​Chapter 37. Kill Me

A stranger’s cuff — metal and plastic — Amy pressed into his hand right here in the bar. Mark clenched it so hard the metal creaked. It could have been Lily — her calculated move meant to drive a wedge between him and Mari. Or Amy — all false smiles and venomous hints. Another manipulation, another attempt to drag him into their bloody game.

But beyond logic and suspicion, something else broke through — not knowledge born of reason, but of that dark essence now living in his body. It recognized, unmistakably, her pain and longing in the message. A recognition he had felt for the first time that night on the roof, in the rain, when her eyes — one light, one dark — pierced straight to his core.

It was Eliza.

He lunged to his feet, knocking the chair over. Derek shouted something after him, but the words stayed behind the door. And then he was running. The snow-covered streets of the Ring blurred into a white tunnel. He ran toward her home — the place where everything had begun — pushed forward by desperate hope.

Eliza stood beneath the dim glow of a single streetlamp; her hair was wet with melting snow. Not a captain in a flawless uniform, not a demon. Just a woman — fragile, lonely, waiting for him under the falling snow. Her face, with its distorted features, looked strange, almost broken. He felt her call — not with his ears but somewhere deep inside.

“Here you are, Mark,” she said.

She turned and walked toward the entrance, her steps swallowed by the snow. Mark followed — because nothing else mattered.

The apartment remained the same yet breathed differently. The old dresser, the worn-out chair, the window overlooking the City — none of it felt foreign anymore. Every object recognized him, and the room itself seemed to exhale in relief, taking him back into its womb. Eliza stopped in the middle of the room and turned.

Mark looked at her — and his eyes tore through the veil of the Pact, revealing the essence beneath. He saw an endless, cosmic loneliness — the loneliness of a being standing between worlds, belonging to none. He felt her pain — not as a memory, but as a living, bleeding wound that had become her prison. In front of him stood Liza Dahmer, kneeling in a puddle, in the rain, beside the small body of a girl with pigtails whose life had ended because of her mistake. This scene, this guilt replaying endlessly in her soul, had become her Hell.

He saw the bridge. Not steel and concrete, but a symbol — a black channel frozen like mercury beneath a starless, grim sky. At the edge — her, a gun at her temple, ready to step into oblivion. He lived through her despair, her death, and her agonizing rebirth into the thing that now stood before him. He saw not her life story but her very nature — and lived it as if it were his own pain.

His fingers, crooked and monstrous, touched her cheek. She didn’t recoil — she just closed her eyes., and a tear slid down her face, pure as an echo of a forgotten memory. In that moment there was no Pact, no Ring, no City. Only them — two ruptures in the fabric of reality.

Not a kiss but a merging of abysses, a collision of dark stars in the void. His darkness recognized hers; his pain answered her pain. Their closeness was neither tenderness nor passion, but something ancient, primal — recognition in which two hurricanes found a common center. In the abandoned apartment, under the howl of the wind and the glow of distant towers, they were not human but gods — the Destroyer and the Reaper, whose realities had collapsed into one.

A ritual of union, where they shaped their bodies — his black armor, her scaled flesh — into a pure extension of their will. Every movement, every touch, shattered the last chains binding them to the world of lies. They destroyed the boundaries between them, burned them in a rhythm where pain and fury became a shared song. In this room, in the heart of the dying Ring, they were at home for the first time.

Their bodies, torn out of the Pact, were now nothing more than empty shells, foreign and dead. Outside, the snow covered the dying world. Eliza looked at it, and in her eyes he finally found his own reflection — not a man, but the Destroyer, whose crown shone in half-light.

She looked into him, and his memory opened before her like a book. Mari’s shop, smelling of dust and herbs. The fragile figure in the chair. The visor, shimmering like stars in the Limb. Their strange conversations, the warmth of tea, her calm — salvation and a trap. The Legion turning into a legion of demons. He himself — the Destroyer, crushing turrets, reality exploding as it erased his enemies into dust. His rage, his triumph, his pain. Mari’s eyes and the connection that held them. She knew everything.

In her knowing, there was no jealousy or hatred. Those feelings belonged to the Pact, to people clinging to illusions of possession and loss. They were beyond it now; the Pact had released them, and its laws no longer held power.

They lay side by side, two beings stripped to their core, and between them no secrets remained.

Silence broke with her voice — quiet, almost soundless, tinged with sadness.

“So you are bound to her,” she said.

She saw Mari through his eyes: warmth, hidden strength, that mysterious power that held him. Mark could not lie.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I think so.”

Mari wasn’t a memory or the woman who had pulled him from the void. She was an anchor, a thread stretched from the past, from the world of the Pact — hated, yet still holding him. As long as that bond existed, he could not become part of Eliza’s hell.

Her asymmetric face froze in the half-light like something cast from metal — a mirror where rupture and darkness mingled. There was only one way out — monstrous, but simple.

“Then do it,” he said. His voice was calm, like the water of the Fort-Point Canal. “Kill me, Eliza.”

A shadow crossed her eyes — not fear, but understanding.

“Kill me,” he repeated. Cold logic of a being that had stepped beyond human morality. “The same way you do with the others. Consume me. Reassemble me. Give me an anchor point in you. Erase what belongs to them.”

He extended his black, clawed hand and touched her cheek, feeling the coldness of her skin and the heat of what she carried inside. Eliza looked at him, and there was no horror in her eyes. She understood the sacrifice he was asking her for. Not death, but union — the final step to become one.

Her hand rose, and a knife coiled out of the darkness: a black bone handle, a matte blade that reflected no light. Her movements were smooth, ritual, like those of a priestess of an ancient rite. She leaned in, raised the blade. Not hatred — mercy. A love not human, but the kind born in Hell, where two ruptures fall into one abyss.

The blade slid under his ribs easily, almost without pain, finding his heart with surgical precision. Cold turned into the burning warmth of blood, and the world collapsed into a point. Her face flashed before him, distorted by snowy light, leaning over him, and the eyes in which he had found a home.

His shell — the flesh bound to Mari — was disintegrating. Eliza was drawing in his pain, his fury, and his memories, rebuilding him within her reality.

The bond vanished, but its shape remained imprinted forever in his new essence.

He thought he was severing the anchor. He didn’t understand the truth: that this severing was itself another manifestation of Mari. For what is the rupture of an anchor, if not simply another Rupture?

Instead of the stale apartment, he was lying on a cold, rough surface, like wet gravel. Each breath was thick, with a taste of smoke and dampness, as in an abandoned bunker where he had once hidden from bombs. Above him stretched a bleak sky, smothered by clouds.

The park was a wasteland of lost hopes. The skeletons of trees — black, withered — reached upward in useless pleading. Their bark peeled away in layers, and beneath it, brown, rotting wood seeped out, exhaling ash and oblivion. There was no life here — only the petrified memory of something gone forever, frozen in the very air.

Mark felt Eliza in every breath of the motionless air, in the cold tightening around his chest, in the silence pressing down like a stone vault, in the longing that pulled him forward like a nerve torn from a body and still connected to it. Her essence — pain, loneliness, eternal exile — lived everywhere: in the shadows between the trees, in the crumbling bark, in the mute places where steps disappeared.

This longing was different, inhuman. Not sentimental, not the kind expressed with tears or words. It was inevitable, like the death of a star.

Before him lay a wide bridge, lined with streetlamps and rusted railings. Its concrete, wet from the fog, stretched into the distance and dissolved into a pale shroud where all boundaries vanished.

Below it was a canal where darkness flowed, swallowing reflections. Not just a river, but a boundary, an Acheron. A line beyond which the living cease to live. He stepped onto the concrete. With each step, the past crumbled to ash — memories of the Pact, of the Ring, of Mari. It trailed behind him, but then tore loose and fell, dissolving in the water.

And he kept walking, sinking into the wet, heavy air. Stopping was impossible — something unknown was pulling him forward, not thought or desire, but a primordial call, stubborn and unavoidable.

Another step, and the concrete of the bridge beneath his foot turned soft, like wet earth. The air thickened, smelled of damp ash, and the shroud of fog ahead condensed, taking on the outlines of dark rooftops. Before him lay Carver Falls, a phantom carved out of darkness. The street stretched into the gloom, the asphalt cracking and crumbling like the skin of a dying thing, and the void gaped in the fissures.

The storefronts of the few shops — murky, like fogged glass, with no light or people behind them, only a viscous dusk. The main square extended farther, seeming endless. The wind drove dry leaves, lifting them into whirlwinds like the shadows of long-departed souls.

The town didn’t speak to him with voices. Its speech seeped from the silence of walls, trickled down in warm drops of rain, howled in empty windows. The whisper was faceless, but Mark recognized it — as his own essence.

Carver Falls was not a place but a threshold. A cave without walls, where the cracks in the asphalt became gates, and the depths below breathed sorrow. From there, from the depths, came the echo of guilt and pain frozen into this land.

He was guided by a longing that permeated every corner of this ghost town. It pushed him forward, toward the place where something he did not yet know would be revealed.

The town ended, and before him rose a dark wall of forest — dense, snow-laden, where the trees stood motionless, guarding a passage into the unknown. The path vanished, and Mark trudged through snowdrifts up to his waist; branches clutched at his cloak with desperate insistence, like the fingers of suicides clawing for life in a final grasp. Frost pierced his body deeper than any blade. Skin born of fire and fury cracked with a dry snap, like obsidian cracking under water’s icy breath. The cracks deepened, and from them oozed thick, black ichor — his blood. Beneath the armor, exposed flesh emerged — raw and crimson — and every step echoed with agony, as if his very body were being flayed without mercy. The wind howled, the snow blinded his eyes, and in this pain a power awakened — inhuman, calling from the darkness.

The forest did not end. The darkness contracted and expanded, revealing bottomless pits under the snow. Mark fell into them, choking on the air, climbed out again, and scraps trailed behind his every movement — shreds of black flesh freezing into the icy crust. It was his past, falling away from him in pieces of rot. Pain did not break him — it burned away everything unnecessary like acid.

The drifts seized him, tore him sideways, but in every fall, in every torn shroud, he found purification. Flesh crumbled to dust, and with it the entire world crumbled away.

When his strength ran out and his body was stripped down to ragged wounds, the forest parted. Before him spread a plain — white, smooth, endless. Above it hung a coal-black sky, empty, without a single star. There was no horizon: beyond lay only the nothingness into which reality itself disappeared.

A river cut across the plain. Thick as oil, it knew no frost and devoured light.

On its bank stood a house. Old, dead, its walls whitened by frost, cracking like ancient bones. The roof sagged under the weight of unbearable sorrow. The house was silent — foreign, lonely, like death itself.

And there, at the very edge of the water, He stood.