The ballroom should have collapsed.
Anyone with sense could see that. The roof had been split open by lightning. Pillars lay cracked, their sun-crests broken and bleeding dust. Fire chewed through silk banners and gilded tables. Nobles had died where they stood, burned or crushed before fear could even reach their throats.
And yet—
The room remained.
Not intact. Not safe.
But unfinished.
Stone that should have fallen hovered mid-sag. Fractures crawled through marble floors, then stopped, as if the ground itself had forgotten the next step. Smoke hung too long in the air, refusing to rise or settle.
At the center of this wrongness stood Mathis.
He was small. Too small for the silence bending around him.
His chest hurt. His ears rang. Elise was gone, pulled away by guards just before another blast had torn the hall apart. The Falsies princess had vanished in the smoke, swallowed by foreign colors and screaming steel.
Mathis stood alone.
And the world did not dare finish breaking.
A disturbance rippled at the edge of the hall.
Not a spell.
Not an attack.
A misplacement.
Shadows along the walls slid sideways instead of stretching long. They pooled near a fallen pillar where torchlight failed to behave. From that darkness stepped a boy, only a little taller than Mathis, his posture loose, his presence sharp.
Black hair. Red eyes.
Five rings sat on his fingers, dull and dark, each one quietly warm, as if something beneath them pressed outward and was told no.
The shadows clung to him. They did not spread.
Mathis felt it immediately.
Not fear.
Not danger.
A pressure, like the room being claimed by two hands at once.
"Wow," the boy said lightly, looking around at the devastation. "This party really went downhill fast."
Mathis swallowed. "You shouldn't be here."
The boy smiled. It was easy, practiced, and irritated at the edges. "Yeah. People keep saying that."
Mathis stepped back.
The marble beneath his heel cracked—then stopped. The fracture sealed halfway, stone refusing to finish what physics had already decided.
The boy noticed.
His smile faltered for half a heartbeat.
Something in his eyes sharpened.
That annoyance came quick and ugly. He didn't understand how Mathis was doing this. He only knew the world was behaving around him. Holding. Obeying.
And Xavier hated things that obeyed someone else.
He lifted his hands in a mock-surrender. "Relax. I'm not your enemy."
Mathis didn't lower his guard. His hands trembled, heat and pressure coiling under his skin without shape or color.
"What's your name?" Mathis asked.
The boy paused. Not because he was afraid.
Because he was choosing.
"…You don't need it," he said. "Call me whatever makes this easier."
Mathis nodded, because things were supposed to make sense, and that answer felt close enough.
Deep beneath the estate, where the blast had thrown Garin's body into ruin, something went wrong.
The corpse twisted.
Not violently. Not loudly.
Bones bent inward like softened metal. Skin tightened around a shape that could not stand upright. For a moment, something almost human tried to rise.
Then it folded in on itself and vanished.
Not destroyed.
Corrected.
The ballroom shuddered.
Mathis gasped, pain lancing through his chest. He didn't know why. He only knew something had tried to continue and failed.
The air thickened.
Across from him, the boy stiffened.
The rings on his fingers grew warm.
Not stronger.
Tighter.
Shadows coiled closer to his body, bending around his arms and legs, warping the space near his skin. They did not reach outward. They pressed inward, restrained by something older than instinct.
"You're doing something," the boy said, irritation bleeding into his voice now. "And you don't even realize it."
"I'm not!" Mathis said, panic rising. "I just— I just want this to stop. I want everything to stay the way it was."
And the world listened.
The falling debris slowed. A burning banner froze mid-collapse, fire guttering but refusing to spread. The air itself grew heavy, as if movement required permission.
The boy felt it like a hand on his throat.
Reality wasn't resisting him.
It was already claimed.
He took a step forward anyway.
The shadows obeyed the rings, bending tighter around him, forced into shape, into function. No outside will. No watching god.
Just a child who wanted everything.
And another who refused to let anything be taken.
The space between them cracked.
Not stone.
Air.
Mathis's presence pressed outward unconsciously, not attacking, not shining—asserting.
This moment exists.
This room stands.
This does not end here.
The boy laughed. Sharp. Real.
"Oh, that's annoying," he said. "You're really annoying."
Mathis clenched his fists, tears burning his eyes. "I don't want to fight!"
"I know," the boy replied, shadows tightening as the rings bit deeper. "That's why this works."
He leaned forward slightly, red eyes bright against the smoke.
"My name," he said, voice cutting clean through the frozen hall, "is Xavier."
And the world, caught between dominion and refusal, finally screamed.
Under the world, between places that were never meant to touch, Veltrix stopped walking.
He did not hear the explosion.
He felt the misalignment.
The path beneath his feet thinned, not tearing, not breaking, but hesitating. Space forgot which side of itself it belonged to. The air tasted wrong, like a sentence cut short.
Veltrix laughed softly. Not because it was funny.
Because it was familiar.
"Oh," he murmured, adjusting his coat as the corridor around him wavered. "That's new."
No. Not new.
Layered.
Two presences grinding against each other inside a single moment. Neither dominant. Neither yielding. Reality wasn't choosing a winner.
It was shedding skin.
Far above him, in a duchy ballroom that should have been rubble, the room finally began to understand what was happening to it.
The floor buckled.
Not from weight.
From contradiction.
Mathis stood frozen, breath shallow, heart hammering. He didn't know why the air had grown so thick it hurt to move. He didn't know why his thoughts felt heavy, as if they were pressing outward instead of staying inside his head.
All he knew was this:
Things were not allowed to change.
And yet—
Across from him, Xavier smiled wider, teeth flashing, irritation sharpening into something close to delight.
The shadows around his body began to peel away from the walls.
Not reaching outward.
Peeling inward.
The rings burned now. Not with power, but with resistance. They locked the darkness into shape, forcing it to obey direction, intent, hunger.
The marble between the two boys cracked clean through.
A line split the floor, running from Mathis's feet to Xavier's shadow, then branching like veins across the ballroom. Chandeliers finally fell, smashing against the ground as gravity remembered itself all at once.
The room began to collapse.
But not uniformly.
Sections folded in on themselves. Corners stretched too long. Distance warped. A fallen pillar existed in two places at once, half-buried, half-standing, unsure which outcome it belonged to.
This was not destruction.
This was argument.
Mathis cried out as pressure surged through him, something deep inside tightening, shedding layers he didn't know were there. The quiet authority he carried began to shake, shedding its softness.
The world did not simply obey anymore.
It clung.
"Stop!" Mathis shouted, voice breaking. "I don't want this!"
And the room answered by refusing to end.
Flames guttered and went still. Smoke reversed direction. A fallen guard twitched, not alive, not dead, locked in a moment that refused to move on.
Xavier staggered, boots scraping against marble that no longer behaved like stone. The shadows snapped tighter to him, dragged into sharper edges, more defined shapes.
Too defined.
His grin faltered.
"Hey," he muttered, annoyance flashing hot. "That's not fair."
The shadows wanted to spread. To take. To become more.
The rings said no.
The clash intensified.
Where Mathis stood, continuity thickened. The air resisted change, resisted conclusion. The room remembered itself as it had been moments before the blast and tried desperately to return there.
Where Xavier stood, possibility bent inward. Shadows sharpened, condensed, turned into tools instead of fog. The space around him thinned, as if reality itself could be folded and pocketed.
Bread and butter.
Too close. Too compatible. Too opposed.
The ballroom screamed again, this time silently.
Walls folded inward, then snapped back. Windows showed reflections of rooms that didn't exist. The ceiling peeled open to reveal not the night sky, but an earlier version of itself, unbroken and whole, hovering like a memory refusing burial.
Veltrix winced as the tremor rippled through the in-between.
"Oh, that's bad," he said cheerfully. "That's very bad."
He knelt, pressing two fingers against the thinning edge of space. The path shuddered, trying to decide whether to let him exist there.
"Two of you," Veltrix muttered. "Already tearing paint off the walls of the world. No wonder the old men are nervous."
Back in the ballroom, Mathis dropped to his knees.
Something peeled away inside him.
Not lost.
Exposed.
The weight he carried sharpened. What had been a wish became a rule. What had been fear became insistence.
Things should not be taken.
Moments should not slip.
People should not disappear.
Xavier felt it and snarled.
"Oh, I get it now," he said, voice low, rings blazing as the shadows strained against their limits. "You don't want more. You want everything to stay yours."
Mathis looked up, eyes wide, tears streaking his soot-stained face.
"I just don't want it to end."
For the first time, Xavier didn't smile.
The room lurched.
A section of floor simply vanished, folding inward and sealing itself as if it had never existed. Another wall duplicated, two identical stone faces overlapping and screaming as they tried to occupy the same place.
Reality was shaking off something old.
Something patient.
Something that had assumed it had time.
Veltrix stood as the tremor passed beneath his feet, eyes gleaming with interest and something like dread.
"…So that's where you are," he said softly.
And far above, between a boy who would not let go and a boy who wanted everything, the world bent far enough to remember that it could bleed.