Before we followed Mara's lead, we had questions for Mori and Amityria about the figure they had encountered during the night. The name Amityria gave us was Rikcla. He had once been her childhood friend, though their friendship had ended badly. When they were young, she had taken one of his eyes. The details surrounding that act were not yet entirely clear to me, but one fact made the story difficult to accept: it had happened centuries ago.
Amityria believed Rikcla should have been dead.
She had not seen him for all those years, and whatever she had encountered during the night bore enough resemblance to the friend she remembered for her to recognize him, while being different enough to make her doubt what she had seen. Mori's account only deepened the uncertainty. Between them, we had little more than fragments, but one possibility seemed increasingly difficult to ignore. If Rikcla truly was the same man Amityria had known as a child, then he had somehow survived centuries beyond the span of an ordinary mortal life.
We began to suspect that he might now be a vampire.
If that were true, then his appearance was perhaps not coincidence. The loss of an eye, followed by centuries of undeath, left an obvious possibility: vengeance. I have seen beings in Heaven carry grudges longer than mortal kingdoms, but there was something particularly strange about the idea of a childhood wound surviving for centuries inside a mortal soul. Mortals are brief creatures. Their lives are measured in decades, their loves and hatreds often compressed into a handful of years. To preserve hatred for centuries requires becoming something other than what one once was.
Perhaps that is what undeath does. Perhaps it preserves not only the body, but the unfinished things inside it.
For now, however, Rikcla remained only a suspicion. We had his name, Amityria's memories, Mori's observations, and little else. There would be time enough to discover whether the dead had truly returned to settle an ancient debt.
Mara Veyr gave us something more tangible.
She told us that Rook had changed during the past year. Not simply that his methods had become different, but that the difference was so profound that Mara could scarcely reconcile the man she knew with the man represented in his more recent dealings. She had examined his ledgers closely and found herself thinking that she was reading the records of another person. The same name appeared on the pages, the same organization, the same business, yet the decisions recorded there seemed foreign to the Rook she remembered.
I understood what she meant better than I wished to.
There are changes that come slowly, like age upon a mortal face, and there are changes that replace something essential while leaving the outward form intact. During my first days in Etharis, I had looked into my own reflection and wondered whether the creature staring back at me was still Samael. The face was mine. The memories were mine. Yet the wings were ruined, Heaven was gone, and whatever I had been before my fall could no longer exist in precisely the same way. Perhaps Mara was seeing something similar in Rook. Not merely a man who had changed, but the remains of one identity being occupied by another.
She directed us toward Gull's Knee, an underground warehouse from which Rook was believed to have operated.
We found the corruption before we found its master.
Those dreadful vines had spread through the compound, twisting through the chambers and rooting themselves into the structure as though the stone itself had become fertile ground. There was something deeply wrong in the way they grew. Plants should seek light. These things seemed to seek life. They spread toward warmth, flesh, decay—anything that could sustain them. I have seen gardens in Heaven that would have covered entire valleys, but even the most exuberant growth there obeyed a harmony I could sense without needing to understand it. These vines possessed no such harmony. They grew as though hunger itself had learned to take root.
Then the Corpse Flower came.
The battle was brutal and close. The creature had made the dead part of its existence, and zombies moved around it like extensions of the same corruption. We fought our way through the chamber, destroying the undead and the monstrous plant until at last the thing fell silent. There was no triumph in its death. Only the absence of movement, followed by the unsettling realization that the chamber was not yet finished with us.
And inside, we found Rook.
Or what remained of him.
His corpse lay concealed within the compound, hidden away from anyone who might have stumbled upon it. For a moment, none of us spoke. Mara's words returned immediately: a different person. She had not been imagining the change. The man she had known was dead, and someone, or something, had been operating under his name.
That knowledge changed the nature of the mystery.
We were no longer searching for a man who had altered his methods. We were looking at the remains of one man while another had assumed his place.
And the evidence around us pointed in the same direction. The vines, the undead, the hidden corpse, the transformation of Rook's organization—all of it led back toward the Healer.
I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with that name.
Not because healing is unfamiliar to me. In Heaven, restoration was among the most natural expressions of celestial power. To mend what was broken was not considered extraordinary. It was simply part of the order of things. Here, however, the word healer has begun to acquire a different meaning. Whoever this being is, their work leaves traces that are difficult to reconcile with the simple act of saving lives.
Perhaps that is what troubles me most. Not that the Healer possesses power, but that I cannot yet understand the purpose behind it.
We left Gull's Knee with the certainty that Rook was dead and that the person now acting in his name was connected to the same corruption we had been following since La Esperanza. The mystery had grown, but at least the shape of it was beginning to emerge.
Outside the compound, we were approached by a messenger.
Njall, the surviving stevedore, was looking for us.
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