Chương 16: Chapter 15: The Edict of End

The following morning, Elma stood in the gardens, staring at the east wing. Most of the destruction had been cleared away, but the stone still bore it—a long fracture running from the second-floor balcony down to the foundation, hairline cracks spiderwebbing out from the impact sites, a section of railing simply gone. The workers had done what they could. What remained was the rest. In the days that followed, the golden-haired came.

Every Altheris noble who hadn't marched for the red shore found occasion to visit the manor. They arrived in succession, draped in the family's embroidered silks, and each one did the same thing: they looked at Elma with something warm and proprietary in their eyes, praised her at length, and then turned to Christa with something else entirely. You must be more careful. Said gently, always. As if Christa had misplaced something that belonged to them. One had been less gentle.

She had looked Christa over with a long, measuring calm before she spoke. If Lady Kresnik had no interest in taking the Altheris name, she said, then perhaps she might take greater care of the family's future. Christa had smiled through every visit. Elma had watched her do it. After four days, the visits stopped. Word had come that the armies had finally crossed back into Veraxys. They would reach the city anytime now. Elma turned away from the east wing and looked at Jorm.

A few feet away, Jorm stood with her eyes squeezed shut, her small hands trembling as she manipulated five heavy stones. They hovered in a tight, uneven orbit around her. Enhancing the girl's control and compression was the only viable power-up Elma could teach her. Without the capacity to increase Jorm's Lattice Reserve or Total Resonance Output, efficiency was her only weapon. As Elma watched the stones grind against each other, a question surfaced in her mind. Force is force.

If all elements were simply different frequencies of vibrating universal threads, why couldn't her field manipulate the Geo elements? Why was she strictly bound to Flow? Elma expanded her invisible perimeter, pushing her field outward until it completely engulfed Jorm and the hovering stones. She bypassed the girl's presence and focused entirely on the rocks, trying to "feel" their density. Nothing.

She could feel the thin layer of moisture trapped on the stone's surface, the exact temperature of the air currents swirling around them, but the stone itself remained a dead zone to her senses. Frustrated, Elma pushed harder, forcing her awareness deeper into the underlying architecture of her own field. She stopped looking outward and looked inward. That was when she felt it. It wasn't the stones. It was a mechanism embedded deep within the architecture of her own lattice.

It felt like a dormant muscle, or a heavy, metallic toggle switch resting at the absolute center of her field. Curiosity overriding caution, Elma mentally seized the switch and pulled. Thud. Thud. Thud. The five heavy stones dropped out of the air, hitting the dirt simultaneously. Jorm gasped, her eyes snapping open. She stared at the fallen rocks, her face draining of color. She threw her hands out, her chest heaving as she strained to lift them again. Nothing happened. The dirt didn't even tremble.

"I can't feel it!" Jorm panicked, her voice pitching into a terrified squeak. She backed away from the stones, gripping her head.

"My field... I can't feel my field! Is it broken? Did I break my Resonance?!" Elma observed the girl's terror, slightly taken aback by the sudden, absolute shutdown. A faint smirk touched the corner of Elma's mouth. The mechanics seemed obvious.

"Do not move," Elma instructed, her tone calm and authoritative.

"Your Resonance is not broken. This is simply the consequence of overlapping fields." It was basic physics. Her own Resonance Unit density was exponentially higher than Jorm's—higher RU dominates lower RU in shared space. The strong overwrites the weak.

"Watch," Elma said, raising her own hand. She intended to generate a highly compressed air current to lift the stones and demonstrate the disparity in their power. She applied the pressure. Nothing happened. Elma blinked. The air remained completely still. She pushed harder, commanding the moisture in the grass to rise. The dew didn't move a fraction of a millimeter. Her smirk vanished instantly. Her own field was completely dead.

In the exact space where their two fields overlapped, the threads of reality were completely unresponsive. Elma lowered her hand, immediately discarding her previous theory. Jorm's field couldn't possibly be suppressing her. The interference was internal. It was the toggle she had activated. She reached back into the dark architecture of her lattice, found the heavy, invisible switch, and flipped it off.

"Wait!" Jorm yelled, throwing her hands out again. The five stones instantly jerked off the ground, resuming their hovering orbit. Jorm let out a massive, shuddering breath, a relieved smile breaking across her face.

"It worked! It came back!" Elma didn't say a word. She kept her eyes fixed on the floating stones. She reached inward and flipped the toggle on. The stones slammed into the dirt. Jorm's smile shattered. Elma flipped it off. The stones lifted back into the air. Jorm gasped in relief. Elma flipped it on. The stones dropped. Jorm began to hyperventilate. Elma ignored her, staring intensely at her own hands. The toggle wasn't dominance. It was cancellation.

Wherever her field overlapped another Resonant's, both fields simply ceased functioning within the shared space. Mutual Negation. To classify and understand the mechanical anomaly, Elma required immediate data. She turned on her heel, setting a direct trajectory for the library.

"Is... is that everything for today?" Jorm asked. Elma paused. She looked at Jorm for a moment.

"You can come." Jorm's mouth opened, then closed. She glanced down at her apron, then back up, clearly torn between two competing instincts.

"Are you sure? I'm not—I mean, I'm just a maid, and you're going to the library, and I haven't even washed my hands since the stones, and—" Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"Then I suppose tomorrow's lesson is cancelled," Elma said, already walking. Jorm scrambled after her so fast she nearly tripped over her own skirt.

"Wait, no, I'm coming! I'm right here!" They navigated the stone corridors to the library. Arem sat in his usual chair, his posture utterly unchanged, looking as though he hadn't shifted a single muscle since their last encounter. He glanced up from his parchment, his eyes tracking Jorm as she nervously trailed behind Elma.

"Brought a new one, I see," the archivist noted. Elma ignored the observation.

"I encountered an anomaly. When my field overlaps another Resonant's, neither functions. Explain." Arem chuckled, a dry, grating sound.

"Straight to the point. Not even a greeting."

"You are alive."

"How considerate of you to check. If you don't enjoy my company why would I answer you then?"

"It's your job."

"Oh, right."

"The anomaly." Arem let out a slow breath.

"Describe it." Elma recounted the experiment. The toggle hidden within her lattice. Jorm's field disappearing. Her own field becoming equally unresponsive. Arem listened without interrupting, his fingers idly tapping the armrest. When she finished, he nodded.

"That's most likely your Innate Ability." Elma waited.

"It's a mutation within the Lattice. Extremely rare. Most Resonants have ordinary fields. A few are born with properties that distort the normal rules."

"Are there others with the same anomaly?"

"The same? Unlikely." Arem leaned back in his chair.

"Innate Abilities are as individual as fingerprints. One may resemble another, but perfect duplication is almost unheard of." Elma silently archived the information. A mutation. Potentially a very useful one.

"I see."

"Do you want to ask about anything else?"

"No."

"I could tell you when it was first documented." She turned on her heel immediately.

"We'll be taking our leave now." Arem sighed and returned to his parchment.

"The other visitor had a greater appreciation for context." Elma stopped. The pressure in the room seemed to drop.

"The boy. He came back?"

"Showed up again once," Arem said, waving a dismissive, ink-stained hand.

"Don't remember exactly when, to be honest." Jorm stepped out from behind Elma, her eyes wide.

"You saw it too?" Elma snapped her gaze to the girl.

"Did you see him?" Jorm shook her head frantically.

"No, no! But the maids did. They said he had blood-red eyes with cat-slits. Tina swore she saw him flying over the manor last night with horns and massive black wings." Elma's mental processing temporarily crashed. The sheer absurdity of the servant gossip actively degraded her threat-assessment models.

"I don't know about all that," Arem muttered, leaning back and crossing his arms.

"He looked like a perfectly normal, solid child to me."

"If he breaches this estate again, you will report it to the guards immediately," Elma ordered, her tone shifting into a cold directive.

"Not my job." Elma suppressed a sharp spike of irritation. Fine. She would simply have Christa station heavily armed Alloys at the library doors.

"What did he want?" Elma asked. Arem set his quill down.

"He wanted to know about a birthmark."

"A birthmark."

"A peculiar one." The archivist folded his hands.

"He was asking about a mark on his hand. Resembling a Sickle." The word landed in Elma's chest like a dropped weight. A sickle. She had heard that word before, in a different life, in a different body, from a man who never said anything without a reason. Hephryx had spoken about it constantly in those final years. They had shared a skull—two bodies, one head—and when the decision came, the stronger body was kept. The mark had been on the other flesh, the part that was cut away. Christa's ghost child.

She had assumed a dozen explanations. A spiritual manifestation. A lingering echo of the dead son. A trick of grief on a fragile mind. It hadn't occurred to her until this moment that there was another possibility. The Other. It could've been her twin. The same deal that put her in this body could've put him in another, and if it had, he was here, in this house, sneaking through it at night. Did he know she was here too?

Her pulse had picked up before she'd finished the thought, and she logged it without naming what it was. She needed to find him.

"You seem lost," Arem observed, not unkindly. Elma pulled herself back.

"What's special about the mark?" Arem was quiet for a moment.

"It isn't a birthmark." She waited.

"It's an Edict of End." He settled back in his chair.

"The Sickles of End are artifacts that preceded the gods themselves. Think of it this way. The artifact doesn't want you to do something. It gives you the edict. You do the thing anyway." He drew a slow line across his own throat with one finger.

"The edict isn't decorative." The Other didn't have it better than her. The thought settled with something that wasn't quite satisfaction, but was close enough that she didn't examine it further. She was bound to her Shepherd, and he was bound to these Sickles. What exactly had they done to earn that kind of attention from beings like that—meaningless creations at the edge of the world, by any rational measure, and yet here they both were, leashed to something ancient before either of them had a say in it.

And whatever the Other had been forbidden from doing, knowing him, he'd probably do it anyway. Elma pressed her fingers to her temples. She really needed to find him. Though the thought of speaking to him from outside her own skull was, even now, deeply strange.

"The Sickles," she said.

"Tell me about them."

"The Loom, the Scale, and the Sickles." Jorm's voice came from somewhere behind Elma's left shoulder, small and careful.

"They say they exist beyond this world." Arem turned to look at her. A faint, genuine curiosity crossed his face.

"That is correct. Where did you learn that?" Jorm scratched the back of her head, her ears going pink.

"My mother."

"Your mother is well-read." He looked at her a moment longer, then turned back to his parchment.

"The Three Equitors are instruments older than existence itself. Each one has an Avatar currently walking this world." He paused, the quill hovering over the parchment.

"As the Loom of Chaos grants possibility and the Immutable Scale grants order, the Sickles of End grant finality. Each stroke is said to have made the world smaller." His eyes flicked back to her.

"I have spent a very long time in this library. I have never, in all of it, heard of the Sickles of End placing an edict on a child." Elma looked at the brass globe. The three miniature suns drifted in their slow, dying orbit. He must have placed it in their previous life. Before the cut. The Other had never even been given the chance to do whatever the Sickles had forbidden—he had been reduced to her tumor before his life properly started. And the edict had followed him anyway.

Elma should have known better than to test her luck a third time. She'd asked Arem about Bio Resonants—whether they could heal other Resonants—under the guise of idle curiosity. What she actually wanted to know was whether something like that could explain how she'd survived a scythe through the sternum. It had felt like a reasonable question to bury inside a larger one. It was not a reasonable question.

Five hours later, she and Jorm stumbled out of the library, both of them hollowed out, navigating the heavy stone corridors on legs that no longer fully cooperated. The actual answer had taken eleven minutes to deliver and roughly four hundred and eighty-nine to arrive at. Bio Resonants couldn't heal another Resonant—their weaving couldn't take root under another lattice. Non-Resonants, lacking any lattice to resist it, were fair game. That was the entire answer. Elma had it memorized within the first sentence.

Jorm had not been so lucky.

"What is his problem," Jorm muttered, swaying slightly as she walked, one hand pressed to her temple.

"My mother could tell that whole story in two minutes. Two minutes, Elma. If she taught at that library, we wouldn't be like this."

"You said that already."

"I'm saying it again because it's still true." Jorm scratched at her scalp, wincing.

"Hey. When are we going to be able to weave?"

"Unclear. It depends on our development."

"Okay, but—say I get there eventually. Could I make, like. A fire sword?" Jorm's hands shot out, slashing an invisible blade through the air in front of her, nearly clipping a passing tapestry.

"Tearing through Dissonants left and right?"

"Your reach does not support sword utility," Elma said. Jorm stopped walking entirely.

"What?"

"Your arm length. It is insufficient for an extended blade weapon to be tactically efficient at your current height."

"My—okay, see, this is exactly what I'm talking about, this is a height comment, you can't just—" Jorm launched into a fresh, wounded monologue about her growth rate, her mother's growth rate, and the statistical unfairness of being compared to people who were apparently going to end up "freakishly tall, it's not normal, Elma, it's not." Elma was no longer listening. She wanted, with a focus that rivaled any tactical priority she'd held in either life, to sleep.

They rounded the corner into the main arterial hallway, and Christa appeared at the far end. Jorm vanished. There was no transition. One moment she was mid-sentence, hands still gesturing through the air; the next, she had pivoted and disappeared down an adjoining servant's corridor so fast that her apron string was still fluttering in the empty space she'd occupied. It's like noble blood was anti-Jorm. Bug spray, and she was the bug.

Whatever she'd been about to say about her height stayed half-finished, looping uselessly in the back of Elma's mind. Christa approached, her hollowed eyes tracking the empty space where Jorm had just been.

"Is she your friend?" Elma didn't answer. Any response carried the risk of triggering another emotional spiral.

"The maids have seen the boy again. The archivist as well. He has been coming to the library. You should station guards at the doors." Christa didn't seem to hear her. Instead, she stepped directly into Elma's personal space, her pale hand reaching out and pressing flat against the center of Elma's chest. Christa's fingers traced the solid outline of the gold sun hidden beneath the fabric. A profound, shuddering relief washed over the woman's exhausted features.

"Your father is at the city gates," Christa said, her voice dropping to a low, urgent murmur.

"We must get ready."

"Right," Elma replied, keeping her gaze locked on the stone wall behind Christa's shoulder. Silence stretched between them. Christa kept staring, searching Elma's face for something the former weapon couldn't provide. After a full minute of the suffocating standoff, Christa finally yielded, dropping her gaze to the floor and pulling her hand away. Freed from the interaction, Elma immediately retreated to the isolation of the nursery.

A massive new variable was about to enter the estate, and unlike Christa, Valerius was someone she couldn't afford to draw suspicion from. Valerius had chosen the worst possible time to return. She needed to find the Other before he did.