The hissing of the sword was the quietest sound in the room, but it echoed with the force of a thunderclap. It was the sound of a fundamental law being executed, and every person in the room—guards, aristocrats, and schemers alike—felt it in their bones.
The charging guard froze, his hand still gripping a now-useless hilt. He stared at the shimmering metallic dust drifting from Ravi's palm, his mind refusing to process what his eyes had just seen.
For one, single, crystalline moment, there was no narrative. There was no jinx, no saint, no quiet sun. There was only a man who had unmade steel with a touch. The raw, terrifying truth of Ravi's nature was laid bare in the silence.
And in that moment of absolute clarity, Ravi knew he had made a terrible, irredeemable error.
He had meant to create an accident. Instead, he had revealed a fact. An accident can be dismissed. A fact must be dealt with.
Aurelise's breath caught in a sharp, audible gasp. The hunger in her eyes flared into a possessive, feverish blaze. The mask of the political player was gone, burned away by the raw sight of absolute power. This wasn't a leverage point to be negotiated with. This was a force to be owned.
Lyssara's face went pale. She had spent all her efforts building a careful, untouchable myth, and in a single, reflexive act of self-preservation, Ravi had torn it all down. He'd traded the mystique of a ghost for the glaring reality of a monster.
The moment shattered. The remaining four guards, their terror momentarily overridden by a primal survival instinct, reacted.
"Sorcery!" one screamed. "Cut him down!"
They lunged, not in a disciplined charge, but a panicked, chaotic swarm. Swords and spears stabbed at the air, all aimed at the epicenter of their fear.
Aurelise's two briar-crested guards moved to intercept them, but Lyssara was faster. She grabbed Ravi's arm, her grip like a vice. "The window!" she yelled, her voice a sharp crack in the chaos.
Ravi didn't need to be told. The tearoom had become a cage, and the keepers were about to slaughter each other for the prize within. He let Lyssara pull him toward the open-air window overlooking the canal. It was at least a twenty-foot drop to the murky water below. It might as well have been a thousand.
The clash of steel rang out behind them as Aurelise's guards engaged the Watch. "Seize him!" Aurelise's voice cut through the din, sharp with command. "Alive! Do not let him escape!" Her objective was clear. She wasn't saving him; she was capturing him.
They reached the window. The canal was a dark, uninviting ribbon below.
"I can't jump!" Ravi yelled over the sounds of battle, his lifelong cowardice roaring back to the surface.
"You don't have to!" Lyssara countered, her mind already three steps ahead. She pointed not down, but across. A wrought-iron sign for a pub, shaped like a leering kraken, hung from the building on the opposite side of the narrow canal, barely ten feet away.
"Your fall in the well..." she said, her words a rapid-fire calculation. "...your power seems to have a small area of effect. It cushioned us both. Just get us close!"
One of Aurelise's guards went down with a choked cry. The odds were shifting.
"Lady Thornwyn!" a Watchman roared. "Harboring a blasphemer is treason!"
Ravi looked at Lyssara, at the desperate hope in her eyes, then back at the iron sign. He took a deep breath. He ran. Three steps were all he needed. He launched himself out the window, a clumsy, graceless leap born of pure terror, Lyssara's hand still clamped to his arm.
For a moment, they were airborne, suspended in the cool twilight air. Below them, the water churned. Gravity took hold. They began to fall.
He braced for the cold shock of the water. But as they passed within a foot of the iron kraken sign, Ravi felt a now-familiar tingle run up his arm. It was a faint, almost imperceptible tremor, the whisper of his power reaching out, of reality bending around his presence.
The iron sign, a half-ton of forged and bolted metal, ripped free from its century-old stone moorings with a deep, groaning screech. It didn't just fall; it flew sideways, as if slapped by an invisible giant's hand, its heavy chains whipping through the air.
It slammed into the side of their own building, directly below the window they had just exited, with the force of a battering ram. The stonework exploded inward. The entire corner of the tearoom, already stressed by the earlier tremor, collapsed.
The floor gave way.
With shrieks of pure terror, guards from both factions—Warden's Watch and Thornwyn's elite—tumbled into the churning canal below, along with the splintered remains of a lacquered table and several expensive porcelain cups.
Ravi and Lyssara hit the water a second later. The impact, which should have been bruising from that height, felt like landing in soft foam. His power had cushioned them again. He surfaced, sputtering, the foul taste of the canal in his mouth. He saw Lyssara break the surface nearby, her hair slicked back, her eyes wide with shock.
Above them, Aurelise Thornwyn stood on the ragged, broken edge of her ruined tearoom. She wasn't looking at the chaos of her men splashing in the canal below. She was staring at Ravi, her elegant silks torn, her face smeared with dust.
The cold, calculating strategist was gone. The possessive collector was gone. In their place was a woman who had just had her prized possession, and a sizable chunk of her property, blown apart by a force she had tried, and failed, to cage.
And the look on her face was one of pure, unadulterated fury.
He had escaped her trap, but in doing so, he had done far worse than make an enemy. He had made a promise. A promise of destruction that he had just proven, beyond all doubt, he was capable of keeping. And now, she knew for certain what he was: not a tool to be wielded, but a catastrophic power that had to be controlled. At any cost.
His secret was out. The rumors were no longer whispers of saints and jinxes. Now, they would be stories of a man who could turn steel to dust and stone to rubble. He wasn't just hunted anymore. He was a strategic asset, a doomsday weapon walking free. And every power in the city, from the Warden's crude fist to Aurelise's silken glove, would now be coming for him.
And as he treaded water, staring up at the furious woman silhouetted against the ruins, a far colder, more terrifying thought wormed its way into his mind. He looked at the cracked facade of the building, the fine web of stress fractures radiating out from where he'd touched the window frame.
Lyssara's words came back to him. 'The world buckles when you exert force.'
It wasn't just a metaphor. He could feel it now. The world around him wasn't solid. It was fragile. It was a thin sheet of ice, and every step he took, every "accident" he caused, every reflexive act of self-defense, was making it crack.