Stolen Gifts

[Nox]

After seeing Jay and reality set in, it was time to tell people who might help, or would give a fuck. But the fact was, he was incapable of doing jobs that he had been hired to do.

The first text he sent to Jacob.

Need to talk. Pick a day/time/place and I'll be there

Jacob's reply came back rather quickly

Going Hunt. Meet up afterwards

The Atharim needed to know he could no longer hunt channelers. He could but it was far more dangerous and more likely to get caught and he really didn't want to anyway.  But it was what it was and he would sit down with Jacob and they'd talk.

The second text went to his contact for the Ascendancy.

I need to debrief with the Ascendancy himself. In person. Important information to relay.

He was pretty sure that the whole thing would be a hassle and that they'd have to go in and out of negotiations on whether or  not to let him near the ascendancy. He's had ample opportunity to kill the leader of the known world he could have done it many times -- not that he'd survive the encounter,

Hours later the response came with a date and time and Nox was there at the Kremlin fifteen minutes before the appointment and walked into the Kremlin sans gun and knife even though he absolutely no protection for dying now. He unzipped his coat as he walked inside, he missed the warm bundle of baby he usually kept nestled against his chest, but now wasn't the time. 

His voice was neutral, devoid of any emotion as he walked up to the desk. "I have an appointment with the Ascendancy."  He wasn't wearing a suit like everyone else in the building. He was getting the side eye from security. He didn't care. He didn't feel anything. It wasn't like he was a stranger, he'd been here a few times before, dressed exactly the same, jeans, t-shirt except this time he work heavy hiking boots to stay warm and keep traction as he walked the streets of Moscow.  He should use the car Sage provided them, but he didn't. He could drive if he truly wanted to but it all seemed so frivolous and he didn't want to be in a car anymore than he had to. He preferred his own two feet.  Living in a car tarnished the luxury.

Nox showed the receptionist his ID and they went through the whole thing. He wondered how many hoops he'd have to jump through.

[Ascendancy]

And an ordeal it was, for at least a while. An unexpected addition to his schedule would required approval from high up, if not from the Ascendancy himself. While admitting Nox Durante wasn't exactly a problem, at least not anymore given the many times he'd proven his loyalty, Nikolai thought it best that even the great Nox be reminded that he was only a cog in the machine of the Custody.

To that end, once he was admitted, he was shown to the Executive Offices. There were plenty of staffers to bear witness to Nox's appearance, but stranger things had happened than allowing a scruffy young man in jeans and a t-shirt an audience with the Ascendancy. They would spill no secret, even if they would gossip as much as they dared. 

Nikolai was working at a desk when Nox was shown in and the door closed behind him. When he looked up, he paused almost as if he was startled. Nox was hardly a business formal kind of person, but today, his appearance was even more disheveled than usual. Or perhaps it was only his expression, but something was off. Perhaps it explained the urgency in his request. 

"Nox," he said by greeting and gestured. "Have a seat. I am told you have something urgent to discuss. I hope it's not a new campaign by the Atharim."

[Nox]

Nox was eyed as he walked down the hall. Tongues would waggle as they always did and normally he might listen but as he walked he made sure that the song in his ear was neutral, neither content and happy nor sad and emotion and hopefully not completely devoid of all emotion, though he was sure it didn't show on his face, smiling was a chore, so he chose not to do it. He had to remember not too big, not to bright, don't frown. It was just easier to remain neutral. This was important after all.

He sat down across the desk from the Ascendancy he'd been here enough times he didn't look around. "It could become one when they find out, and they will find out since they are getting the same information sometime in the near future."

Nox was sure the Ascendancy knew his typical rambling so he kept it short. "So my ability to channel, that's what you call the power of the gods right? Yeah, it's been collectively severed from my being. I can't keep doing some of the jobs you hire me to do. I can't touch the source, I can't even feel it. Can't feel anything really, but that's only a fun side effect." He had proof and he had it on him and a copy for the Ascendancy's team to study. Though he didn't offer it up yet. First he wanted to see how Nikolai Brandon reacted to the idea.

[Ascendancy]

Nikolai stared.

The words fell from Nox’s mouth like ash, dry and impossible. Severed. Gone. Cannot feel it.

There was a moment, a flicker between seconds, where he did nothing but listen to the sound of his own pulse beating behind his eyes. He had endured terrible things in his time. Threats. Warnings. Prophecies. Assassinations.

No. No, this was not a message. This was not a confession.

A lie. An impossible lie.

His palms remained still on the desk while every other movement was outwardly composed, but he felt the tautness building in his spine, the way a cable holds just before it snaps. He exhaled once, long and slow.

“You can’t feel it,” Nikolai repeated softly, more to himself than Nox. “You say it’s been taken. As if it were a coat or a watch mislaid.”

He looked at Nox, this rumpled shadow of a man who had, for better or worse, been of use to him. Who had bled for him. Who had killed in the name of order.  Nikolai could not allow what he was hearing to be true.

Because if Nox could lose this Power, then it was not eternal. Then he—Ascendancy, the light and shadow of an empire—was not invincible. A tension curled behind his teeth, and he drew in the breath like a man swallowing lightning.

The lights dimmed.

No. He dimmed them.

The air in the room thickened.  Like ink, like tar sliding into the corners of the chamber. It wasn’t darkness in the ordinary sense. It was deeper than that. The shadows did not fall across the walls, they consumed them, crawling outward until the walls themselves were erased. The gilded fixtures and polished stone were devoured in silence until only two souls remained untouched: Nikolai Brandon, sitting in his chair like a statue of a long-dead god, and Nox Durante, seated before him like an accused man waiting for the sentence to fall.

Then a thread of something darker than shadow wove itself into the air. It was obsidian, sharp and silent. It spiraled upward from the floor and formed a perfect wire. It hung in the air around Nox’s head for a moment before descending in an elegant, murderous curve around his throat.

Nox’s chair tipped back, not with a jolt, but with precision. Engineered. Designed. Steady. Nox reclined unnaturally, his head craned back to expose his neck to the cool caress of that black wire. Nikolai remained seated.

The obsidian wire touched skin.

A line of blood appeared where the obsidian kissed flesh, red against pale, delicate as a lover’s stroke and just as personal.

“Defend yourself,” Nikolai said softly. There was no anger in his voice. Only clarity. Cold, bright, inexorable.

“Channel,” he whispered.

The wire drew in a hair tighter. Just enough to sting. To promise.

“Channel, or I will kill you where you sit.” The air in the room was still. Heavy with promise.

“Because if what you say is true…” Nikolai leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on his desk now, hands still open but rigid, “…then it means our power is not divine. It means it can be severed like a leash. And I do not wear leashes.”

His voice dropped into something more intimate as if he didn't realize it was said aloud. “It means I am not what I am suppose to be.”

Another breath. Slower now, as he climbed to his feet.

“And I will not allow that to be true.”

The wire trembled, as if awaiting its cue.

Nikolai studied Nox, eyes hard as granite. All natural light in the room was gone, banished by this unnatural shadow that curled around them both. Not angry. Not even afraid. But desperate. The kind of desperation that lives only in those who believe they were born to greatness. And who now see the cracks in their crown.

[Nox]

Darkness crept in from the corners. The lights dimmed. The sunlight from the windows faded until they were covered in nothing but the darkness. He could only see the man sitting before him. The power he wielded lost, though Nox was saddened he missed the sight of the weaves. But where there should be fear there was nothing. He knew this was how it would end. Knew that if he came here, told the Ascendancy he was not a god, he would likely die at the man's hands. How he had managed to get away unscathed in the past he wasn't sure, but he'd made himself useful at least.

And now that usefullness was gone. But that wasn't what the Ascendancy tested his fear for. It was the loss of his godhood. He could see it in his eyes. That fear. And a slight bit of anger in it.

"Any means of defending myself was left at home. No gun. No knife and the power is not within reach. If you feel the need to end it. By all means get on with it. I always excepted it would be you to end my life." Nox spoke softly through the pain. He felt that, the tiny sliver of whatever weave was wrapped around his neck. Nox gribbed the chair arms trying to hold still and ease the pain of the razor sharp thread. He'd used similar tricks before, he knew how it worked.

The words came out without fear, without emotions. No songs played in his ear. "But if you let me go, I can tell you what I know of how it happened. And share the data we've collected."

[Ascendancy]

The wire around Nox’s throat trembled like a blade on the verge of commitment. The weave was impossibly sharp. Drawn from something deeper than steel, older than breathing, and it trembled not from instability, but from restraint.

A tremor of red blossomed at Nox’s throat, fine as the nick of a barber’s slip, and still… still - there was no resistance. No flinch. No attempt at defense. No song. No spark. Nothing. It was worse than defiance. It was apathy.

Nikolai narrowed his eyes, and for one breathless moment he considered pushing the weave completely. One flick of thought. A clean line. No consequences he couldn’t explain away here in the heart of his power.

But instead, the thread shivered. Then slackened. The obsidian line retreated like a serpent called home, dissolving into the dark as if it had never been there. Nox remained, jaw tight, fingers clenched to the arms of the chair, but not broken.

Nikolai rose from his seat. The movement was fluid and charged, like a man stepping off the edge of a precipice just to prove the cliff had no claim on him.

He crossed the space between them, and one hand came down hard and fast onto the back of the precariously tilted chair, halting its unnatural angle. The other planted itself on the armrest, leaning him forward until his face hovered just inches above Nox’s own.

The shadows swelled at Nikolai’s back. They cloaked the room, the desk, the world. The only thing that existed in that moment was Nikolai Brandon’s face, lit from beneath with the eerie glow of power, and Nox, laid bare in the cradle of restraint and suspicion.

He searched Nox’s eyes. For anger. For fear. For anything. But what he found was vacancy. Not a void of intelligence… Nox wasn’t a fool. But a hollowness. An absence. As though something vital had already been taken from him, and whatever remained had stopped bothering to pretend it missed the rest.

Nikolai stared, jaw rigid. “It can’t be taken,” he said at last. The words came low, like accusation.  He said it again. This time to himself. “It can’t be taken.”

There had never been a system to it. Not truly. No ceremony, no rules, no inheritance. The Power was. It revealed itself, and those it touched simply became. And once claimed, it was theirs forever. It had to be.

Because if it could be lost, worse, if it could be stripped, then the divine right wasn’t a right at all. It was a lease. A loan. And gods did not beg permission to remain gods.

“Maybe you can’t touch it,” Nikolai whispered. “Maybe you... surrendered it. Maybe some broken part of you let it go.”

The accusation laced through the air like poison, but it wasn't meant to wound Nox. It was meant to protect Nikolai from the abyss opening inside his own certainty. The shadows stirred faintly behind him. But the rage had cooled. Not extinguished, but banked. Like coal under ash.

He leaned in closer, a final inch, his voice almost intimate. “It can’t be taken,” he said again, the words hollow and fragile now. He needed Nox to deny him. To argue. To scream. But there was nothing. Just that terrible, perfect silence. And Nikolai felt a whisper in the back of his mind.

What if it can?

[Nox]

The Ascendancy was afraid and it showed in the anger. He may not admit it, and Nox would never push that particular button but there was no other reason to be this pervasive if not for fear. Nikolai Brandon was face to face, a hairs breath it would be nothing to close the distance and the thought did cross his mind but Nox didn't want to face any other wrath. He should be trembling in his shoes. He should want to piss his pants. This was what fear was, but short of the small lances that pierced his body with each change of situation he didn't show it.

"Why would I lie to you? Why would I say this? You know me enough to know that I lived and died with my power. Why would I choose to give it up? Maybe I am broken, or was broken. But either which way it is gone. Taken. And I can show you what I know."

Nox flicked his eyes and the lens warriors followed his command. His wallet which he held against the arm of the chair flared with a holo projection of himself. Two actually. Spinning in the dark eerie darkness with a sickening green glow. One with the horde, and one without. One with the power, and one without. There was no coincidence in the situation. The horde had changed with the power. It listened to him despite not being connected to their hive mind. He felt them and they had felt him. And they obeyed his control. There was no coincidence. He didn't know what happened. Not completely but he knew enough.

He didn't beg for his life, it was a quiet whisper. The only sign there was fear. But he felt nothing. He wished he felt it. He fucking hated that he couldn't feel it. Though even that was just a passing feeling in the dull gray world he lived now.

[Ascendancy]

The holograms rose. Two versions of Nox spun slowly between them. Green-lit ghosts suspended in the dark, rotating in sterile symmetry. The body with the Power. The body without. At a glance, identical. But then, Nikolai saw it, subtle and chilling. A shadow within the mind.

Then, not.

He didn’t speak at first. Not because there was nothing to say, but because every part of him, every instinct, was pulling inward, recalibrating. Anger had not solved this. Force had not clarified it.

He stepped back from the chair.

The shadowweave dissolved fully into the air like breath fading on glass, and the darkness retreated. Light bled back into the corners of the room like color returning to a corpse. The glamour of power lifted, but the tension lingered.

Nikolai turned without a word and walked toward the window. His hands were behind his back, but they were clenched. Not from fury. From restraint.

He needed to see the sky.

The snow outside had picked up again, frosting the capital in white. The golden domes of Moscow’s skyline shimmered beyond the glass, beautiful and ancient and solid.  He closed his eyes for the space of a single breath. Then he spoke.

“When you leave this office,” he said, voice flat, low, and cold, “you will go directly to the Facility. I’ll make sure Dr. Weston is  expecting you.”

He didn’t look back. “You will not be leaving the Kremlin until those tests are complete.”

There was a pause. Not for emphasis. He didn’t believe in wasting time that way. It was simply the space necessary to file his next words away in perfect, deadly order. “If you do not go willingly, you will go regardless.” Still, he did not turn. But the weight of his attention focused on the horizon as if he was studying the future itself. Nox would feel it as surely as if Nikolai had laid a hand on his shoulder. “This is not punishment,” he added. “This is necessity. And if your data is real. If this is replicable, even in theory, then the implications are far larger than you understand. You are not a weapon now, Nox Durante. You are something … rarer.”

His reflection shimmered faintly in the glass: dark, austere, backlit by winter.

“You are a precedent.”

The word lingered. It tasted wrong in his mouth. Like admitting gravity could be optional. He watched the horizon a little longer, waiting for the fear inside him to settle into something more useful. Strategy. Resolve. Control. And with that, Nikolai stood in the silence as if he was still enveloped by the blanket of shadow, staring out at a world that had just begun to shift beneath his feet.

[Nox]

When things faded Nox relaxed a little, but he didn't dare move and he didn't really say much when he was clearly dismissed. "I will go freely, but I will not be a prisoner. I have no problem taking my own life if I feel it's the only way out. A lovely side effect of the lack of power." Nox stood up and set a data stick on the Ascendancy's desk. "I have another copy for the facility."

The Ascendancy made no move and continue to stare out the window. Nox took his leave. There was someone waiting for him outside the room ready to walk him -- forcably if needed to the Facility. There was no need and they knew it as Nox headed down the hall toward the bowels of the earth.

He'd been to the Facility before -- a prisoner then, sedated and still studied. Nox wasn't sure why they let him go. Or why he wasn't conscripted into things here.

Nox knew the way. His world might be gray but his memory was still intact.

He's met Dr. Weston before. He'd gone through her tests before. He was sure she would find the same thing Sage did. It was a physical disconnection but without knowing what was horde and what was the ability to channel there was nothing else to be done. He just had to sit through all the things. And answer all the questions.

He hoped that it wouldn't take long. It wasn't that he was worried about leaving. He didn't want to worry his family. They knew he was coming here. Hayden knew why, their conversation that morning had been short and it made Hayden worry a bit. But the fact that Nox predicted he'd end up with yet another dr looking at him made Hayden happy.

[Ascendancy]

The day crawled.

Nikolai dismissed three meetings before they even began. He left one man speaking mid-sentence and walked out of another strategic review after no more than five minutes. None of it held his attention. The battles in Africa could burn itself out. Infrastructure in Dominance Five could collapse under its own weight. Nothing mattered in the face of this.

The knowledge sat behind his ribs like a blight. Something eating at him. Something impossible. He had built a world atop certainty. His certainty. Now someone had shoved a crack through its foundation. And he refused—refused—to let it spread.

When the notification finally came that Dr. Weston had something to show him, he made the journey himself. The Facility was as he remembered it: immaculate, sterile, quiet with that suffocating kind of silence that had nothing to do with sound, much of the training space the Dominions once occupied shifted to the Garden. The Facility knew he was coming. The entire Kremlin did. He didn’t walk through the halls. He occupied them.

Dr. Weston met him in the diagnostics lab. He noted how quickly she stood when he entered. Her nervousness was telling. She was always formal, but rarely emotional.

“Ascendancy,” she said, bobbing slightly in greeting. She gestured to the holoscreen behind her. “I’ve reviewed the comparative scans.”

He said nothing at first, only approached, eyes scanning the three-dimensional render that hovered above the table. A brain. Nox’s brain. It rotated slowly. Clean. Normal. Unremarkable. Except it wasn’t.

“What am I looking at?” he asked.

Weston took a breath. “These are the most recent neurocognitive scans of Nox Durante. I’ve seen his historical data before. He’s been imaged here several times. This is the baseline—” She flicked her fingers and the original rendering of Nox’s channeling-capable brain appeared beside the current scan. “And this is now.”

The difference was immediate.

The original scan had a luminous center: a sort of glowing web of overactive synaptic density deep in the cerebral architecture. The new scan lacked it completely. But where it once had been, there remained something else.

But it wasn’t absence. It was more like damage.

“This region,” Weston said, highlighting it, “shows an abnormality consistent with... well, the best word I have is scar tissue. Synaptic disruption, degeneration, a collapse of interconnectivity. In the previous scan, this area was one of the most active in his neural profile. Now it’s functionally... offline.”

Nikolai didn’t blink. “And the data he gave you?”

She nodded. “Matches this, but goes even further. He, or rather, whoever captured his personal data, mapped what appears to be a complex synaptic mass not normally found in the human brain. Not even in other channelers we’ve studied.”

“What kind of mass?”

She hesitated. “It’s like a brain within a brain.”

Nikolai’s eyes narrowed.

“He was... hosting something?” he asked.

“No, not hosting,” Weston replied quickly. “More like... developing. It wasn’t foreign. It was him. But somehow more. An architecture layered on top of the original. The kind of structure you’d expect from an artificial neural net—purpose-built, responsive, incredibly complex. And it’s gone now.”

He folded his arms. His voice came low. Measured. “Have you seen anything like it before?”

She shook her head. “Nothing even close. But I went back through the archives. Every active channeler we’ve scanned shows heightened synaptic concentration in that same region, but without the additional mass. None were quite so elaborate as Nox’s used to be, but the signature is consistent. This area lights up when they channel. In his case, it was almost like that part of his brain had grown into something new.”

Nikolai stared at the image, the ruined nerve cluster flickering in green light. “And can it be reversed?”

Dr. Weston didn’t answer immediately. “We don’t know what made it appear in the first place. Or what caused it to vanish. Whether it’s decay, severance, or something else entirely. Until we understand that, I can’t even speculate on reversal.”

He said nothing.

Weston continued, gentler now. “This isn’t loss like we understand it in the traditional medical sense. It’s erasure. Whatever this was... it didn’t just shut off. It was ripped out.”

Nikolai turned from the image. He didn’t want to see it anymore. He didn’t want to look at a brain that had once contained godhood and now looked average.

The walk back through the corridor was silent. He barely registered the security team that accompanied him. His hands were clasped behind his back, his pace smooth, unhurried. But inside? Inside, there was only one thought now.

Something did this. Something made this happen.

And he would find it. Learn it. Control it. If Nox had lost the gift, then perhaps it wasn’t divine after all. Or perhaps divinity had rules. Ones he simply hadn’t yet mastered. But he would. By will or by war, he would.

Nikolai opened the door to the waiting chamber without knocking. He found Nox seated alone in a minimalist room, no restraints, no guards. Just some snacks and screens to pass the time. Waiting. He stepped in, let the door slide shut behind him. It was only the two of them now.

When he spoke, he was calm and precise, but no longer cold. Not a ruler demanding obedience.

“Explain it to me,” Nikolai said, taking up a chair as if it were a throne. “From the beginning. I want every detail.”

He would tear the truth out, one word at a time if he had to. Because if this power could be taken... Then he would learn how to take it back.