CHAPTER 171: STRANGER IN A STRANGE WORLD

The wind howled at the top of the cell tower.

For a moment, Hermes thought Raphael was joking.

He wasn’t.

"You’re telling me..." Hermes narrowed his eyes, "...you came here inside a comet?"

Raphael spread his hands, palms open, as though that explained everything. "That is what I remember. One instant, there was darkness. The next, fire. Then I was here."

Hermes’s brows furrowed. "So you’re an alien."

"If that’s the word you want to use." Raphael said with a careless shrug. "Yes. From outer space. Though I cannot tell you from where. That part of me is gone."

"Gone?"

"My memories. Of before." His smile was faint, almost mocking himself. "Perhaps that’s the cruelest joke. I know I came from elsewhere, but I do not know what elsewhere is. No home. No coordinates. Just the arrival of a stranger in a strange land."

Hermes pressed his lips into a line. "And you just... landed. What, on a random farm?"

"Not random." Raphael’s eyes glinted. "The Mirasols. A cattle-wrangler and a seamstress. That was the home I crashed into. Or rather, under."

Hermes stiffened.

Raphael caught it immediately. His smile sharpened. "Ah. You’ve been there, haven’t you?"

Hermes hesitated. "...Yes. Me. Ymir. Magni. We found that crypt."

"Found," Raphael echoed, amused. "Careless of you. The Thirteen Stripes knew about it long before you ever stepped inside. That crypt wasn’t coincidence. It was waiting for me."

Hermes’s jaw tightened. "You’re saying SHIFT expected you."

Raphael leaned back against the steel, gaze distant. "From the moment I landed, agents and scientists were expecting me. They moved fast. The Mirasols took me in, yes, but not as their own child. They’re more of my keepers. My wardens. My real life was under the barn, in that crypt you saw."

Hermes’s stomach turned. He remembered the stench. The cold. The cage.

"That golden room."

"Yes." Raphael’s smile thinned. "Solar-powered. My powers fade without sunlight. They discovered that quickly. So they built me a prison and a lifeline in one. A cage that both sustained and bound me. A child raised in a box of light, staring at the same walls every day until I knew their cracks better than I knew my own reflection."

Hermes’s throat dried.

"And you know what else was down there," Raphael continued softly.

Hermes blinked. Then the pieces fell into place. His breath hitched.

"...The shadows."

Raphael’s golden eyes gleamed as he nodded. "Yes, there is a Rift there."

Hermes stared at him. "That thing in the crypt... it wasn’t just a hole."

"No," Raphael said. "It was a wound. A tear into Nott’s domain. The Primordial Goddess of the Night. From it, creatures spilled. Void-born shadows. Kin to the Night Cyclops we fought. You saw them, did you not?"

Hermes remembered. The black forms, writhing. The way only light pierced them.

His fists clenched. "So that’s what they were."

Raphael nodded once. "Yes. Beasts of the night, sustained by darkness. I grew up in a cage with them scratching at the bars. Every moment of my childhood, they waited to devour me."

Hermes went still. His mind, unbidden, conjured the picture.

A boy, no more than five, pressed against golden bars, his only warmth the glow of a lamp. Beyond it weremonsters. Eyes gleaming like coals. Claws dragging across metal. Shapes that moved wrong, that wanted him, wanted to drag him into their dark.

The cage hummed with solar energy. It burned the creatures back, but it could never silence them. The scratching, the whispering.... The way they rattled the dark like chains.

Hermes imagined the sound never stopping, even in sleep.

And Raphael had no friends, no siblings, no real parents. Only books slipped through the bars. Dog-eared copies of novels meant to humanize him. Fables, encyclopedias, instruction manuals, fairy tales. Anything to shape his mind while his body sat trapped.

Movies projected against stone. Old reels humming in the dark. Images of laughter, families eating dinner, children running in fields.

He would press his face to the bars, staring at the colors, memorizing every detail like scripture. That was how he learned what "normal" looked like. That was how he built his idea of a world that never touched him.

Hermes’s chest grew heavier the longer he imagined it. A boy raising himself on borrowed words and flickering light. A boy forced to practice smiling into a mirror because no one smiled back at him. His lullabies were not songs but claws scraping metal.

His bedtime stories were not told by a parent but whispered by void-beasts hungry for him. Every night he must have wondered what was worse: to be eaten alive or to live forever caged.

Hermes’s stomach twisted. A whole life shaped in silence, in fear, in mockery of sunlight. No wonder Raphael was strange. No wonder his smile always seemed too knowing, too cruel. Not only was he not a ’human’, he was raised in conditions no human would ever survive sane.

Even Hermes himself, with all his resilience, doubted he could have endured such a thing without breaking.

Hermes swallowed hard. "And you survived this?"

Raphael tilted his head. "What choice did I have?"

His tone was light, but beneath it there was a brittle edge. The kind that came from decades of keeping pain polished and sharp.

Hermes clenched his fists.

Then Raphael’s voice lowered. "And one day... they let me out."

Hermes’s brows drew tight. "Why?"

"Because of Eirwyn. I was his replacement."

Hermes’s chest clenched. "He’s not dead."

Raphael’s smile was almost kind. "My Lord, he might as well be. A fetus cannot play his role. And that is all he ever was.... filling the place of the Soldier."

Hermes’s eyes darkened. "The Soldier?"

"The hound of the Stripes," Raphael said simply. "The strongest among them. The weapon. When one hound falls, another takes its place. Eirwyn held it before me. When he fell, they chose me."

Hermes’s jaw locked.

"They gave me a name. Paragon." Raphael said it like a curse wrapped in velvet. "A mask. A persona polished for the public. With their ties to politics and media, they placed me before the world as a hero. Cameras followed me before I even knew how to speak to them."

Hermes’s stomach turned. "A hero raised in a cage."

"Yes." Raphael’s smile was thin. "And they gave me one mission."

Hermes’s gaze cut to him. "What mission?"

Raphael’s golden eyes fixed on him, unblinking. "To make sure Hermes Potentia does not bring the end of times."

The words made the temperature drop.

Hermes felt the tower beneath them suddenly cold, the city below suddenly small.

"...What did you just say?" Hermes whispered.

Raphael didn’t flinch. "You heard me."

Hermes stared, blood roaring in his ears.

"The Thirteen Stripes," Raphael said calmly, "believe you will cause the end of the world."