The morning light felt like a physical weight against Elma's eyelids. She sat on the edge of her bed, watching in silence as Leta dipped a cloth into a basin of cool water to clean a deep, purple bruise blossoming across Elma's leg.
Elma had tried to hide it, but this body was a traitor. The leg wouldn't move properly, and its natural healing rate was glacially slow compared to the rapid-regeneration she once had.
She resented this frame. It was a prison of soft flesh and fragile bone. Yet, each time frustration threatened to boil over, she felt a cold relief at the memory of the burning stone from last night.
Leta was the one who had brought breakfast today: a simple bowl of porridge that sat untouched on the nightstand. The maid was mumbling under her breath, a nervous, rhythmic sound.
"Trying to hide it... acting like nothing happened," Leta whispered to herself, her hands shaking slightly as she dabbed at the bruise. "So weird. This child is..."
Elma said nothing. She looked at Leta, but didn't truly see her. Elma applied her new focus, pushing Leta's presence to the periphery of her mind until the woman was nothing more than a blurred shape and a noise.
"Where is Christa?" Elma asked, her voice flat.
Leta looked up slightly. "She's locked herself in. In the solar. Praying to that... that fallen god again. Won't come out for anyone."
"Fallen?" Elma sharpened her gaze.
Leta didn't answer directly. She seemed to have forgotten she was even speaking to a child. Her eyes were wide, darting toward the nursery door as if expecting it to burst open.
"I'm worried for her," Leta continued her frantic self-dialogue. "If the Lord Valerius finds out... he won't tolerate this."
Leta continued to scrub at the bruise, her movements becoming repetitive and mindless. She was no longer answering Elma; she was drowning in her own fear of the master of the house.
---
Elma's progress toward the solar was slow. Each step sent a sharp, rhythmic protest from her bruised leg up to her hip. She reached the heavy, ornate doors and stopped.
Beyond that wood was Christa, currently drowning in prayer and terror. Sable's command echoed in Elma's mind like a directive from a handler: Make it work. Stay on good terms.
But as she stood there, her hand hovering inches from the door, the tactical part of her brain stalled.
How did one compromise with a mother who saw her own child as a divine curse? What words existed in the language of weapons that could heal the mind of a broken noblewoman?
She searched her memory for the Silk collar, but it felt frayed, thin. Every sentence she drafted—I'm sorry, I'm not a curse. Please don't be afraid—felt like a lie, one that would only make Christa's paranoia flare.
The silence from within the solar was absolute, save for the faint, obsessive hum of Christa's praying.
Elma felt a tightness in her chest. She let her hand fall. Forcing a confrontation now, while still feeling like this… would risk another "tantrum." She couldn't afford to fail again.
She turned her back on the door and began the slow, pained trek away from the solar. She needed air.
She headed out to the garden.
---
Under the willow tree, the air was still and smelled of damp earth and willow bark. Elma sat with a small notebook, the quill scratching against the paper with a precision that would have made Christa even more suspicious.
She was drafting a technical manual for her Aegis.
Aegis Analysis: Phase 1
• Effective Radius (Compressed): 10 Meters.
•Capabilities: Generates immense kinetic force, grants overwhelming sixth-sense perception.
•Drawback: Severe sensory overload. Requires active "Filtering/Ignoring" to prevent mental collapse.
•Current Limitation: Cannot yet interface with the Aether.
"Uhm..."
The voice pulled at Elma's focus like a snag in silk. She spun around, her Aegis surging outward in a violent, invisible wave that nearly leveled the grass.
It was Jorm.
The girl stood there, her eyes wide as she stared at the empty space where Elma's power had just flickered. To Elma's senses, Jorm still carried almost no weight, just a faint, pathetic ripple in the air.
"You said... tomorrow, right?" Jorm whispered, clutching her apron.
Elma stared at her for a long beat. Time was a strange thing lately; the hours spent in the dark with Sable made the daylight feel like an intermission. She snapped the notebook shut and stood up, her bruised leg giving a metronomic protest.
"How far can your domain reach?" Elma asked, her voice cold and stripped of any childish inflection.
Jorm blinked, looking confused. "I... I don't know, my lady."
Elma didn't waste words. She walked to a patch of clear dirt and began placing stones in a straight line, spacing them out with a calculated distance. She walked until the last stone was roughly forty meters away.
"Move the furthest one," Elma commanded, pointing.
Jorm stepped forward, her face turning a deep shade of red as she squeezed her eyes shut. She stood like that for a full minute, her small frame vibrating with the effort. The forty-meter rock didn't so much as twitch.
"Next one," Elma said.
She moved Jorm through the line—thirty-five meters, nothing. Thirty-two meters. Finally, when they reached the thirty-meter mark, the stone gave a distinct, rattling tremble.
"Thirty meters," Elma muttered to herself.
Jorm collapsed into a sitting position, gasping for air.
Elma looked from the girl to the stone. Jorm's reach was three times her own compressed radius, but her power was so thin it could barely move a pebble.
Even when Elma had been stretched to a staggering 7.5-kilometer radius, the power she had generated was still vastly superior.
"Your Aegis is too thin," Elma said, her voice like a scalpel. "Feel the borders of your Aegis. Find the edge where the world stops answering you."
Elma picked up a fallen willow branch and dragged it through the dirt, carving a wide, shallow circle around Jorm to help the girl visualize her own limits.
"Everything inside this circle is yours," Elma commanded. "Now, pull it in."
Jorm stood up, her small hands trembling. She closed her eyes, her face scrunching in concentration. One minute passed. Then three. The air around them remained still, save for the distant chirping of birds.
After five minutes, Jorm's eyes snapped open. "I... I feel it," she whispered, her voice breathless with awe. "The edge. It's right there."
"Good," Elma said. "Now move it. Push the edges toward yourself. Make the circle smaller."
Jorm grunted with the effort. To Elma's senses, it was like watching a ghost trying to thicken into a shadow. Slowly, painfully, the "dust" of Jorm's presence began to contract.
Thirty meters. Twenty. Ten.
As the boundary passed the five-meter mark, the sensation changed. For the first time, Jorm's presence registered as something tangible.
"Stop," Elma commanded.
She was no longer a speck of dust—she was a stone now, small but solid.
Jorm immediately collapsed back into the grass, her chest heaving as she gasped for air. "I'm... I'm so tired," she wheezed, her forehead slick with sweat.
"Jorry!" a kitchen maiden called from the distance, her voice shrill and impatient. "Get back here now!"
Jorm scrambled to her feet, the exhaustion in her eyes replaced by instant, practiced terror. "I... I have to go now. I'll find you tomorrow!" Without waiting for a response, Jorm bolted in the opposite direction, her small frame weaving through the garden rows.
The older maiden ran toward the willow tree, stopping only when she reached Elma. She dipped into a hurried, shallow curtsy, her face flushed. "I'm so sorry she was bothering you, my lady. She's stupid, that one—doesn't know her place. I'll see she's punished."
The woman turned and continued the chase, their footsteps fading until the garden was silent once more.
Strange, Elma thought. She looked at the dirt where Jorm had been sitting.
Elma sat back against the rough bark of the willow, reaching for her notebook to record the data on Jorm's five-meter compression.
She had just touched the quill to the paper when the world suddenly thickened.
A weight materialized directly above her in the branches of the willow.
Elma's eyes widened. Her Aegis screamed a warning. She didn't look up; she didn't have time.
She used her Aegis, blasting a pulse of kinetic force against the tree trunk behind her.
The recoil hurled her small body forward, skidding across the grass just as a heavy thud shook the earth where she had been sitting a millisecond before.
A crooked, serrated blade stood impaled in the dirt, buried deep, reeking of venom.
Elma's breath caught. She had seen that blade before.
The wielder crouched over the weapon, draped in a cloak of shifting greens and woven branches that made him almost invisible against the garden foliage.
He didn't waste a heartbeat on surprise. With a fluid, predatory motion, he yanked the blade from the earth and charged.