Elma stood before the tall, silver-framed mirror in her room, her breath hitching. She peeled back her nightgown, her eyes scanning her own skin with the clinical precision of a surgeon.
It wasn't just the puncture from Nagin's shrapnel that had vanished. The deep, purple bruise that had bloomed across her leg was gone. The small nicks from her training with Sable—gone.
Her skin was as smooth and unblemished as glass.
Regeneration? Do I still have it?
She picked up a small, silver letter opener from the vanity and made a swift, shallow cut across the tip of her index finger. A bead of bright crimson blood welled up. She waited. One minute. Three. The cut remained open, stinging slightly in the morning air.
No regeneration. Her physiology was still human, still fragile.
Elma turned her gaze toward the velvet chair.
Christa was still there. She looked as though she hadn't moved an inch since Elma had drifted off. She was deep in a heavy, unnatural sleep, her head tilted sharply to the right. Her breathing was shallow, labored.
As Elma watched, Christa's silk gown slipped slightly off her shoulder, revealing the edge of a thick, white linen wrapping.
Bandages.
The sight was a jarring anomaly in the pristine room. How?
Elma stepped closer, her footsteps silent on the rug. The air around Christa felt different today—not crushing and cold, but drained. Hollowed out.
Just as Elma's fingers were inches from the silk, Christa's eyes snapped open.
She straightened abruptly against the chair back, fingers digging into the armrests.
"What happened?" Elma asked. She pointed a small, steady finger toward the white linen peeking from Christa's collar.
Christa didn't look down at the bandages. Instead, she reached up with a trembling hand and adjusted the silk of her gown, jerking it upward until the white cloth was swallowed by the fabric.
She stood up, her movements stiff and pained, as if her entire skeletal structure had been replaced with rusted iron. She walked toward the door.
"Your father is on his way from the Red Shore," Christa said, her hand gripping the door handle. "He will find whoever orchestrated this infiltration."
"Christa—"
The door clicked shut, the sound final and cold.
Elma stood in the center of the silent room. She looked down at the tiny cut on her finger. The bead of blood had dried into a dark speck, the sting a constant reminder of her own fragility.
The Red Shore. Is that where Valerius had been all this time? Two years. What could possibly keep him there that long?
---
Elma stepped into the hallway, the air thick with the smell of cold stone and ozone. The guard presence had tripled overnight; they stood like silver pillars every five paces, their hands resting on the hilts of their weapons. They didn't look at her, but she felt their Aegis overlapping in the air.
She bypassed them, her stomach giving a sharp, impatient growl. In the kitchen, the usual morning bustle was replaced by a frantic, heavy silence. She snatched two bananas from a wooden bowl—simple, portable fuel—and scanned the room for Leta. The maid's rhythmic, optimistic mumbling was missing today.
Elma pushed through the rear exit into the gardens, but the sight stopped her dead.
The manor didn't just look "damaged." It looked as if a titan had taken a bite out of the east wing. Massive, jagged cracks ran through the reinforced masonry, and entire stone balconies had been sheared off as if they were made of parchment.
High above, workers were suspended by thin ropes, using their Aegis to weave the building back together with the invisible art of bending the Aether.
The scale of the devastation was absolute. It dwarfed her skirmish with Nagin. While she had been unconscious, a far more violent storm had visited the Altheris estate.
Elma peeled the first banana, the mundane sweetness of the fruit a sharp contrast to the lingering smell of ozone and pulverized stone. She chewed slowly, her eyes tracking the workers.
Then, the sound reached her—rapid, stumbling footsteps hitting the damp earth. To her Aegis, the presence was unmistakable: it was that familiar, small "rock-like" weight.
Before Elma could turn, a pair of small, trembling arms wrapped tightly around her. Jorm buried her face into Elma's shoulder, her body shaking with violent, rhythmic sobs. "I'm glad you're okay, my lady... thank the gods you're okay," the girl wailed, her voice thick with terror and relief.
Elma stood frozen, the half-eaten banana forgotten in her hand. Why is she holding me? Her hands rose, palms flat, ready to shove the girl away and re-establish the distance required of a member of House Altheris.
Her hands stopped mid-air. She looked at Jorm's messy hair, felt the dampness of the girl's tears soaking into her collar.
For a fleeting second, the "Iron" in her soul felt heavy.
She's insignificant, Elma told herself. A variable with no weight. Shoving her away now would only draw attention—risk damaging the fragile disguise she wore.
Slowly, she lowered her hands back to her sides.
Jorm didn't let go for a long time. For nearly an hour, the only sounds in the ravaged garden were the distant shouts of workers and the girl's fading sobs. Elma remained a still, silent anchor, the banana turning brown in her hand.
Eventually, they sat together on a weathered stone bench, the weight of the morning pressing down on them.
"It attacked the maid house," Jorm whispered, her voice raw and hollow. She couldn't lift her eyes from her trembling hands. "I wasn't inside. I was hiding from lea in one of the shacks. I saw it from a distance."
Elma's gaze sharpened. "It?"
Jorm's eyes welled up again, a fresh wave of grief breaking over her. "The house— it didn't collapse. It was taken apart. One moment it was there, the next…" She shook her head. "No one came out. Not one."
She squeezed her legs together, her fingers digging into her arms.
"I just… I hid. I thought I could be a Knight, that I was brave. But when it started, I couldn't even move. I just stayed in the dark, shaking."
"What was it?" Elma asked, her voice a low, steady anchor in the garden's heavy silence.
Jorm wiped her face with her tattered apron. "The guards... they don't know," she said, her voice trembling. "They think it was sent by another House. It hit right after they caught the one who targeted you. It didn't just attack, my lady—it tore through them. Most of the guards who fought it... they're just gone."
Jorm's eyes went vacant, staring at the far rubble that used to be the maid house. "I didn't get a good look at it. But I saw something lashing out from the haze. It was red—like wet sinew. It moved fast. Anything it touched, it split."
Red sinew? Elma's mind immediately began a deep scan of her memories from the Facility. There were high-speed kinetic specialists and organic-weapon prototypes, but nothing that matched that specific description.
Is it a new generation? Or something else entirely? The uncertainty felt like a cold draft in her mind.
Jorm sat upright, pulling her knees closer to her chest. "I heard the Alloys talking afterward. They said if it wasn't for Lady Christa and a mysterious woman in a cat mask, the manor would have been emptied. They drove it away, but only just."
A cat mask? The thought hit Elma with the force of a sudden wind blast. Sable.
What the hell is happening? Elma thought, her eyes narrowing as she looked at the shattered east wing.
She worked with Christa? Did she just… expose herself? Or had she been working with them all along? Nothing made sense.
Elma's mind raced, piecing together fragments of truth, half-truths, and possibilities that refused to align.
Every answer she considered only raised more questions, like sparks igniting in the darkness, leaving her more lost than before.
If Sable was involved, I should try getting answers from her during the next session.
An hour passed in silence. Both of them were lost in their own thoughts, the garden around them fading into a quiet blur. Jorm's tears had dried, leaving her eyes wide and shadowed with a deep, lingering sadness.
Despite the dirt and grief, there was a weight to the girl's voice—a cadence that didn't match her small, scrawny frame.
"How old are you?" Elma asked.
Jorm froze. The vacant look in her eyes snapped away, replaced instantly by a deep, burning crimson that spread from her neck to her forehead. She looked down at her boots, fidgeting with her apron.
"I'm... I'm ten," she mumbled.
The answer sent a literal error message through Elma's mental programming. She stared at Jorm in utter, frozen silence.
Jorm jumped to her feet, her grief momentarily forgotten as her insecurity took the wheel. "You think I'm small too, don't you?! I'm just a late bloomer! My mother said I'll be taller than the garden walls one day! Just you wait!"
Elma looked up at her, then down at herself. "You're... almost exactly as tall as I am," Elma noted. "And I am four."
Jorm's demeanor shifted in a heartbeat. The sobbing child vanished, replaced by a whirlwind of indignity. She started shouting, her voice rising an octave with every word, a barrage of defensive excuses about "nutrition," "genetics," and "impending growth spurts" that began to drown Elma's brain.
Elma sat on the bench, feeling the "Iron" in her soul retreat in the face of this verbal assault.
I should have never asked.