The Porcelain Stag advanced with measured inevitability, its ceramic hooves striking stone in controlled intervals. It was not enraged. It was refining.
Caelum moved.
Not fast. Not erratic. He angled away from the creature's trajectory, keeping his breathing controlled, gaze lowered without fully breaking situational awareness. Panic fed Impulses. Shame fed Echoes. He would not contribute either.
Behind him, Toren tried to stand.
The Stag's gaze lingered briefly on him, glaze replaying variations of small corrections—bracket tension adjusted, patrol observations noted, Mara's steady hands replacing his own. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing dramatic.
That was the danger.
Toren had survived worse during the early Collapse. He had worked through districts where Collective Fractures tore buildings open. He had endured neural audits, suppression recalibrations, mandatory memory thinning.
He had not broken.
He had endured.
That was the problem.
Suppression did not eliminate emotion. It stored it.
And sometimes, under prolonged Violet, storage matured into structure.
The Stag had not been born from a single moment of humiliation.
It had been born from years of unvoiced corrections, swallowed acknowledgments, the quiet erosion of confidence beneath discipline.
One fated day, repetition crossed coherence threshold.
And the Stag stepped through.
Sirens rose at the far end of the corridor.
Containment patrol.
Four officers entered the courtyard in disciplined formation, coats reinforced, triple Mind-Blankers pulsing at synchronized intervals. Their movements were economical, eyes half-lidded to prevent reflective engagement.
"Tier II Echo," the lead officer assessed calmly. "Public shame origin. Spread formation. Avoid glaze contact. Deploy Red."
Each officer drew a triangular device from their belts—matte alloy, palm-sized, edges beveled, a small red core at its center.
Red Gravity Dampeners.
The first officer hurled one toward the far edge of the courtyard.
It struck stone and adhered instantly, its three corners embedding into the surface with magnetic force. A low-frequency hum radiated outward as compressed Red law activated locally.
The second device landed opposite it.
The third completed the formation.
The moment the three triangles formed a perimeter around the Stag, a visible distortion manifested along their connecting edges—faint red lines outlining a geometric boundary in midair.
Within that triangular field, gravity intensified.
Outside it, nothing changed.
The courtyard floor inside the perimeter groaned under sudden compression. Dust settled violently. Loose debris flattened against stone.
Caelum felt the boundary when he stepped near it—a sudden heaviness at the edge, as though crossing into deeper water.
The Stag staggered.
For the first time, its hooves sank fractionally into the ground. Hairline fractures along its ceramic limbs brightened as compression strained its articulated joints.
"Hold compression at forty percent," the lead officer ordered. "Do not exceed fifty or we destabilize foundation."
The Stag lowered its head.
Its glaze shifted.
Now it reflected the patrol officers—not their current stance, but archived failures. A containment sweep that arrived too late. A Fracture that breached the perimeter. A civilian casualty report signed in quiet.
One officer's breath hitched.
The gravity field flickered.
The Stag lunged.
Distance fractured again.
It slipped between the densest compression nodes, antlers grazing one officer's shoulder and sending him spinning into a padded wall. Ceramic hooves struck a dampener anchor, cracking its casing.
The field destabilized.
Weight snapped back to baseline.
The Stag reared, stronger than before.
Echo Fractures adapted to opposition.
"Reset perimeter!" an officer shouted.
Two more triangular dampeners flew through the air, embedding at new positions. A fourth device struck down, completing a square formation around the creature this time.
Red lines flared again—four anchors projecting a quadrilateral boundary of intensified gravity.
Inside the square, compression deepened more evenly.
Outside it, Caelum remained at baseline weight.
Caelum used the disruption to move toward the collapsed lattice near the east exit. He did not run. Running triggered attention. He moved with measured urgency, counting breath intervals.
Within the square Red perimeter, gravity pressed downward with grinding insistence as two officers advanced in synchronized steps, containment rods leveled.
They did not swing wildly; they waited for the Stag's weight to settle under compression, then struck in intersecting arcs meant to disrupt symmetry at the shoulder joints. The rods connected with sharp concussive cracks, ceramic splintering outward in white shards that rang against stone. For a fraction of a second the Stag's foreleg buckled, its fracture lines flaring crimson under artificial Red law. One officer pivoted and drove his rod downward toward the skull seam, aiming for the convergence point between antler base and crown. The blow landed—hard enough to shear glaze and expose a darker lattice beneath—but the reflection across its hide did not falter. Instead, the Stag absorbed the impact, its ceramic plates realigning along glowing fault lines, and with a violent torsion of its body it twisted free of the square's densest node, slamming a hoof into one dampener anchor just as its cracks blazed white and the perimeter began to rupture.
The Stag split the second officer's containment rod in two with a downward sweep of its antlers. Ceramic shards scattered across the courtyard like brittle snow.
"Forty-eight percent compression!" another officer called.
"Hold it steady!"
The dampeners hummed again, red field intensifying. Stone groaned beneath sudden artificial gravity.
The Stag faltered briefly.
Then its cracks flared white.
Its supernatural response shifted.
Instead of charging, it began to stomp.
Each hoof impact created localized micro-compression that countered the artificial Red field, distorting the gravitational gradient around it. The dampeners' hum wavered.
It was learning.
Or rather, the repetition anchoring it was adjusting.
Toren, half-conscious against twisted metal, watched the creature through blurred vision. In the Stag's glaze, he no longer saw bracket adjustments.
He saw the moment he chose silence.
Years ago.
When someone else was corrected unfairly.
He had said nothing.
The Stag fed on that too.
The gravity field flickered again.
One dampener failed completely, collapsing inward with a metallic snap.
The courtyard lurched.
The Stag surged through the weakened compression line and slammed into the lead officer, driving him across stone in a spray of dust and fractured tile.
"Fall back!" the second officer shouted.
They did not panic.
But discipline was no longer enough.
"This exceeds standard containment," the lead officer gasped, pushing himself upright. "Request escalation."
One of the patrol units tapped the communicator embedded at his collar.
"Dispatch, this is Sector Four Containment. Tier II Echo escalating beyond Red dampener control. Requesting intervention from a Phase Adjudicator."
The title carried weight.
Even Caelum felt it.
Phase Adjudicator.
Junior rank, technically.
But specialized.
Trained in controlled manifestation rather than suppression alone.
Static crackled through the communicator.
"Adjudicator en route," came the reply. "Two-minute arrival."
Two minutes.
Under endless Violet, two minutes could birth a cathedral.
The Stag turned slowly, porcelain hide gleaming with layered reflections.
Its hollow gaze fixed again on Caelum.
In its surface, the kitchen flickered once more.
The dying breath.
The shard forming.
Not humiliation.
Structure.
Recognition sharpened.
The Stag began to move toward him, ignoring the remaining patrol officers entirely.
Behind him, the last Red Dampener strained at maximum output, its casing glowing dull crimson.
The Phase Adjudicator was coming.
But the Stag was already closing the distance.