Afterglow Fire - Nine

She has died a million times...

Someone or something is stalking her.

It has always been here.




She returns to Arcadia after years abroad.

There is something in the wind, something moving from person to person in crowded streets, no longer a figment of the imagination, no longer the hope of a mirage. It's tangible, it is real. Forces beyond time and space are reaching for her. Afterglow feels them like a knife in the gut. In the back alleys and lit plazas and agoras of the realm, no matter where she goes... they are stalking her, attacking her like a blunt force, a sharp blade. A hammer is falling on Afterglow.

The passion and hatred she finds is deeper than the ocean.




Afterglow returns to the Island of her birth, childhood and adolescence. She does not like it there, does not like the Island at all, but it beckons her, like the ancient sirens of myth did with sailors of the seven seas. Afterglow does not want to go, but she goes anyway, pulled by memory and longing and the part of her past she has never managed to put to rest, no matter how hard she has tried.

Jupiter's Cauldron is acting up again, worse than anyone can remember. She feels it, even more than her eyes see, like a potent force within.

It is time for the final curtain to fall, for all the demons, all the ghosts of the past to catch up with her, for the blackest of blades to gut her and expose her softest of insides.

Janet Kathryn Caldwell is shaken apart by the onslaught of the world.