Rowen's eyes were buried in a sea of files sprawled across the table, while a ceiling fan turned lazily above his head.
He was bored.
This world — the Caledron, the resistance cells, the creeds, the revolutions stillborn before they could even scream — all of it bored him to death.
He needed a game.
A game where the pawns fancied themselves kings, where blood would be spilled not out of necessity… but out of faith.
He called it SPIRAL.
A spiral that wound downward into madness, from which no soul could return.
It would not be an organization, it would be a lie, feeding on the naïve hunger for hope.
And in his hunt for the absurd, he found Milo Forgher.
A man with lifeless eyes, a former assassin, exiled to Kovalia in hopes of a new beginning.
Once, he had been a father — to a little girl named Sophia. Gone.
Another tragedy, buried beneath the weight of injustice.
He lived only for her now. By habit, he set two plates at dinner.
He closed his eyes when passing her room, he spoke to her.
And in his mind… she answered.
She was there, sitting in the back seat of the car, resting her head against his shoulder.
— "Daddy… you promised you'd take me to Puck Land."
So he did.
An old, decaying amusement park, once the kingdom of children's laughter.
Now a husk, abandoned since the Mechanical Dragon Incident.
But to Milo, it was full of light, of music, of balloons. Sophia was there — arms open wide, running toward the rides.
He didn't notice the wary stares, he didn't see the rusted chains. He saw a celebration.
And so he stayed. Day after day, in the park of the dead.
Rowen watched from afar, entranced.
— "A man, alone… tethering souls to the earth by the sheer weight of his grief."
He didn't need to do much. Just plant a few false newspapers, false radio signals.
He led Milo to believe in a conspiracy.
That the Caledron had shielded the network of Sophia's attackers. That the amusement park had been a front. Justice ? Corrupt. The state ? Complicit.
Milo believed. Not because it was credible — but because belief was gentler than forgetting.
Thus was born his cold paranoia.
When Rowen approached him, he posed as another victim of the fabricated incident.
— "Do you know why you're still alive, Milo ?"
— "Because I refuse to let her die."
He never spoke of her in the past tense.
He said :
"She loves this ride."
"She wants me to train."
"She gets scared when I sleep too long."
Rowen smiled.
Of all the madmen, Milo was his favorite. Because he wasn't lost — he was lucid in his madness.
And so SPIRAL was born :
An imaginary family, meaningless missions, fabricated reports.
Milo, within this fiction, became a survivor.
And Sophia… a reason to kill.
She sang that old nursery rhyme she loved so much, while her father crushed the skulls of those he believed had taken her.
— "One, two, three, Daddy sees me…
Four, five, six, death quietly slips…"