Wind rustled through the trees, a susurrus laughter that filled Bunny’s silence and whipped the misty cloud of Cain’s breath to the breeze. Most mornings, now that winter sat dark and heavy around them, Cain would step onto the street, his long wool coat an afterthought, and stand, for a moment, on the steps of his building watching all those plumes of misty breath fog the air.

He’d watch his own – at first a thin mimic of life, and then as the winter chill chased the lingering heat from his lungs, nothing but a ghost. It always struck him that if someone noticed, it’d be much the same as finding a man with no shadow blackening the ground at his feet. Like he pulled his lungs open and closed but didn’t breathe at all.

“Don’t think we was talking about Levi.”

Cain’s eyes strayed back to Bunny at her spitting words, the inflection in her accent harsh and lilting at once. Her dark eyes still fixed on the horizon. A gleam cradled her iris that, to Cain’s eyes, pulsed and seared in a crescent of liquid gold.

“Oh?”

“Nah, you done know we talking about this fucking state. The one that you caused, and now you’re sitting there pretending you’re someone normal. Pretending you ain’t still got those gun bits going on the side, that you ain’t still got fingers in the company churning out the most expensive insulin on the market and you’re halfway to undercutting every other public health company that makes it cheap. Just ‘cause you ain’t out there threatening the fucking prime minister in his house or—or orchestrating false fucking bomb strikes on foreign military, don’t mean you ain’t still screwing every single one of those people down there who ain’t got the pennies to keep floating.”

Now he recalled why he never talked to Bunny. Cain crossed one leg over the other, a surly cast to his lips, and picked idly beneath his nails. The shape of them seemed to shiver, to warp and double and glaze. “Business is business, Bunny. If I can, why shouldn’t I?”

“You still going to be saying that when the world goes up in flames? It ain’t business; you turned your back on every shitty thing you’ve done to the world, and I’m trying – like every day I’m trying something new to fix it, and it’s not even my problem!” Bunny twisted in her seat, her eyes wild and passionate against the dark. “Do you know what it’s like standing there while the pigs lob tear gas at me for giving a shit, knowing that unlike every other person around me, I always know exactly whose fault it is?”

There was, now he looked closer because looking elsewhere would only needle this fraying restraint in his mind more, a fire burning in the city. Cain had mistaken it for a nexus hub of streetlights gathered in a square through the blurring veil of the rain, but now he looked, the city burned. Flickers of red and blue surrounded the seething flames, and the patch alight seemed almost incomprehensibly massive at this scale.

Once, not very long ago, Cain had blinked and found himself on a street awash with blood and rotting flesh. Brick and mortar had crumbled, and as he walked through that echoing silence, his limbs shaking beneath him, he passed gully after gully between buildings where the same tide of obliterating sorcery had swept through for blocks around. He’d seen someone before it happened, he knew that, but no matter how much he wracked his trembling mind, he couldn’t remember who it had been or what that person had done.

And there was no trace left but sodden bones.

There was a story about it, out there amongst the men and women who’d once followed him. Cain had heard it once and hadn’t left his room for two days.

And the King raised his hands and the great black tide engulfed all. As high as the tallest building and stretching beyond sight, the tide cleansed all in its path. And when the darkness cleared, though the shrouded light was shrouded no more by the haze of chaos, none remained to see it, for all in its path had been poisoned so deeply by chaos that its purging took them all.

It was tight, the memory. It was a layer of sorcery and skin and muscle and veins, and it was the vacuum inside him that sucked them inimically inward, stretching his being taut against his bones until he looked just like the monster that lurked beneath his flesh.

“I did what I could.” Cain’s words came between gritted teeth. Sorcery gathered so thick against his skin it throbbed, and the lights below bloomed, ultraviolet sunbursts that drowned the dark. It hurt, enough that if he didn’t grit his teeth, the words would come thick and gasping with pain. “I threw away everything I ever made of myself and I was the only reason your crusade to save the bloody world succeeded.”

“Well guess what, King Cain, you’re not doing enough.” Her voice reverberated against the inside of his skull, a rattling agony that had Cain hissing, and the longer Bunny talked, the more it all built and built. “You made this, and you made what we have now more than all your Spider Queen’s apocalypse. This world – this crumbling dystopian shitfest – this is all straight out your selfish, tyrannical manifest. That makes it your problem, and it’s about time you stood up and did—”

Cain did stand up. The cityscape before him pulsed, engulfing every inch of him in the burning lights. The darkness, when he turned, consumed him in turn, like he passed from a dying earth to beneath heaving waves of the black, black sea. Branches withered where he passed them, the wood curling brittle around itself, turning to claws like the arms of a body where the mind already ran away.

If he just let it go. Let the black tide spill across the streets or plume into the petrol-coated air, draw rot from an already rotten city and bring decay to where it already tumbled to its knees. It’d all be fine – his head would stop hurting, this light would stop twisting his eyes. The Veil had come, and now Cain gave it no purpose, it screamed.

“Cain?”

Cain stopped. A strip of amber struck out ahead of him, poisoned and gnarled by the monstrous claws of branches and bent, withered lampposts. Stacks of cars trailed along to his left, a technicolour corona that seared somewhere at the base of his skull. One shape alone stood in front of him, a little distant, short, all wrapped up in black. The frayed edges of the fabric danced like whipcords across the light.

He tasted the name on his tongue. “Casper?”