Chapter 6.6: He Must Be Dead

For a solid week, Ace's disappearance was all anyone would talk about.

  After that, people who didn't know him simply forgot. Why waste energy on some poor boy that was probably killed and buried, maybe thrown at the bottom of a lake by now? Tyreceus took a leave of absence from work in an effort to find his son, but after an entire month, no one was willing to keep looking for him.

  Ace wasn't a small little girl, who might have been easily lured away by some imaginary stranger with a windowless van. The police had very little to go on after they interviewed everyone he knew, and it was very hard to trace Ace's movements. Ace teleported wherever he wanted, but he was limited to only moving to places he had been before, or places he had seen pictures of.

  That was a large range of places to track someone's movements, so no one was even sure who the last person who he spoke to was. Tyreceus was desperate to find his son.

   After arguing with the police, begging Maximillian for help, searching on his own in almost all across town, Tyreceus decided to ask for some help from a higher power.

   He opened his closet and took out his sword. He unsheathed it from its scabbard, and it was old, rusty, and faded.

It's been so long since I've used it, I need to fix it, he thought.

  Tyreceus went to the kitchen and held his arm over the sink. Using the rusty sword, Tyreceus cut the back of his arm. All the blood seeped into the sword. It glowed a bright red, and his blood shot upwards to the hilt, wrapping around and filling into the crevices of it.

  The sword now looked as if it was just made, heat emanating from it like a sauna. Tyreceus stared at it, but everything was silent.

Is he angry at me, Tyreceus wondered.

  Suddenly Tyreceus was angry. Angry with himself for never noticing something was wrong with his child. Angry that everyone except he and Fenton had given up on searching for him. Angry that no one cared about him, or assumed that he was a bad parent because he was young, and his child simply left.

"Hello Tyreceus," the sword grumbled. "What have I missed?"

  Tyreceus shuddered and reminded himself that the sword was cursed. That it would amplify his anger and turn him slowly into a monster. He had used the sword for so long, that slowly he began to change. Thankfully the only thing that happened was his ears changed shape, and his incisors grew slightly bigger, and people chalked up the changes to him simply being a foreigner.

  "My son is missing, Unas," Tyreceus mumbled. "Help me find him." The sword was silent for quite some time. He was not unwilling to help, in fact he was shocked. "Your son is mine as well," Unas said. "I will kill those that have taken him." "Why does everyone think he is dead or kidnapped," Tyreceus hissed.

   "He would not have left and said nothing," Unas declared. "Therefore he must be dead. Let us kill those who have wronged us."

  Tyreceus could no longer ignore the truth. "I have failed mother," Tyreceus whispered. "I have broken my promise to protect him." Unas genuinely was in pain. He could only empathize with a very short range of emotions: anger, hatred, hunger, revenge, and fatigue. He understood what it was like to have someone take your child.

He tried to console Tyreceus in the best way he could.

  "He may still breathe and walk upon the living," Unas grumbled. "Let me help you." "Call for Invictus," Tyreceus commanded. "I cannot sense him anywhere, I cannot see him anywhere." Unas was quiet again, this time concentrating. "He is not here," Unas grunted.

"That's impossible," Tyreceus hissed. "You and Invictus are brothers, you should be able to find him anywhere."

"I do not lie, son of Prima," snarled Unas. "You are the one who is a born liar."

  Tyreceus put Unas back into his scabbard before he chucked it out the 6th floor.

  He was desperate, and decided to use his last course of action. He returned to the closet in his room and moved the false panel. Immediately he knew someone had been through his things. The box was not closed properly, and some of the things were shifted around.

  His panic reached its apex once he could not find the watch. "Someone took the Infinite Watch," Tyreceus mumbled. He looked around the room, checking every part, even though he knew where he had left it. He never took it out, because he feared the watch more than death itself.

  After turning his room upside down looking for his watch, Tyreceus sat on the bed and started to cry. "I cannot find him," Tyreceus despaired. "Not now, not in the past or the future."

"I am sorry," Unas mumbled. "I cannot sense the watch either. They are gone."

  Tyreceus cleaned up his room, trying to find something else to focus on. He would find little things throughout his day to try and get his mind off of his son's absence. He would go for a jog, drink, eat, smoke, watch television, scream, read, write, and then once he had exhausted all activities he could think of, he simply cried.

  He took a bath, and sat in the tub for almost an hour and a half, pretending that the world had stopped, that everything would be fine. At one point he started to lie to himself in many strange ways.

Ace never existed this entire time, he told himself. Why else would someone refuse to help me look for him?

  The sad truth was that empathy could only be given for so long, and it was harder to continue to aid others in their grief than to continue with your own life.

  Tyreceus put on a shirt and boxers, and watched TV while he heard Unas mumbling in the background. He was absolutely silent, rarely speaking when they first met, but after a while Unas felt the need to chastise Tyreceus for every aspect of his life, like the angry old man Unas was.

   Instead he was much kinder today, trying to cheer Tyreceus up, but it didn't work. Instead Tyreceus started to cry again once Unas said his son's name, and he decided that it was possibly time to move on.

He went to bed and started making a mental list of who to call for the funeral.