Rising above time and the universe, a tale of chosen souls, united by fate.
THE STORY THUS FAR :
John Wingliss is an enigmatic figure who exists at the intersection of power and mystery. Publicly known as a philanthropist and a visionary, he possesses an uncanny ability to influence global policies from behind the scenes. With a vast network extending from Wall Street to international government agencies, he is often referred to as a “puppet master” by those who suspect there’s more to him than meets the eye. His aura exudes a magnetic charm, one that captures the attention of everyone he encounters, not least of which is Jessica Dark, the Seraph assassin sent to eliminate him.
Despite his commanding presence, there are moments where glimpses of vulnerability and a yearning for genuine connection shine through. He seems to intuitively recognize the complexities within Jessica, fueling a connection that neither of them can easily break. While John Wingliss may appear to be a master of his universe, he too is a man caught in a web of complexities, a puzzle that is missing a few crucial pieces. Whether savior or manipulator, visionary or heretic, he stands at the crux of multiple lives, his next move invariably sealing not just his fate but also the fates of those entangled with him.
###
Jessica Dark, socialite by day and assassin by night, is a paradox wrapped in enigma. Heiress to an oil empire and a fixture among New York’s elite, her public persona is that of a glamorous fashion queen, the kind whose every outfit becomes an instant trend. But beyond the glitz and the parties lies a woman trained in the deadly arts, a member of the secretive Seraph organization that breeds assassins to eliminate high-profile targets. Gifted with an arsenal of alternate identities, Jessica is skilled in the art of seduction and manipulation, traits honed to perfection to ensnare her victims at their most vulnerable moments before she strikes.
Yet, under the veneer of her many roles, there’s a growing sense of doubt, a questioning of the life she has led, intensified by her complicated feelings for John Wingliss, her current mark. Jessica finds herself at a crossroads, caught between her lethal profession and the stirring of unfamiliar emotions within her.
As she encounters Benedict “The Revelator” Lockwood, her life takes another inexplicable turn, forcing her to confront the complexities of love, identity, and the harrowing possibility of change.
###
The Revelator is a transcendent figure, seemingly unbound by the laws of time and space, whose origins are as mysterious as the knowledge he possesses. Cloaked in an aura of otherworldly wisdom, he appears to select individuals at pivotal moments in their lives, offering them revelations that defy conventional understanding. Neither entirely human nor entirely divine, The Revelator exists in the interstitial spaces between reality and the unimaginable. He operates on frequencies most humans cannot perceive, tapping into subliminal audio technologies to awaken latent potentials within the human psyche.
Though his demeanor is calm, there is an intensity in his eyes that suggests he is perpetually tuned into the undercurrents of the universe. A harbinger of transformation, he initiates individuals like Jessica Dark into higher planes of consciousness, compelling them to question their very nature and purpose.
Is he a guide, a trickster, or a cosmic interloper? The Revelator defies easy categorization. He promises to unveil the secrets of the universe, yet his true motivations remain hidden. Like a prism refracting light into various spectrums, his character casts shades of both enlightenment and enigma. Those who encounter him are left forever changed, yet forever questioning— for The Revelator embodies the eternal riddle of existence itself.
###
I have felt a love so deep it could birth universes and end them. Those who took that from me, from the faceless foot soldiers to the power-brokering puppeteers of OMEN, will know a reckoning unlike any other. I am John Wingliss. And they will pay.
Under the shroud of Tokyo’s midnight haze…
John Wingliss was a man on fire. His eyes, smoky with rage and pain, zeroed in on his target through darkened streets. Gone was the James Bond charm and the tailored suits. In its place stood a weapon of raw revenge, wrapped in battle-scarred gear, and oozing danger from every pore.
His once-polished look had been traded in for combat grit—his attire a patchwork of rips, burns, and bullet holes, each a badge of bloody honor. The clean-cut face that once wowed high society was now hidden under a rough beard. It wasn’t just facial hair; it was war paint, masking the diplomat and revealing the warrior.
This was a guy in a war with the world—and himself. His new face had a message for anyone brave enough to look: He’d been to hell and was ready to go back, taking with him anyone foolish enough to get in his way.
In the distance, shrouded by the ink-black folds of Tokyo’s nocturnal cloak, Shadowstrike was a virtuoso of the night—a maestro controlling darkness as it swirled around him. His maneuvers embodied a masterful grace, with a controlled liquidity as he effortlessly leapt from rooftop to rooftop.
Just when it appeared that Shadowstrike would vanish into Tokyo’s labyrinth of dim-lit backstreets and faceless crowds—melding into the night like vapor—Wingliss decided it was time to show his ace in the hole. Fingers nimble as a virtuoso, he fished in his pocket and extracted a set of earbuds, jamming them into his ears.
“Q,” he commanded, his voice steel-wrapped in focus. The arm-mounted device hummed to life with a flurry of micro-processors aligning themselves to his neural impulses.
“Listening, John,” the AI purred.
“Play ‘Survival Instinct X.’”
And the familiar sound of trickling water and the awe of nature began to play. Moments later, it was as if he’d plunged into an aural vortex. This was no ordinary audio—this was an infusion, a rush of psychoacoustic steroids that sharpened his senses to a near-mythic acuity. If a track could make you feel transcendent, this was that playlist.
Wingliss felt the energy generated by the subliminal audio sink deep into his biological framework. His muscles tensed and hummed with a predatory alertness; his cells ignited like micro-furnaces, each one in sync with the relentless pursuit of his objective. His footfalls on the rooftop were no longer bound by mere human physics, each step a rupture in the reality of what a man should be capable of. It was as though he had mainlined the raw code of the cosmos itself, a cheat code from the universe applied directly to his adrenal glands.
No longer was he just flesh and bone; he had transcended. He was a human missile, an embodiment of righteous fury cutting a swath through Tokyo’s murky underbelly. The cityscape became a blur, its myriad lights and shadows coalescing into a singular tunnel of focus.
If Shadowstrike was the phantom that terrorized these moonlit labyrinths, Wingliss had become its banisher. Armed not with ancient incantations but with raw willpower and next-gen tech, he was the ghostbuster of the modern age. The hunted was about to get a lesson in existentialism; you can’t ghost fate when it’s stalking you with a GPS lock-on.
Wingliss soon completely closed the distance between them. One moment separate rooftops; the next, the two men occupied the same deathly claustrophobic space, charged with the explosive potential of a storm waiting to break. The air seemed to thicken, becoming almost viscous with the built-up tension. It felt as if they were surrounded by a membrane of glass so strained that even a murmur would cause it to shatter into a thousand shards.
“Last chance,” Wingliss warned, his voice sounding like gravel churned through a blender and laced with an unmistakable edge of deadly sincerity. “Who’s pulling the strings of The Silent Veil? Who sent the shadow with the blade after me?”
Shadowstrike’s response clearly indicated his intention as he slowly unsheathed his katana. The blade seemed to sing as it sliced through the thick air, recounting sagas of bloodshed and demise that only the watchful eyes of Tokyo’s midnight sky could fully understand.
“Your arrogance blinds you, Wingliss,” Shadowstrike hissed, disdain lacing each syllable as they passed through clenched teeth. “You think this is about you? No. She’s the endgame, not you. You’re just a fossil, a leftover from an era where men of your ilk had their run of the world.”
Wingliss drew his katana in one smooth motion, its sound a haunting crescendo that echoed through the air like a lament. In an instant, he was in a combat-ready low stance, his body a blend of grace and killing potential—years of high-stakes operations distilled into this moment.
Shadowstrike responded by shifting into an attack posture, his blade angled in such a way that the moonlight struck Wingliss’ eyes. He lunged, weapon aimed for the kill. But Wingliss, blinded only for a split second, dodged—his head so narrowly missed that hairs were severed in the attack. As they floated down, Wingliss understood: The rules had changed.
Wingliss regained his stance undeterred by the close attack—the instinct to kill his adversary simply surged harder.
“What’s so special about her? Why Jessica?” Shadowstrike spat the words, taunting.
A surge of emotion threatened to breach Wingliss’s long-held composure. And Shadowstrike picked up on the success of his mental attack.
“You’re clueless,” Shadowstrike sneered, savoring his apparent advantage. “Let me enlighten you. Your beloved Jessica Dark was a Seraph.”
Wingliss felt his stomach tighten, his entire body on the verge of eruption. “Seraphs,” he said, spitting out the word like a curse.
The Seraphs. An elite group of all-female assassins, trained from a young age to be the invisible forces shaping destiny. Specializing in emotional and psychological manipulation, they employed a range of carefully crafted personas to learn every vulnerability and hidden desire of their targets.
Their missions could last years, even decades, ensuring that by the time a Seraph agent entered the scene, the target was fully understood and vulnerable.
“You lie,” Wingliss growled, a low, dangerous sound vibrating through the air.
“Look at yourself, John Wingliss,” Shadowstrike’s words were cold, calculated. “You’ve become the very thing you despise: reckless, impassioned. You’ve killed countless people, ruined lives, and now you paint yourself as the victim because something you actually care about is finally on the line? Where’s your honor?”
Wingliss’ grip tightened on his katana’s hilt. “Honor is a luxury, not an obligation. And if you think taking her from me has weakened me, you’re dead wrong. It’s made me something far worse.”
And then, Shadowstrike lunged. His blade was a flash of silvery death, a blur arcing through the night with one target—Wingliss’s heart.
In a burst of kinetic energy, Wingliss dodged, his movements a ballet of precision and intent, nearly poetic in their split-second choreography. The adrenaline coursing through him had elevated his senses, lending an almost artistic quality to his life-or-death evasion.
And just like that, the dynamic shifted. If Shadowstrike was an unsolvable riddle, then Wingliss had just found a crack in the cipher. And in the world of shadows they inhabited, a single crack was often all it took to bring down empires.
But everyone has their flaws, lurking in the shadows of their greatness. For Wingliss, it was a haunting phantom of a memory that chose this moment—of all moments—to materialize and besiege his senses. Fragmented images of Jessica Dark, her lips fusing with his, just before an apocalyptic inferno engulfed them, flashed through his mind like grotesque stills from some nightmarish film. In that sliver of a moment, his laser-focused, anger-driven concentration splintered.
Perceiving this chink in Wingliss’s mental armor, Shadowstrike launched a spinning kick—so flawlessly executed it seemed like a shadow come to life on the breath of the wind. The blow hit its mark, propelling Wingliss across the coarse gravel of the rooftop, where he crashed down, a heap of disheveled defeat.
Shadowstrike towered over Wingliss, his ominous presence casting a pall that could make even the Angel of Death reconsider. His katana, poised like the scythe of fate itself, captured fragments of the night sky in its polished surface—each flicker a chilling harbinger of an impending, irreversible finale.
“Last time we clashed, I barely escaped with my life,” he hissed, his voice laced with glacial contempt. “Your tech upgrades and bio-mods may have amped you up—faster, stronger, perhaps even wiser. But love? Love has gutted you, laid bare your vulnerabilities.”
Each word from Shadowstrike was a sniper’s bullet, meticulously calibrated for devastating emotional impact.
But in that instant, the universe seemed to shift. As Shadowstrike’s katana hovered menacingly above him, time’s normally relentless march suddenly froze, as though even this fundamental force of nature paused to bear witness to the high-stakes face-off between these two titans.
Every tick of the clock stretched and contorted, giving Wingliss a moment hyper-focused clarity, as if his entire life—all its highs and lows, its whispered promises and shouted betrayals—funneled into a single pinpoint of awareness. And in that instant, an ethereal voice, familiar and yet wholly otherworldly, cut through the veil of reality.
“Do you see?”
That whisper, more an echo of a deeper truth than a question, jolted Wingliss back through time, folding his present crisis into a rich tapestry of memories, flooding his mind faster than the speed of thought.
###
Suddenly, he was back in a secluded bungalow, its glass walls offering panoramic views of the ocean as it kissed the shores of Bora Bora. Here, the walls seemed less like barriers and more like an invitation for the world to come inside—a melding of man-made structure and nature’s splendor. Memories of a time when he knew what happiness felt like.
In this dreamscape, his senses were so vivid he could almost smell the salty sea air mixing with the unique perfume that Jessica Dark wore—the scent that had come to define so many intimate moments, now forever embedded in the tapestry of his memories.
Haunted by their last real conversation—the nature of love—Wingliss couldn’t shake it. To him, love was a liability, a chink in armor meticulously constructed over years in the shadowy world of espionage and danger. In his universe, love was a commodity, up for auction to the highest bidder, and almost always leading to a tragic end. Even a flirtatious glance from a striking woman had to be measured against the risk of a knife in his back.
Love, he thought, was just a poetic term for another way to meet your end.
Yet Jessica had whispered words that reverberated like a distant echo from some alternate reality. “Love isn’t your Achilles’ heel, John,” she’d said, her voice imbued with a gravitas that felt as old as time itself. “It’s our bedrock, our raison d’être. It’s not just what binds us; it propels us, gives us purpose. It’s the closest thing we have to immortality.”
Wingliss entertained her idealistic take on love, though he was loath to fully buy in. Immortality? The very idea seemed like a paradox. Lives ignited and snuffed out like fleeting stars—random points in an uncaring cosmos, devoid of any lasting significance. Yet, in that ephemeral instant, something inside him wavered. An alien notion infiltrated his consciousness, tampering with the very core of his identity—an insidious, beautiful thought that he couldn’t easily quarantine: the desire to be tethered to her, through all of space and time.
“What about me? Do you love me, John?” She asked.
The question didn’t just hang in the air; it reverberated, leaving in its wake a kind of existential turbulence that rocked the core of his being. A question so disarmingly simple, yet packed with the explosive impact of C-4, detonating long-held beliefs and cracking the façade of his pragmatic worldview.
The words rolled through his mind, each syllable a stone dropped into the placid waters of his thoughts, sending out ripples that disrupted his focus, yet strangely fortified his resolve. As if, somehow, their love could act as an invisible force field, deflecting even a master assassin’s most deadly strike.
Their eyes met, and in that moment, the universe seemed to pause, bending to the gravity of their gaze. Her eyes—a kaleidoscope of emotion that ranged from hopeful yearning to flirtatious challenge—mirrored the intricate tapestry of his own elusive spirit.
“Yes,” he finally said, his voice barely above a whisper but laden with a vulnerability he had long quarantined, safely away from the world’s prying eyes. In that fleeting utterance, the fortress walls he had so painstakingly built crumbled, revealing the raw, unguarded human underneath.
Her eyes caught fire, an inner universe ignited in a split second. It felt as if he had touched eternity itself. With grace and fervor, she vaulted from the silken bed, her robe a comet’s tail behind her. When her lips met his, it was as if they had captured and consumed the essence of a supernova.
“No cabal, not even Omen, can sever what we have,” she declared, her voice a velvet elixir that neutralized his ever-present sense of dread.
In the perilous chess game of his life, where emotional openness was a gambit too risky to play, John found himself recklessly exposing his king. They sat on the edge of the bed, souls entangled, in a universe pregnant with undisclosed secrets.
Breaking the silence, Jessica leaned in. “So, are we fated to only dream of an unreachable future?” Her emerald eyes shimmered with a compelling mix of danger and desire, encapsulated in her sultry tone.
Suddenly, he found himself without a rehearsed answer. This was not a question to be ciphered or dispatched in clandestine codes. It demanded an emotional pilgrimage, a deep dive into the uncharted abyss of his own soul.
A sly grin unfurled across John’s chiseled face. “Some dilemmas demand personal, intimate negotiations,” he intoned. And as their lips reunited, the electric connection was palpable, a melding of not just mouths but souls. His hands masterfully unfurled the sash of her robe, revealing her with each calculated motion, like a cartographer unveiling unexplored terrain. For that transient yet eternal moment, they were the epicenter of passion, locked away from a volatile world by their unbreakable bond.
Then—CHOP. CHOP. CHOP. CHOP.
A staccato chorus of chopping invaded their sanctum. The rhythmic beats sliced into John’s awareness, as jarring as a sniper’s laser tracking across his brain’s landscape. Every muscle in his body seized, locking in a flash-freeze of tension.
Jessica, her senses still cocooned in the afterglow, quirked an eyebrow in expectant curiosity. “John, what—”
“Shhh,” he hissed, his voice threaded with high-strung urgency. The airborne chopping swelled in volume and proximity, its cadence unmistakably sinister.
CHOP. CHOP. CHOP. CHOP.
Paradise imploded. John’s battle-tuned instincts latched onto the menace behind that rhythmic sound. A helicopter’s blades—always the overture to violence in his high-stakes world.
“Get down!” His roar cleaved the amorous haze like shattering glass.
Almost before his mind had even evaluated the threat, he yanked her off the bed and catapulted them both to the floor. Overhead, the room’s expansive windows now loomed as hazardous vulnerabilities, inviting airborne eyes a voyeuristic peep into their exposed souls.
Their haven morphed into a kill zone. The once-transparent walls that framed serenity became the backdrop for a nightmarish tableau. Bullets sprayed from above, each one a lethal note in a discordant symphony of destruction. Their refuge, moments ago a temple to intimacy, was being shattered, the splinters of their idyll spiraling like shards in a merciless whirlwind.
Jessica’s eyes met his, ablaze with urgency. Amidst the hovering specter of doom, her voice was an oasis in chaos. “John, you’re going to survive this. The Revelator promised as much. He said that you will save us all.” Her belief was so concrete, so inviolable, that an ember of faith ignited within him, even as the room around them came undone.
Time seemed to pause, the universe stilled for the briefest of beats. “The Revelator saw the same for you,” he murmured, his words tinged with a rare reverence. For an instant, the cold-blooded operative vanished, leaving only a man awed by love and fate.
Her eyes lit up, a universe about to go supernova. “Then let’s be the constants in a universe full of variables,” she whispered back, her words barely audible above the escalating chaos, a vow almost drowned out by the wall of noise enveloping them.
As gunfire continued to destroy their former sanctuary, a wordless compact passed between them—a tacit pledge, woven into the very fiber of their beings. In this perilous nexus of espionage and crumbling worlds, they stood unbreakable. More than spies, more than lovers—they were cosmic constants, and the next move was theirs.
Seized by the anchor of her belief, Wingliss clung to Jessica as if she were his last lifeline in a churning ocean. When their lips met, it was more than a kiss; it was like a cosmic communion, a fusion of souls that transcended human logic. For that fleeting moment of infinity, they were tethered by a love that defied all understanding.
But reality, unyielding and unsparing, yanked them back from their mental heaven. Their kiss was now a sanctuary etched in memory, a refuge for Wingliss in a world spiraling into chaos.
Barely had their lips parted when the room was cleaved by a screech—a banshee’s wail signaling incoming missiles. Through the shattered remnants of their glass fortress, Wingliss caught sight of an emblem that froze his blood—the symbol of the Silent Veil, a dagger silencing a mouth. Then, the room erupted into a pyre of blinding light and searing heat. Their private Eden was now ground zero, a blaze of obliteration.
Wingliss’ consciousness slinked back, as surreptitious as a night burglar. His senses reeled from the sterile tang of hospital air and the coarse scrape of medical sheets against his skin. Pain flared through him, each nerve an individual aria of agony. But that physical torture was merely the prelude to a mind-bending nightmare that was only just unfolding.
His eyes darted across the sanitized room. “Where’s Jessica?” he croaked, his voice laced with a desperation that mirrored his inner tumult.
The nurse, engrossed in her routine, halted as if jolted by voltage. Wordlessly, her hand pointed to a shrouded form on an adjacent bed—a silent tableau that screamed a language of anguish so visceral, it was nearly tangible.
Something in Wingliss detonated. A guttural scream ripped from the core of his being, slashing through the antiseptic quiet. It was more than a scream; it was an unleashed crescendo of unendurable grief and fury, a sonic eruption that seemed to rattle the very foundation. Words could not capture this—the yawning abyss of loss within him, a black hole so utterly consuming, it threatened to devour him from the inside out.
###
His mental odyssey screeched to a halt. He was back on that rooftop, an island in a sea of cityscape awash in murky hues. Alone, yet accompanied by an emotional maelstrom more potent than ever.
Time kicked into overdrive. Shadowstrike’s blade sliced the air, a flash of metal hungry to sever fate. But the prey had evolved. Grief, memory, love, and rage had forged an indomitable core within him. Fueled by that inner scream, his eyes ignited with a ferocity beyond words.
With grace honed by years of lethal dance, he dodged the descending blade, pivoted, and counter-struck. His sword’s arc was a physical manifestation of his bottled-up fury. It cleaved into Shadowstrike’s leg, a gory geyser erupting from the wound. Time seemed to slow down as his adversary fell to the ground, and the air filled with a sense of electricity, of finality.
For a moment—something he’s never thought before, occurred. The thought to give mercy. But that sentiment wilted under the blazing heat of his inner rage—a drug that isn’t easily overcome. Mercy? What was its value in a world screaming for vengeance?
Not finding an answer, Wingliss opted for brutality—a stomp that shattered Shadowstrike’s skull, making a marionette out of the would-be killer.
What does mercy give? And since Wingliss didn’t know, he answered it the best way he could: A brutal stomp to Shadowstrike’s skull, leaving him a crumpled, lifeless ragdoll.
But the aftermath brought him no satisfaction, no triumphant high. No cold spike of justice to ease the hellish flames of hatred burning inside him. He pointed his katana at the sky, daring the deities of heaven to try and stop him.
“And if you stand in my way, even you will be cut,” he dared.
Wingliss’s eyes locked onto the distant blue beacon atop a skyscraper—his lodestar in Tokyo’s concrete labyrinth. He’d fought through lies, betrayals, and a thousand dark alleys to reach this climax, a showdown wrapped in endless acts of the unforgivable. The world would tremble at his fury until he’d made them all pay. His redemption—if it even existed—would have to wait, marooned in the murky past that refused to let him go.
Yet he was blind to the fact that the truth of his redemption lay hidden in the mists of his own turbulent past, buried in the shadowlands beyond the city where the twisted plots of global intrigue unfolded in perpetual twilight.
In this clandestine game of spies, sins left permanent scars, inked onto the soul and impossible to erase. These dark acts weren’t the finale; they were milestones on a twisting path leading to an elusive, questionable salvation. Wingliss’s inheritance was a legacy of shadow wars and lies whispered in the dead of night.
Paid in full now, he knew one bitter truth: no illumination existed that could brighten the abyss in his soul.
Epilogue:
Nestled against a backdrop of majestic peaks, The Revelator’s cutting-edge aircraft set down with engines that offered merely a whispering hum. It was as though the future had arrived to salute the ancient—a sleek modern marvel sharing space with a centuries-old monastery, its worn stones and elaborate etchings carrying the weight of a thousand stories.
As The Revelator stepped out, his silhouette seemed to melt into the descending twilight, as if the timeworn temple had waited eons to enfold him in its cryptic enigmas.
Inside, the atmosphere was hushed, the air filled with the soft, inconsistent glow of candlelight flickering against aged stone. It was here he came face-to-face with a mysterious figure swathed in billowing robes—a living repository of ancient secrets and riddles yet unsolved.
“We teeter on the edge of cataclysm,” said The Revelator, his words charged with a wisdom that seemed to extend beyond mere human understanding. “The very weave of destiny is tangled, twisted by the turbulence we ourselves have set in motion. I can no longer see the future.”
His speech was heavy, almost weighted down by the unspoken prophecies it contained. Taking a momentary breath, he fortified himself for the revelation that was about to unfurl. “We are playing a dangerous game. John’s grief and wrath have the power to drag the world into his personal hell. And what happens when he learns—”
A soft sound interrupted his impending disclosure—the lumbering creak of the temple’s great wooden doors heralded a new entrant. She stepped into the chamber, her form given life by the silvery moonlight that invaded through the haze of lingering incense.
Unexpected, yet unmistakable: Jessica Dark.
“—that the very source of his unquenchable thirst for vengeance, the axis around which his chaotic war spins, is still very much among the living?”
The question hung heavily in the air, vibrating with tension, as if each word were a bomb rigged to disrupt their intricate game. Their eyes met—The Revelator and Jessica Dark—and in that elongated second, every unspoken truth, plan, and looming disaster swayed on the brink of revelation.