Cameraman Never Dies

Judge touched his throat, slowly running his hand down to his chest.

It's healing.

The words never left his lips, but the thought pulsed clearly in his mind—quiet, steady, almost indifferent.

He sighed, not out of relief, but with the subdued acceptance of a man too accustomed to pain. The kind of sigh that didn't ask for peace, only acknowledged that the worst hadn't come yet.

The bruises were gone. The searing tear that had once split across his sternum like a jagged smile had sealed over, replaced by fresh skin, eerily pale and too smooth to be natural. Something about the way it pulsed beneath his fingers made him suspect it wasn't skin at all.

Still… it held. That was enough.

His face still had a long way to go, he doubted whether it could heal at all.

He sat up on the branch, letting his legs dangle over the edge. The nap had been brief, but oddly satisfying.

The bark beneath his back, rough and sun-warmed, had offered more comfort than the silken beds of the Drakonis estate.

No overstuffed pillows. No scent of lavender oils. No suffocating walls of carved ivory and curated elegance. Just wind and leaves and birds that didn't care who he was.

Yet even with his wounds sealed and his mind freshly shaken from sleep, he still felt… hollow. Not weak, but spent. Like something had been torn out of him and hadn't yet grown back.

He knew what it was.

Not strength.

Not ether.

Not some magical reservoir.

It was himself.

Whatever that part was—the small, quiet piece of him that could still feel awe, or grief, or anything deeper than strategy and survival—he'd left it back in the Flux Zone. Traded it, perhaps. For knowledge. For power. For whatever that cursed place had deemed worthy.

He took out a pocket watch from within his studio, the carving gave a sense of familiarity. It worked just fine, the time was still early. A picture of his family was on the top half. And for the first time in his life, he missed his siblings.

Amber would always find something that would cheer him up, and Liam would watch him from afar, not knowing what to do.

Judge shook his head and dropped to the ground with a muted thud, bending his knees to soften the impact.

The trees around him rustled in faint protest. Ancient things, older than most current villages, gnarled and tall and blanketed in a thin mist that curled around their roots like sleeping snakes. He glanced upward. The light was dim, filtered through twisted branches and thick foliage that swallowed the sun. Not night, but not quite day either.

He tightened the strap of his pistol holster.

"One... step," he muttered with labored breaths, each word a quiet effort. Mostly to convince himself he was still there, still whole. "Then... " Exhaling, "then another."

The forest seemed to respond.

A distant creaking, like bone against bark. A flutter of wings too large for any bird. A hiss — wet, and close.

He ignored it.

The forest was dangerous. It wasn't a warning, it was a promise. And promises, unlike threats, didn't back down. And there was this feeling that someone was following him, but he didn't mind; he could always escape inside his studio if things went south.

He moved with experience, weaving between gnarled roots and moss-slick stones. His footing was careful, practiced.

This was no simple terrain. He once darted through forests like this with ease, vaulting from tree to tree, resting only when he chose. But now he was weak and had to recover a bit more before he used more ether than necessary.

Forcing recovery would do more harm than good since he needed a better grasp of his newfound powers.

A flicker of movement.

Judge froze. Slowly, he turned his head.

A creature, barely visible between the folds of fog, with long limbs, eyes like burning candle wicks, and a body that swayed as if it were part of the mist. It watched him, unblinking.

Judge didn't reach for his weapon. Not yet. You didn't draw steel on every shadow in this forest. Some things only attack when you acknowledge them.

He walked on.

Another hour passed, maybe two.

The deeper he went, the more distorted the light became. He passed a clearing where the grass grew in perfect rings, like scars. He saw a tree weeping sap the color of blood, its bark peeled back like old skin.

And once, just once, he passed a set of stones arranged like a doorframe—no wall, no structure, just a threshold standing in the middle of nothing.

He didn't step through it.

Eventually, the fatigue crept in again. His legs ached. The nap from earlier had been too short. His mind wandered back to the mansion, to the cold voice of Eleyn, to the glint in Amber's eye. Then to the heat of the Flux Zone. The way it had looked at him. Like it knew him. Like it remembered things he had never lived.

A branch cracked ahead.

Judge stopped.

This time, he drew.

The Golden Eagles gleamed as he raised them in a steady hand. The forest was silent, deadly silent. No birds. No wind.

Just the faint outline of a human figure, cloaked in robes of black threads, its face hidden beneath a mask shaped like a deer skull.

It stood unmoving.

Judge didn't lower the gun.

"If you're thinking of attacking me," he forced his raspy voice, "make sure you do it from behind."

The figure tilted its head.

A slow exhale echoed from within the mask. Then it stepped backward, into the mist, and vanished like it had never been there.

He held his breath for a few seconds longer, then holstered the pistol.

He pushed forward again.

By the time he reached the forest's edge, the light had begun to shift. A strange golden hue stretched across the trees like paint spilled from the horizon. He stepped into it slowly, cautiously, and the forest let him go.

Just silence behind him, and ahead…

A vast field of tall grasses with blood red flowers stood in front of him. And of course, more trees.

The judge narrowed his eyes. He could see a ruin of some village nearby, with some neatly cut trees just beside it. Whoever cut it had done the whole batch in a single slash...

He stepped forward anyway; he had a mother to catch up to. And a cracked body to heal.

Ouch!