CHAPTER 308: THEY’RE BAITING US

"They want my god to act," she whispered, voice so low it barely reached her own ears.

"They want him to overstep."

But even as the words left her lips, something in them didn’t sit right anymore.

Because this didn’t feel like a provocation. Not really.

It felt like an invitation.

A dare.

Not the kind that pokes and prods and mocks until something breaks—but the kind that says: step forward, go ahead, we already have a place ready for you.

It was as if the trap had been built not for the girl, not even for the cult, but for something far bigger.

And whether the god stepped into the light or stayed hidden in the shadows, it didn’t matter anymore.

The moment he moved, the board would shift.

And that was the part that finally, fully sank in.

She wasn’t setting the stage.

She wasn’t the one watching from above.

She was bait.

The polished piece was sent forward to measure their strength, test the waters, make the first noise, and see who responded.

Only now she could feel it—down to her core—that she hadn’t just triggered a reaction.

She had entered a room where every sound she made had already been predicted.

Pale Mirror leaned back slowly against the cold stone wall behind her, tilting her head until the rough cracks overhead appeared like tiny fractures in a ceiling she wasn’t sure would hold.

The faint glow of her shard communicator pulsed at the edge of her vision—regular, soft, like a heartbeat waiting to be answered.

Maybe it was trying to warn her.

Maybe it wasn’t.

Either way, she didn’t move to respond.

Didn’t even blink.

Because now she understood what this world had done.

It hadn’t fought her.

It hadn’t confronted her.

It had simply looked through her.

And somewhere, deep in the dark corners of this planet—this slow, fractured place that had once looked so easy to shape—something had already been watching her.

For a long, long time.

—

Elsewhere—far past the borders of space and matter and language—deep inside a chamber that didn’t echo because sound didn’t belong there, Deacon stood still.

Not stiff. Not guarded.

Just still.

The Black Observatory wasn’t a place you walked into. It wasn’t built.

It had been found, dragged from the husk of a forgotten realm and folded inward, shaped not by hands, but by memory.

Its walls weren’t metal or stone. They were grief. Hardened loss. Old failures flattened into function.

Even the space around it twisted whenever it moved.

And for some reason, the laws of space didn’t resist, nor did it care.

And Deacon, for all the power he commanded, barely noticed.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe he was just used to it.

He stood before the viewing well—a wide basin of dark crystal that shimmered not with light, but with signal.

Faint pulses came through in broken fragments.

Shards of Pale Mirror’s final reports, incomplete and scattered like memories being yanked back in pieces.

Her voice glitched in and out, caught in breathless gaps that didn’t quite form into full sentences. Half static. Half silence.

She hadn’t screamed.

But the silence between her last words... it had weight.

It said enough.

Deacon’s fingers curled slowly over the edge of the basin. The crystal beneath his palm flared red—not from rage, but from pressure. Controlled. Focused.

"She was the best," he said under his breath. "I trained her myself."

No anger in the voice, but there was something more.

Maybe it’s the loss of a capable person or the sadness caused by the amount of time spent together.

The world she had been sent to infiltrate—a world that was supposed to be fractured, weak, unguarded—had responded not with delay, not with noise, but with speed and silence.

A system that should’ve taken weeks to even notice her had crushed an entire cult cell in a night.

And left no trace.

He took in a long breath. It didn’t steady him.

The god hadn’t spoken.

Not with words.

But Deacon could feel it.

The throne behind him was active now—not loud, not flashing with divine rage—but humming with thought.

The kind of rhythm that meant something old was awake again, not because it wanted to be...

...but because it was calculating.

The kind of presence that waited for the other side to blink first.

That throne hadn’t pulsed in cycles.

Now it did.

And Deacon, careful not to turn fully, glanced toward it.

There wasn’t a figure sitting there.

Not really.

Just a shape that wasn’t a shape. A reality gap. A presence without form. Like someone had carved a god-shaped hole into the air and let the idea of him rest there.

Still, watching, waiting.

He looked back at the shard.

"She said the boy was nothing," he muttered. "They all did. Hybrid. Seed. Background noise."

But the feed was gone now.

The last coherent phrase had glitched.

And now even that was silent.

She hadn’t died.

He would’ve felt it if she had.

But she was gone in a different way.

Covered. Folded. Tucked somewhere outside their line of sight—not by brute force, but by rejection.

As if the world itself didn’t want the god to see what it had done.

That kind of concealment wasn’t random.

It was designed.

And design meant planning.

He stared down into the dark glass, speaking low.

"They’re baiting us."

It came out harsher than he meant.

Not angry at her.

She had done everything right.

She had stepped forward and measured the unknown.

She had just been caught inside it.

"They want to provoke something," he continued, quieter now. "Something official. Something recorded."

Not Ethan.

Not anymore.

The boy was the thread.

The god was the target.

They were building a case—a scenario that would force the god to respond, to step out of the mist and declare presence.

Once that happened—once the god took a full step forward—the old rules could be invoked.

The forgotten pacts.

The pre-Rift laws.

Ancient agreements were written before this world even knew what power looked like.