Control.
Control was the first, last, and only religion I possessed.
My father had taught me: Control your magic. Control your face. Control your world. And I did. My world was a fortress of clean, hard Aether-lines.
Anya Rostova was a sledgehammer.
I was in the West Training Hall. The silence here was a tool. It was a space I used to re-calibrate, to grind my Aether back into its perfect, precise, silent state.
But the silence wasn't working.
The Resonance had a new name now. It wasn't an irritant. It was an addiction.
I could still feel it. That moment in the forest. The Synergy. The glorious, perfect, limitless power. My magic, my Animus, which I had always known as a finite, controlled well, had liked it. It had craved it.
It had felt... complete.
The thought was a sacrilege. It was a filth in my mind, a weakness so profound I wanted to scour my own soul.
I had spent my entire life honing my Aether. And she... she... had made it better, just by existing near it.
And then I had failed.
I had executed a perfect, logical, merciful plan. I had removed the contamination. I had cut the rope.
And she had climbed out.
She was a ghost. A ghost made of grit and blood, and she was still here.
I felt her before I heard her.
The thrum in my own chest, the low, agonizing hunger for the Synergy... it changed. It spiked, from a low hum to a wail. A physical pulling need that made my teeth ache.
She was here.
I turned, and my control cracked.
She was a horror. She was filth and blood and Dregs-hate, dragging her wounded leg, contaminating my training hall. She was a stain on the polished wood.
"You're a contamination," I growled, the words tearing out of me. "You're a disease. I purged you."
"You tried to kill me," she said.
The words were quiet. They were facts. And they hit me. Because in that cold, hateful, truthful space, was it mercy? Or had it been... panic? Had I cut the rope not to save her, but to save myself from that addictive, horrifying power?
No. The logic was sound. I had to be right.
"I tried to save you!" I roared. It was true. It had to be.
"From THIS!" I gestured at the cold, stone walls, at the privilege she couldn't understand. "From this place! You don't belong here, you... You chaos!"
She just walked. Limped. Thud-scrape. Thud-scrape. Closer. The Resonance was a shriek in my head. My Aether was surging under my skin, wanting to meet her. My Animus was aching for her Anima.
It was a sickness.
She stopped, her face inches from mine. She was a full head shorter, a wounded animal, and she was not afraid. She was looking at me like I was the one who was trapped.
She was right.
"You. Don't. Get. To. Decid."
Her voice was a low, blade-like whisper. She had no idea.
"I... am... the only one who gets to decide," I seethed, my control shredding. "I am saving you from my father. I am saving you from Varrick. I am saving you from a system that will grind you into dust and laugh while it does it!"
"No," she said, her eyes pure, cold, ice. "You're saving yourself. Because you felt it."
My blood ran cold.
"You felt it in the forest," she whispered, her voice a poison. "You felt the power. And you liked it. And it scared you."
"Shut. Up." My voice was shaking.
"You're a coward," she spat. "You're not a prince. You're just a coward in a clean uniform, and you're terrified of a girl from The Dregs."
She was wrong. She was twisting it.
"I'm not scared of you," I snarled. "I'm disgusted by you."
"Good," she said. "Then you'll have no problem when I win this whole thing. And I'm going to do it... by walking over your perfect, elite corpse."
And then...
After I had warned her...
After she had felt what happened...
She shoved me.
She put her small, bloody, filthy hand on the center of my chest and shoved me.
The first time, in the forest, it had been a merger. It had been Synergy. My Aether, his Anima, her chaos.
This...
This was not Synergy.
This was an attack.
Her hate, a pure, cold Anima void, slammed into my fury, a white-hot, jagged Animus wall.
It was not a merger. It was a detonation.
A bang so loud, it wasn't a sound; it was a pressure wave.
My Animus magic, my Aether, exploded outward.
Her Anima magic, her void, pulled inward.
The two forces met in the air between us.
A shockwave of pure, unmade force and detonating light tore the room apart.
The high, slitted windows of the training hall didn't just break; they imploded, the glass turning to dust in the air.
The lights in the ceiling, the Aether-globes... they flared. They shrieked. And they burst, raining fire and sparks.
The polished wooden floor between us cracked.
The marble-column base nearby shattered, the stone exploding outward.
We were both thrown backward like we'd been hit by a battering ram.
I slammed into the far wall, my head cracking against the stone. The air was gone from my lungs.
She was thrown, a small, bloody-rag-doll, into a rack of practice blades, which crashed down on top of her.
The room was ringing. A high-pitched, wailing sound.
The air was thick with smoke, and stone-dust, and the smell of ozone and ash.
And I was... I was shaking.
I looked at my hands. My own hands. They were vibrating.
I had... I had lost control.
I had detonated.
I had exploded. Just like... just like she had in the Qualifier.
She hadn't just touched me. She hadn't just shoved me.
She had made me into her.
She had made me chaos.
And as I heard the sound of shouting in the hall, of heavy, booted feet running toward the training hall, my fury... it vanished.
It was replaced by a pure, cold, absolute terror.
They would have felt that.
Varrick. The other students.
My father.
I was ruined.