Norman dreamt of golden eyes.

In the depths of his restless slumber, his new apartment was a dark, twisted place with shadows dancing menacingly on the walls. A chilling wind crept through the room, sending shivers down his spine.

From the darkness emerged a figure, her golden eyes framed by long dark hair streaming down around her face. The all too familiar irises pierced the veil of the night like twin beacons of malevolence. Her face, illuminated by the blazing eyes alone, was as beautiful as he remembered, but the rest of her was a grotesque being with a mangled body and twisted claws. In the shifting waves of unnatural darkness, she approached him with an unnatural grace, each step accompanied by an echoing cackle that reverberated through the room.

Norman was frozen in inexplicable dread, unable to move, as Flavia's eyes bore into him, a burning intensity that seemed to sear his soul. His heart raced, his mind a whirl of fear and desperation. He tried to utter something, but his voice was stolen from him as the Flavia's malignant presence sucked out all sound from the room. With each step she took, Norman felt his spirit being chipped away, his will to resist crumbling like sand beneath the tide.

He could feel her rage grow, but could only watch in horror as his own strength and resolve ebbed away. Bound to his place by invisible cords, Norman was a helpless observer to the destruction of his own being, a puppet to the whims of this malevolent force.

Somehow, in defiance of all physics, the distance between them never reduced, but with every step that Flavia took towards him, the room shook with the intensity of her presence. Norman could only feel the weight of his own despair, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do to save himself. His mind began to fracture, the lines between reality and nightmare blurring. He could feel himself slipping away, his consciousness dissolving into the darkness. In his final moments, he could only beg for mercy, his pleas lost in the suffocating silent void.

Suddenly, a ping on his tablet interrupted his dream. It was followed by another, and then yet another. As reality crashed in, the nightmare came to a close, leaving Norman to awaken with a start, drenched in sweat and trembling with fear.

With shaking fingers, he steadied himself, grasping the edges of the table. Yet again, he had fallen asleep on his study table cross-verifying the results of his computations late into the night. And macabre dreams had followed his fatigue. Shuffling into the washroom, he splashed his face with water repeatedly, the last remnants of the feeling of utter helplessness departing. But the memory of Flavia's golden-eyes lingered, a haunting reminder that the woman was likely plotting his demise somewhere. Even in the safety of his own home, the darkness still held a foothold.

Once he felt somewhat relieved and blinked away the last of his sleep, he looked at the new notifications in his tablet. He had received messages in the chatroom he had joined using the moniker of Nazaar - the late scribe who had been his primary source of information about the Yaskh culture and technology. It was still the early hours of the morning, but timezones got complicated when members were spread out across multiple planets.

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The sender was familiar - an individual who went by just 'L'.

The conversations in the chatroom had been awkward at first. Norman had introduced himself as a close confidante of Kiri and the progenitor of the aegis project. Over time, the latter part helped establish trust with the group because he was obviously intimately familiar with the design of that project, and could answer their questions about its architecture.

He, of course, omitted anything about Kiri's death. Kiri was officially missing, and Norman only mentioned that she had not been seen in months. While he detested this entire deception, he had presented Kiri's disappearance as the primary reason for joining this room. His story was that Kiri had feared for her life, and shared the credentials for the chatroom with Norman through a failsafe notification.

The individual who had messaged him, L, had been very concerned about Kiri's disappearance. Perhaps someone who had known her before the academy.

After his relentless poking and prodding on the specifics, Norman had cautiously fed him a carefully altered version of events. He mentioned that through Remus, Kiri had planned to extract some valuable secrets from the Ortimus guild. But Flavia Ortimus had been getting suspicious. There was a likelihood that her true identity as a member of Helicon rebel group had been uncovered by Flavia.

Norman could not tell whether L bought this explanation or not. But he had not been kicked out of the virtual room.

Today's message was accompanied by an attachment.

*L: This might interest you. Related to our last conv.*

Norman surmised that the conversation L was referring to was when Norman had messaged about his inability to obtain a good resource that offered an unbiased treatment on the true nature of the Saan mycelia.

Apparently, L had found something for him. But the size of the payload was suspicious.

Norman immediately downloaded the message in a secure sandbox that he shared with Garvin and thanked L.

In just half an hour, Garvin knocked on his door.

"Man, this is dangerous..."

Norman just smiled. This was not unexpected. He had been waiting for the members of the rebel group to try something nefarious. He wouldn't expect them to trust a random stranger with their secrets.

"Yes, I suspected something fishy from the size. This is supposedly a collection of publications on Saan mycelia."

"That it is, but there is something else embedded alongside the documents. Likely a virus"

They spent the next half day trying to figure out exactly what L had sent them in an isolated sandbox. But eventually, it became apparent that the payload was a notification beacon. "It looks like our friend is trying to verify our location."

"Let us not keep him waiting for long, then"

They took the throwaway device housing the sandbox to a location away from their apartments and relaxed the restrictions. As expected, the software embedded in the document immediately pinged a remote address with a summary of their location.

"What now?" Garvin asked.

"Let's hope they were only attempting to verify that we are actually in the Illustrious Torus. Does the document look legit?"

"That it does."

They flicked through the stack of virtual pages of the humongous set of compendiums that appeared to have been extracted from various sources.

A smile spread on Norman's face as he realized exactly who had authored most of the articles. The late Yaskh scribe Nazaar.