The grain of the dark oak door remained etched in Stellan's sight. Soren's ultimatum still hung in the air: report to Archon Manor before dawn for observation, or Liska stayed sealed behind quarantine wards forever. Yielding meant needles, binding sigils, and dissection; resisting meant an outright war.
“Stellan…” Anja laid fingers against his sleeve, her grip tight enough to dig through wool. Her irises had gone pale with strain, fixed on his rigid shoulder.
Pav, however, had finally processed the scene. “Wait, wait, wait! Liska? Quarantined? Soren? Is this a new type of… business venture?” His voice thinned, cut off the second he caught Stellan's blank glare.
Stellan pivoted away from the threshold, his joints locking tight. Beyond the antechamber lay polished flagstones, the quiet hum of nocturnal lamps, and the deep, pressurized thrum of stored alchemical charges vibrating against his ribs.
Surrendering to Archon Manor meant becoming an open specimen pinned to an alchemical slab. Never.
He had one path left. A desperate, catastrophic gamble. He slid a hand into his satchel, fingers finding glass. One vessel held a thin amber brew—a common restorative draught, standard issue for field burns. The other, nestled in velvet, was the Phoenix Tear: a drop of crystallized essence Pav had hauled back from the markets as an alleged talisman.
He pushed past Anja and Pav into the academy's west corridor. Heavy boots struck flagstone, rhythm regular and flat. He tracked the lingering odor of Soren's spiced wine toward the reception rotunda where the Archon's retinue staged their demands.
He shoved the tall brass doors open. Soren stood beside an obsidian reading dais beneath the overhead lanterns, hands clasped behind a breastplate emblazoned with the Archon crest. Two sentries flank him in the broad rotunda.
Soren angled his chin up, lips curling. “Back before dawn, boy? Practical choice. We wouldn't want complications visiting your sister’s isolation ward.” He pointed to an iron-banded chair opposite the dais. “Sit. The Archon's physicians prepared three binding matrices for your intake.”
Stellan didn’t sit. He stopped twelve paces short of the dais, the amber phial raised in his left fist, the Tear pinched in his right. Footsteps clattered behind him as Anja and Pav cleared the double doors.
Anja saw the crystalline drop, her breath catching audibly. “Stellan, no! The baseline volatility will tear your marrow apart!”
Soren snorted, glancing between Stellan’s hands. “What is this? Threatening royal guards with a field restorative and glass scrapings? You have nothing.”
“I have enough,” Stellan said. He popped the wax stopper with his thumb and tipped the crystallized Tear into the neck. The drop dissolved on contact, bleeding gold through the suspension until the glass hummed against his palm like a trapped hornet.
Anja lunged forward, but Pav caught her sleeve, dragging his feet across the floor as the liquid flared white.
Stellan raised the burning glass to his mouth. Soren’s smirk collapsed into sudden focus. “Restrain him—now!”
Stellan drained the flask in one pull. A freezing shock tore down his esophagus, racing into bone and capillary like winter runoff. The floor tilted; colors sharpened into needle-fine edges. In the dead center of his vision, the glyphs materialized.
[Healing Potion x1000 Consumed. All Stats Amplified Exponentially. WARNING: Resonance Cascade Imminent.]
The air around him warped, shearing the lantern rays into disjointed prisms. A bass vibration rose from the flagstones under his boots. The obsidian dais split down its spine with the crack of a pistol shot. Overhead, lead-framed windows depicting the Zorya founding lords bowed inward, then burst across the courtyard in a spray of red and blue glass.
Soren threw up an arm against the glass shards and dragged a runic longsword from its scabbard. His knees bent, balance skidding as radial cracks shot through the marble beneath Stellan’s boots. The bronze ceiling sconces flared green, popped their filaments, and dropped the chamber into ash-colored predawn gloom.
Stellan’s skin bled blinding gold, the heat baking the front edges of his tunic. Sinew and bone locked into iron rigidity. Every second-guessing hesitation that had governed his work at the mortar vanished beneath an impossible pressure spike—a pure, suffocating density of force rooted right in his chest.
His gaze, burning pale yellow, locked onto Soren, whose blade trembled against the draft of the broken windows. Stellan drew breath, and the acoustic pressure rattled the bronze candelabras against the stones.
“You took my sister.”