Chapter 41: The Black Halo Wizard

  A quiet grief settled over Hawthorne the next few weeks.

  It wasn’t the kind of grief that screamed. It didn’t tear at the sky, or demand the world stop long enough to pay attention. It simply…sat. It sat in the corners of rooms. It sat in the empty spaces at tables where someone should’ve been.

  Bodies were buried, funerals were had. Cole stood over graves while people clutched each other, openly weeping.

  He’d seen death since the Convergence. He’d killed monsters until it felt like a job, until the rhythm of it became routine. Choir, lance. Choir, lance. Kill, wipe the notification, move on.

  But this wasn’t that.

  These weren’t nightmares from a rift. These were men and women he’d talked to. People he’d watched grow braver, watched try. People who’d taken what the System offered them and still chosen to stand. People who could’ve hidden behind a palisade and prayed someone else would do the hard work.

  They hadn’t.

  They’d walked out, steel in shaking hands, because Hawthorne was their home and because children lived behind those gates.

  Cole could still see it if he closed his eyes. Veritus laughing. Blood on the pavement.

  He didn’t close his eyes.

  He didn’t look away at funerals either.

  The dirt was dark, damp in places. Shovels scraped, thudded, sank. Some graves were marked with wood, some with whatever could be found. A piece of plank. A strip of painted metal. A brick with a name scrawled across it.

  Cole watched hands tremble as people put down small things. A locket. A ring. A folded note. A toy someone had carved from scrap wood.

  Someone prayed softly. Someone else tried to start singing and couldn’t get the words out.

  Cole stood there and felt his jaw ache from how hard he clenched it.

  He felt like his palms would have permanent marks. His fingers were sore for how long they dug in.

  At first he’d hated that sensation, that constant tension. He’d tried to shake it out like a cramp, tried to force himself to breathe it away.

  For once, he embraced the pain.

  Pain and grief, intertwined.

  Cole found himself reflecting on that, more than once. People didn’t like pain, but it was necessary. Not just for reminding you that you’re human, but reminding you that some things shouldn’t be forgotten.

  Pain was the body’s alarm.

  Grief was the soul’s.

  Some part of him, the part that wanted to survive by becoming numb, wanted to shove those feelings down again. That part whispered that grief would get him killed. That it would make him hesitate next time.

  Cole didn’t listen.

  Grief and pain were often reminders that you had loved, that you had cared, that you were a human being.

  The Convergence had changed so much. It had introduced magic, monsters, and more into the world. One moment, things were normal, the next…well…they weren’t normal anymore.

  You could wake up and everything was coffee and traffic and annoying emails.

  Then you woke up to the sound of a rift tearing open and the smell of blood.

  The System didn’t care about your calendar or your plans.

  It just rewrote reality and told you to adapt.

  Yet it couldn’t take that away. For everything the System had done, it couldn’t change humanity.

  People still held each other when they cried.

  People still looked at children and felt something protective twist in their chest.

  Cole watched Hawthorne mourn and he realized something simple and stubborn.

  The System could change the world.

  But it couldn’t rewrite the fact that loss hurt.

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  If anything, that pain was proof there was still something inside them the Convergence hadn’t killed.

  Cole began to distance himself from Hawthorne, despite the settlement’s best attempts to involve him.

  He didn’t do it cruelly. He didn’t ignore people. He didn’t refuse help when it mattered. He went to meetings. He answered questions when they were asked. He showed up when someone needed a decision or an opinion or a little extra force to reinforce the line.

  But in the quiet moments, he pulled back.

  He spent more time alone.

  He walked the palisade by himself at night when the wind carried the smell of smoke and old city rot. He sat on the cot in the room they’d given him and stared at nothing, Crozier resting across his knees, feeling the weight of it.

  He knew why.

  He was leaving.

  He could feel that decision in the way his thoughts kept circling back to Nathan. In the way his hand sometimes drifted to his pocket where the photo was creased now from being handled too often.

  Somewhere out there, his son was alive, in a cell. Veritus had shown him, just enough to make it real. Just enough to make it hurt in a new way.

  That meant Cole couldn’t stay.

  Hawthorne would need to learn to exist, to survive, without him.

  At first, that thought had felt like betrayal, that leaving would be turning his back on people who had become his responsibility. People he had helped train. People he had watched level up, watched become something harder and stronger.

  Then he realized something else.

  If he stayed, Hawthorne would start building itself around him.

  It was natural. When someone shows up who can erase bullets and drop monsters like it’s nothing, people begin to lean on that. They begin to count on it.

  And if Cole died, or left later, it would break them.

  He didn’t want that.

  He wanted Hawthorne to stand on its own legs.

  He wanted them to be able to keep going when the next Veritus came, and he wasn’t there.

  Hawthorne would be a chain around his leg if he stayed.

  It was time to go.

  First, he prepared.

  Ingredients soon came in, and Cole made more mending potions. The cauldron did what it always did now, obedient and efficient. He didn’t have to fight with heat or timing the way he would’ve in a normal kitchen. He simply willed the process into motion and watched the liquid take shape the way he knew it should.

  He didn’t linger on it. He didn’t take pride in it the way he might have before all this. It was work. Necessary work.

  A tool for what was coming.

  For what felt like the one hundredth time, he resolved to find other recipes.

  Mend was good. Mend kept him walking. Mend kept him breathing.

  But the world wasn’t going to stop at broken ribs and bruises. He’d already seen what a tier-five being could do to him. He’d felt his shield fail. He’d felt bones crack.

  There would be worse than that.

  He could feel it.

  When that was all done, he met with the others.

  It wasn’t some grand meeting in a council hall. It was a room with a table, chairs that didn’t match, and the faint smell of canned food and sweat and disinfectant. It was the same kind of room they’d been meeting in for weeks, making plans.

  Seth was there. Naomi had her clipboard like she always did, fingers tight around it. Dr. Alina Park stood off to the side with her arms crossed, shoulders slightly hunched.

  Cole didn’t pretend they didn’t all know.

  “You’re leavin’ us,” Seth stated.

  No question. No anger. Just a fact spoken out loud.

  Cole nodded.

  Naomi’s grip tightened on her clipboard. Her eyes flicked down and up again, as if she was trying to keep herself from looking like she cared too much. She did, of course. She just didn’t know how to show it without turning into the kind of person who cried in front of everyone.

  Alina Park looked sad, but understanding gleamed in her eyes.

  Cole recognized it. That look people got when they knew something hurt but they weren’t going to argue because they didn’t have the right.

  “I have to,” Cole said simply. “I need to find my son. Besides, you’re all getting along just fine without me.”

  It was true.

  He could say it without forcing optimism, because he’d watched it happen.

  The settlement’s defenses were evolving. The palisade was sturdier now, patched and reinforced in places where it used to look like a desperate barricade. People had learned routes, watch rotations, how to respond when the System’s waves came. They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t helpless either.

  Someone had even gotten the enchanting profession very recently, a woman named Alita. She was studying runes, a book supplied by the System.

  Cole had seen her once, hunched over a page with her lips moving as she read, tracing symbols with a finger. It was the same look Cole had worn when he’d first stared at potion recipes, trying to make sense of the logic behind them.

  Scouts reported a possible dungeon rift nearby and plans were being made to go complete it.

  People were leveling. People were adapting. The city, little by little, was starting to be retaken, in slow increments. A cleared street here. A secured building there. A checkpoint dismantled. A supply run that came back with more than it lost.

  Soon, it may even start to come back to something resembling normalcy.

  For Hawthorne, anyway.

  For Cole, things would never be normal until he found Nathan.

  That was the line. The dividing point in his life. Before, he’d had regrets. He’d had failures. He’d had a relationship with his son that was…complicated. Full of things said wrong and not said at all.

  Now he had a single image burned behind his eyes. Nathan in a cell. Nathan looking up at a voice with a southern accent Cole couldn’t place. Nathan alive.

  Alive, and unreachable.

  Cole shook hands with the leaders.

  Seth’s grip was strong and quick. He didn’t want to make it sentimental. Naomi’s was brief, awkward, she wasn’t used to shaking hands with people who felt like they mattered. Cole didn’t judge. He understood.

  Then Alina blew out an exasperated breath and stepped forward before Cole could move away.

  She hugged him.

  It was firm. She needed to make sure he felt it.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Cole patted her back, a little awkwardly. He wasn’t good at this. He wasn’t good at being someone people thanked.

  He was good at killing monsters.

  He was good at keeping people alive, at least for a while.

  Cole thought the gratitude was too heavy for what he’d actually done.

  Still, he didn’t pull away.

  He let it happen.

  Then he stepped back.

  Crozier in hand, Cole left.

  He didn’t look behind him when he reached the gate. If he looked back, he might stay.

  He walked through the gate and out into the broken city.

  Unknown to him, his reputation began to grow.

  Whispers passed as he left through the gate.

  “There he goes,” someone said quietly.

  “The Black Halo Wizard.”

  Cole didn’t hear it.

  He kept walking.

  He had a son to find.

  And the world was still full of monsters.

  THE END OF BOOK ONE

  A CONVERGENCE UNIVERSE NOVEL