Someone’s Summoning Ghosts

I found Lancer in a dead arcade two blocks past nowhere. The building looked like it had survived three gang wars, two rent hikes, and one apocalyptic firmware update. The sign outside still flickered—BL CK ARC D—like a neon ghost trying to remember its own name.

Inside, it smelled like old soy-dogs and ozone. The kind of place where you duck under a busted light and don’t come out the same. I passed a squat elf kid jacked into a jury-rigged deck with half the casing torn off, skin glowing from bad bio-lum tattoos. He didn’t look up.

Lancer didn’t show up in person. She never did.

The mannequin body waiting at the back booth was a high-end Harmony-Flesh model, repainted matte black with silver joints. No eyes, just a glowing slit across the face like a sideways visor. It lifted one delicate hand and beckoned me like we were old friends meeting for soykaf.

“Cute body,” I said, sliding into the booth. My coat hissed against cracked vinyl. “New?”

The voice that came out was Lancer’s, filtered through a voice modulator that couldn’t quite hide the surgical scars under the words.

“You know me. I don’t upgrade unless something starts bleeding.”

“Something is bleeding,” I said. “You sent the trace.”

The mannequin cocked its head. “Three bodies in the last five days. All flatlined in the Redmond grid. Neural cores fried. Heads gone.”

“Literally?”

“Decapitated. Surgical. Like someone wanted to keep the meat and melt the soul.”

I leaned back, watching the buzzing light overhead stutter like it couldn’t make up its mind. “And you think this ties to the rider?”

Lancer piped static through the commlink for a second. Old habit. Her version of a sigh.

“I pulled residuals from the node wreckage. There was a glitchprint. Something weird. No signature. But it left patterning like corrupted AI… or worse. You ever hear of soul-shadowing?”

My fingers twitched. I folded them under the table.

“Not in years.”

“One of the witnesses said it had no face. No head. Just this weird light pouring out from under a helmet. Like… stars.”

I closed my eyes for a second and saw the girl in the alley. Her voice came to me like torn silk: "A helmet full of stars."

“It’s not just killing them,” Lancer said. “It’s rewriting them. Like it’s wiping their memory before they hit the black. It’s not just frying their cores,” Lancer said. “I pulled brainwave echoes from the trode logs. Should’ve been scrambled noise, but there were impressions. Echoes of someone else’s memory.”

I narrowed my eyes. “What kind of impressions?”

“One of them was humming. A lullaby. Old drow dialect. And you, Valk? You were the one singing it.”

My blood went cold. Selvetarm doesn’t just kill. He collects.

“That’s not a ghost,” I said. “That’s something wearing a ghost like a skin.”

The mannequin leaned forward. “And you think it’s him.”

I didn’t answer, just looked at my reflection in the dead glass of an unplugged arcade cabinet. For a second, the flicker of the light behind me made it look like I had no head either.

Then the light blinked out.

I left the Black Arcade with my collar turned up and my pulse running dirty. Rain slicked the streets like a sheen of oil. A dead billboard flickered static above the rooftops: a half-glimpsed corp girl smiling through the glitch, selling a dream no one in the Barrens could afford to want.

My safehouse wasn’t far—a forgotten third-floor flat above a noodle joint that hadn't served real food in years. I paid extra to keep the warding etched into the doorframe sharp and humming. Spirits didn't knock here. Not unless they were invited.

I set the ritual bowl on the floor and cracked open the stolen data shard from Lancer.

The icon flared to life like a wire pulled too tight: blue fire laced with error code. It pulsed once. Then it began to sing. Not a song and not music, it sang a memory

A field of snow. Footsteps behind me. A pulse in the sky like a dying star. And his voice.

Selvetarm.

It didn’t come from behind or above. It bloomed inside me, low and velvet, curling like smoke through the hollows of my ribs. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It knew I would listen.

“You wanted strength. You called me. And I came.”

Each word struck like a heartbeat made of ice. Not cruel. Not kind. Just inevitable. It wasn’t just a voice—it was a pressure behind my eyes. Velvet-wrapped razors slipping between my thoughts. A whisper that didn’t echo in the room, but inside my ribs. Smooth. Intimate. Patient.

It was a voice that I had tried to forget. My breath fogged. Not from the cold, but from the weight of the memory crashing down on my bones like rebar.

Suddenly, I was there. I was in that alley again. The real one, years ago, before I had the name Valkyrie. I was just a girl with blood on her boots and a broken promise bleeding out in her arms. I remembered the way the shadows moved, the way the runes carved into my skin pulsed when I said yes.

“They abandoned you. I never will.”

That voice again—like a lullaby murmured through borrowed teeth, soft enough to almost believe. It slipped beneath my skin, warm as oil, thick with sorrow, and heavy with the kind of regret that knows your name. My name was Isilme then.

My fingers twitched. I nearly dropped the shard. The image changed. I saw a face. Mine. Younger. Laughing. Then it was gone, overwritten by a chrome helm and a spray of data like a corrupted angel.

The Dullahan didn’t just kill. It was collecting.

I killed the feed and broke the shard with a snap of my fingers. I let the pieces smoke in the incense bowl until they were nothing but ash and old echoes.

I sat in the dark for a long time. Listening to the walls breathe, remembering the cold hands that once lifted me up and told me I was chosen. I sat there asking myself—quietly, desperately—if I’d ever stopped being his at all.

Morning didn’t come so much as fade in. The Barrens doesn’t get sunlight. It gets dilution—like someone up top wrung out the sky and let it trickle down through smoke and scaffolding. I pulled my coat tight, holstered the old Ares under my ribs, and stepped back into the city’s breath.

The trace Lancer sent led to a dead node on 162nd. The building itself—burned out, bricked and bricked again—looked like someone had tried to erase it from memory by setting fire to the mirror. It wasn’t just data, it was history. The surrounding blocks had gone hollow. No gang tags. No scent markers. Even the ghouls kept out.

But I knew that sigil burned into the sublayer of the grid—a coiled snake made of iron circuits, its eyes twin data ports.

The Iron Snakes.

They were ghosts before. A gang that dabbled in ritual tech and spirit-binding—half street myth, half unstable magic. Now they were ashes. And I had been here the night they died, blade in hand, telling myself it was justice.

I followed the signal down a back alley that felt too quiet. Street cams had long been blacked out. There were no rats, no data traffic. There was only the rhythmic drip of a busted pipe and the thrum of something waiting.

The old bar that had served as their base looked like it had been chewed on by time. Bricks melted in places. Rebar warped like fingers reaching skyward. The door was still there—barely—bearing a long, vertical scar of melted ceramsteel.

I stepped inside.

Dust swallowed the sound. The air was thick with old sorrow. And something else.

Heat. Not temperature—residual power. Magical. The kind of heat that clings to your skin and sings lullabies into your bones. Something had been here. Something still was.

On the far wall, layered beneath graffiti and gang totems, a mural remained: a headless rider on a data bike. Halo of light under a cracked helm. Lines of code woven like smoke behind him.

It wasn’t art. It was a summoning. This wasn’t some lingering ghost—it was an invitation. And they’d used my past to send it.

I knelt by a broken VR jack in the floorboards. The cable was fused, scorched black.

Still warm.

There was a memory trap set into the wall—a silver-thread dreamcatcher wired with psychotronic nodes. Old tech. Pre-Crash. It pulsed when I touched it. A whisper leaked out—ragged, strained, like a voice pulled from underwater.

“Isilme...”

I froze.