Chapter 6: The Price of a Sister

Chapter 6: The Price of a Sister

The silence in the derelict hospital wing was a living thing, heavy and suffocating. Kael’s question—“What… did you just do?”—was not a request for information. It was a demand, the sound of a geologist discovering a vein of impossible, world-altering metal and wanting to know its source.

Elara met his stare, her brief moment of triumph curdling into a familiar, cold dread. His usual apathy had been a shield for her; she knew how to navigate his indifference with sarcasm and grudging compliance. But this new, predatory interest was a blade at her throat.

“I completed the assignment,” she said, her voice tight. “The echo is pacified. The soul is reaped. It’s done.”

“You did not follow protocol,” Kael stated, taking a slow, deliberate step out of the shadows. The moonlight caught the severe lines of his face, making him look less like a man in a suit and more like a statue carved from a dying star. “Protocol dictates severing the emotional anchors to induce systemic collapse. You… resonated with them. You manipulated them. You wove them into a resolution.”

He was dissecting her actions with chilling precision. He hadn't just seen what she did; he understood it on a fundamental level that she was only just beginning to grasp herself. The realization that he understood her power better than she did was terrifying.

“I improvised,” she said, forcing a shrug. “The System only cares about results, right? The ledger gets paid either way.”

“The System cares about order,” he corrected, his voice dropping, taking on a dangerous edge. “And you are an anomaly. That ability… to not only perceive the threads of fate and attachment but to influence them… it is not a flaw. It is a key.”

A key to what? The question hung unspoken between them. Kael’s obsidian eyes held a universe of secrets, but he offered her none of them. Instead, his expression hardened, the moment of shock and awe receding, replaced by the familiar mask of the warden.

“Your methods are unsanctioned and reckless,” he declared, reasserting control. “You invite contamination. Your debt remains. Your next assignment is-”

He was cut off. Not by Elara, but by a sudden, frantic jolt that shot through her entire being. It was the phantom phone vibration from his office, but a hundred times stronger, a desperate, screaming alarm bell ringing in the core of her soul. It wasn't a memory or an echo. It was live. It was happening now.

It was the brilliant, unwavering thread she had seen in Mrs. Gable’s room, the one that had stretched out into the night. But this wasn't a thread of gentle, grandmotherly love. This was her thread. Her connection to Chloe. And it was vibrating with pure, undiluted terror.

Chloe’s voice erupted in her mind, not as a thought, but as a psychic scream carried along that vital connection.

Elara! Elara, oh god, where are you?

Elara staggered, clutching her head. The grimy hospital corridor dissolved, replaced by a searingly bright, sun-drenched image. A college quad. Green grass, students laughing on benches, the scent of fresh-cut lawns and textbook paper. A perfect, normal, beautiful day. And at the center of it, her sister.

Chloe was huddled behind a large oak tree, her face pale, her knuckles white where she clutched her phone. Her eyes, the same stormy grey as Elara’s, were wide with fear, fixed on something just out of sight.

Chloe? What is it? What’s wrong? Elara projected back, a frantic, desperate pulse of thought.

There’s a man, Chloe’s mental voice trembled, laced with panic. He keeps trying to talk to me. I told him to leave me alone, but he’s still watching me. Elara, it’s his eyes… they’re… they’re not normal.

A cold that had nothing to do with Kael or the nature of death flooded Elara. She knew. Before Chloe even said the words, she knew.

“What is happening?” Kael’s voice was a sharp intrusion, breaking the vision. He could sense the shift in her, the sudden, violent redirection of her attention.

Elara ignored him, focusing everything she had on her sister. Chloe, what do his eyes look like?

Like… like purple gems or something. Amethyst. Chloe’s terror spiked, a needle of pure fear stabbing into Elara’s soul. He knows my name, Elara. He just called my name. He said… he said he has a message for me, from my sister.

Lysander.

The name was a detonation in her mind. This wasn't a random recruitment pitch anymore. He had failed to sway her, so he had changed tactics. He had found her one, singular weakness and put a knife to its throat. He was targeting her sister.

The choice wasn't a choice. It was a reflex. The Crimson Ledger, the debt, the System, Kael’s menacing interest in her powers—it all turned to dust. None of it mattered.

“No,” Elara whispered, the word a feral growl.

“Harvester,” Kael’s voice was a sharp command. “Report. What has your attention?”

“He’s gone after my sister,” she said, her head snapping up to face him. For the first time, she wasn’t a frightened, sarcastic trainee. She was a predator whose territory had been invaded. “Lysander. He’s at her college.”

Kael’s face remained impassive, but a flicker of something ancient and cold passed through his eyes. Annoyance. Fury at a rival’s move on his chessboard. “Lysander’s actions are not your concern. Your sister is part of the mortal coil. You are forbidden to interfere. That life is over.”

“The hell it is,” Elara snarled. Her scythe blazed into existence in her hand, its silver light no longer gentle, but sharp and furious. “He’s using her to get to me. To get to you.”

“Your duty is here,” Kael stated, his voice dropping to absolute zero. It was not a suggestion. It was a law of nature. “Your next target is waiting. To abandon your post is a cardinal transgression. The penalties are… severe.”

He was threatening her with oblivion, with a soul-debt so vast it would crush her into nothing. She looked into his cold, obsidian eyes and felt nothing but contempt. He and Lysander were two sides of the same monstrous coin, cosmic beings playing games with mortal lives, and her sister was caught in the middle.

“Then penalize me,” she spat.

Without another word, she turned and ran. Not through the hospital, but through the veil itself. She pushed her will outward, focusing on the terrified, pulsing thread that connected her to Chloe. She was no longer a reaper, a harvester, or a debtor. She was just a sister, and she was coming home.

“ELARA!”

Kael’s voice boomed behind her, no longer a thought in her head but a physical shockwave that cracked the very fabric of the ethereal plane. It was the sound of a god’s fury, of cosmic order being defied.

She didn’t look back. She poured all of her energy, all of her fear and rage, into her flight, tearing a hole between the shadowed world of the dead and the bright, sunlit world of the living. The crumbling hospital wing dissolved around her, and the scent of antiseptic and dust was replaced by the smell of green grass, warm sunshine, and her sister’s terror.