—Broadcast—
The stone in Perona's hand was warm. That was the first thing. Stones were not warm. Stones were cold, or at best ambient — they borrowed temperature from whoever held them and gave nothing back. This one felt like skin.
She turned it over slowly, studying the closed eye on its surface. It looked less like a carving now than like something resting.
"Perona." Moria's voice carried a weight that wasn't quite like him. "For your own safety, throw it away."
He was a zombie. He shouldn't have been capable of unease. And yet — ever since they'd entered the streets and found the tentacle creatures, something had been accumulating at the edges of his thoughts. A residue. Not pain, not fear exactly, but the sense of something leaking in from somewhere it didn't belong. The longer his proximity to those things had lasted, the worse it had gotten. Mental pollution was the only term that fit.
He was fairly sure it wasn't his imagination.
Perona closed her fingers around the stone and looked up at Jade. "Lady Jade— is it dangerous to keep this with me? I don't want to become one of those things." She hesitated. "I'd like your honest opinion."
The Shadow Queen looked at the stone with an expression that was specific and old. Not fear. Something closer to the particular distaste of a person confronting an object they have extensive and unwelcome personal history with.
"Beherit," she said, "was present in the era I lived in. Whenever it appeared in large numbers, it was a sign that something catastrophic was coming." She paused. "Today you've encountered one. Where one appears, there are usually more."
The weight of that settled over the group.
She continued, her tone shifting into something more precise — the voice of someone recounting documented history rather than feeling. There was a pattern to Beherit's appearances, she explained. Roughly every thousand years, they emerged in concentration, seeding themselves across the world in the hands of the desperate and the grieving, paving the way for something that had no name in any language that ordinary people used.
The last time it had happened on a large scale, the sun had gone dark. An eclipse — but not the kind that passed. The kind that changed things permanently. Jade had only been a bystander, and still the memory had left a mark she'd carried into her tomb and back out again. She had a psychological wound around Beherit that no amount of centuries had fully healed.
After her resurrection, she had studied them. There were varieties — black ones, blue ones, and according to records she'd found credible, red ones. They varied in texture and temperature: sometimes cold and hard as river stone, sometimes skin-warm and yielding. They could not be destroyed by fire or blade. Thrown into the deep sea, they found their way back to the surface. They were patient in a way that had nothing to do with intention.
Every Beherit had one function.
When its holder fell into despair deep enough — genuine despair, the kind that closes off all ordinary exits — the stone became a key. It connected the holder to something outside this world, something from a higher-dimensional space that humans were never meant to have access to. Through that connection, things that should not exist in the human world could enter it.
Different eras called them different things. Ghosts. Monsters. In this age, demons. But the origin was always the same: creatures from the other side, responding to a human's sacrifice.
The holder could satisfy their desire. Give up what they loved most, and receive in return whatever power they wanted — become whatever they were willing to become.
"Did that man sacrifice his lover?" Perona asked quietly. She was looking at the remains on the street. "To survive?"
The answer came before Jade could speak.
A ghost rose from the body of the tentacle creature — small, pale, wearing a white gauze dress that moved as though there were a breeze that only she could feel. A girl. Young, no older than a child. She drifted toward Perona with the lightness of something that no longer has any weight in the world, stopped just in front of her, and inclined her head in a small, deliberate nod.
Warmth brushed Perona's cheek. Like a child's smile pressed briefly against skin.
Then the ghost dissolved — not dramatically, simply: starlight breaking apart into the dark, each mote fading until there was nothing left to see.
Perona stood still for a long moment.
"The truth is the opposite of what you guessed," Jade said. Her voice was not unkind, exactly, but it carried no softness either — just the flatness of someone reporting a fact they've confirmed too many times. "The woman sacrificed the people around her. She wanted to resurrect her dead husband."
She let that sit, then continued. The innkeeper had used an entire shipful of people to call her husband's soul back from wherever it had gone. She had paid everything. But a soul without a body needs a container, and containers don't volunteer for that kind of occupation. She had given up everything for him. He had taken her body in return, and whatever remained of the person she'd been had died under her own husband's will.
Jade had seen this pattern before. Most Beherit uses ended in human tragedy. The dark creatures that answered the stone's invitation had aesthetic preferences that ran toward irony. Only rarely did a holder come away with power and something resembling their original self still intact.
She ordered a shadow warrior to turn over the half-head on the ground and expose the back of the skull. A symbol was marked there — carved or grown, it was hard to say which.
"First Apostle," she said. "The symbol means 'one.' The lowest rank." She looked at it without particular interest. "Primarily physical. No special abilities beyond what you've already seen. Minimal threat to the wider world."
She enumerated the others with the calm of someone reciting a table of contents.
The Second Apostle represented a qualitative step up — something closer to the special abilities of a Paramecia-type Devil Fruit user, she described it, though the analogy was imperfect. Variable in strength. Manageable, if encountered with adequate preparation.
The Third Apostle combined the capabilities of the first two and added something more: a vitality that resisted finality. Killing one cleanly required full effort from her, and even then the margin for error was narrow. She described this without pride or drama, as simple operational fact.
The Fourth Apostle she described by absence. All intelligent creatures who had encountered one were dead. No record had survived. If you found yourself in the presence of one, she said, the outcome was already decided.
Moria absorbed this. "And you've faced these things personally."
"The title of Shadow Queen was built on their corpses," she said simply.
She didn't say it to impress. There was nothing performative in it. She said it the way a craftsman describes their work history — accurately, because the record is what it is.
She was quiet for a moment, her eyes on the street, on the dissipating black mist, on the place where the trolls had been and were no longer.
"Everyone dies eventually," she said. "The strong, the weak. Death doesn't negotiate. Whatever you've built, whatever you're known for — none of it follows you underground. It stays up here for people like Moria to dig up."
Moria, to his credit, did not argue with this characterization.
"I killed many apostles," she continued, "for the sake of everyone who was alive at the time." A pause. Something shifted in her expression — not quite guilt, but its older sibling. The thing that survives guilt and becomes a permanent fixture. "I also did things that were forbidden. Otherwise, I would not have been in a position to be resurrected in this era."
She did not elaborate. The shadow warriors waited at her flanks in silence, and the street was very quiet.