After breakfast, Caspian and Alain had taken Aethea back to her room to rest. Being up so long seems to have taken a heavy toll as she fell asleep almost as soon as she was put back into bed. “Your mother looks so peaceful.”

“Mm,” he whispers, stepping back from the bed. “She always has.”

Her eyes turn to his face, which has turned back to its normal, focused state. She looks down, moving to gingerly take his hand. “You provided a service I don’t think I can repay.”

“No need to pay anything back. I felt it was necessary before... what is to come.” His tone is grim, though he does not speak of the illness ripping away at his mother’s being, but of something else. He speaks of a completely new world, one shrouded in mystery and intangible complexity. With such a melancholy pitch about his voice, he alludes to one thing worse than any of his fears: the Abyss.

---

“The ‘Abyss’?”

“Yes- It came to me in a dream last night,” Caspian tells Alain in his observation room-like fake parlor. After Deacon Urius decided to compromise his secrecy, Cas thought it only necessary to keep his Controller informed on his findings. “I thought it was another hallucination, but I now know it wasn’t. It was a vision coming to me from the place, like I’d seen before already.”

Alain’s confused look reminds him that he never told her of the being in his dream. She asks, “You mean you’ve been affected by this... Abyss, but neglected to tell me?”

“Well... Correct, I neglected to tell you, but I had no way of telling if it was real or just a night terror at the time. Last night, however, it appeared again. Most of what I heard was nonsense, but I could make out the phrase perfectly clear: ‘Beware the Abyssal Core.’”

“That sounds quite cryptic. Have you... found this ‘core’?”

On the massive screen in front of them, Cas is searching endless bits of terrain that still seem to make little sense at all. “No, I haven’t found anything useful. It’s as if this world is incomplete, unfinished. This may be the best time to go if I can still disrupt the process of its creation.”

The Elf’s look turns to worry. “Maybe it's best we stick to the Council’s schedule. It knows best, after all.”

“Yes, that it does,” he agrees, eyes stuck to the screen. He continues scrolling, searching for something that may never appear to him.

“Agent, are you sure this is how you want to spend your last days in a familiar place before-”

“Shh.” Caspian lifts a hand, quieting her with the hush. “Do you hear that?” He gets no response, or at least doesn’t hear one as his attention begins to fail him except for the sound of a quiet melody in his ears. As he focuses more and more on the song, he makes out distinct chords, thinking it to be some kind of distorted music box. Knowing this is impossible in his home, Cas realizes it must come from the screen, from his search that has yet to bear any fruit.

The man scrolls ever so slowly, unable to sense anything but the music in his ears and the screen in his eyes. Before he can attempt to locate the source, the melody starts to fade. Without hesitation, he begs it to stay, even beginning to hum the melody to keep focus on it. The varying pitches help to keep it fresh in his mind, humming it slowly at first to keep the sound alive. Doing this, and scrolling in what must be the right direction, the tune returns to him louder than ever. He hums the melody, picking it apart each moment as it grows in volume. The music’s call pulls his search away from the main halls of this world, and he simply pans over empty nothingness.

After what feels like minutes of following the song, it suddenly disappears without a trace. Caspian is left staring at a blank screen. “No-” he spurts, “No no, come back to me.” Try as he does, humming and pleading, the ethereal music fails to return. “Please, no... Damn it, damn it all.” Finally accepting defeat, he scrolls his way back to where he was, but loses the way. “Huh? This isn’t right,” he says as the halls are utterly different than before. They have morphed, changed while he wasn’t looking, as if playing some sick trick on him. It doesn’t make sense. None of this makes any sense! Hands meet his head and his elbows meet the desk. “It... doesn’t... make... any... sense...”

Coming back to his senses, Cas feels a familiar touch on his shoulder. “Agent... It’s time to take a break.” Despite his silent protest, she pulls him from the room, refusing to watch the room return to its normal state as she brings him over into his bedroom. There, he is led to lie down and rest for a bit. Alain, however, doesn’t stay. She closes the door behind her and retreats to the living room where a chair and her tablet await her. “Cas...” she whispers to herself. “Maybe we’re both a bit stressed.”

On the tablet, she brings back up the photos from the night before. “Three days left... two and a half.” She flips through the pictures, a small smile returning to her face. “How can you be such a different person out there? How... how can I be so different out there?” In one image, it is clear that someone else was the photographer. Alain is standing with her Agent in front of a massive structure of a Goddess she forgets the name of. The two of them look so happy, likely faking the smiles used for the one picture together. No, not the only one. Her finger swipes at the screen, bringing her back to the final point of their night where the two of their faces are there, hers pressed to his. Why the long face, handsome?

As she stares, Alain’s mind begins to distort the image she sees, like if she were to stare at her own face in the mirror for too long. The smile fades as she realizes something- Caspian isn’t just not paying attention or looking out into the distance, he’s looking at something. It wasn’t clear at first, but the way his eyes are positioned with the slightest hint of focus on them brings the revelation to the Elf. She goes back to the other pictures, finding more where Cas either isn’t looking at the camera or is looking seemingly just past it. A chill ripples down her spine as this fact becomes true in almost every image. Her Agent was keeping something in his sight at almost all times, but... why?

Alain goes back to the beginning, analyzing the scene of every photo taken the night before. Some were taken by her, some by him, and some by some third party. The ones taken by him have her or the object of interest in view, but not always in the center. One particular image is of Alain posing with an Ascentian guard, though the two are on the left side of the photo, like Caspian was for some reason failing to center the camera. What in the world was he...?

When she finally sees it, her eyes widen and her body becomes paralyzed. In the upper left corner, just past her own person, there is the faintest appearance of something otherworldly. She just sees an arm sticking out behind a pillar, but it is elongated and thinned out to the point of being impossible for any Angel or other Ascentian being to possess. Blade-like claws stretch from an equally thin hand, and the whole appendage is pure black, but with a starry texture to it, like riddled in very subtle, white glitter.

In another picture, a face is seen in the pool of a fountain. Almost transparent, nearly completely invisible, the only way to see it there is to stare directly at it longer than a few seconds, which Alain does. The same starry texture is about it, but all she sees is the face this time. Two jewel-like eyes stare just past the camera, surely at Caspian, and a wide, fanged smile giving off some sinister glee stares just as menacingly. With the two images together, she is closer to piecing what had been seen together. This has to be what has him so spooked right now.

Alain dims the tablet, putting it to the side. Frighteningly paranoid now, she pulls her legs up onto the chair and watches the door to the bedroom. He has been in close proximity to that coin for at least a few days now; how long, I don’t know. That, combined with his mother’s life fading and what the Ascentian woman said about her own nightmares... we’ve been taking this mission assignment lighter than we should be. However... we can’t seek out more information without harming him more before he even steps foot in that “Abyss.” What do I do to keep him going? What is he missing that I’m not giving? Why wouldn’t he tell me about this?

Time goes on, and Alain decides she’s going to confront him. She gets up from the chair, taking a deep breath as one foot moves in front of the other. Step by step, she nears the door with overwhelming anxiety. Is he going to be okay? Her body trembles for a second at the thought of what she had uncovered in the photos. Will we have to cancel him for this mission? A hand reaches up to take hold of the door handle, feeling its cold feedback. Cas, please don’t succumb to this insanity. Like ripping a bandage off, she braces herself and pushes through the door, ready to face him and his fears.