Morning in Ynkeos Tower moved like a machine learning itself—precise, cold, and hungry. William Lex Webb stood before a map of the city projected in slo-mo light, streets traced like arteries. Ten days burned across the margin of his tablet—ten small suns counting down to a reckoning he intended to own.
"Only ten days left," he said, voice smooth as glass. "The stars will turn. We have less time than I thought. He grows bolder."
Juarez—no longer quite the man of muscle and swagger who'd once run contraband convoys—bowed with the practiced humility of something that has been taught to kneel and to kill. His skin still bore the faint luminescent veins of possession; his eyes had that patient, wet gleam like predator's eyes before it pounces.
"My lord," Juarez said, "I will finish him this time. I have a new boon. Tzitzimimeh blessed me." He looked at William not with fear now but with something like consecrated resolve. "You will see."
William's lips curved. "You failed once. I gave you warning. What guarantee do I have that you will not fail again?"
Juarez's jaw tightened. "I carry the Eclipse Mantle now. The dark god has carved a shard into my flesh. It is a thing that eats the moon's edge and keeps its teeth. He will not pierce me so easily." He let the words sit in the hush like a benediction.
William rose and crossed the room like a shadow that knows its way. He placed his hand on Juarez's shoulder. "Then go," he said simply. "Bring me his mask. Bring me his bones if you must."
Juarez left like a man walking toward his own execution and his own coronation.
—
Night in the city felt like a held breath. Moonveil haunted the roofs, listening to the stone-speak of the streets. The limiter at his throat was a memory and a leash. He had marked the abandoned tube, the hill of the devoured, the chalked sigils. He had catalogued horror and promise in equal measure. He moved only because each night without action felt like a lie.
Then the sky split with a scream.
Juarez struck like a falling building. He moved through the city not as a thief but as an avalanche—silhouetted against sodium lamps like an unmaking force. He tore through storefronts and lamplight; by the time he reached the block where Moonveil waited, the air smelled of iron and very old pipes. He laughed—no human laugh—but a sound that had passed through other throats before reaching his.
"There he is," Juarez taunted, voice reverberating off brick, "the great pretender of peace. The man who hides in moonlight. You cannot harm me. I have gifts now."
Moonveil did not answer. His hands opened, closed; the fight had been rehearsed in his bones weeks ago. When they collided the first blow was an impact like weather—fist against fist, stone into stone. Moonveil pushed, using the stolen physics of the Aetherian axe and rifle he'd buried beneath false floorboards—keeping his attacks surgical, thought-through. Juarez's body dimpled like flesh that was both human and scaffolded by something else.
"You think a cloak will save you?" Juarez spat, eyes glittering. "They gave me the mantle to stand inside storms. They taught me to drink the storm."
He struck Moonveil low; the vigilante sank through a storefront and out the other side, glass raining like bad stars. Moonveil rose as he always had: measured, fierce. He hit Juarez hard enough to fold the man in half. He hit again. He struck a third time and felt his own shoulders reel with the violence of the exchange.
Juarez laughed, and the laugh became a noise that sprouted black motes in the air—tiny motes that tasted of ash. "It does not matter," Juarez said in a voice that sounded like two people speaking. "The Eclipse Mantle makes me whole. I mend in breath and bite. My wounds seed new hunger."
Moonveil's axe struck and found bone where there should have been—
—and the bone knit itself back in a slow, stubborn bloom as if roots would not be denied. The limb reformed like a bloom of iron.
"Damn it," Moonveil hissed. He tried a strike of pure lunar collapse—the kind of blow Tecciztecatl used to whisper about in the earliest days—but the limiter sang like a harp-string when he channeled it. The strike bent oddly and recoiled not into Juarez but into the space around Moonveil; the suit stiffened and a shock of pain cut up his arms. The limiter did not merely hold; it punished.
Juarez pressed forward with a new violence, feral and elegant at once. He grabbed a broken sign and drove it through a wall; where it should have stopped and splintered, the metal dissolved into light and slid around his hand like a living cuff. The Eclipse Mantle had not just healed him; it braided his body to something else—an armor of shadow stitched into the angles of his ribs.
"You see how it learns," Juarez crowed as they crashed through a café window. "It tastes the fear of your people. It learns their stories and uses their bones to walk." He grabbed Moonveil's collar and smiled close enough that the scent of him—sour and metallic—filled Moonveil's nostrils. "Your god can't touch me soon. He taught me a way to eat a moon. I am full."
Moonveil struck the man's ribs, a blow meant to unmake a person's breath. Juarez's lungs shuddered—and then his chest knit again, harder. The Eclipse Mantle had changed him from man to function: an engine that repurposed wounds into fuel.
"Explain your boon," Moonveil said, breathing, anger sharpening the edge of his words. "What is this—this mockery?"
Juarez's smile was a wound made public. "Listen close, vessel of light," he said. "The Eclipse Mantle is three things. First: it is a shard of Tzitzimimeh's shadow grafted into me. It feeds on the celestial favor and on any divine backlash; it pulls the starfire out of a strike and turns it into flesh glue." He slammed Moonveil into a lamppost. "Second: it learns the geometry of your weapons. It absorbs aetheric shock and reroutes it into itself; the more you strike me, the more it knows how not to be undone. Third: it is contagious. A cut from me, a lick of my blood, a bite—these become small black seeds. They do not always grow into full servants, but they make men small, quiet, hungry."
Moonveil heard that last line with the chill of witnessing a map of a future made cruel. "You make monsters of men," he said, voice low.
"I make tools of faith," Juarez corrected. "And why should the devout be ignored? Why should we not use what our god offers?" He spat the words at the moon. "This city will be sown with people that feed it."
Moonveil seized him again—hard, because what else was there? He slammed Juarez through a brick wall and held him by the throat in the hollow of a collapsed shop. The limiter pulsed in his ears like some ordained beat.
In the displaced calm of breath and dust, Moonveil laughed—short, brutal. "So the prize is not war," he said. "It's famine. The god wants mouths."
Juarez's eyes rolled with the bliss of possession. "Why save a world you despise when you can remake it hollow and then control the hunger?"
Moonveil held him poised and felt the city leaning in, waiting for a hero to make the choice. He thought of Alexia curled asleep in their cottage; of Howard's nervous hands; of Tecciztecatl's chained light kneeling in the dark. He thought of burning the hill in the tube and of the limiter Tecciztecatl had bound him with. He could not strike without risking the fury of the very god who guided him—and that fury would not land on Juarez alone.
Juarez laughed again, throat wet with his own rage. "You will not stop me," he said. "We are already inside."
He struck, and the shock of the blow folded Moonveil. They rolled through the street like two storms colliding. The buildings shook, windows shattered, and people fled. A news drone hovered, cheap cameras cataloguing what the world would call a "vigilante engagement." None of the commentators would guess the algebra of gods, shards, and bargains that fed the night.
Moonveil rose between the ruin and the world, fury and sorrow braided into one movement. He struck until he could not; then he struck again. Each time, the Eclipse Mantle damped him, learned more, fed on the concussive memory of the blows. Juarez absorbed and remade his pain into a darker, live thing.
Above them, between sky and antenna, two voices threaded the night.
Metztli—older, colder than the moon's new whisper—was a presence like frost. She moved like the cut of star-silver. Tecciztecatl answered her not with words but with the sense of a man who had weathered too many winters.
You made a promise, Metztli said in the hush that belonged to constellations. Her voice was less sound than gravity.
Tecciztecatl's reply tasted of iron. I promised I would not abandon the forms I touched. I promised vigil—persistence. I meant to guide him, not eclipse him.
You've loosened him, Metztli observed. He is no longer simply a vessel.
He is necessary, Tecciztecatl answered. If I do not let him carry a shard of my will, William swallows the city. If I give him all, he will eat himself. Balance is a brittle thing between two tyrants.
And the cost? Metztli asked. Your hand grows light, and something ugly learns to wear it. Do you suppose a god who gives away his fire is the same man when he asks for it back?
Tecciztecatl's quiet in the dark was an admission. I do not know.
Below, the fight reached the point where architecture and bodies blurred into the same ruin. Juarez's laughter became distant as Moonveil found the steadiness to pull back, to let another night end with someone having fallen back to lick their wound.
Juarez stumbled away into alleys, still alive, still laughing. His silhouette swallowed in a corner of the city, and Moonveil stayed on the pavement with his breath fogging the cold.
Above them, the two gods watched the minute gears of their wager turn.
Metztli's last whisper was a stone in the water. He will need your mercy later, Tecciztecatl. Or he will become the kind of god that has no dawn.
Tecciztecatl's answer was only a promise that tasted like ash. Then teach him mercy.
And below, in a city that would not yet grasp the architecture of its doom, Moonveil lit the last arc of his breath and began the long accounting of the night—wounds to bind, maps to draw, the realization that what he fought was not simply a man with a blade but a religion in motion.