CHAPTER 2: PARALYSIS
The silence after Lyra Vance's question was more complete than any Idris had ever known. The distant chatter from the salle, the hum of the academy's latent wards, the very rustle of his own blood in his ears—it all vanished, swallowed by the echoing void of her words.
What did you see, Idris?
He saw everything. He saw nothing. He saw the universe as a screaming, beautiful wound, and he had no language for it. The after-images of the Flow—Garron's chaotic fire-storm, the hundred other students' flickering auras—still pulsed behind his eyelids, a permanent scar on his perception.
He opened his mouth. A dry, pathetic click came from his throat.
Lyra's grip on his shoulder didn't loosen. It wasn't comforting; it was anchoring, as if she were a scientist steadying a volatile specimen. Her grey eyes held no pity, only a voracious, analytical hunger. She had seen an anomaly, and she would not let go until it was categorized.
"You're thermally depressed," she stated, her voice cutting through the fog in his head. "Localized zone, three-centimeter radius from your temples. Ambient Ether polarization was anomalous at the moment of your collapse. The refractive index of the light around you shifted by point-three degrees." A pause. "These are measurable facts. Your retinal flare was inconsistent with a seizure. Therefore, you perceived something. Define it."
Idris managed to push himself up, shrugging off her hand. The world tilted, then righted itself, but it was a different world. The solid stone of the salle wall wasn't just grey; it was a sluggish, deep-grey current of stabilized Ather, shot through with lazy veins of earthen Ether. He could see its history, the slow pressure that had formed it. He looked away, nausea rising.
"I can't," he rasped.
"You will," she said, not unkindly, but with utter certainty. She stood, offering no hand to help him up. "If you wish to avoid being labelled defective and shipped to a sanitarium for the magically unstable, you will learn to explain it. To me. First."
That was how the pact was formed. Not with a handshake, but with a cold, clinical assessment of mutual need. Lyra Vance needed a mystery to solve. Idris Vane needed a handler, a translator for the terrifying new reality he was trapped inside.
---
The next morning, Magus Theron's Theoretical Creata class felt like a personal assault.
Theron himself was a relic, a man whose face seemed carved from the same weary stone as the academy foundations. He was missing the index and middle fingers of his left hand, the stumps neat and smooth as if polished. He never explained how.
On the slate board, he drew two circles. A small, bright one inside a larger, shimmering one.
"The Outer Flow," he intoned, his voice like gravel under a cart wheel, "is the sea. Vast, powerful, indifferent. It is the ambient Ether and Ather that permeates our reality—the 'Weave' that the ancients poetically mumbled about." A few students smirked. Idris didn't. He saw the words 'the Weave' leave Theron's lips, and in the air around the old man, the Flow itself rippled, as if in recognition.
"Your own essence, your soul-spark, is the Inner Well." He tapped the small, bright circle. "Finite. Precious. The source of your consciousness. Standard Creata—" he drew an arrow from the small circle, mingling it with the larger one, "—involves mixing a drop from your Well with the Outer Sea to steer it. You are a sailor. This is safe. This is control."
He turned from the board, his clouded eyes sweeping the room. They passed over Idris, and for a heartbeat, Idris felt seen in a way that had nothing to do with vision. It was the feeling of being recognized by a fellow inmate.
"There is a third method," Theron said, the temperature in the room seeming to drop. "A forbidden calculus. The texts call it 'Soul-Forging.' The Solipsist's Folly." He drew a new arrow, a stark, direct line from the Inner Well, bypassing the Outer Sea entirely, and striking the board with a hard crack. "Using only the pure, concentrated power of your Inner Well."
A wave of intrigued whispers. Power, pure and undiluted.
"Think of it," Theron continued, a grim spectre at the front of the room. "No intermediary. No filtering through the wild, impure Weave. Your will, made reality by the direct combustion of your soul's essence. For a moment, you would be a god in a bubble."
He let the awe hang for a deadly second.
"It is suicide. Not of the body, but of the self. Your Well is not just power; it is the substrate of you. Burn it as fuel, and you are not casting a spell. You are erasing your memories, your loves, your name, to pay for it. What returns is not a person. It is a hollow god. A walking, talking oblivion wearing a familiar face."
From the back row, a snort. Jaxon, a lanky student with a permanent smirk, leaned back. "If it's so dangero—I mean, if the consequences are so severe, Magus, why even teach us about it?" He grinned, inviting laughter. A few obliged, the tension breaking.
Theron didn't smile. The laughter died.
"Because, Jaxon," he said, his voice softer, deadlier, "ignorant children who stumble upon this power think they have discovered a secret path to greatness. They believe they are the main character of a story where rules do not apply." His gaze, like shards of flint, swept the room. "We teach you so that when the temptation whispers, you will know it for what it is: the voice of your own annihilation."
The class fell utterly silent.
Idris, however, was no longer listening to the words. A pressure was building behind his eyes, a familiar, terrifying itch. He tried to focus on the grain of his wooden desk, to lose himself in the slow, brown Flow of petrified life.
His gaze flicked to Jaxon.
And his Seer Sight ignited.
It wasn't a choice. It was a catastrophic system failure. Jaxon wasn't just joking. Under the desk, his fingers were curled, trembling. A tiny, horrifyingly pure spark of Ether—the color of a raw, exposed nerve—was coalescing at his fingertip. It wasn't drawn from the room's chaotic Flow. It was being pulled, thin and bright, from a small, bright orb glowing in Jaxon's core.
His Inner Well. He's trying it. Right now.
The data was a screaming torrent.
SUBJECT: JAXON.
ACTION: SOUL-BASED IGNITION. PURITY LEAK DETECTED.
OUTER FLOW REACTION: RECOIL. TURBULENCE FORMING.
CASCADE FAILURE PROBABILITY: 17%. 23%. 31%—
Idris saw a dozen branching futures. In most, the spark sputtered out, leaving Jaxon with a migraine. In three, the leak became a torrent, the bright orb shattering, Jaxon's vibrant Flow signature unspooling into dull, mindless grey static.
The overload was instantaneous and vicious. A white-hot nail drove into his temples. The world became a kaleidoscope of screaming light and probabilistic doom. A metallic taste flooded his mouth. Heat—real, physical heat—tracked down his cheek. The luminescent tear. He was crying light.
He slammed his will against the Sight, a mental scream of NO! He violently, blindly shut it down, plunging himself into a blessed, narrow darkness behind his own eyelids.
Gasping, he stumbled to his feet. His chair shrieked against the flagstones. Every eye in the room was on him. Theron's lecture had halted. Jaxon's illicit spark winked out, the idiot none the wiser to how close he'd come to oblivion, or to the boy who had just seen him approach its edge.
"I—need air," Idris choked out, the words thick.
He didn't see Theron's slow, knowing nod. He didn't see Lyra, several rows over, her stylus frozen above her notebook, her eyes calculating the variables of his flight. He only saw the door.
He burst into the cool silence of a cloistered walkway, the afternoon sun painting sharp rectangles on the ancient flagstones. He staggered to the wall, pressing his forehead against the cold, solid stone, trying to anchor himself in its simple, physical reality. He focused on the chill, on the smell of damp moss, on the sound of his own ragged, panicked breaths.
"Look who's cracking up already."
The voice was slick, oily with mock concern. Idris didn't need to turn. He knew them. Borin and Ghent, from the Earth-alignment track. Brutes who measured power in the weight of a conjured rock and the fear in a weaker student's eyes.
"Heard you freaked in Practicals, too," Borin said, his shadow falling over Idris. "All that weird shaking. Maybe you're not Academy material, Vane. Maybe you should save us all the second-year tuition and crawl back to whatever gutter sponsored you."
A hand shoved Idris's shoulder. He stumbled sideways, his vision swimming, his mind still raw and flayed open from the overload. He was utterly defenseless.
Before Ghent could grab his tunic, the sunlight on the flagstones vanished.
Not by a cloud. By a presence.
Kaelen Stone was just there. He hadn't walked; he had manifested, as if the concept of 'wall' had decided to occupy a new space. He wasn't overly tall, but he was broad, his shoulders blocking the sun, his frame speaking of a density that had nothing to do with muscle. He looked at the two bullies, his face not angry, but profoundly, disappointingly calm.
"There is no strength in preying on the fractured," Kaelen said. His voice was low, each word a stone settling into place. "Only weakness. You are weakening the cohort. Leave."
It wasn't a threat. It was a statement of geological fact. Borin and Ghent, their aggression meeting not resistance but immovable, silent certainty, deflated. They mumbled something, cast one last glare at Idris, and slunk away, their bravado leaching into the stones.
Kaelen turned. He didn't offer a hand. He didn't ask if Idris was alright. He looked at him as a mason might assess a cracked foundation.
"You are leaking light from your eyes," he observed, his tone matter-of-fact. "You should see the infirmary. A structure cannot stand if its core is bleeding."
Then he nodded, once, a gesture of finality, and walked away, his footsteps silent on the ancient stone.
Idris slid down the wall, sitting heavily on the ground. The cold seeped through his robes. He touched his cheek. His fingers came away smeared with a faint, shimmering residue, already fading. Leaking light.
A shadow fell over him again. He flinched, but it was only Lyra. She held out a clean, white handkerchief.
"Stone's intervention had a ninety-four percent probability of success based on observed social hierarchy and body language," she said, her voice clinical. "He is a stable variable. Predictable. We should incorporate him."
Idris took the cloth, wiping his face. "Incorporate him?"
"Into the project." She knelt, her grey eyes level with his. "You are a system in catastrophic failure. I propose a collaborative effort. I will provide analysis, create protocols to manage your public… episodes. In return, you provide data. Descriptions of your perceptions. We run experiments. We find the parameters of your condition."
"I'm not a condition," Idris muttered.
"You are a phenomenon," she corrected, unblinking. "And phenomena can be understood. Or they get dissected. Your choice."
There was no choice. He was adrift in a sea of light, and she was offering a rope, however cold and logical. He nodded.
---
The experiments began that evening in a disused storage room Lyra had "logically requisitioned." They were agony.
She would light a candle. "Describe the Flow."
Idris would look, and see not a flame, but a furious, dancing knot of hungry Ether, sucking Ather from the air to sustain its reaction, throwing off tendrils of heat and light in a complex, beautiful pattern. He'd try to speak, and the words would jam in his throat, overwhelmed by the sheer data. A headache would spike, his vision would blur.
"Failure," Lyra would note, her stylus scratching on her tablet. "Overload at simple thermal emission. Hypothesis: data influx exceeds cognitive processing speed."
They tried everything. Focusing on a single drop of water. On a still piece of metal. Each time, the world would explode into its brutal, truthful complexity, and Idris would be left trembling, nauseous, his nose bleeding from the strain.
But slowly, through sheer, painful repetition, a flicker of control emerged. It wasn't about stopping the Sight. It was about focusing it. Like forcing a torrent through a pinhole.
Five days after the pact was formed, he managed it. Lyra held a falling leaf, dropped it.
"Only its descent," she instructed. "Nothing else."
Idris breathed in, and instead of fighting the Sight, he directed it. He screamed in his mind, NOT THE AIR, NOT THE TREE, NOT THE LIGHT. ONLY THE FALL.
The world did not vanish. But it muted. The roaring symphony of Flows became a distant hum. And in the centre of his perception was one, single, perfect thing: a graceful, arcing line of emerald-green kinetic energy, tracing the leaf's path through the air. It was beautiful. It was simple. It didn't hurt.
For ten seconds, he held it. Then, elated, he turned to look at Lyra, to share the victory.
And saw her.
Not her face, but her Flow.
Lyra Vance was not a storm of color. She was a structure. A breathtaking, chilling architecture of silver logic and crystalline curiosity, a latticework of interconnecting theorems and cause-effect chains. It was the most orderly thing he had ever seen. And at its very centre, a single, hair-thin fissure, pulsing with a faint, lonely ache he couldn't name.
The overload slammed back in, a tidal wave of other perceptions crashing the party. He doubled over, gasping.
But he had seen it. He had held a single strand.
---
"We need to try direct data transfer."
A week later, Lyra proposed the next logical step. They were back in the storage room. Idris, still drained from the day's classes, felt a thrum of fear.
"It's too much," he said. "You saw what even a leaf does. If I try to push what I see to you…"
"You are hypothesizing my incapacity without data," she countered. "The failsafe is simple. I will hold your wrist. If my vital signs fluctuate dangerously, you cease. The objective is not to transmit the full spectrum, but to see if any resonant frequency of your perception can be… echoed in my cognitive matrix."
It was madness. But it was logical madness. And Idris was tired of being paralyzed.
He sat across from her, their knees almost touching. He took her offered hand. Her skin was cool, her grip firm.
"Focus on a simple source," she said. "The candle. Send only the visual of the flame. Not its composition. Just its shape."
Idris nodded, closing his eyes. He found the candle in the dark of his mind, not with his Sight, but with memory. Then, carefully, he nudged the Sight awake, focusing it down to a needlepoint on that single, dancing flame. He imagined the image, wrapped it in his will, and pushed.
The sensation was immediate and wrong. It wasn't like speaking. It was like tearing a piece of his own mind and handing it over. A sharp, psychic pain lanced through his skull.
Across from him, Lyra gasped.
Her hand went rigid in his. Her eyes, wide open, saw nothing in the room.
She is not seeing a flame, Idris realized with dawning horror.
Lyra Vance saw Idris Vane.
Not his body. She saw his mind.
A cathedral of light, but a cathedral after an earthquake. Stained-glass windows of memory were shattered. The central pillar of his consciousness was a magnificent, fractured thing of quartz and pain, buckling under the immense, blinding vortex of raw perception that poured through a hole in the roof—his Seer Sight. It was a architecture on the verge of collapse.
And there, woven into the very foundation stones, almost invisible against the brilliance, was something else.
A rune.
Ancient, intricate, and thrumming with a soft, gold power that was not his own. It was a seal, a fortification. And he saw, through her eyes, what it was doing. Where the corrosive, chaotic energy from the Breach—the same energy that fuelled the Catastrophic Waves—tried to stain his visions, to corrupt his sight… the rune gently, firmly, repelled it. It was a filter. A shield.
The connection snapped.
Idris fell backwards, his head striking the wall with a thud, consciousness fleeing into black.
Lyra jolted back to herself in the dusty room. She was on the floor. A hot trickle of blood ran from her nose. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, irregular rhythm her logical mind immediately flagged as dangerous.
Idris was a heap against the wall, unconscious, breathing shallowly.
She ignored him. Her own mind was a scream of silent, perfect conclusions.
She staggered to her feet, wiping the blood from her upper lip with a trembling hand. She looked at the boy on the floor, not as a person, but as a phenomenon. A solved equation.
The data was irrefutable. The architecture of a breaking mind. The foreign, stabilizing rune.
Her breath hitched, not with fear, but with the terrifying thrill of absolute comprehension.
He is not cursed, her logic whispered, the truth settling into her mental lattice with the finality of a tombstone.
He is fortified.
Someone built him to perceive the Breach.
And they signed their work.