The first thing Low felt was cold. Not the sting of wind or weather — but something more profound, as if the memory of heat had been stripped from bone.
He gasped, but no air entered. The breath was reflex. His lungs filled like they remembered being human.
'What the hell...?'
He reclined in the shallow, overgrown wreckage of a ruined chapel, its roof years before fallen in, walls enfumed with vines and rot. Moonlight seeped into the ruptured areas, gathering silvers in pools of dust.
The world was quiet — claustrophobically so — as though sound itself did not care to acknowledge what had just been returned.
Low slowly sat up, his muscles tight.
'Its... painful.'
The wind wasn't in his face. The crickets weren't chanting. Even the dead, seemingly, were drawing breath.
Then he saw it.
The Mark — once twisted across his chest — was absent. It had shifted, ascended, usurped new space. Now it glowed dully on the left side of his cheek, etched from brow to chin like a holy scar.
It throbbed gently beneath the skin, as if to warn him:
"You are no longer hidden."
He put a hand to his face — pale, spare, powdered in gray like rock left too long in darkness. His skin did not flush anymore with blood, but it wasn't corpse-gray either. Stained not with the hue of life.
Long, silvery-white hair clung to his face, dusty. It fell in rough waves below his shoulders, as if it had grown wild while the world had been too preoccupied to remember him.
His eyes — half-shut and sunken into something old — no longer sported the smile of Lucius Clockwell.
'No... this isn't real...'
One of his eyes remained veiled in black, the other, beside his Mark, a nearly colorless white — a window not to the soul, but to the shadow of one.
He pressed his lips.
They were cold and immobile, unlike before.
He didn't shiver, well, he couldn't. The cold wasn't on the surface of his skin; it was his skin.
And for the first time after his death, Low knew: this body was not brought back in one piece.
It had been rewritten.
Low looked around — and for a moment, nothing knew him. Not the trees. Not the sky. Not even the ground. The world had changed, as had he.
Then, a sound. Barely. A crow, somewhere in the distance, cried once — harshly. Others answered. One after another, they gathered over the chapel's broken steeple, against the stars.
Low stood.
There was no ceremony. Just a man with nothing left of his name and a voice not yet raised.
He stood before the crypt.
The place where Lucius Clockwell had been buried long before he ever died.
Under the chapel's broken altar was the entrance — a wedge of stone darkened with age, half-hidden by roots and rubbish.
Low walked up to it and the crows above rustled in respect.
He pressed his hand against the stone.
The cold there was something he had never known. Older than death. It pulsed once — with something like welcome. The Mark on his face responded, a slow roll of light moving down his cheek like a tear that would not fall.
The slab moved.
Dust unrolled as the crypt opened wide.
The stagnant air curled upwards — heavy with rot. Sever descended step by step, echoing like a remembered heartbeat off the walls. There was no moss on the stairs, no spider's web. As if nothing had ever come close enough to claim a space in a man's tomb.
He stepped to the ground.
There, on a raised bed of stone, lay the remains of what he used to be — a skeleton, covered half in ritual cloth, the collapsed ribcage where there used to be a spike lodged. The crossed arms were still over the chest.
Low approached his own body.
He did not recoil. Not even when the corpse's head turned towards him — in realization. In recognition flowered that which was once and that which is now.
He knelt.
He did not do it to mourn, but to take back.
He reached into the folds of the burial shroud — and pulled out a charred rosary. The beads were broken, the chain rusted through.
But the centerpiece remained.
Low looked at it.
Then let it fall from his fingers.
He would not carry that with him. Not any longer.
Instead, he stood, and cast his gaze toward the far wall — where something lingered.
Wound in cloth, salt and sigil.
A sword. Not one he'd ever realized he'd possessed — and yet, somehow, it was as if he'd always had it.
And the moment Sever had grasped the hilt, the earth groaned. The Requiem had spoken truth.
He was not Lucius — a follower.
He was Low — a Sundered.