Nyxara Rising
They saved their courtesies for prey they considered worthy, and for as long as Nyxara could remember, she had been a complication, not a prize.
She scanned the monitors out of habit, but the first collector was already there, standing in a blind spot that shouldn’t even exist, defying every camera and sensor, as if reality had simply decided to look away. It was tall, painfully pale, and draped in something that might have been a suit if you ignored how darkness clung to its silhouette, how its eyes seemed to bend the light into spirals that hurt to look at.
Nyxara’s blood turned to ice. There were old stories about what happened when the collectors took notice, and none of them ended well.