His bare feet were on the stone. The wind moved his hair, though it did not touch him with its cold. He looked down at the abyss, then at the young man floating beside him.

Clothes formed on Raven’s body.

Not the casual garments of the village. Armor. Dark, segmented plates that looked like dragon scales, overlapping across his chest and shoulders in a seamless weave of obsidian and crimson.

A cloak of deep red that snapped in the mountain wind, the fabric heavy and rich. Boots that gripped the stone with claws. Gauntlets that ended in sharp, elegant points. And in his hand — materializing from the air with the sound of a drawn blade and a flash of silver — a sword.

The Sword of the Hero.

He recognized it. The blade he had taken to the guild months ago, the weapon he had sold for coin and a night at the inn, the steel that had sung when it was forged. It had returned to him now, called by his will, its edge humming with the particular note of a weapon that had been waiting for a worthy hand and had been disappointed until this moment.

Raven looked at the blade.

Then at Jacob.

The young man was still unconscious. The wind was cold on his face, biting at his exposed skin, turning his cheeks red. The altitude was thin. He would not survive long here without waking, and he would not survive at all without what Raven intended to give him.

Raven snapped his fingers.

The sound cracked like a whip against the mountain stone, echoing across the peaks and returning as a series of dying snaps.

Jacob’s eyes flew open.

He gasped. The air hit his lungs — thin, freezing, burning like he was inhaling broken glass. He coughed, his body convulsing, his eyes rolling wildly. He saw the sky, the peaks, the endless drop. He saw Raven standing over him in armor, holding a sword, looking like the end of the world made flesh and dressed for war.

Memory returned.

The waterfall. The night. His grandmother. The screaming. The women holding him down. The blindfold. The gag. The wet sounds of his grandmother being destroyed, the slap of flesh, the begging, the way the demon had used her until she was nothing but a hole in the grass.

Rage flooded him.

It was not the rage of a knight. It was the rage of a boy who had watched his grandmother die twice — once in fire, once in flesh — and had been helpless both times. It was the rage of a regressor who had come back to change fate and had found fate worse than he remembered. It was the rage of a young man who had just learned that being from the future meant nothing when the present was stronger than your memories.

"I WILL KILL YOU!" Jacob screamed.

His voice tore out of his throat, raw and broken and completely desperate, shredding itself on the thin air. He thrashed against the invisible bindings that still held him. He thrashed against the reality of being small and weak and utterly unable to touch the thing that had destroyed his grandmother.

"YOU BASTARD! YOU FUCKING BASTARD! I WILL KILL YOU! I WILL CUT YOU OPEN! I WILL—"

Raven raised his hand.

A small sphere of black light formed in his palm. It was no larger than a marble, perfectly round, pulsing with a rhythm that matched the heartbeat of the mountain — slow, ancient, indifferent. It was not magic as humans understood it. It was a piece of his will made visible, a fragment of his authority over life and death.

He leaned down and placed it on Jacob’s forehead.

The young man went silent.

Not because he chose to. Because the sphere touched his skin and the command entered his nervous system directly, bypassing will, bypassing rage, bypassing the desperate survival instinct of a regressor who had died once and come back and thought that made him special.

"Shut up," Raven said. "And simply die."

The black line formed.

It appeared between Jacob’s eyes — a thin, vertical crack of darkness that ran from his hairline to the bridge of his nose. It widened. The skin parted. Not blood. Not bone. Just darkness. The line expanded, consuming his eyes, his nose, his mouth, swallowing his face in a vertical split of annihilation that ate the light around it.

Jacob’s body jerked.

His arms went stiff. His legs spasmed. His eyes — the wide, furious, tear-filled eyes of a young man who had failed — turned hollow.

They became pits.

Not empty. Not blind. Hollow. The irises vanished. The whites vanished. The pupils became dark holes that looked into nothing, that offered nothing, that simply ceased to be windows to anything human. The light in them went out like a candle blown by a gale.

He died.

It was instantaneous. The command was absolute. The magic Raven had placed on his forehead was not a spell. It was a sentence. A verdict. A simple declaration that the boy’s life had served its purpose as a host and was now forfeit.

Jacob’s body began to fall.

The bindings released. The magic that had held him in the air vanished. Gravity reclaimed him with the hungry, open-mawed eagerness of a force that had been waiting. He began to tip backward, toward the thousand-meter drop, his hollow eyes open to the bruised sky, his mouth slack, his heart stopped, his chest still.

But before his body could fall—

His eyes moved.

The hollow pits twitched. The darkness inside them swirled, and then, like ink dispersing in water, the blackness drained away. The whites returned, but they were wrong — too white, too pure, like porcelain. The irises returned — but not as they had been. They were different. Older. The vertical slit pupils of something that had been hiding inside the boy’s skull for years, waiting for the host to die so it could emerge and claim the vacant flesh.

Jacob’s body straightened.

It did not move by muscle. It moved by something else — by the tension of the thing inside, pulling the strings of the corpse like a puppet. The spine snapped upright with a series of audible clicks. The arms rose. The legs found the stone. The head tilted with a mechanical, insectile precision, the jaw setting, the hollow mouth forming a smile that was not human.

Raven smiled.

"Ah," he said. "There you are."

He had known. Of course he had known. The moment he touched Jacob’s mind at the waterfall, he had felt it — the foreign presence, the passenger, the parasite that had ridden the regressor’s brain across timelines. The thing that had sent him back. The thing that had made him think he was changing fate when he was merely being steered like a mount.

The parasite looked out through Jacob’s eyes.

The vertical pupils focused on Raven with the cold, calculating assessment of a creature that had not expected to be exposed. The mouth opened. The voice that came out was not Jacob’s. It was older. Dry. Brittle. The sound of something that had spoken in the dark for centuries without ever needing a human tongue, each word clicking like mandibles.

"You—" it began.

Raven moved.

He was fast when he wanted to be. Faster than teleportation. The Sword of the Hero left his hand and flew through the air, spinning, its blade catching the gray mountain light in a flash of silver that cut the wind. It landed point-first in the stone between the puppet’s feet, quivering, singing, the steel humming with the particular fury of a weapon that had been denied its purpose for too long and was now eager to be claimed.

The parasite flinched.

The body jerked. The hands twitched. The eyes — the vertical, black, ancient eyes — looked down at the sword embedded in the rock, then up at Raven.

"Pick up the sword," Raven said.

His voice was warm. Pleasant. The voice of a man offering a choice that was not a choice, a path that led only forward.

The parasite looked at him. The puppet’s face was slack, but the eyes were calculating. The thing inside was assessing. It had not expected to be found. It had not expected the host to be killed so casually. It had certainly not expected to be addressed directly and offered a weapon.

"Or," Raven continued, his hand gesturing at the blade with a casual sweep, "I will pull you out through his eye sockets and feed you to the mountain wind."