Page 130 of The Devil's Canvas

He smirks. “Lovely. Shall we knock?”

I don’t answer. I just walk straight up the steps, letting my power leak out in little pulses—just enough to short out the electricity and make every mirror crack from the inside.

Inside, I hear scrambling. Footsteps. Panic. Good.

Let the show begin.

The door doesn’t open.

Itexplodes.

Splinters rain down like confetti at a funeral. Smoke curls through the gaping threshold like a storm trying to remember its name.

We step through. Julian appears beside me in a ripple of shadow and heat, calm and coiled like a blade sheathed in velvet. I’m flame. He’s the match. Together? We’re arson with a vendetta.

Inside, the house is exactly what I expected—cheap furniture, fake florals, the smell of microwave dinners and unresolved trauma. And right there in the middle of it, frozen like deer in demonic headlights—

Cassius.

Melanie.

Cassius is halfway out of a fraying recliner, mouth parted in what might be a scream or a stroke. Melanie stands at the kitchen island, a wine glass in one hand and terror in the other.

“Miss me?” I ask, voice sugar-sweet and full of venom.

Melanie drops the glass. It shatters against the floor, wine blooming like fresh blood. Cassius doesn’t speak. Not yet.

Julian steps forward, slow and deliberate. “You really downgraded. The aesthetics are…” He glances around, lips twitching. “Unfortunate.”

“Wh—what is this?” Cassius chokes. “You’re supposed to be—she was supposed to be gone.”

“Funny thing about fate,” I murmur, stepping closer. “It doesn’t like being rewritten. So I did what you never could.”

Melanie’s voice is barely a whisper. “What did you do?”

I smile. The lights flicker above us, every bulb pulsing with unnatural rhythm.

“I rewrote the Loom.”

Cassius stumbles back like I slapped him. “That’s impossible.”

“No,” I say, eyes locking with his, “what’s impossible is thinking you could rip my life apart and not pay the price.”

Julian crosses his arms, gaze deadly. “Go on. Tell them. What’s their fate?”

I let the silence stretch, tasting their fear like dessert.

I don’t whisper it. I declare it. “Oblivion.”

Melanie gasps. Cassius swears under his breath.

“You don’t get fire,” I continue, voice rising. “You don’t get glory. You don’t even get remembered. Your threads are already unraveling, strand by strand. In every realm, every version of time—your names are fading. Your power? Gone. Your legacy? Forgotten.”

They try to speak. I raise my hand—and the shadows hush them like a blade at the throat. “I was mercy,” I hiss. “I was forgiveness. I wasdone. But you kept reaching. Kept hurting. Kept taking. So now?”

I turn to Julian, my voice dropping to a near whisper. “Now, I collect.”

From the floorboards, from the smoke, from the corners of every forgotten shadow — Calliope rises.

---