For a heartbeat after the knife went in, Evan stayed upright.
The Shadow Walker's dagger was buried almost to the hilt in his chest, left of center. The assassin's hand still gripped the handle. Evan's fingers were locked around the man's wrist, holding him there, refusing to let the blade come free.
Ezra stared.
His heart—if it wasn't pierced clean through, it was torn beyond healing.
Evan drove what remained of his mana into his arms and forced his body to keep moving. His heartbeat had already stopped.
His mana burned anyway.
"Milord…" Evan's voice came out as a rough, bubbling rasp. He forced his body to burn mana instead of oxygen and kept his grip on the Shadow Walker.
His gaze tore off the assassin and found Ezra. Behind the pain, there was something like peace. A knight taking stock.
"It has been…" He coughed; blood flecked his lips. "…a pleasure to… serve you… and your… mother…"
His grip tightened for a heartbeat. He dragged the man's arm down, pinning the knife in place and buying Ezra another second.
"Go. I know you…" His chest hitched. "…can change the world."
The light went out of his eyes between one breath and the next. Finally, his hand slackened.
The Shadow Walker ripped his wrist free.
"No," Ezra whispered.
The assassin's cloak of shadow rose.
"No. No. NO!"
Something in Ezra's chest tore—a crushing, inward pressure, like cold iron fingers wrapped around his heart and squeezed.
The dagger was still in Evan's chest.
Thoughts stopped and instincts took over. He didn't know what he was doing exactly. He only knew he needed to do something, and the first instinct was to grab the Chimeraan crystal.
The Shadow Walker seemed more adept than the others. He didn't look like a blot in the background; he looked like glass. He looked wrong—light bent around him, making him almost transparent.
As soon as Ezra got hold of the crystal, he raised it. His limbs snapped impossibly precise, as if there was no momentum at all. He pointed it at the retreating smudge.
Ezra's vision tunneled. The square, the shouting, the clang of steel—all of it slid away until there was only that point: the crystal in his hand and the man who had just killed Evan.
Ezra screamed. "NOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
He seized every last thread of mana inside his small body—every spark in his core that fed his muscles, his senses, his magic—and drove it, all of it, into the raw crystal in one furious, uncontrolled surge.
For a moment there was a vacuum in the air, as if something was being sucked away.
Then the air detonated.
BOOM.
From the knights' point of view, the spell was wrong. It didn't look like a normal spell pattern—there was just condensation and nothing else.
No one saw Ezra take the crystal. Everyone was engaged in their own skirmish. Those who were coming to help the toddler were positioned such that they couldn't see what Ezra exactly did. To them there was only movement.
Fire—white-gold—erupted from the crystal. It didn't look like what the Chimeraan had cast before.
The blast looked like a plasma beam: a pillar—thicker than a wagon—punching out from the little shard in Ezra's fist and swallowing the Shadow Walker whole. Darkness vanished, burned out of existence.
Everything within a man's stride of the assassin ceased to exist.
The Shadow Walker. Two bandits running past him. An Anticourt pikeman who had lunged a second too late. Half a low stone ledge.
Where they had been, there was a shallow hollow of fused rock, glowing orange-white.
The shockwave followed.
It slammed outward. Knights and bandits alike went down. Shields tore out of numb fingers. Torches flickered or died. Windowpanes along the front of the hall shattered.
Men closest to the center were hurled hard. A few struck stone and never moved again. Others rolled and groaned, ears ringing, eyes blinking against the afterimage.
For a moment the column held, a blinding spear into the sooty sky.
Then the crystal in Ezra's hand changed.
The shell collapsed inward and turned to dust between his fingers—a cloud of fine, glittering particles. For an instant, motes of light danced around his hand.
Then they fell, and the pillar winked out.
Some parts of the ground had turned to glass.
Ezra swayed.
He reached inward for mana and found nothing.
Before, when he'd overdone it, it had felt like exhaustion—channels sore, core tender. Now it was as if someone had scooped him hollow.
He reached again and felt only the edge of that emptiness.
His knees hit stone.
The only thing that stayed sharp in his vision was Evan.
Still kneeling where he had died. Still impaled on the dagger. Head slightly bowed, as if still watching the boy in front of him.
Ezra crawled.
He dragged himself across the scorched street by inches, fingers slipping in soot and dust and melted stone. Every movement felt slow and wrong, as if his limbs belonged to someone else.
He bumped into Evan's shin and hauled himself upright by the dead knight's cuirass.
"Uncle Evan," he croaked.
No answer.
He shook the older man with what strength he had left. The body rocked, limp and heavy.
"You are a damn liar," Ezra whispered.
The words tore at his throat.
"You told me you would bring me home."
His voice rose, fraying.
"You told me—" he hammered a tiny fist against the breastplate, just above the dagger's hilt, "—you'd bring me back to Castle Blackfyre."
His breath hitched, turned ragged.
"You promised me you'd take me home," he shouted, the last word breaking. "You promised, you stupid knight! You swore an oath—!"
Around them, men were getting back to their feet. Once the Shadow Walkers had seen that one of them had killed the target, they started to retreat. But once they saw the flaming pillar, they hastened even more. They were terrified, and thought there was more coming.
"YOU SAID YOU WOULD TAKE ME HOME!" Ezra screamed. "YOU BROKE IT!"
His throat burned. His chest felt crushed from the inside. Hot tears cut clean paths through grime.
"You broke it," he whispered again, voice crumpling. "You liar…"
He sagged forward until his forehead rested on cold metal.
For a few breaths, only sobs came—raw sounds he couldn't stop.
Then, slowly, the noise inside him ebbed.
"I… I killed him," he whispered.
The thought landed like a second knife.
"If it wasn't for my stubbornness… if I hadn't snuck out… if I hadn't gone into the grove…" His words tangled. "Evan wouldn't have been here. Wouldn't have needed to…"
He swallowed hard.
"I killed my uncle," he said. "I really am an idiot."
His nails dug into his own chest, scrabbling at the leather of his tunic as if he could dig the pain out.
"I don't want to feel anymore," he whispered. "It hurts. It hurts so much. I've never… I've never felt anything like this."
He squeezed his eyes shut.
All of it, suddenly, only memory.
"This is a new body," Ezra muttered, half to himself, half to the empty air. "A new life. And I… I kept pretending I was still who I was before. Like this world was just data. Like nothing here really mattered."
His breathing slowed. Each sentence came out on a small shudder.
"But it does," he forced out. "I have responsibilities. People who look at me and see more than some bored man poking at the world to see what breaks. I am their son. Their heir. The center of a very small piece of this stupid world."
His fingers slackened on Evan's armour.
"I cannot afford," he whispered, "to act only on my own whim."
He drew in a shaky breath and let it out.
"I have family. I have friends. I have men who died because I was there. Because I am who I am."
The edges of his vision were going dark.
"I will change this world," Ezra murmured.
His voice thinned.
"I'll make it fair. As fair as I can. So people like you… like Mother… like that merchant woman you told me about… don't have to live and die under some whim."
His head felt too heavy for his neck.
"For your sake, my friend," he whispered. "For your sake, Uncle… Evan."
He slumped forward, cheek to cold metal, small body draped over the dead knight's lap.
This time, when the dark came, he didn't fight it.
He let it take him.'
***
Viscount Hollorn and Baron Vespra had only just arrived when they saw it.
A pillar of flame tore across the night, a beam spearing toward a Shadow Walker.
Back at the Trident's Throng, an Anticourt messenger had finally made it through with the report that there was a bandit attack. Terros's men could no longer hold the fleeing residents. There were too many, and the perimeter was leaking. Once the message landed, nobles began to spill out of the inn to "confirm" what was happening for themselves. Zannis, sensing the truth was about to become public anyway, rushed with the first wave, if only to be seen doing so.
Outside, the situation was impossible to miss. People were running in one direction, and smoke and screams rose from another. It took only moments to triangulate the center of the fighting: the administrative district near the heart of Anticourt.
With their names as Imperial nobles on the line, with honor at stake, and with "Arcanists" on the tongues of panicked residents, they hurried toward the scene.
They stopped dead.
They gasped.
For a moment, no one spoke. Men simply stared at the blast.
It didn't even register as a spell to them.
They only felt the shockwave.
It had come from a single point. And the person who had cast it was a toddler.
"Who—" Zannis tried to speak, but words wouldn't form. His eyes saw it, but his mind refused to accept it.
What they had seen was a toddler who had raised a palm toward an Arcanist and unleashed something with the force of a fourth-circle cast, edging toward fifth.
Cold sweat beaded on Zannis's forehead.
Vespra spoke first.
"That's an Awakening," Mallos blurted.
"A targeted one?" Zannis gulped.
"Seems like it."
"Who—who is that child?"
Mallos didn't wait for an answer. He pushed forward toward Ezra.
Oswyn, Phobos, and Galwell stepped into his path.
"Easy, baron," Phobos called.
A whip snapped.
It cracked across the stone in front of Mallos' boots.
"Not one more step," Phobos said.
Mallos snapped back, irritation plain in his voice. "I bear no ill will, Sir Demon Hunter. I wish only to inspect the child."
"Then you'll do it the right way," Phobos said. "You don't touch him unless the Blackfyre Guard vouches you."
He jerked his chin toward Galwell and Oswyn. Viscount Hollorn's ears twitched at the words Blackfyre Guard.
"Those men," Phobos said. "Not you."
Mallos stepped forward again.
Phobos snapped the whip a second time, this time with intent.
Mallos backed away. He raised his voice.
"I told you, I only want to check if the boy is well! He needs a healer!"
"Stand down, Baron Vespra," a voice called.
A man hurried into the square from the rear, cloak tugged tight against the smoke.
"The boy is under the protection of House Blackfyre," he said. "He will be under my care."
Mallos opened his mouth, then closed it.
Zannis rounded on the newcomer at once, voice sharp.
"Where were you then, Baron Overseer?" he barked. "When the bandits attacked? As far as I can tell, you weren't here. You didn't even get to command your troops."
Baron Incendis stayed calm. He glanced once at the slumped toddler, then back to Zannis.
"I decided to ride to Bren earlier this afternoon and made my preparations," he said. "I had only just set out—perhaps a quarter hour into the night—when a rider overtook me with the message."
"Why ride tonight?" Zannis pressed. "Were you working with the Arcanists? Did you ride so that you could wash your hands of this attack!"
"That is a bold accusation, Viscount Hollorn," Incendis snapped. Stress edged into his voice. "I have served Anticourt for the length of my tenure. This was unforeseen. I had urgent matters to report that required my person."
"Matters that cannot be sent by hawk?" Zannis asked. The sharpness in his tone didn't move. "Was it that urgent?"
"Of course," Incendis said immediately.
"So it pertains to this boy," Zannis said at once.
Incendis hesitated.
"That—" he began, then stopped.
"That's the answer," Zannis said, and his tone went smooth again.
He turned back to Mallos and dipped his head in a shallow bow, but he hid his smirk.
"Don't worry. We won't touch the Blackfyre heir, and we won't pry further into what happened," Zannis said. "Come, Mallos. Let's make sure the Arcanists scum have been decimated."
***
Orst's heart raced. He meant to move toward Cram Antipas, the direct route to Loria, but he decided against it at the last minute. He noticed that several nobles had finally decided to move toward the administrative district, some coming from the west and north. He decided to get out of Anticourt the fastest way. It was better to be outside of Anticourt than in.
He travelled east instead and waited for an hour.
His mind went back to the battle he'd just fought.
It replayed in ugly fragments: the slick ice under his boots, the smoke in his lungs, the moment the boy started placing stones like he owned the ground, the way trained men listened to a toddler and moved as if it was doctrine. Orst felt heat crawl up his neck as the humiliation resurfaced—being forced to retreat, being made predictable, being hurt in front of witnesses. His blood boiled, but anger didn't change the math. He needed his strength back. Enough mana, enough control, enough body left to reach Loria without collapsing in a ditch.
A rustle echoed in the dark.
Orst went rigid.
He didn't have enough mana left for a full fight with a trueborn and still escape. He turned and ran.
He didn't get two steps.
Something slammed into him from the side. He never saw it—only the impact, the sudden loss of balance, the way the ground rushed up.
His knees hit stone.
A boot drove into his back and kept him there.
Kneeling.
Then pain exploded in both forearms—red hot and immediate. He jerked, but the pressure held. Flesh burned. Something bored through him. Something was pushed into the holes.
Orst clenched his jaw and reached for mana.
Nothing came.
He tried again, forcing breath and focus, and found only a dead, blank silence where his core should have answered.
A sharp spitting sound snapped close.
Then a blow landed behind his head.
The world went dark.