Dane's voice was steady, carrying the weight of a question he'd been building toward his entire adult life.
"My grandfather believed it. His grandfather before him. Four generations of our family kept the records and kept the belief alive when everyone else called it legend. We dedicated our lives to finding you."
He paused.
"I need to know if we were right."
Jolthar was quiet.
"No," he said.
"In the first place, who is this immortal lord? I don't know anything about him."
Dane absorbed this.
"I don't believe you," he said, without hostility. Simply as a factual counter-position.
"You ca out of a sealed tomb in Kreeshan Valley. You have energy readings that exceed the equipnt's asurent capacity."
He leaned forward slightly.
"My ancestors were scholars and researchers and careful, rational people. They docunted what they found with academic rigor across four generations. Their records describe an immortal being with chaos-based power, sealed by the Sovereign Queen and a daemon goddess working in conjunction."
He looked at Jolthar steadily.
"That is you. I am certain of it."
Jolthar looked at the old man for a long mont. At the years of work and sacrifice and belief are written into his face. At the hands that had carried docuntation across dangerous borders and through witch squad pursuits.
Four generations of one family keeping faith with sothing the world had decided to forget.
"The na they used," Jolthar said finally.
"The immortal lord. What did your family's records call him?"
Dane's eyes sharpened imdiately. He recognized the question for what it was—not a denial, but a test. A way of verifying the accuracy of the records before deciding how much to confirm.
"Jolthar," Dane said quietly.
"They called him Jolthar. Or sotis the Chaos Lord. Or simply the Sealed One."
He paused.
"But the na that appeared most consistently, the one the original records used, was Jolthar Arkwright."
The na hung in the air between them.
Jolthar looked at his own hands resting on his knees. The hands that carried power that had grown for three hundred years in the dark and that held inside them the chaos energy that predated the organized structures of this entire world.
He looked up at the old man who'd spent his life believing in him.
"Your family kept good records," he said.
It wasn't a confirmation in words. But Dane's eyes filled with sothing that had been waiting decades to be released, and his hands, clasped in his lap, tightened briefly before he controlled himself.
"What do we do now?" Dane asked. His voice was rough but steady.
"The resistance is broken. The Council is hunting us. The world is..."
He gestured at everything and nothing.
"The world is what it is. We ca to find you because we believed you were the only power capable of changing things."
Jolthar remained quiet, staring at the floor. His mind was still occupied with Martha and Kate.
The door opened, and Martha returned, Dr. Nansen behind her with a tablet showing results that she was still visibly processing. Sofia ca in from the waiting area, no longer pretending she hadn't been watching through the window.
Martha looked at Dane sitting beside Jolthar. At the quality of the silence between them. She read it with the accuracy of soone who'd spent decades interpreting evidence.
"How much did you tell him?" she asked Jolthar.
"Nothing," Dane said, before Jolthar could answer.
Martha looked at Jolthar. He t her gaze steadily.
She looked at him for a long mont with the expression of soone reorganizing their understanding of a situation.
"Alright," she said.
"Then we need to talk. All of us."
She looked around the room.
"Not here. At ho."
*
The drive back from the hospital had been quiet.
Martha drove with the focused attention she brought to all practical tasks.
Dane sat in the passenger seat, still processing whatever had passed between him and Jaenor in the examination room. Sofia occupied the back beside Jaenor, her body language suggesting she had approximately seventy questions and was physically restraining herself from asking any of them.
Jaenor watched the city pass through the window. His mind was still reeling from the fact that two important won of his life are right before him. He watched the car make its way, passing by the city's wide streets.
They rged onto the highway heading north toward Silverwood Heights just as the sun dropped below the horizon.
The traffic moved with the characteristic density of the evening commute. Mostly private vehicles, so comrcial transport. Martha drove the car with a distant gaze, her mind filled with thoughts of Jaenor. But her eyes never left the road.
They were perhaps ten miles from the Silverwood exit when everything stopped at once. The entire flow of traffic simply halted, brake lights flaring red across multiple lanes. Martha's hands tightened on the wheel as she brought the car to a stop behind a comrcial van.
"Accident?" Sofia asked, craning to see ahead.
"Or checkpoint," Dane said.
"Council sotis runs random inspections on the major routes."
But it wasn't either of those things.
The screaming started perhaps thirty seconds later.
Not one voice, but multiple. Coming from ahead in the traffic jam, carrying across the evening air with the particular quality that made human nervous systems react before conscious thought caught up.
Terror began to engulf the highway as the screams beca louder and more alarming.
Martha's window was half-open. Through it ca sounds that didn't belong to a highway traffic jam.
People screaming in pain and fright.
Jaenor's posture changed instantly. His body went from casual observation to absolute readiness in the space of a heartbeat. His eyes fixed forward, tracking sothing the others couldn't see yet through the rows of stopped vehicles.
"Lock the doors," he said quietly.
Martha reached for the lock button.
She was half a second too slow.
The figures appeared between the cars with speed that defied normal human movent. They wore black clothing that blended with the darkness, their faces obscured by hoods and the particular shadow that wasn't quite a natural shadow.
Four of them converged on Martha's vehicle.
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