Chapter 4: Thorns of Truth
The air in the narrow alley behind the florist’s shop tasted like spoiled roses and wet concrete. Amber pressed herself against the cold brick, her breathing so slow it barely misted in the chill. She was a shadow within shadows, her black tactical gear absorbing the scant light. From her vantage point, she watched the mundane street. A woman in a cream-colored coat fumbled with her keys at a door across the way.
And it was there, a distortion in the air like heat haze over asphalt, clinging to the woman’s shadow. A Keshin egg, low-level, a scavenger drawn to fleeting human anxieties. It pulsed, a shapeless hunger preparing to lunge and amplify that latent stress into a full, soul-corrupting feast.
Pathetic, Amber thought, her lip curling. A year ago, this would have been a challenging hunt. Now, it was a chore. The final chore.
She didn’t need to speak. The bond hummed between her ribs, a silent chord of understanding. In her hand, weight shifted and flowed. The feel of his palm became the cool, textured grip of aged hickory. His reassurance became perfect, lethal balance. Leo, as a battle-axe, was a beautiful, terrible thing: a broad, crescent moon of darkened steel etched with fine, spiraling patterns that seemed to drink the light, mounted on a haft just long enough for her to wield with devastating control.
The Keshin egg coalesced, forming jagged, needle-like limbs. It sprang.
Amber stepped out of the shadows.
It was less a fight and more an execution. One fluid step forward, a pivot from the hips, a single, downward arc. The axe-head passed through the nascent monster with a sound like tearing silk. It didn’t scream. It imploded into a swirl of sickly yellow light, a wisp of corrupted soul desperately trying to hold form.
Leo dissolved from her grip in a shower of silver sparks that reconstituted into the young man kneeling beside the dissipating energy. He was tall, leanly muscled, with messy dark hair and eyes that always held a hint of an electrical storm. He opened his mouth and inhaled sharply. The yellow light streaked into him like smoke sucked into a vacuum.
He gagged, swallowing convulsively, then shook his head as if clearing water from his ears. “Ugh. Tastes like static and regret.”
The woman in the coat finally got her door open, shivering and glancing around at the sudden, inexplicable chill that had washed over the alley. She saw nothing, and disappeared inside.
Amber let the tension drain from her shoulders. Then it hit her. The math. The endless, grinding math of souls that had ruled their lives for three brutal years.
“Leo,” she whispered. Then she squealed, grabbing the front of his jacket. “Leo! Do you know what this means? Nine-hundred and ninety-nine! That was nine-hundred and ninety-nine! We just need one. One witch soul. And we graduate. Today. We could graduate today.”
He grinned, a bright, fierce thing that crinkled the corners of his storm-cloud eyes. He pulled her into a hard, spinning hug. “Told you we’d beat the record. Youngest in EAT Class history. Suck on that, everyone who said we were just kids.”
They’d been called reckless. Over-ambitious. Their break came eight months ago, finding that festering nest in the old subway tunnels—a writhing mass of over five hundred low-level Keshin eggs, a corrupted hive mind. It was a goldmine. A cheat code, some muttered. Leo had consumed them in a single, terrifying, resonant pull. He’d then spent three days trembling and feverish in the infirmary, his skin hot to the touch, muttering about voices. But it had put them so far ahead of schedule the finish line had suddenly morphed from a distant dream into a tangible destination.
“C’mon,” Amber said, dragging him towards a nearby phone booth, its windows cloudy with grime. “We have to report.”
Inside the booth, she fed coins into the slot and dialed a number that wasn’t printed on any card. As it rang, she noticed a familiar figure lurking by a newsstand across the street. Her father, Kilson, stood pretending to read a paper, tears streaming openly down his broad, rugged face. He gave her a wobbly, thumbs-up.
She rolled her eyes so hard she saw her own brain. “Dad,” she mouthed, making a shooing motion. He just cried harder, his shoulders shaking.
The line connected with a theatrical pop.
“YEEESSSS, THIS IS DEATH SPEAKING!” The voice on the other end was a booming, cartoonish baritone, each syllable dripping with exaggerated gravitas.
“Headmaster, it’s Amber Claudius. Reporting successful collection of a Class-2 Keshin egg soul. Total count is now nine-hundred and ninety-nine corrupted souls secured.”
The pause on the line was brief, but in it, Amber could feel the weight of the institution. “VERY WELL DONE, AMBER! EXEMPLARY WORK! YOUR PROGRESS HAS BEEN… A SPECTACLE TO BEHOLD. YOU STAND ON THE PRECIPICE OF HISTORY. ONE MORE SOUL, AND YOU MAY INDEED BECOME ONE OF THE YOUNGEST TO GRADUATE FROM THIS ACADEMY IN ITS LONG, BLOOD-STAINED HISTORY! I OFFER MY MOST HEARTFELT, FIVE-SECOND-LONG APPLAUSE!” There was a sound of slow, overly emphatic clapping.
Amber’s chest swelled. After all the sneers, the doubt, the brutal training under Crow’s cold, trembling eye, this recognition was a potent drug. “Thank you, sir. We… we believe we have a viable witch target already identified. We’re moving to engage now.”
“CAPTURE THAT SOUL, AND YOUR PLACE AMONG THE ELEGANTLY SKILLED WILL BE SECURE! GO! WITH MY THEATRICAL BLESSING!” An eerie silence passed, and then he said, “JUST DON’T FORGET YOUNG AMBER, IF YOU FAIL THIS, THEN YOUR COUNT GOES BACK TO ZERO.” The line went dead with a final, resonating clang.
Amber replaced the receiver, her heart hammering against her ribs. This was it. The final hunt. She looked at Leo, his expression now serious, focused. The glee was gone, replaced by the hunter’s calm.“You sure about this?” he asked quietly. “The florist shop? Intel’s solid?”
“As solid as it gets,” Amber nodded. “Soul resonance scans show a persistent, twisted signature woven into the pollen. She’s hidden there for years. A collector of beautiful, dying things.” She cracked her neck. “Let’s go give her something new to collect.”
The derelict hotel was a tombstone in the middle of the city’s bustling downtown, a relic everyone’s eyes slid past. Amber and Leo moved through its corpse-like lobby, dust swirling in their wake, and ascended skeletal stairs to the rooftop.
The rooftop garden was a vision of elegant decay. Rusted iron trellises, once delicate, now clawed at the twilight sky like the ribs of a fallen beast. Roses, untamed and vicious, had overrun stone benches, their thorns as long as fingers. In the center, a cracked fountain held only a powdering of dead leaves and dust. The air was still, too still, carrying the coppery tang of old blood beneath the cloying perfume of rotting blossoms.
She was there, waiting for them.
The witch looked nothing like a storybook crone. She was perhaps forty, wearing a simple linen dress smudged with soil, her hands—knotted and strong—resting on her knees as she sat on the fountain’s edge. She was pruning a dark orchid with a pair of silver shears. Snip. Snip.
“I wondered when the Academy’s prodigies would come,” she said, not looking up. Her voice was soft, weathered. “The little girl who moves like a shadow, and the weapon who shines so brightly it hurts to look. Amber and Leo. I’ve heard the whispers about you two”
Amber’s grip tightened on Leo’s weapon form. He was already in her hands, the axe-head a dull promise in the gloom. “You know why we’re here. Your soul is forfeit. Come quietly. It’ll be cleaner.”
The witch finally looked up. Her eyes were the unsettling green of new leaves, but deep within them swirled a darkness like pooling ink. “Forfeit? To feed your graduation tally? To prove your worth to a skull in a top hat who views you as data points on a ledger?” She smiled, a sad, knowing twist of her lips. “You have no idea what you’re part of, child.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Leo’s voice resonated in Amber’s mind, a private channel. “She’s stalling. Witchcraft 101: confuse the hunter.”
“We’re part of the line between order and chaos,” Amber stated, falling into a ready stance. “We clean up the corruption you spread.”
“I spread?” The witch laughed, a dry, rustling sound. “I tend my garden. I ease the passing of mortal souls who cling too tightly. A gentle transition. What your Headmaster does in his laboratories… that is corruption. What he did to your precious Professor Crow…”
Amber’s focus wavered for a split second. Crow?
“He talks in his sleep, you know,” the witch whispered, leaning forward. “When the madness bites deep. He mutters about the experiments. How Death doesn’t just study the Weapon-Meister bond. He alters it. Strengthens it artificially, warps it, breaks it to see what happens. Crow wasn’t just driven mad by battle. His soul was sculpted towards madness, to see how long a Meister of his caliber could withstand it before becoming a Keshin himself. A controlled test. And you, my dears… you’re next. The perfect, pure, record-breaking bond. How do you think he’ll twist you, once you’ve graduated and are in his service?”
“Lies,” Amber spat, but the word felt hollow. She remembered Crow’s trembling hands, the fits of rage followed by terrifying, vacant calm. She remembered the way Headmaster Death’s praise always felt like a measurement.
“Is it?” The witch stood, letting the orchid fall. It hit the stone and dissolved into black smoke. “I offer you a choice, Leo. A weapon’s choice. Consume my soul. Take your thousandth. Graduate, and walk into his gilded cage as his newest, most promising subjects.” She spread her arms, a gesture of surrender. “Or spare me. Let me go. And I will show you the proof. I will lead you to the records, to the other… test subjects. You can know the truth before you chain yourselves to him forever.”
The rooftop froze. The only sound was the distant groan of the city.
The dilemma was a physical vise around Amber’s heart. Everything she had worked for, every sacrifice, every time she’d pushed Leo past his limits, every soul he’d painfully consumed—it all hung on this single, looming action. Graduation was a breath away. Recognition, freedom, power.
But the witch’s words festered, dripping into the cracks of her certainty. Crow’s deteriorating sanity. The Academy’s cold, impersonal efficiency. The way Death had called their progress “a spectacle.”
Leo was silent in her soul. The choice, ultimately, was his. To consume, or to question.
The witch watched them, her green-and-black eyes unblinking. “Well?” she breathed. “What is your beautiful, resonant bond truly made of? Obedience? Or truth?”
Amber’s knuckles were white on the axe haft. She met Leo’s consciousness in their shared space, a place of quiet understanding beneath the storm of thought. No words were needed. A feeling, a question, a fear.
The hunt was over. Now, the choice began.
Now, the choice began.
Amber’s decision was a lightning strike, not a deliberation. Truth was a luxury for after the fight. “We’re not falling for this,” she snarled, and charged.
The witch sighed, a sound of genuine disappointment. She flicked her pruning shears towards a tangled bank of ivy. The vines exploded from the wall, not growing but launching, thick as pythons and moving with horrifying speed. They didn’t try to entangle. They struck like iron whips.
Amber pivoted, bringing Leo around in a wide, clearing arc. The axe-head sheared through the first wave, spraying sap that smoked where it landed. Two more vines shot from her blind spot. They wrapped her ankles and yanked. The world upended. Her back slammed onto the cracked stone, the breath punching from her lungs.
Leo shimmered back into human form beside her, the resonance severed by the shock. “Amber!” He grabbed her arm, hauling her up as another vine speared the space where her head had been.
They retreated, gasping. The garden was awakening. Gourds swelling on a fallen trellis twisted, their skins hardening into spiked, fleshy cannonballs. They detonated on impact, not with fire, but with a concussive blast of compressed seeds that sliced like shrapnel. Amber dove behind the dry fountain, Leo following. Seeds embedded themselves in the stone with a sickening thwick-thwick-thwick.
“We can’t get near her!” Leo yelled over the rustling, growing roar.
“We have to!” Amber pushed off the stone, bursting into the open. She focused, her soul reaching for his. He dissolved into silver light and reformed in her grip. She didn’t run at the witch. She ran at the rose thicket, leaping, using a petrified bench as a springboard to get altitude, to come down from above.
The witch didn’t even look up. She pointed a finger at a gnarled apple tree. Every rotten fruit tore free from its stem. They shot upward, a dense, buzzing cloud, each apple hardening to the density of brick mid-air.
Amber swung Leo in a desperate, spinning guard. He connected with a dozen, the impacts shuddering up her arms. One got through. It smashed into her ribs. A sick crack echoed in her chest, wrong and wet. She dropped from the air, hitting the ground in a rolling, painful heap. Leo clattered from her nerveless fingers, reverting to his human form with a gasp of shared pain.
They scrambled behind a crumbling planter. Amber pressed a hand to her side, feeling the grate of a broken bone. Every breath was a knife. Leo’s forearm was bleeding from a deep gash, his left eye swelling shut from a glancing hit.
For twenty minutes, it continued. A relentless, demeaning barrage of botanical cruelty. Squash rolled under their feet like living mines. Thorn-studded morning glory stalks lashed from the shadows. A barrage of acorns, fired with the velocity of bullets, pinned Leo’s sleeve to a post, tearing the fabric. They were not hunters. They were pests being swatted.
They collapsed, backs against the fountain’s cold base, utterly spent. Their shared wavelength, usually a vibrant channel, was a frayed, staticky thread. The physical exhaustion had eroded the spiritual link. Amber’s entire body was a symphony of bruises. Leo’s breathing was a ragged saw.
“This is insane,” Leo wheezed, spitting blood. “We can’t even get within twenty feet of her. She’s playing with us.”
“So we change the plan,” Amber hissed, wiping grit from her eye. Her side screamed in protest.
“There is no plan!” Leo snapped, his voice rising. “Don’t you get it? We lost. We take the L. We crawl out of here and live to fight another witch, another day.”
“We need her soul today!” Amber’s voice broke with the strain. “We are not starting back at zero! Not after everything!”
The bond between them, strained to its limit, finally snagged. Leo shoved himself to his feet, his form shimmering violently before solidifying, not as a weapon, but as a furious young man. He had broken the resonance intentionally. “This isn’t about the count anymore, Amber! It’s about you not being able to lose! You’d rather we both die here than admit we failed!”
The battlefield fell silent. The aggressive vines slowed, then stilled, retracting into the shadows. The witch watched from her perch, hands folded patiently in her lap. She was, perversely, polite enough to let them argue.
“You want to quit?” Amber roared, lurching up to face him. “After three years? After the tunnels, after the fever, after all of it? You want to walk away from graduation because it got hard?”
“I want to walk away from getting murdered for a number!” Leo shot back, gesturing wildly at the tranquil witch. “She’s offering answers! About Crow! About what we’re really signing up for! That’s more important than a ceremony!”
“You believe her lies?” Amber’s laugh was sharp and broken.
“I believe our teacher is disintegrating!” Leo’s shout echoed over the dead garden. “I believe nothing in that Academy is what they told us! And I’m tired of just being the weapon that follows the meister’s orders! Maybe I want to think for myself!”
The words were a physical blow. Amber felt a crack, fine as a hairline fracture, somewhere deep behind her sternum.
He took a step away from her, towards the winding path that led to the waiting woman. “I’m going to talk to her. You can stay here and nurse your perfect record.”
He was leaving. He was actually turning his back and walking towards the enemy, choosing her whispered promises over their forged partnership. The crack in Amber’s heart widened, threatening to split her open.
A memory flooded in, unbidden and sharp: the first day in the resonance chamber, three years ago. Her, a scrappy sixteen-year-old trying to project confidence. Him, a lanky seventeen-year-old weapon who couldn’t hold a stable form for more than three seconds. The frustrating, silent hours. The scorn from other pairs. The shared, secret pizza afterwards, where they admitted, faces flushed, that they were both terrified of being sent back to the mundane world. Their ambition had been the bridge—a silent pact to be the best, to prove everyone wrong. That was when the resonance first clicked, a shaky, bright chord that made the instructors stop and stare.
Sure, he was a dick sometimes. He left the toilet seat up in their shared apartment. He played video games too loud in his room, the sound of gunfire and explosions seeping under her door. His snore was a distant tractor engine she could hear from her own bed. He left his dirty clothes in a damp pile on the bathroom floor. His room smelled of old pizza and boy. She had to stop cataloging his flaws, just for a minute.
But he was her partner. He was the other half of her wavelength. And he was walking away.
Why did men always leave? Her father’s face, charming and empty, superimposed over Leo’s retreating back. Kilson Claudius, who’d left her mother with a stack of bills and a broken heart because something newer and shinier had caught his eye. The tears, hot and shameful, welled in her eyes, blurring the monstrous garden.
Leo was ten feet down the path now, his posture tense but determined.
“You’re just like every other sleazy guy!” The scream tore from her throat, raw and full of shattered glass. “I thought you were different!”
Leo stopped. He didn’t turn around. His shoulders slumped for a second, then straightened.
He half-turned his head, just enough for her to see his profile. “I can’t say I’m like every other sleazy guy,” he said, his voice suddenly low and clear. “Yo know why?”
He made a subtle, almost imperceptible wink with his unswollen eye.
The world snapped into a hyper-focused still frame. The tear on Amber’s cheek. The witch’s patient smile. The rustling of a single leaf. It wasn’t surrender. It was a feint. He’d gotten close. The argument, the abandonment, the heartbreak—it was cover.
Their resonance, thought dead, ignited with a silent, white-hot spark. No discussion was needed. The plan crystallized in the space between their souls.
Leo’s body dissolved into a torrent of silver particles that didn’t stream back to Amber. They shot forward, past the witch, reforming with a screech of twisting metal into his massive axe form—but he was embedded, head-first, deep into the stone wall behind her. A diversion. A focal point.
The witch’s head instinctively turned toward the sudden, violent noise at her back.
Amber was already moving. She hadn’t just been crying; she’d been gathering the scattered, aching pieces of her wavelength, focusing them into a single point in her palm. She didn’t have her weapon. She was the weapon. She vaulted the fountain, her broken rib a distant echo, and closed the distance in three silent, explosive steps.
Her hand, alight with a concentrated blast of pure resonant energy, a spear of condensed will, shot forward—not at the witch’s body, but at the corrupted soul she could now see swirling at its core, a knot of thorns and regret.
It was a perfect, climactic strike. A year of perfected synergy. A lifetime of shared ambition. It connected.
The glowing soul emerged, squinting like a cat shape. Leo jumps on quickly and consumes the soul, burping once its down. He positions himself with his legs apart, beginning to scream, “I CAN FEEL THE POWER!!!” Aaaand he farts. Amber stares at him in disbelief.
A meow sounds from behind them.
The witch was gone. In her place, on the edge of the fountain, sat a sleek black cat, calmly licking a paw.
It looked up with luminous green eyes, then hopped down. As it walked, its form stretched and flowed. The black fur receded, the posture straightened, and within three strides, a young woman in her mid-to-late twenties stood brushing nonexistent dust from a simple black dress. She was beautiful in an unremarkable way, with sharp, intelligent features.
She looked at the axe stuck in the wall, then at Amber’s stunned, pained face. A faint, apologetic smile touched her lips.
“I never said I was a witch,” she said, her voice now lighter, younger. “You just assumed. The signature in the shop was a ward I placed, a little joke. A trap for the arrogant.” She glanced towards the fire escape. “The real witch left this city weeks ago. I’m just a cat with a ridiculous amount of power, and you only got one of my seven lives.” You failed your finals. My condolences.”
She gave a small, almost respectful nod, then stepped off the edge of the roof, dissolving into a flutter of shadow and leaves before she ever hit the ground.