered the Thing from the Geode Coffin, arguably were the lucky ones. Those that were far enough away to react in time to the sudden heat of the Thing’s wake, though, were scarcely allowed a second of time to mourn their fallen comrades of processing the sheer horror of their deaths before what would reunite the two groups made its presence be known. It started as radio silence, the voices and sounds of their comrades suddenly disappearing. Thus isolated from each other, only the very brightest of them caught on to what was going to happen before it did. It did them little good.

The final problem the scavengers would ever face started with slight dizziness. The kind of thing one could dismiss weren’t it for how sudden it started, and how steadily it grew more severe. Once the scavengers were starting to feel light-headed, the damage was already done. Their Void Pearls losing all magic bound to them, reducing the life-saving life support they provided into being, at best, a fetching lapel pin to asphyxiate with. Some scavengers panicked immediately, gasping for breath that would just not come, as even the buildup of poisonous CO2 dissipated into the void, along with whatever scarce air the pearl had produced before fading entirely. Those that tried to hold their breath only prolonged the inevitable, feeling the build-up of burn from the acidic gas they would not allow themselves to expel until the body took matters in their own hands and expelled the offending gas because anything, surely, would be better than this. The next breath never came, heaving diaphragms and aching lungs be damned. There just wasn’t any air to breathe, and though the Newtonian laws at play kept them floating in the same direction and at approximately the same speed as before, it didn’t take long before the scavengers stopped moving, fallen into an unconscious daze from which they’d never awaken. One can only speculate on what thoughts and fears passed through their dying minds before the lights went out, and whether they would have preferred to be one of those burned to a crisp instead.

Felipe gave up on the whole going to sleep thing. There was only so much trying you could do before the juice stopped being worth the squeeze, and since he was only lying there thinking mostly unchristian thoughts anyway, he might as well get up and do something about it. To Felipe’s mild surprise, he wasn’t putting on his everyday outfit after getting out of bed, as he did not pull on what Lex had described as “one of [Felipe]’s Fuckboy Shirts,” referring no doubt to one of his silk shirts, or one of the more delicate linen ones potentially. What was, however, more surprising to the part of Felipe that didn’t think too hard about the decisions, was that he wasn’t pulling on his exercise gear either. Washing clothes was a pain in Thereafter, and so Felipe had requested Lex magic up something that’d handle the sweat better for his workouts. What Felipe was ultimately putting on, though, was a similar special request to Lex, albeit one that he had used way less often.

Felipe remembered the conversation well. Lex had complained about all the difficulties they’d had making good magic to produce clothing, “It’s like the base category of ‘clothing’ is impossible to produce without being a massive impractical pain in the ass, no machining it, and I’ll be fucked if conjuring it is a pain in the ass too,” Lex had complained over a stack of sweaters whose sleeves somehow had ended up Klein Bottle-shaped. Felipe, ever the helpful collaborator, hadn’t demanded as much as suggested Lex try to lean into the impossible-ness a bit. He would, for example, like very much if Lex could come up with some duds that made it a bit easier to get around unseen. “There is, after all, a troubling Sneakiness Gap in the group right now,” as Felipe had pitched it. Fortunately for Felipe, Lex had been inspired by this suggestion, and although it DID lead to a batch of socks that, although they were impossible to separate by more than about a meter and attracted each other through something that seemed to be magnetism but inverse, when not in use, which was handy, also itched in technicolor, which was a strange sensation that Felipe was still getting used to.

The Paparazzi-Proof Getup, as Lex had come to call the pair of loose black pants and cloth tank top, seemed mostly unassuming, weren’t it for the slight, if deranged masculine energy that came with certain brands of workout-wear. Once you put it on, though, it was clear that some sort of Magic had Happened to the clothes, if that was even the correct term. It muted sounds slightly. This was, as best as Felipe understood it, a consequence of dampening outgoing sound. As for the slight vibration that it felt like every movement carried that apparently was the sign that the Light Thread effect that allowed Felipe to jump and run easier worked. That one didn’t make sense to Felipe, but at least it was a nice and clear indicator that things were working. Magic was weird like that. Technology had indicator lights and made sounds and generally gave signs that for all its complexities, it was a part of nature and the world. Magic? Not so much. It was apparently common practice among People Who Knew About That Sort Of Thing to add a mostly harmless secondary effect that was easier to observe through your senses. According to Lex, it was a lot like adding comments to your code. Felipe was willing to, and indeed reliant on, taking Lex on their word about matters such as these, as the one thing he knew less about than magic surely had to be coding.

Before he left his room, Felipe was faced with a choice. He was going out in the night, probably to start some kind of trouble if he knew himself right, and that probably meant he should bring a weapon. On one hand, the presence of a weapon could escalate things into violence faster. On the other hand, Felipe told himself, this effect would surely largely be avoided if nobody saw him before escalating to violence was not only acceptable but expected. As a compromise, he chose his so-called Bra Of Death, a leather chest harness with four throwing knives attached to it, two for each pectoral. Felipe’s aim was imperfect with throwing weapons, but in a pinch it was better than having to resort to fisticuffs, even if he had to use the throwing knife like a regular one, a solution he certainly hadn’t had to rely on before. Perish the thought.

Thus armed, Felipe headed out into the night. He didn’t need to sleep that badly he thought to himself. After all, he had been meaning to look into certain Comings and Goings of various people connected to The Organization, and what better time to go looking for shady shit than on the wrong side of midnight?

Still unknown to Felipe, the thing from the Geode Coffin continued through the void, heading, unmistakably, towards the only bright star in the darkness of the Void, the City of Thereafter.

Author’s Notes: We’re Back and we’re trying something new! After the relatively restrained opening pace of Voidhearts, I wanted to start this one swinging right out of the gate. In an earlier version of this scene, Felipe chose to bring one of his polearms, but I came up with a Thing that made the relatively limited weaponry more interesting. Also I’ve decided Felipe is a man that desperately needs a sensible reason to wear a chest harness. I may or may not be cooking with this decision overall, stay tuned as I, and some time later you, find out.

Catch you later!

V.S.D