Chapter 502
The world looked different through her scope, smaller, somehow. Easier to control. Freja, a name whispered in hushed tones across the dark web, had made a career of making people disappear from vast distances.
Her apartment in Copenhagen was Spartan, the only concessions to comfort being a high-backed chair and an intricate network of maps that covered the walls. It was more a command center than a living space.
Tonight, her target was in Marrakech. She adjusted the scope, her eye cold.
The setting sun cast long, dancing rays over the city's red buildings. It looked like a postcard, vibrant yet sinister.
"Another day, another disappearance," she stated to the quiet room.
Her finger traced the trigger guard, feeling the metal cold beneath her skin, she inhaled softly.
The mark was a local merchant, someone who'd upset a dangerous someone, or something. The reasons, to her, were always unimportant.
Freja found him easily, the scope locking onto his image. She noticed the pattern on the man's robes, she committed it to memory and felt satisfied.
She saw his lips move. Was he speaking to someone? To no one? It didn't concern her.
She was the instrument, not the orchestra. And tonight, the music of her precision was about to play out.
Her shot was a muted thud. The man in Marrakech crumpled to the ground, unceremoniously. The shot was placed so carefully, so precisely.
A brief flicker of feeling crossed her face. Not regret, but the recognition of something finite in a chaotic world. This brief interlude never stayed with her.
She started dismantling her rifle, a well-crafted workhorse made of deadly materials. Her mind already re-aligning on her next target. This was an unending sequence.
She received her instructions through an encrypted file, usually accompanied by a picture and some relevant info. Always in coded fragments.
Next was a politician in Washington, then some kind of influencer in Tokyo. The assignments were random, like someone playing chess with a globe.
The world was a vast board, and she was merely a pawn, a queen. All her pieces moved in death's name, this she understood implicitly.
The faces became indistinguishable after a time, dissolving into an endless procession of the marked, never the known, always a mark for her sights.
One time, it had been a young boy in Mexico, who'd stumbled upon a cartel's dealings, the next was an old woman in Italy with information about a dark secret. The scale never mattered, or even the rationale.
The variety was what truly set in with her. Each place different, every culture another facet in her view of the world, through the scope she possessed.
Weeks blurred into months, months into seasons. Freja became a ghost, gliding between apartments, cities, and countries.
She was a phantom in this great design, a silent reaper with no known allies. Each night she stared into the darkness before her with steely determination.
She noticed a man she'd terminated in Singapore, his form came to her in the most odd ways. Was he reaching to touch her? Did he resent his ending? She'd never know, or rather, it wouldn't matter.
Freja accepted it, as well, she always had accepted what has happened before, is now, and would continue to exist, so long as she remained alive, herself.
The assignments became more daring, more impossible, but they also were much, much more odd.
There was that time that it had to be a person during the London Fashion Week in the front rows. The press barely registered the individual who was gone.
One time a cardinal was a victim of the world she lived within, all these were taken into her memory as just more notches in the rifle's barrel, not hers of course, but she knew, deep inside that is precisely where the mark exists, still, to this day, for eternity.
She'd gotten accustomed to not experiencing anything for the ones she had to send to their ultimate endings. It felt like removing a rock, another form of stone. That is all they had become, simply rocks in her endless game.
She noticed the world she walked around had started to shift. There was a very, clear distortion as she moved forward.
One night, after completing an assignment in Moscow, she felt this odd, cold sensation, a sort of deepness she hadn't experienced in many of the years she lived in this odd sphere she'd crafted with each ending.
It felt wrong and all her training told her something is very, very much not right.
She moved toward the window. Nothing appeared to have changed, but something definitely had. She turned and moved to look at the walls, to the map. The many different flags she looked at on any given night.
That night the world she existed within wasn't as solid anymore. Things did not make very much sense now, she felt this sense of dread, a great anxiety in the spaces between spaces.
The flags she studied closely didn't represent places of where her victims existed. The flags became different as she looked over them.
There were new designs, some recognizable as forms of old ancient gods. Others made of sharp jagged edges that seemed to spin and gyrate on their own.
A shiver traced its path down her spine, each point sharp and intentional. This, was all terribly wrong, even for her existence of dealing with the ultimate finality on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.
She tried to bring up her digital interface. There was nothing. The screen was now filled with static. This is no glitch she quickly knew. This is all real. This isn't happening inside her mind, the chill within her was most definitive on this reality.
Panic, a long-forgotten acquaintance, started to gnaw its way to the surface. She hadn't experienced this type of dread before, not like this.
She took deep breaths and looked over the room she stood inside of. The silence had grown deeper, even the sounds outside her windows seemed far, far, away, muffled like they were underwater.
Her hand went to the door, to leave, to seek some normalcy but it was far too late now. The walls started to drip with the inky substance. The room started to shrink around her and her ability to even understand that had just become the focus of this odd hell.
A deep, resonant sound came through all space around her. It began low, barely a tremor in the air, then grew in intensity, the room around her warped into an awful vortex of colors and sharp angles.
She reached out to touch something to orient herself but her hand simply went straight into the nothingness of it all. What is it now she could have asked, to whom?
Freja tried to access her rifle, to take an assessment of the world, to make it her target again but it had started to change before her very eyes, morphing into the shapes of nightmares she didn't even know existed before.
The barrel of it started to stretch out, as thin as human hair and so very long now that she didn't understand where exactly it was pointed now. It was almost formless in nature and she knew then, she had now finally seen the ultimate reality that lay in waiting.
The scope turned to a gigantic eye, now focusing on her, peering in, not at her, into her, directly through the form she presented, to her very essence.
A sound unlike any other emanated from its opening. The room spun and warped and stretched even more before her, this time all colors morphed into the inky blackness she was very much now enveloped inside of.
The map on the wall transformed, displaying a twisted, spiraling abyss that seemed to swallow everything into the vast emptiness of it. This great darkness is where she existed now, alone.
She realized, with a bone-deep certainty that she had not only become an instrument of endings, but that in truth, her true form now became just an end, an empty existence within.
A strange sensation began to unfold in her soul. It felt like something was pulling her, apart. In all those years, it was now she finally felt and understood her very existence had meaning, for someone, but sadly she understood it in her end.
Her body twisted like an old piece of metal. This time her own existence became a canvas as well. It contorted and stretched further than what she understood as an absolute fact.
Her eyes widened, not with surprise but with the full measure of despair. The edges of her soul ripped with such sharp precision. Everything is an edge in her mind, so clearly, in all its horrific beauty.
Freja did not utter a sound, didn't cry, didn't whimper. There was just an acute acceptance that now has fully been achieved. It's final now.
Her consciousness started to un-make itself. Not slowly as she expected, not suddenly. Simply with a profound awareness that it all no longer truly mattered.
The last vestige of her human understanding now began to completely let go.
She was just, simply, completely gone.
The apartment, once filled with purpose, stood as a quiet monument, completely empty of its existence. The maps still covering the walls. The inky substance has long left.
Only one thing remained, or rather had, always been the only true constant all along: her high-backed chair, looking directly out of her large window into a completely still sky.