Time stopped.
For a moment, the world hung still—like a raindrop suspended before the fall.
Celeste’s eyes fluttered open into frozen light.
The sound of battle—chants, roars, cracking mana—was trapped mid-air.
Elder Arlo and the others were locked in motion, their forms trembling under the strain of holding the wards together. The barrier blazed with a thousand colours, frozen arcs of lightning and rune-fire suspended like shattered glass.
Celeste turned her head slowly, every movement syrup-thick in the halted air.
Her heart pounded faintly, echoing through the silence.
Then—
a quiet, amused voice behind her.
“Naughty.”
She squeaked and spun around so fast her hair almost hit her in the face.
“Oh stars—don’t do that! You nearly scared the soul out of me!”
The Lynx hovered lazily in the still air as though the laws of the world didn’t apply to him. Shadows bent toward him like obedient smoke, and his eyes glimmered with the pale sheen of twin moons on black water.
His gaze slid over her face.
Then lower.
To her chest.
To the core burning beneath her ribs.
His smile thinned.
“Ah,” he said softly. “I see you finally met Karethiel.”
Celeste froze.
Her breath caught so sharply it almost hurt.
“You know her?”
The Lynx tilted his head, expression unreadable. “Know is such a rude little word. It makes history sound tidy.”
Celeste took a half-step toward him. “Wait. You can see her?”
For the first time, the Lynx did not answer quickly.
His eyes softened.
Not much.
Only enough to be dangerous.
He looked at Celeste’s face as though searching for someone else beneath it, some older shape wearing new skin. The amusement faded from him, leaving something quieter behind.
Sadness.
“It is hard,” he murmured, “to separate the face from the soul.”
Celeste’s ears flattened. “What does that mean?”
He blinked, and the sadness disappeared beneath velvet and smoke.
“It means,” he said lightly, “that you should be careful what she offers you.”
Celeste swallowed. “She said she wanted to help.”
“Oh, I’m sure she does.” His smile returned, but it looked tired at the edges. “That’s the trouble with old ghosts, little star. They rarely lie about wanting to save the world. They only forget to ask what kind of world will be left when they’re finished saving it.”
Celeste’s paw moved instinctively to her chest.
The Lynx drifted closer, his voice lowering.
“Be careful what Karethiel offers, for she does not even know what she is asking.”
A chill moved through Celeste despite the frozen air.
“She doesn’t know?”
“No.” His eyes glinted. “And that makes her far more dangerous than if she did.”
Celeste stared at him, heart thudding.
The frozen battlefield shimmered around them, silent and bright and waiting.
The Lynx’s tone shifted back into that playfully scolding rhythm, though the sadness had not fully left his eyes.
“You shouldn’t pull your rune out for too long,” he chided. “It can have… consequences.”
Celeste blinked, frowning. “What—what do you mean? I only wanted to see what would happen if I—oh no.”
Her hands—her arms—her whole body began flickering, her outline thinning until she could see the frozen battlefield through herself.
“What’s happening to me?” she gasped.
The Lynx tilted his head, watching her like someone observing a curious insect in amber. “You’ve peeled yourself away from the stream. I only… stopped it from snapping back for a moment. Time’s such a fragile thing, don’t you think? Push too hard and it bruises.”
Celeste stared at her fading fingers, voice small and frightened. “I don’t understand! I didn’t mean to—oh dear, I’ve broken something, haven’t I?”
“Not broken,” the Lynx murmured, drifting closer, his voice a silken monotone. “Just rewritten. Your rune isn’t ready for your full current. You opened a door your soul hasn’t finished building.”
He reached out and tapped her forehead with a single claw.
The touch made her shiver like struck glass.
“You’ll need to be careful until the seal learns who it belongs to.”
Celeste blinked up at him, eyes wide. “That’s… rather ominous. Is this normal?”
“Nothing about you is normal,” he replied, faint amusement touching his tone. “That’s why I’m here.”
He turned her gently by the chin toward the frozen scene around them.
Her friends hung suspended in a moment of perfect stillness—Mezzo half-reaching, Bonbon’s tiny paw mid-air, Ray’s claws a streak of silver light.
“They’re quite devoted, aren’t they?” he said softly. “Such fragile creatures—depending on a core that doesn’t yet know if it wants to burn or bless them.”
Celeste’s tail twitched nervously. “They’re not fragile. They’re… brave. I’m the one who keeps breaking things.”
The Lynx’s mouth curved faintly—not kind, but curious. “And yet they follow you. Faith is the prettiest illusion of all.”
“That’s not true!” she said, stamping her foot, though it passed slightly through the frost. “They’re my friends. They stay because they care, not because I make them.”
His eyes gleamed, sharp as a knife under velvet. “You believe that now. Keep believing it. It’s the only thing keeping you from becoming me.”
Celeste blinked. “That sounds rather sad. You could… stay instead?”
For the first time, the Lynx’s expression faltered—just a fraction, some flicker of old pain buried under detachment.
Then he stepped back into the deepening shadow.
“Until your rune and your core stop fighting, child of four bloods,” he murmured, voice fading like smoke on water, “walk softly. Every step you take teaches the universe something new… about how to break you.”
The darkness rose, curling around him until only his eyes remained.
“See you soon.”
He flicked his tail—
and vanished.
For half a second, nothing moved.
Then time slammed back into motion.
Sound hit her like a wall.
Screaming.
Chanting.
Stone cracking.
The thunder of wards tearing themselves apart.
Celeste gasped as the world snapped around her, too fast, too loud, too bright. The frozen arcs of lightning burst back into motion. Rune-fire exploded against the barrier. The air folded in on itself with a shriek.
And Mezzo’s arms were around her.
He was holding her so tightly it hurt, his feathers scorched to ragged ash, his fur blackened in patches, his wings flickering between flesh and red-gold mana.
“Cel!” he shouted. “Cel, look at me!”
Lumina lay beside her, pale and trembling, one hand locked around Celeste’s so hard her claws dug into her palm. Her own rune had clicked back into place, but pink-white mana still shimmered weakly over her body like dying candlelight.
Everyone outside the circle was screaming.
“Stop!”
“Celeste!”
“Get back!”
“Don’t touch her!”
The voices tangled together until Celeste could barely tell who was who.
Her body was still blazing.
Not as wildly as before, but enough that the stone beneath her glowed white-hot. Her hands flickered in and out of shape, dissolving at the fingertips into tiny golden squares before snapping back together again.
Mezzo caught her face between both burned hands.
Then he froze.
Her eyes were glowing.
Still white.
Still terrible.
But not empty now.
There was focus in them.
Fear.
Recognition.
Celeste saw him.
Really saw him.
“M-Mezzo…”
His breath broke out of him, half laugh, half sob. “There she is.”
Another pulse tore loose from her core.
The barrier around the chamber buckled.
Not cracked.
Buckled.
The air itself bent inward, then snapped back with a thunderclap that threw half the elders to their knees. The ward lines around the floor flared bright red, then white, then a colour none of them had a name for.
Outside the Trial chamber, Rustrows began to distort.
The old factory roofs stretched like soft wax. Chimneys bent at impossible angles. Iron railings became vines, then bone, then iron again. Streets lengthened and folded over themselves, turning corners into loops. For one dizzying heartbeat, the entire abandoned estate looked less like a place and more like a memory trying to decide which century it belonged to.
The Mythics gathered beyond the inner wards cried out.
Some threw up shields.
Others fell to their knees and prayed.
Above them, small wounds opened in the air.
Pocket dimensions.
Tiny, ragged windows into elsewhere.
One showed a forgotten ruin buried beneath black sand, its pillars carved with symbols no living scholar had ever recorded.
Another opened over a forest of silver-blue flora, each flower turning its head as if listening to the screams.
Another revealed a city of beings no one recognised—tall, many-eyed, crowned in feathers and glass—who looked up from their own impossible sky as Rustrows briefly looked back at them.
One tear opened directly beside Brassmane.
A pale hand, long-fingered and root-wrapped, reached through from a place of green twilight.
It nearly caught his mane.
Brassmane jerked back with a roar as the rift snapped shut, severing the reaching fingers into motes of harmless light.
He stumbled.
Then coughed blood across the ward stones.
Elder Arlo tried to rise beside him, but another pulse hit the circle. He doubled over, one hand pressed to his chest, blood spilling from his mouth into his beard.
Solas saw it.
His face went hard.
“That is enough.”
He snatched the mana gun from the nearest warden and raised it again, sighting through the storm.
“I am taking the shot.”
Ray’s head snapped round.
“No, you’re not!”
“She is tearing reality open!” Solas shouted. “Look around you!”
Another pocket dimension burst above the chamber ceiling, spilling upside-down rain that turned to moths before it struck the floor.
Solas’s hands tightened around the gun. “If she collapses the wards, there will be nothing left to save!”
Brassmane staggered upright, blood dark on his chin.
“Lower the weapon.”
“She is killing them!”
“Lower it!”
Solas did not move.
Inside the storm, Celeste’s gaze jerked past Mezzo, down to the cracked stone beside her.
Her rune lay there.
Small.
Blackened.
Still pulsing.
She reached for it with a shaking hand.
The movement sent another wave of mana blasting from her body.
Mezzo snarled as it hit him, his arms pixelating at the edges, but he did not let go.
“Arcade!” he screamed over his shoulder. “Get her rune!”
Arcade was already moving.
His quills were blazing with electricity, each spine lit green-white and snapping like a storm trapped in fur. He dropped to all fours and launched himself across the cracked chamber, dodging bursts of blue-white fire as they carved trenches through the floor.
“I’m going, I’m going!” he shouted, voice sharp with panic. “Try not to let reality explode before I get there!”
Another pulse ripped outward.
Arcade was thrown sideways and hit the ground hard, sparks skittering from his quills.
Ray lunged, phoenix-fire flaring around her as she softened the next blast before it could tear through him.
“Move, Hedgehog!”
“I AM!” Arcade snapped, staggering upright.
Celeste tried to pull away from Mezzo. “No. No, stop. I’ll hurt you.”
“You already are,” Mezzo said.
Her face crumpled.
He held her tighter.
“And we’re still here.”
Celeste shook her head, sobbing now. “I can’t. I can’t control it.”
“Yes, you can.”
“I can’t!”
Mezzo pressed his forehead to hers again, even though the light burned him.
“Then don’t control all of it. Just a little.”
Celeste blinked through tears.
“What?”
Mezzo opened his mouth—
but Ray got there first.
Her eyes snapped to the blue-white threads pouring from Celeste’s core. They were lashing everywhere now, striking stone, wards, air, bodies, anything that could hold even the smallest trace of mana.
Ray looked at her own burning hands.
Then at Mezzo’s scorched wings.
Then at Arcade’s sparking quills.
A terrible idea lit across her face.
“Wait.”
Arcade glanced over, still crawling toward the rune. “I hate that tone.”
Ray stepped closer, phoenix-fire rolling over her shoulders. “The bursts are worse because she has nowhere to put it.”
Pitch snarled, shielding Skye as another rift split open overhead. “Ray—”
“She’s overflowing,” Ray said. “So we give it somewhere to go.”
Arcade stared at her.
Then his face twisted in horror.
“Oh, that is criminally stupid.”
Ray’s flames flared. “Can it work?”
“That is not the same question!”
“Arcade!”
He looked at Celeste.
At the storm.
At the rune still pulsing on the ground.
His jaw tightened.
“In theory,” he snapped. “In horrible, body-melting, obituary-writing theory.”
Hughes drove both hands into the ground, roots wrapping around his arms as he braced the collapsing floor.
“Then we have to try.”
Arcade barked a laugh. “Of course the walking forest thinks being lightning-fried by a baby goddess is worth trying.”
Hughes looked toward the collapsing ward line.
“Lord Brassmane!”
Brassmane turned, blood dripping from his mouth.
Hughes shouted through the roar, “We can slow the bursts! Let us take some of it into our cores!”
Solas whipped around. “Absolutely not.”
Brassmane’s eyes narrowed.
Arlo, still coughing blood, looked up sharply. His gaze shifted to Celeste’s threads, to the hybrids around her, to the way the mana reached for them not like an attack, but like distress.
“Her core is calling them,” Arlo rasped.
One of the elders beside him went pale. “It will kill them.”
“Maybe,” Hughes shouted. “But if we don’t try, she dies first!”
Solas lifted the gun higher. “She is tearing reality apart!”
Brassmane roared so loudly the nearest rift shuddered.
“Let them try!”
Solas stared at him, furious. “You would risk all of Rustrows on children?”
Brassmane staggered, caught himself, and spat blood onto the stone.
“No,” he growled. “I would risk all of Rustrows on the only people she is still trying not to hurt.”
That silenced him.
For one heartbeat.
Brassmane turned his blazing eyes toward Mezzo, Ray, Arcade, Pitch, Hughes and Skye.
“This is your last chance.”
His voice cracked under the weight of the wards.
“Make it count.”
Mezzo looked back at Celeste.
His burned hands were still holding her face.
“You heard the big lion.”
Celeste trembled. “No.”
Ray stepped closer, flames crawling over her arms. “Celeste.”
“No! I could kill you!”
“You won’t.”
Arcade, still scrambling toward the rune, shouted, “Technically she absolutely could, but this is not the time for honesty!”
Pitch bared his teeth, planting himself between Skye and another burst. “We can take it.”
Hughes tightened his roots into the broken floor. “Give us the weight, lass. Not all of it. Just enough.”
Skye’s light trembled, but it did not go out. “We can help you see where to put it.”
Lumina squeezed Celeste’s hand weakly.
No command pulled her now.
No chain tightened around her throat.
She chose to reach.
“Cece,” she whispered. “Let us help.”
