The hallway had gotten worse in the seconds it took to reach her. A support beam had dropped at an angle across the far end, and dust hung so thick the exit was no longer visible. The house creaked around them, timber giving way somewhere above.
They cleared the front door into the yard as something behind them gave up entirely, the whole east wall of the house folded inward in a collapse of white dust and violet light, close enough that the heat and pressure of it knocked them both to the ground.
He gently placed her down, clear of the debris field, before dragging her another ten feet across the grass by main strength alone. He finally set her down hard against the low garden wall, checking her over with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. Dust in her hair. A cut above one eyebrow, bleeding into her eyelash. Alive.
"I’m fine," she said, before he could ask. This time, for once, it sounded almost true.
He didn’t get the chance to answer her.
The ground behind them buckled a second time, this time it was the earth itself, a raw seam of violet light splitting open across what used to be the garden path. Something came through it before the light had even finished tearing: easily the size of a carriage, already moving.
"Emeric—" Isolde’s hand closed hard on his wrist, urgent in a way her voice hadn’t let itself be all night. "Move. Now."
He got her up, one arm again, no negotiation this time, and ran. The thing behind them didn’t waste any time, it just came. The garden wall he’d set her against a moment ago wasn’t going to be enough distance for either of them.
He saw the gap in the hedge line ten feet ahead, narrow, but narrow enough that the creature’s shoulders wouldn’t fit through clean, might cost it a second, might be the only second they had.
He didn’t think past that. He shoved her forward.
She went through the gap already off-balance, the momentum carrying her clear onto the soft grass beyond it. He didn’t follow. The hedge closed the gap behind her body but not his, and the world came down where he’d been standing a half-second before.
Pain shot all over his body. He had been buried beneath the rubble. Whatever had just happened, he was not making it out of here alive.
His vision was blurring as he tried to make sense of the space he was in. Did he fall into the rift?
He was a goner. Nobody was coming to save him. There wouldn’t be a monster extermination unit for at least another hour or two.
He could feel a warm liquid trickle down his face.
Blood. Yes, that was what it was.
Just then, a window appeared in front of him.
[CONDITION MET: SELFLESS ACT OF PROTECTION UNDER MORTAL THREAT]
[TARGET: ISOLDE ROWAN]
[NOW CALCULATING REWARDS]
You have chosen to invest yourself in the survival of another, at direct cost to your own. The Ledger returns what is given.
Continued devotion, proven through action, is the only currency that grows this Authority further. Become stronger to protect what you love.
[STAT GROWTH: PHYSICAL RESILIENCE +14%]
[STAT GROWTH: RECOVERY RATE +9%]
[AFFINITY UNLOCKED: WIND, FIRE, EARTH & AIR MAGIC]
[MANA CORE: 9th TIER] [TIER PROGRESS: UNRANKED → 9th TIER]
Wait, what did this mean? He had failed his awakening many years ago. In a world of magic, he had none and he had come to accept it.
This couldn’t be right.
Something in his chest tore open, sending a hot piercing pain through his entire body. Worse than the pain he had been experiencing so far.
He got a hand free first. Then an arm. The stone that should have held him down, maybe permanently, shifted instead like it had already decided it owed him the room.
He broke the surface into violet-lit dust and open air, and somewhere close by, he heard Isolde say his name.
The stone gave first at his shoulder, then his back, then all at once. He came up through the last of it coughing, dust thick enough to chew, and for a moment all he could do was kneel there in the wreckage, struggling to remember how to breathe properly.
His hands didn’t shake. That was the first thing he noticed, distantly, the way a person notices small wrong details in the middle of something too large to process all at once. They should have been shaking. Everything about the last two minutes said they should have been.
He looked down at himself instead. A gash across his forearm that should have been bleeding freely had slowed to a sluggish trickle, already closing at the edges in a way that made no physical sense. The ache in his ribs that had been sharp enough a minute ago had dulled to something he could ignore. He’d been certain something was broken. Whatever had happened to him under that rubble, it hadn’t just spared his life.
There was something different. He could feel a light tingle under his skin.
He tried to ignore the thing that had told him he was now a 9th tier Vessel. That was all so complicated.
He had Awakened?
He didn’t believe it himself.
The word sat strange in his mouth even unspoken. Seven years of being told, gently and not so gently, that whatever made other people Awaken had simply skipped him, and here he was, kneeling in the dust with a fading wound and what felt like a mana sense. Was he sensing mana?
That would make sense because rifts were made of mana and one just tore right through their living room.
He didn’t have time to sit with it. That was a problem for later, if there was a later. Right now there was a hole in the world two streets over still bleeding violet light into the sky, and half the block around it looked the way his house did — caved in, burning in patches. He could hear voices calling names into the dark the same way he’d called hers.
"Isolde."