The echoes of the splintering table were still reverberating in her skull. The dining hall, the smell of roasted meat, and the sight of the empty doorway where Christa had vanished were suddenly replaced by the biting wind and the smell of dry earth.
It was only dusk. The sun hadn't fully retreated, leaving the sky a bruised, angry orange.
"It's early," Elma said, she looked at the woman in the cat mask, who stood silhouetted against the dying light. "Why are we here now?"
The woman was silent for a long moment, her mask unreadable. She didn't look at the trees or the sky. She looked directly at Elma.
"You messed up," the woman said. The metallic rasp of her voice was colder than usual.
Elma's jaw tightened. "I messed up? Your training did this. My Aegis was too compressed. She felt the weight of it. She knew."
"She suspects," the woman corrected, her tone sharp as a blade. "But you confirmed those suspicions with a tantrum. You allowed the child to lead the weapon."
Elma lowered her head, golden hair falling over her clasped hands. Her fingers dug into her palms. She was right. Never again would she let herself be led like that.
The woman stepped closer, her Presence expanding until the orange sky seemed to darken prematurely.
"Christa Kresnik is not a threat to your identity," the woman stated. "She is known throughout the capital to be brittle, and prone to bouts of paranoia. If she tells the House her four-year-old is a monster, they will see it as another crack in a failing mind. They will not believe her."
The woman paused, the cat mask tilting.
"However," she continued, "it is essential that you stay on good terms with her. If she rejects you, if you antagonize her until she turns, the structure of this masquerade collapses."
Elma looked down at her hands. The memory of the sun-pendant skittering across the floor flashed through her mind. "It won't work."
"That wasn't a request, D—66," the woman said, the air around them humming with a sudden, lethal pressure.
"Make it work."
Elma said nothing; arguing with a shadow was pointless.
"Sparking conflict with Christa wasn't the only consequence from this compression," Elma said, her voice steady. "It's unusable. The moment I touch anything, the sensory data is a tidal wave, I feel it in every nerve, every pulse."
The woman stared at her for a moment. Then a jagged rock thrust from the ground, and the woman seated herself atop it.
"You were trained to notice everything, D—66," the woman replied, her voice echoing with that metallic distortion. "In your previous life, that hyper-awareness might've served you well."
The woman paused, letting the silence of the twilight settle between them.
"To master the Aegis, you must unlearn your primary instinct. Learn to go blind to the trivial. Learn to ignore."
Faint footsteps whispered behind Elma. She whipped her head around, eyes scanning the gloom, but there was nothing. When she looked back, the woman was no longer there.
The darkness seemed to thicken in her absence, wrapping around the field like a heavy shroud, leaving Elma alone in the center of the void.
Another footstep echoed. Closer this time.
Elma instinctively reached out with her Aegis, her mind snapping toward the sound. She caught nothing but empty air, but the price was immediate.
The sensory overload returned with a vengeance, the data biting at her brain like a thousand needles.
It's her, Elma thought, her teeth clenched against the sting. It has to be an illusion. But the night was absolute, and the possibility of a wild beast prowling the plains was never zero.
Her current body was soft—easily broken. No. They need me. They wouldn't allow me to die here. She's trying to teach me how to ignore.
She sat down in the dirt, forcing herself to be still. She tried to ignore the sounds, to let the footsteps wash over her without reacting.
But as the noise drew closer—a heavy, rhythmic thumping that suggested something large and predatory—it felt impossible to stay passive.
Every instinct she had ever been taught screamed at her to identify the threat.
Each time she flinched and used her Aegis to check the darkness, the white-hot sting returned. And each time, there was nothing there.
An hour passed. The footsteps circled her, retreated, and rushed forward, but never touched her.
Slowly, the frantic rhythm of her heart began to steady. It became clear: these were nothing but ghosts of sound, a psychological loop designed to break her focus.
The realization acted as a shield. If the threat wasn't real, the data wasn't vital.
For the first time, Elma found the strength to let the sound exist without needing to know it. The ignore was finally possible.
She sat rooted to the dry earth, her jaw locked. She heard the heavy, rhythmic thumping of something massive charging at her from the darkness. It's not real, she told herself. Ignore it.
The sound reached a crescendo, a roar of displaced air right at her ear—and then, nothing. The sound vanished as if it had never existed.
She didn't flinch. She felt a cold spark of victory.
But then, the air didn't just roar; it hit.
A sudden, violent gust of wind slammed into her chest like a physical blow, throwing her backward across the dirt. She skidded, her small frame tumbling until she stopped, breathless and bruised.
She scrambled back into a sitting position, her heart racing. The footsteps were everywhere now—chaotic, a dozen different weights circling her in the gloom.
They all charged at once. Most vanished into silence the moment they reached her, but then some would manifest in a blast of wind that struck her.
The woman was mixing the two. Some of the sounds were illusions, designed to make her waste her energy. Others were real physical attacks.
Elma hissed through her teeth and reached out with her Aegis, desperate to tell the difference. But the moment her senses expanded, the world screamed again.
It was too much. In that sea of information, the source of the gust felt exactly like the phantom footstep.
She couldn't filter the difference.
---
Elma stood, her small frame swaying against the onslaught, but her eyes were fixed on the void. The goal wasn't to be blind to the world, but to choose exactly what to ignore.
She allowed the next gust of wind to hurl her across the dirt, refusing to spend a single drop of focus on the pain or the impact.
Instead, she pushed through the agonizing sensory flood.
She stopped looking at the similarities—the noise, the vibration, the cold—and started hunting for the difference.
She ignored the ground beneath her, then the grass. The only threat that mattered now was the wind. She pushed the volume of the world down until it was nothing but a dull hum.
Then, she saw it.
Amidst the chaos of the shifting air, there was a hole—a tiny, concentrated pinprick of another Aegis. A fly. It made no sound, yet it was the source.
These tiny being was the gear generating the massive gusts.
It charged toward her at high speed. The next assault was coming.
Elma didn't move her body. She reached out with a sliver of her own compressed Aegis, intercepting the fly mid-air.
She surged her Aegis forward, pushing the air into a violent gust. The shockwave tore through the field, slamming into a massive oak.
The trunk snapped like a dry twig, the tree collapsed with a thunderous roar.
Elma stood in the sudden, ringing silence, her breathing shallow but controlled. She had found the needle in the haystack, and it is now disintegrated.
Purple flames flickered along the perimeter, casting an eerie glow over the clearing.
From the shadows, the woman stepped forward, her cat mask reflecting the shifting violet light.
"Adequate," she rasped, her voice lacking its usual bite. "It took less time than I anticipated."
Elma didn't answer immediately. She reached down and snatched a stone from the dirt. It rose steadily, hovering a few inches above her palm, held in an invisible, iron-tight grip.
The Aegis was an eye. Before, she had been using it with a fully dilated pupil, trying to swallow the entire world at once and drowning in the light.
But tonight she had narrowed her focus until the flood of information became a sharp, manageable beam.
An eye didn't need to see everything, only what mattered.
Now that Elma could properly use her Aegis, she noticed the difference in the compression. It offered less reach, but the force it could generate was immense.
Elma flicked her wrist.
The stone didn't just fly; it ignited. It tore through the air with a supersonic crack, leaving a streak of orange fire in its wake as the friction of the air turned the rock into a miniature meteor.
It vanished into the distance, the burning trail the only evidence it had ever existed.
Elma turned toward the woman. "What should i call you?" She demanded. It was a moment of silent recognition.
The woman was silent for a beat, her head tilting as if weighing whether Elma had earned the right to know.
"You may call me Sable," the woman said. A silver strand of hair slipped from beneath her mask, catching the violet glow of the flames.
"Well… Sable, when can I bend the Aether?" Elma asked.
"That will be your next lesson," Sable replied.