The corridor seemed to stretch and warp as she knelt there, the stone beneath her palms cold and unforgiving, the world stripped of color as pain threaded through her core with surgical precision rather than violence. Her vision was a blank, blinding white, yet she could see more clearly than she ever had, awareness expanding inward instead of outward as if something had reached past flesh and bone and taken hold of the place where she truly existed.
The knight's hands were on her shoulders, firm and grounding, her voice sharp with alarm as she barked orders down the hall, boots thundered, and steel shifted, while the wards flared, but all of it felt distant, muffled by the sudden depth of the space she had been pulled into.
"Who are you?" the voice asked again, closer now, no longer an echo but a presence that pressed against her thoughts like a hand against glass, testing for cracks. "Why are our souls making contact?"
She gasped, breath stuttering as the image sharpened, and her eyes trailed the two arms bound in ancient shackles etched with runes older than the city itself, blood trailing slowly down pale skin, not fresh enough to drip yet never allowed to dry. The woman attached to them lifted her head, and deep within, recognition struck her with such force that it almost hurt worse than the connection itself.
She did not know why she felt like that, she hardly knew anyone here yet she felt as though this person was connected to her.
They were alike in a way that defied form, both shaped by survival, by being noticed by things far too old and far too powerful to care about mercy.
"I don't know," she managed, the words forming inside her mind before she realized her lips were moving, sound barely carrying beyond her own head. "I didn't mean to. I didn't reach out."
A pause followed, heavy and dangerous.
"Lies are inefficient," the woman replied, her tone cool despite the blood and restraints. "But ignorance… Ignorance is believable, this is just the start. We will meet, it seems, eventually. Let's see if you are able to survive this nightmare."
The pressure shifted, easing just enough that her vision began to bleed back into the world in fragments, stone walls reappearing in blurred shapes, armored figures kneeling around her, hands hovering uncertainly as if afraid to touch her again. The knight who had brought her from her room was still there, one knee on the ground, jaw tight with controlled fear.
"Easy," the knight said quietly, more to herself than to her. "Stay with me. You are here. You're not falling."
She clung to that voice like a tether, grounding herself as the system surged violently, alarms overlapping in a way she had never experienced before.
[Warning: Unauthorized System Contact]
[Source: External Entity — Classification Pending]
[Status: Synchronization Event Detected]
Synchronization?
The word settled in her chest with an uncomfortable sense of inevitability.
The shackled woman's gaze softened by a fraction, curiosity threading through her earlier suspicion. "Interesting," she murmured. "You are not bound, yet you hear me. Not summoned, yet you answer."
"I don't even know who you are," she whispered back, pulse pounding in her ears.
A faint smile curved the woman's lips, sharp despite the blood on her body and the obvious pain she seemed to be in. "Neither do I," she said. "Not anymore. You figure it out or you will be the next in these chains. Those who are seen as threats are not friends to the ones in authority."
The connection snapped then, not severed but withdrawn, like fingers pulling back from a flame that had not burned them yet but promised it might. The pain receded in its wake, leaving behind a trembling emptiness and a deep, unsettling awareness that something irreversible had just occurred.
Her vision cleared fully, the corridor snapping back into sharp focus as she slumped forward, catching herself before she collapsed completely. The knight steadied her immediately, her grip tightened around her and eyes scanned her face for signs of lingering danger.
"What happened?" the knight demanded, voice low and urgent. "Your magic spiked like nothing I have ever seen."
Before she could answer, Selene's presence pierced through the chaos like a sharp needle.
"What indeed."
The magistrate stood at the far end of the corridor, coat immaculate, expression composed, but her eyes were burning with a dangerous intensity as she took in the scene, the flared wards, the unsettled knights, and finally her, still half-kneeling on the floor.
Selene approached slowly, each step measured, then crouched in front of her, close enough that their gazes locked without effort.
"You didn't just trigger the headquarters' defenses," Selene said quietly. "You triggered something beneath them."
Her throat tightened at those words. "I didn't mean to."
"I believe you," Selene replied, and that admission carried more weight than comfort. "Which concerns me far more."
She straightened and addressed the surrounding knights with clipped authority. "Stand down. Seal the corridor. No reports leave this floor until I say otherwise and if anyone asks about her, you come to be first or if you do not, I will show you just how strict and sadistic I can be."
Orders were obeyed instantly, the chaos dissolving into disciplined motion, leaving only the three of them in the suddenly quiet hall.
Selene turned back to her, eyes sharp. "You made contact with something bound," she said. "I can sense a mixed presence around you. Whatever it is or was, it is something that should not be able to reach anyone, let alone a newly arrived irregular under my shadow."
"How do you know?" she asked hoarsely.
"Because," Selene replied, "there are only three beings in this city chained deeply enough to cause that kind of resonance, and all of them are considered catastrophes waiting to happen."
The memory of bloodied arms and unbroken eyes flared again in her mind, not as a vision this time, but as a certainty.
One of them had just noticed her, but she did not know why, yet what concerned her was why they were chained up and whether they were truly evil or not.
Selene extended a hand, not offering comfort, but an ultimatum. "You're no longer just a curiosity," she said. "You are a variable."
She took the magistrate's hand and let herself be pulled to her feet, legs unsteady but resolve hardening with every breath.
Whatever she had become overnight, whatever had answered her call without her realizing she had made one, had shifted the balance of her fragile protection.
The world was responding to a being not supposed to be there in more ways than one, but this time, more than fear, curiosity lingered in her mind for the first time.