Lexie's eyes flew open.

Kill the light.

It lingered in the air, the magical intent that confused the heck out of her. Where the heck did that come from?

Lexie had no clue what it meant. Usually, when she perceived intent, she had an instant instinct on what to do with it, but this time was different. What did 'kill the light' even refer to? The only thing she knew related to light was Xena, and there was no way in hell she wanted to make a card to kill her.

She'd been thinking of a way to counter Wavelost and Shadowsbane's powers and also to suppress Eldritch urges, so which part of that had to do with light? How did that even crop up in her mind? Was it because she'd been worried about the whole breaking her secret to Xena thing? Had that somehow messed with her perception of intent?

No, that wasn't how it worked. Intent was direct communication from the magic ether on how to create a skill that she was already thinking about. It was literally an answer to a question. She'd asked a question, a series of questions actually, and the answer was Kill the light, which was the answer to at least one of those questions. But it was the exact opposite of what she'd wanted to do.

Was it the Eldritch part of her talking? Eldritch tended to give her violent intent, so maybe she could transition it into a non-violent solution to her problem, like how Kill the Wind translated to True Winbreaker?

She sighed. She would ask Naem when she saw him.

She finished up her research about land cards and decided to craft one when she went to the Eldritch realm later tonight. She texted her friends that she would be skipping dinner and went to her room early, before Ava got there. Ava, she knew, typically got to the room around seven, and Lexie didn't want her roommate to catch her performing a ritual.

Lexie looked underneath her bed and found the cymbals there. The necklace rested around her neck. She closed her eyes and felt the candles on either side of her room. The second she thought about them, they lit up, and she materialized her blank card and held it to her chest.

Naem had said that transporting things would be risky and would drain her mana, so it would be best for her to take it one at a time. Today, she would only take her blank card, and later she would take some of the crafting tools.

She lay in bed, still holding the card to her chest, and closed her eyes. She said the words "Yhemk Y Mui Alcratzy."

She tried to say it with the hissing eldritch accent and everything, but she probably botched it. It didn't matter because she got the result anyway.

It was sudden. She felt a gust of ghostly wind blow in the room, and it blew out the fires of the invisible candles. A darkness swam over her, sucking out her mana and all her strength. She opened her mouth and a choking sound left her throat, as even more strength was wrenched out of her chest.

For a second, she was terrified. Would it take too much? Would she die?

But then she felt the drain stop, and when she opened her eyes, she was lying on the dark, shifting ground staring up at Naem.

"Soul-spawn," he greeted.

"Hey, Naem," she said and got up, feeling a little woozy. He glided to stand beside her, and she held his hand for support. "That was hard."

"I told you it would be. It was smart that you only brought the card with you. I would have intervened if you tried to bring more."

She nodded. She held it up. "I wanted to craft a land card connected to the Eldritch dimension. Can I?"

"I suppose you can once you've received the authorization of the owner of the domain."

Lexie's spirits sank. "So I have to ask the V'Sala for permission?"

Naem made a sound like tutting. "You do not ask that inferior creature for anything. You simply assert dominance of his domain and demand he give you access."

Lexie instantly balked at the thought. "Uh…yeah, I don't think I'm there yet."

"You are. You just don't know it."

She sighed and said, "Anyway, I'll need to keep it here for a little bit while I move my crafting tools one by one. Would that be possible?"

"You can, but there is no need." He held open his hand, and a quill appeared. "You can use this."

"Is that an Eldritch pen?" Lexie pursed her lips. "No offense, but I don't want the card to be more...Eldritch."

"You're making a land card to an Eldritch dimension. How much more Eldritch can it get?"

"You have a point." She reluctantly took the pen. "Speaking of making cards, do you know what it means when you don't understand the intent you received?"

He glanced at her. "You received an intent that you didn't understand?"

"Yeah." She nodded. "So far, all the 'intent' I've gotten has felt like an 'a-ha' moment, where I have instant insight into what I need."

"That is the wrong way to think about it, as I've already told you. Intent is not the same as realization, although it can lead to a realization."

"I get that now. So what is this then? What does it mean?

"If you had a blindfold on," he said. "Or the wrong spectacles, would you be able to see?"

Lexie thought about it, then shook her head.

"That's wrong. You would be able to see, in theory, you just do not have the information needed to put together what it is you're seeing. It's similar to what's happening here. Sometimes you receive intent that is more difficult to understand because you lack enough information and the proper context to frame it."

"That can happen?"

"Yes. Usually, it means that you're either on the verge of this 'realization', have all the information but are not arranging it in the right manner, or that the information you're searching for is far more complex than most humans understand it to be, so you would need to think differently. Most likely it's a combination of all three reasons."

"I was thinking of a way to suppress Eldritch urges or to defeat elementals," Lexie told him. "And the intent was to 'kill the light'. Is that something?"

Naem said nothing, but she got the sense she'd surprised him.

"I believe our time might be short today. I will hold onto your card-making tools for now, and we should head start with our business of the day."

"Okay," Lexie said, handing him the blank card and the pen. She was suddenly suspicious that Naem knew exactly what her intent was, but he didn't want to tell her.

She figured Naem couldn't tell her outright because it would go against Eldritch code or because it was super secret Eldritch information or something. Or maybe because it would endanger her.

Was it because she was talking about suppressing Eldritch urges? Was that the key to it?

"Are you ready?" Naem asked her.

"As ready as I'll ever be."

Without warning, the scenery changed as Naem took her to the Eldritch realm. The fear and anxiety instantly flooded her, but she took deep breaths to combat it. She knew what to expect now. She could handle it.

This time, when the V'Sala flew into Naem's hand, Lexie didn't waste time waiting for it to antagonize her even more. She closed her eyes and connected to its soul immediately.

The sadism and viciousness were the first burst of wind slapping her in the face, drowning her with its demands. She fought back against it at first as it seeped into her, urging her to laugh maniacally. Images of a tortured Diana whipped through her mind, and it was interspersed with thoughts of her laughing and torturing her some more.

No. Lexie fought it. She wasn't that person. She didn't want to be that person.

"Let go, Soul spawn." Naem's voice echoed in her mind. "Stop fighting. Simply be."

She shook her head. She didn't want to stop fighting. To stop fighting meant that she had to accept all those ugly feelings as her own, that she was someone who enjoyed inflicting pain on others. She had to fight back. She wasn't that. She was a good person!

But if she didn't let go, she would drown with it anyway. The waves were too strong, too encompassing, her grip on reality slipping. She couldn't fight against it. It was too overwhelming, so she let go of the cliff and slipped underneath.

She was submerged and couldn't breathe.

She drowned.

Her body, her psyche, sank lower and lower.

More cruelty assailed her mind, cackling laughter banging against her eardrums, the bitter taste of suffering in her mouth.

The lower she sank, the worse it got.

Then other things joined in.

Rage.

Indignation.

Loss.

It all felt familiar to Lexie.

There were other emotions she couldn't identify, some she didn't have a proper word of reference for.

But the longer she spent, the more she started to sense what was at the core of it all.

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Pain.

The creature was, at its core, a shaking ball of anxiety, constantly assailed by other people's dread, suspicion, and pain. It was not a living thing, the way most people would understand it. It did not exist apart from those feelings, and the feelings were not a part of it. It was all of it. A creature made of pain, only lived in pain, and that pain became its driving factor. It's light.

It was the thing that all the other emotions sprang out of, and it found a way to derive pleasure in its own pain as well as the pain it siphoned from others. Or maybe pleasure was the wrong word. Sustenance. Purpose.

The pain was the only way it could survive. Even though survival was pain, it was preferable to nothingness, to nonexistence, to stillness.

Its drive was that pain, and seeking it, assuaging that need gave it something that felt almost like satisfaction, but not quite. It was too powerful to just be that, yet not as pleasant as what satisfaction would feel like. It wasn't even close to what humans knew as happiness, but it was everything to a creature who knew only despair.

It was something they would give everything for, the purest, most sublime state of being for an Eldritch.

There was no other word for it except a whisper in her mind that was distinctly Eldritch.

Light.

Right there, in the sea of nothingness, she knew exactly how to suppress an Eldritch creature. She had to kill that light because the light was their drive. The light gave them direction, the urge to do what they needed to do. Without it, they did nothing and were nothing. They were defeated and trapped in their bodies, powerful beings without purpose.

They would be effectively dragons in chains, not because they couldn't fight it, but because they simply didn't want to.

Whoever controlled the light controlled the Eldritch.

It was genius.

If only I knew what to do with that.

That was the last thought she had before Naem brought her out of the soul to witness a bowing V'Sala.

***

Aiden was starting to feel like an obsessed, crazy man. He was chasing a ghost, one that he'd seen with his own eyes, one that haunted his daughter's dreams. The man's face haunted him now, too. He'd had several images drawn of him and plastered to his walls. Aiden constantly looked at his face and imagined his daughter's terror.

It was ripping him to shreds that something had happened to Lexie that he didn't know about. Someone had somehow hurt his daughter, and Aiden didn't know who he was or why.

How had this bastard gotten close to his daughter? Lara didn't know him either, or she would have told Aiden. They never let Lexie out of their sight. Back in the day, they barely ever let anyone babysit Lexie because they were so scared the babysitter wouldn't be careful enough and Lexie would get hurt.

Who was he?

"Damn it," Aiden muttered as he searched through more surveillance pictures, his brain straining as he tried to make out the faces. How was this man not spotted anywhere at the coffee shop? Did he know every single blind spot or what?

Searching through the villain database came up with nothing. Even when he'd used Monty's code to access the super-secret database for [Villains] that the world didn't know about, the man's face was not one of them. Aiden had also taken the picture to the weapons store Lexie had spoken about, but no one there had seen him. He'd given the picture to some of Max's associates who could check the Undernet and the crime underworld for the man. He was tempted to release the image for public circulation, but so far, Vacek still wanted the investigation to be a secret, and Aiden wasn't sure how the man was tied into it yet.

Besides, he didn't know how this villain would react if he knew he was caught, and he didn't want to risk his daughter's safety.

Lexie would be safe at Victoire, he knew. He'd also tell Stella to keep an eye out. He would ask Lexie to stay with her during the upcoming end-of-semester break, and Stella could have guards on Lexie twenty-four-seven.

Lexie wasn't going to like that. It was clear she was looking forward to coming home for the winter break, and Aiden didn't like disappointing her, but he couldn't guarantee her safety with him, not until he found out who this person was.

But if Lexie was surrounded by Firebringers and bodyguards, this man, who clearly cared about keeping a low profile, certainly would be reluctant to approach her.

But seriously, how was it possible that no one had seen him? Was he a shapeshifter? Did he have an invisibility skill? He wasn't even spotted on any surveillance footage around the area.

Aiden swept his seat back and stood, pacing. The person he was looking for wasn't a known villain, yet he'd likely been involved in the Hartville fiasco. Aiden was almost sure of it now, due to how completely the guy had disappeared.

He'd attacked Lexie, but Lexie had survived. Was that when she'd had a soul injury? But her bodily injury had been minimal. If he wanted to kill her, why not just do it outright?

The knock on the door splintered his thoughts, and he sighed. He wasn't in the mood for company, but he went downstairs and looked through the peephole before opening it up.

"Luke."

Luke looked put together as always, except that he was in a pajama set rather than his usual office robes. He had a coat over his body to fight against the cold, and boots on.

Very put together, but like a house that had been abandoned, one could see the cracks and signs of disrepair. He'd not combed his hair at all. His lips were scabbed from how much he'd bit them. New wrinkles had appeared on his forehead, and his eyes were bloodshot, with eye bags underneath.

"I need to talk to someone," he said. "Otherwise, I think I'll just go crazy."

Aiden nodded and stepped back. He figured that was coming. Luke had been great at holding it together and doing his job in the weeks following Max's death, but something had to give at some point.

"It's just been annoying me this whole time," he said. "Max's death. I can't stop thinking about something."

"Thinking about what?"

"Do you think… I mean, do you think there's a chance he survived the dungeon?'

Aiden didn't speak at first. He knew the chances of his friend's survival were slim to none, even if Max had not been killed by the monster. But he hadn't wanted to tell Lexie that. She'd looked so defeated, so devastated that he'd wanted to spare her the pain just for that moment.

He didn't want to admit it to himself either. He would hold onto hope for as long as he could.

In his silence, Luke continued talking, "Remember a year ago, when Max blew up that field with the unstable dungeon?"

Aiden nodded, the aggravating situation now a semi-pleasant memory.

"He got out of that one with such a light sentence because I'm pretty sure he blackmailed someone," he said. "I don't have proof, but I know my brother. Plus, that whole month, he was constantly out looking for clues and collecting evidence of something…of course, he never would tell me who it was for or what he was doing. He told me it was safer for me not to know, but that if anything happened to him and if this person got rid of him, or if he died under mysterious circumstances in any way that looked like foul play, then we would receive black boxes with all that information everywhere, including on the Undernet."

Aiden nodded. He wasn't sure where Luke was going with this, but he had a feeling they would soon be getting to the destination.

"I didn't think anything of it at first," he said. "When Bane told us the news, I thought Max just got unlucky. But the more I think about it…the more I can't help but think about it. Max has always been careful with dungeons, and Bane said that his dungeon was a level 7 that acted like a level 8."

"That sometimes happens," Aiden said. "Dungeons are occasionally misdiagnosed."

"I know that, too. But it's just crazy to think it happened to him. What if he didn't just die? What if whoever was blackmailing him was involved in killing him?"

"If he were blackmailing anyone, it would be someone from the hero association. That's who he thought was involved with the unstable dungeon. You think someone from the hero association sicced a giant bat creature on him in a dungeon?"

"I know it sounds crazy, but is it really, with all the dungeon shenanigans going around recently?"

Aiden couldn't argue with that. "You didn't receive any black boxes, did you?"

He shook his head. "What if that's only because they made it look like an accident, so it didn't trigger any of the mechanisms Max put in place?"

Aiden thought about it. "The Hero association can be corrupt, but I don't think they would go that far."

"You of all people should know that they would." He met his eyes. "I mean, isn't that the same thing that happened to your wife?"

Pain lanced through Aiden at the mention, bitter memories surfacing.

When he'd first learned of what happened to Lara, paranoia had driven him to blame the association at first. He'd thought maybe they'd found out about what was done to Lexie. Maybe it was revenge for Lara's past as an assassin.

Or maybe Vacek had sent her on one of his stupid super-secret missions, and she'd discovered something she shouldn't have, so they'd chosen to get rid of her.

Because it didn't make sense for her to go into such a high-level dungeon with no healer as backup.

Aiden had searched and searched but couldn't find any evidence that anyone at the association was involved.

Vacek had been away at the time, and when he returned, he assured Aiden that there was no foul play. The healer they'd gotten for the mission simply hadn't shown up and had disappeared. Lara and her team shouldn't have entered the dungeon without one, but they did for whatever reason. It was simply a mistake, human error.

Still, Aiden couldn't let himself believe it. His grief drove him to chase conspiracy theories for years.

It was only after he saw the damage it did to his daughter that he was able to let it go.

Luke was probably going through the same thing, and Aiden knew he had to handle it sensitively. He couldn't just discredit him outright or dismiss his concerns. But he didn't want to feed into his delusions and lead him down the same dark path Aiden had gone.

"I'll do my best to look into it," Aiden said. "But I don't want you to get your hopes up."

Luke gave him a wry smile. "I'm not a naturally hopeful man. And I appreciate your candor and your help."

"Of course. What are friends for?"

After Luke left, Aiden went back to his search. He kept trying to figure out what connected the man to Lexie and why he'd come after a little girl rather than her parents. It would make sense if he were a [Villain] Aiden had wronged, but Aiden had no recollection of him. Maybe he was the family of a [villain]? Maybe Lexie was simply a tool for his revenge.

But he'd failed, so why hadn't he tried again?

He'd had several chances to.

As much as Aiden hated to think about it, Lexie was on her own most of the time and often went to dangerous places by herself. The man could have killed her at any time, so why didn't he?

Something was missing. He needed all the information in one place to put the pieces together.

Assuming this man was working with the Villain association and hadn't ever been caught or seen by anyone, it meant that he was crazy careful. Too careful, and no one was ever that careful without adequate planning.

This entire thing had been planned out, probably way before Hartville. The sudden uprising in Villain activity had given the [Heroes] enough distraction and kept them busy to enable Hartville to happen. But how exactly had he managed that?

Aiden had to stop thinking about it as discrete variables and start looking at it as a whole. He had to think like a [Villain].

He called Monty and had to try several times before the other man answered groggily.

"Hello?"

"I need the name of every hero that should have been at Hartville but wasn't. I also need information on all their family and surveillance information from every shop around there."

There was a pause. "Why?"

"Everything that happened in Hartville was intentional. Everything was planned by a man who is meticulous enough to never get caught. We must be just as meticulous and not leave even a single stone unturned. I need to see everything as he did because this is bigger than Silas Creevy."

"What do you mean?"

"Anything that could have caught him was taken off the table. Every surveillance video that could have shown him was turned off, and every route he passed was unmanned. Even if he had an in with the association, it's impossible for him to know all these details and figure out everything. It's a setup with about a hundred thousand dominoes. One single mistake and it all comes tumbling down. He managed to avoid that somehow, so...it's bigger than Creevy."

"So what are you saying?"

"Like I said, I need all the information about everyone around that area in Hartville. And if you can also send me every single member of every single villain group that had increased activity in the past six months, that would be great."

"Okay, I'll get to it in the morning."

"We don't have time. Get to it now."

"It's midnight."

"So you're not busy. Good." Aiden hung up and imagined Monty swearing and grumbling as he got out of bed. The thought made him smile as he got back to work.

While he worked, he also searched his mind for Monty's psychic tag. He wasn't sure what it looked like, but he would use alchemy to find out.

Alchemy was difficult for him with the magic types he'd regularly employed as a mage, because most of his pathways were already primed for years to respond to that magic, and Alchemy worked by a different system, so it struggled to adjust.

Luckily, he'd never been so interested in mind magic before, so it was easier for him to use alchemy to explore that side of him.

He experienced the movement through his brain, feeling the magic grow and move, a living thing of his own. He felt at his brain, nudging at corners, searching and finding, exploring. It was working. He was getting better at alchemy. Good.

He needed to be even more powerful, even more quickly than he thought.

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