Raian's eyes snapped open, his hands clenched at his sides. For a moment everything—memory included—blurred, but slowly his vision and his mind came back into focus.

He was in a generally dark area, he realized, a cavern lit only by hundreds of candles. Underground, he decided. He pondered momentarily being dead, then quickly discarded the idea. This would be a strange afterworld indeed, one he had never heard described in any religion. Besides, a dull consistent ache all over his body convinced him he was alive. For some reason he doubted he would take that with him.

Raian tried to sit up, an unwise move he discovered a moment later when pain shot acutely through his supporting arm and leg. He groaned and looked down; bandages were wrapped in various places over and under his tattered clothes, and something stiff braced his leg and left arm. The leg didn't seem to be more than aggravated. The arm was another matter. Broken, he thought with a grimace, touching it tenderly with his right hand.

Immobile for the most part on the soft bed beneath him, he turned his head gingerly to look around. His last memory was running into the Opera Populaire a heartbeat ahead of half a dozen… no, eight or so… pursuers, being caught a moment later… clearly someone had intervened, and judging from his surroundings had not taken him away from the theater. The candles glimmered off the lake like a myriad of eyes, revealing little from his reclined position. His eyes lit on a small table beside the bed. Propped up against an unlit candle was a folded piece of fine parchment. Frowning slightly he picked it up in his good right hand, turning it over carefully.

He hesitated momentarily, then determinedly and awkwardly unfolded it with one hand, squinting in the dimness and tilting it into the light until the dark-inked letters jumped out at him.

Fondest Greetings, Dear Guest:

I hope you find the accommodations to your liking;

I would offer more but I'm afraid there is little

An abandoned Opera has to offer.

I humbly suggest you do not attempt to leave

Considering the circumstances it could be…

Shall we say, unsafe, for your health.

I assure you your persistent pursuers have been dealt with;

Do not fear them haunting you in death.

There is only one ghost here.

Raian imagined the author laughing silently as he wrote and barely repressed a shudder, bending back to the reading.

My apologies on my absence as you awake.

A rather urgent matter has come to my attention;

Please, monsieur, make yourself at home

Till my return.

There was a bitterness to the double-meaning that did not escape Raian. He turned the parchment over, but that was all—save for the signature "OG".

He paused long enough to re-read the letter. "I humbly suggest you do not attempt to leave. Considering the circumstances it could be…shall we say, unsafe, for your health." The wording was not lost on him. Raian carefully set the letter aside, pondering the repercussions of it. Allowance must be made for his injuries… else circumstance and legend would leap together to form one.

As it was, he thought this "OG"s meaning perfectly clear. The eight men who had chased Raian through the dark alleys of Paris were dead, and his mysterious rescuer had no compunctions on making the number of slain nine. A shiver raced up his spine as he tried to picture it—one against eight, and mightier still? He had difficulty imagining it.

Well, one thing at least was certain—he was alive on a whim, and that could quickly change. I have to get out of here. Had he been thinking clearly, he would have realized that this OG had threatened him with death if he tried to leave, that he was injured and not able to move quickly, and that he had no idea where exactly he was or how to escape.

Raian was, unfortunately, not thinking clearly at all. He had nearly been killed, and a second death threat was doing nothing for his nerves. A sudden urge seized him to get out—he levered his legs off the bed to stand, careful to put his weight on his uninjured arm and leg. After several moments he discovered he could walk—hobble, actually—if he didn't stay on his injured right leg for too long at a time.

Standing, he finally got a halfway-decent look around this place, this lair. Candles and lanterns gleamed on fabric and wood and stone. The place was dominated by a grand piano, littered with candles and notes written in a precise hand. He stared around in awe for a moment, eyes drifting about in amazement.

Forgetting himself a moment he lifted a smooth, tapered rapier with a keen edge from a table, reveling in the balance of it and the flash of candlelight on the steel blade. He was accounted fair with a sword, but the balance of it—

"Awake, I see," a mellifluous voice rang out.

Raian spun—or tried to, as his injured leg refused to comply and he barely caught himself, his right hand—still holding the rapier—steadying himself against the wall. After a moment he regained his balance enough to look up.

The man who had spoken leapt lightly out of the boat he had apparently just used to cross the lake, racking the pole against the wall. Raian's first frenzied thought was that while he was imposing enough, he did not look the part of a killer.

Raian judged him to be a measure over six feet, well-built and deft in motion, moving with a practiced grace and economy of line. He was dressed in fine black and silver that gleamed in the candlelight… and he wore it well, with familiar ease.

It was only when the man turned that Raian reconciled himself with the image of the stranger's threat. The left half of his face was perfectly formed, regal even, the image almost of a Roman god. Twin green eyes flamed, perfect symphonies of madness and sorrow. Here was the line between genius and insanity.

Yet Raian noted all of that later; when the man turned, his eyes riveted to the mask; the stark white in abrupt contrast to the darkness, so that it seemed to take on an essence of its own light. "Opera Ghost," he breathed in realization.

The Phantom swept out his cloak wide in a mocking bow. "Honored, monsieur. Tell me, was it the mask, or the aura of death that gave it away?" he asked bitterly. "I hope you find the accommodations suitable," he continued, pacing forward, holding out an arm in mock display. "Not too dark, is it? Not too grave-like for your nature?"

Raian swallowed hard, lifting the point of the rapier. The Phantom continued to casually advance against the stone floor, boots ringing on the stone deliberately. "Come no closer," Raian forced out, and the Phantom's laugh rang out along the cavern ceiling: harsh, cold, inhuman.

"What, monsieur, am I so unwelcome in my own home?" His taunting gesture took in the candle-garrisoned lake, the piano, the cavern—the deserted opera itself. "How ungrateful of you. Or are you looking to join your eight friends? Don't mind if they turn you a cold shoulder—I doubt they can help it." The two green eyes faded from sadness and burned into hate.

Raian took comfort in the solidly tangible length of steel in his hand. He was armed, and the other was not, he kept reassuring himself. He was armed, he was armed…

The Phantom at last paused mere feet away, just out of reach of Raian's blade. "I marvel at the gall of the living," he said with a hard laugh as he stopped, looking steadily into Raiain's eyes with the darkling stare that had pushed back so many before. "No matter how you play, I have to win," he said simply; a flick of motion and the Punjab Lasso snagged Raian with practiced ease. "Shall we call a draw, then? Come, come now monsieur, surely you are not thinking of leaving?" he asked, far too pleasantly, fingers closing with dread familiarity over his end of the lasso.

The rapier point dropped away and Raian tossed the blade; the Phantom caught the hilt expertly in midair, sliding the blade home with practiced ease. He flicked the noose up and free, coiling it easily and casually over one hand. He paused long enough to loop it over the hilt of the rapier and set the deadly pair back on the table.

Watching the silent certainty of the Phantom's movements, his explicit grave echoed in every motion, Raian wondered at him. As if sensing the gaze the Phantom turned, fixing him with that intense green stare—but there was something missing from it, a quality of anger, that Raian found surprising. "Standing must be tiring for you," the Phantom said smoothly, extending his arm. "Perhaps I can see you to a more comfortable seat." Hesitantly Raian took the offered support, finding it unerringly steady, and found walking incomparably easier when his weight wasn't all on his injured ankle.

He sank gratefully into a sitting position on the cot, at last realizing the foolishness of his "flight". The man—the Phantom, he acknowledged warily in his mind—crossed to a sideboard, his back to him. Curiosity at the sudden change of character ate into him, and at length he ventured to break the silence. "Why did you save me?"

"I did not."

"Not from my bro—Gerard's—hirlings, but from yourself." He wished he could have snatched the words back as soon as he spoke them.

The Phantom pivoted to look at him, stare lancing across the distance between them. "A word and a whim, nothing more."

"Curiosity?" Raian ventured.

"You could say that." The Phantom turned quickly away again, but Raian could have sworn he saw the ghost of pain in those eyes.

"But not accurately," he was about to say when the Phantom spoke in that silvered voice of his—"One the note of curiosity, do you go by a name besides guest?" He returned, varying a tray that wafted a delicious smell in Raian's direction. Suddenly he realized how hungry he was.

"Raian," he said automatically. And you? But he was not so foolish as to speak the words aloud.

"One name only?" The Phantom pressed, placing the tray at his side.

"For now. I will not carry my brother's name."