The technique I used funneled every shard of my wrath into a single, impossible strike; it could end this world and a thousand others if I let it loose.
He stood before me and caught my blade with bare hands as if I were a child swinging a stick.
Snow-white skin, reddish lids, woolly pale hair, a face utterly untroubled by pain.
Robes hung over him like a mourning shroud; with a slow, simple motion he eased my sword down and lifted a single palm.
Nathaniel froze mid-attack, his blade an inch from my throat, and the world narrowed to that small circle of cold steel.
"Why stop me, Noah? Why spare her life when it changes nothing?" I spat, breath ragged.
Noah stepped back and watched the field as if reading scripture. "Because this world must be saved, and you are not the way."
He looked to Griffin then, eyes flat. "When you brought me here, you revealed a wrath that gnawed, not freed."
My knees buckled; I fell to them, words scraping from a throat raw with exertion. "They need a guiding light," I croaked, suddenly small.
His hand pressed cool to my brow; for a sliver the world stilled and acceptance washed over me like a tide.
"Falter, then rejoice. You are free."
A force launched me through space and time; Noah's foot drove into my chest and slammed me into the sand like a rag.
Thrown, holed, humiliated, I had never felt so minuscule. He loomed like a mountain; I, a grain of ruined earth.
"Do you feel it?" he asked, placing his hand over my heart. "The peace that comes with acceptance?"
He spoke a word and the world opened. "Ark."
For a heartbeat I saw the end of my life like a shutter closing.
Nicholas. My children. Names I could not forget burned through my mind.
I could not die here. I inhaled against all odds.
Time stopped. Space halted. Thought locked like a door nailed shut.
In that frozen second I slipped past Noah and struck; Satire's sword shattered the moment my blade bit down the length of her throat.
Nathaniel fell above me; I caught his wrist, twisted, slammed his head into the sand, and bent backward as Noah's fist whooshed past.
I launched a compressed orb into the sky, a thing that contained the totality of a world, and it detonated with the sound of unmaking.
For a beat the three monsters staggered, a fissure of despair widening in their ranks, and I rode that trembling edge.
"For this, I shall reveal my Regalia," I gasped, the name tasting like finality.
"Root of the Beginning: Yoru-Barvasatha."
Power poured from me like an ocean released; an endless source unspooled from my bones until nothing around me stood as it had.
I instantly viewed the entire realm, I saw Earth and wrapped it in a mirror, transcendent.
Mana vanished; Satire evaporated into dust and ash; Nathaniel crumbled to gray motes.
Noah, who had resisted, seemed to buckle and flow away into sand.
Griffin stepped forward, eyes unreadable, and touched the damp sand with a single practiced motion.
Noah snapped back into being as if summoned by a child's trick.
Noah did not hold; he winked into presence and reached with something like command.
My Regalia should have been absolute, the root of being, the strand that reduced all to origin, stripping infinity to embryo.
Instead his aura, his simple touch, answered me.
"Mirabel," Griffin said, and there was a cruelty in his tone that cracked like ice. "This was the final spark I needed. You must die."
He smiled, small, calm, dreadful, and then he spoke a single word that broke the world beneath me. "Shiver."
A prickle ran along my skin; my last reserves of mana bled away in a cold, precise cut.
With one syllable I was unmade: my power snatched, my body riddled with hairline cracks, my armor failing like thin ice.
For a moment before the cut took everything, regret flared through me like a remembered sun.
I thought of Nicholas, small hands, of promises made to children who believed in monsters I could not kill, of the faces I had sworn to protect.
Regret was a hot, clean pain, not submission, but a bright recognition of what my fury had already cost.
Then the world cleaved.
I screamed, sound torn from a deeper chamber, and the scream curdled into a ragged, animal howl as my knees gave.
Rage shattered into madness; I convulsed on the ground, hands clawing at the sky, a fit of fury that tasted of iron and salt and broken vows.
Griffin watched, expression unreadable, as my vision narrowed and the world redrew itself until my eyes held nothing but wrath.
I reached out, but it was only more red, the color of failure, of the last light before everything goes dark.
***
[Makilah Novastia.]
It was frightening, truly frightening.
I never expected Mirabel to be beyond me, but watching her tear down the barriers of this world made my teeth ache.
Worlds like this, those with deep threads into the higher realms, are warded.
They can take blows ordinary worlds could not survive. That resilience earned my respect.
I would not have thought to blame a world for surviving.
But Mirabel was beginning to threaten that resilience.
Her skin glowed pure red, her hair poured like a river down her back, and wrath moved before her like a living thing.
If I had not been here, I might have called her a natural disaster and fled.
Griffin met her without fear. He slipped beneath her strikes, deflecting them with a casual grace that only fed her fury.
She burned through her reserves as if trying to remake herself from fire.
It was obvious: if this continued, she would fracture, lose the thread of herself, and become something like me.
Disasters are not merely accidents; they are truth laid bare.
A storm does not ask permission to wreck a shore; an earthquake does not consult councils before it reorders a city.
There is an honesty to catastrophe that civilization misreads as cruelty.
I have come to believe that some violences are necessary, purges that reveal what is resilient and what is rotten.
To stop every calamity is to strangle a world's ability to test itself, to harden, to grow or to perish on its own terms.
I do not cheer wanton suffering, but I refuse the false comfort of preservation at all cost. Let structure fall where it must.
Let the weak be culled, let the rigid be broken, and let the survivors carry a truer shape into whatever comes after.
In the wake of ruin there is a cruel kind of grace, the chance to be remade without the rot that pretends to virtue.
I had already done my part. I cut down ten of their forces before anyone noticed, each strike clean and silent.
No praise followed me; none was expected.
So, just this once, though I admit a flicker of fear, I would sit back and watch from the sky.
Because an event like this deserved to be seen, and because some disasters…
Once set in motion, calamities should not be robbed of their terrible purpose.
Mirabel moved like a hunted thing made whole in anger; she lunges and claws at Griffin with a desperate, beautiful ferocity.
Griffin weaved through her attacks as if waving away a child's tantrum, deflecting blows with a casual economy that makes him seem almost unassailable.
There is something else, too, his Regalia.
I can feel him watching everything at once, eyes that span the field even while his body dances with hers.
I do not know what power lets a man hold a battlefield in a single glance.
Though I confess the feeling it stirs in me is a small, cold green, jealousy.
My talent is uglier: I shape disasters. I coax ruin into being and then teach it to wear new teeth.
Where Mirabel scratches, I make memory bleed; when she nicked Griffin's cheek, I fed that scrap of flesh into the loom of my power.
I opened every old wound in him to absurd, impossible degrees, old scars remembered anew, phantom cuts blooming along bone and tendon.
He healed through it in a blink, but his eyes flicked to me at once as Mirabel's fist slammed into his chest.
He did not rage at the strike; he resented that I saw it.
He steadied himself, regained control, smaller, faster, angrier.
The bastard's temper is a thin thing beneath that composure, and it showed.