"Meya never knew what was happening behind her back." Jade said quietly.
"Tell it." Angel-slayer rumbled high overhead in the shadows. Jade looked up at him and nodded sadly.
"This is where it all gets worse."
Even before Meya chased Jak through the city, before she cried for her mother and cursed her father, before she was slowly dying, Erol was dreaming.
He dreamt of her again. His sister.
"Brother." She whispered, her saber-toothed wolf's face grinning insanely. "Time to end, my brother." He cried out in his sleep and tossed back and forth as her dream image buried long Dark Eco arrows into his dream body, he, the monster, was a lot smaller now and less frightening. Now he was scared.
"No!" he yelled, his eyes tightly closed, he could feel the quills tear into him.
"They come." Nhana whispered, her bloody dream self disappearing. Before she vanished, before he awoke, Erol saw what she meant. Standing in a pool of purple-black shadows, something dark and foreign to this world stood, something of which he did not know the name to.
"I can tell you its' name though." Jade sighed and Angel-slayer urged her on. "Dark Precursor. That's what it was."
Meya pounded through the city, the wind in her short black hair, her wild eyes staring straight forward (they were finally interested in something, something lethal by the looks of it). She could still smell him and she loved it.
Time to be. Time to be. Time to be. Her mind chanted in time to her rapid heartbeat. He was slowing now, caught by a wrong turn in the bazaar, in a one-way alleyway she was in the only way out. He turned and faced her, she could still sense that he was weak; she could smell the cold ottsel vomit on his shirt, the dried blood in his hair and on his skin.
Very different indeed.
She leapt at him, blades drawn, jaws wide open screaming at the top of her lungs, and her eyes were clamped shut. He was too quick for her, Vulcan Fury drawn and completely devoid of ammo, he brought the firearm up butt plate first into her face. She was knocked back, rolling onto her claw torn back, gravel buried into the many different depths of the cuts there. She opened her eyes as she rolled onto her hands and spat three of her filed teeth onto the dirty street, blood dripping from the gaps in her upper jaw.
"Yes. I knew you would be different." She whispered wetly, the blood running down her chin. She charged him again, this time leaping every now and then from side to side in slalom fashion trying to throw him off guard from which direction she'd strike from. She raised one knife in front of her chest and the other in her left hand sliced the air in front of her as Jak dodged out of the way. He couldn't take it anymore, couldn't keep his rage in check. His vision went dark as his eyes clouded over with darkness, and the eco inside seemed to go berserk in his veins as he sprouted horns and claws.
For once in her life since she was a little girl, she felt fear.
No. Was all she could think disbelieving. The fear awoke something else unnamable inside her, something horrid; something wicked in its truth. This was her death. She was afraid to die. If she could have thought more, she might have thought 'how could a man near death become a beast like me?' or 'what the fuck am I doing?'. But she couldn't and would never think like that again.
His ebon claws came down and cut her open, she fled carrying her own entrails.
A month later, she paid homage to her God, her last sacrifice. But before then, the Guards found her two blocks from the fortress, face down in the street, her hands clamped to her stomach keeping her innards where they belong. In the time between when they found her and her death, her wounds would not heal. She would not allow them to. She would pick at the stitches and make them bleed. Her blood was mixed with her paint at the end in her mural on Dark Jak's bloody claws. Fitting. But that's not the point, the point was that she saw Erol's mechanization of the Krimson Guards, and what the Dark Precursors had done to him. Everything and Everyone was going to Hell and fast.