A muted dawn cast stretched silhouettes across the practice grounds, a slumbering mist trying to disperse, but Omen’s movements were a shadow within the shadows, the air subtly bending around him as he wove through familiar tactical routines.

Amidst the habitual, a figure entered his periphery—a woman, slightly taller than himself, emerging from the dissipating fog with an equal calm. Her presence was weighty, not by an overt demeanor, but by the unspeakable resonance she carried. Like him, she seemed woven from shadow, a living enigma amidst the known parameters of life around.

Their initial meeting was marked by silence and the unspoken recognition of parallel existences. He, a manifestation of shadow, absence personified. She, strangely parallel—an echo of his undefined reality, yet carrying an indescribable presence that resisted complete obscurity. Their resemblance was an immediate intrigue to Omen, an enigma within an enigma.

No words drifted between them, yet an entire conversation seemed to teeter on the precipice of their shared silence. In her eyes was an echo of the same perpetual uncertainty he grappled with—a questioning, a searching—and he knew she felt it too.

In the moments they stood opposite, inhabiting the space between light and pure absence, he perceived in her a vast landscape of untold stories and mysteries. It awakened within him a rare sensation—a flicker of what might once have been called curiosity. Hers was a presence that could shift the very nature of absence, a kinship in the midst of singular isolation.

*This new agent moved with articulation that was fluid yet deliberate, edges softened as if crafted by hands that knew shadows intrinsically. Omen nodded slightly, a gesture of acknowledgment in the way unseen things recognize one another in the quiet corners where the world does not reach.

It was the beginning of a tentative, unspoken alliance, their paths crossed amid question marks and ellipses in place of the world's desires for certainty and punctuation. Here was another whom ambiguity had touched intimately, though her origins—like his—lay obfuscated, threads of narrative hidden within the shadows cast by soft-spoken secrets and draped over well-guarded silence.*

He left her then, with the acceptance that the mysteries she bore were impenetrable yet not intrusive, and perhaps, one day, their combined shadows would carve new pathways through the fog. Yet for now, he would learn the delineations of this new specter in stripes of mist and had no anticipation for the lined convergence except what the void would soon willingly reveal.