The river of memory was reaching its end.
The mirror-shattering sound came again, but this time from everywhere at once, every reflective surface around him breaking apart simultaneously.
The pieces spinning outward into darkness in all sizes and shapes, each fragment catching light from a different remembered moment.
Raphael floated in something that felt like deep space, the shards drifting around him like stars, each one carrying a different scene.
Memory washed through his awareness in fragments, overlapping and non-sequential.
The monastery being repaired, visibly, season by season. Children receiving winter clothing. Meals that were actually meals.
But at regular intervals, a child would disappear, the adults always said adopted, always said it with the same practiced steadiness, always pointed to a wealthy-looking car waiting outside.
Charva arrived at regular intervals too. White bread, soft and warm. Sometimes large crates of milk.
She had acquired the name Auntie Charva among the younger children, who had no reason to think of her as anything else.
The population of the monastery shrank, but the children who remained grew healthier. Rounder.
Stronger.
Every year on the same date, the youngest and healthiest child was adopted and driven away in the expensive car, and the remaining children speculated happily about what comfortable life their friend must be living now.
Most of them felt envious.
Only Evelyn stayed quiet.
Years passed. The famine entered its final stage, and the monastery began accepting new children, families still struggling with the aftermath, wandering children looking for the place where they said you could eat. The walls got painted.
The heating worked. A new sign replaced the warped original.
The Black Truffle Monastery looked, from the outside, like a place that had found its footing.
Golana's temper worsened progressively, her patience fraying under a weight no one else fully understood, but the children depended on her and so they adapted.
Nobody liked Evelyn. She didn't smile or cry or get angry.
She sat among them like furniture, and eventually the other children stopped trying to include her, and Golana looked the other way when they excluded her.
She was the only one who knew what all of this was built on.
Time moved. Until the day it had always been moving toward.
Evelyn turned fourteen with no one marking it. That same day, Charva found her.
The witch looked at her the way you look at something you planted years ago that has finally reached the height you wanted.
"The time has finally come. Everything you've carried, the grief, the anger, all the rest of it, everything that's been waiting, it all comes out today. I've never experienced anything quite like this myself."
A satisfied sound.
"What kind of witch does this much despair produce? I'm genuinely curious."
She pressed one finger to Evelyn's forehead and opened something that had been sealed for years.
The stillness in Evelyn's eyes broke immediately.
Emotions moved through her pupils in rapid succession, cycling through faster than any one of them could be identified, except for two that were too large and too dense to be missed.
Despair, the kind that had no bottom. Hatred, thick as blood, old as the famine itself.
"Kill you... I'llkillyou — AHHH!!!"
The sound she made wasn't entirely human.
Her hands went to her head and her body folded.
The arcane energy came out of her the way water comes out of a pipe that's been pressurized past its limit, not flowing, erupting, filling the room in an expanding invisible wave.
Even Charva, an established witch with decades behind her, was pushed backward into the wall by it.
"Tch. Completely lost control. Too much despair apparently has its own problems."
She straightened, unbothered.
"Stay here and work through it. I'll come back when you've calmed down."
She looked at Evelyn with genuine fascination.
"That level of arcane output at initial awakening. How far will she develop? I want to see."
On the floor, Evelyn curled around herself and wept.
Her hair changed first, the arcane energy bleeding into the pigment, washing the black out of it, silver spreading from the roots outward.
Her eyes shifted from their deep brown toward green, the color brightening as it settled.
"There it is. Your sin-self, show me what it looks like..."
Everything stopped.
One full second of absolute stillness.
Then Evelyn's skin cracked open.
Not painfully, or perhaps beyond pain, the surface splitting in clean lines as thorn-covered vines pushed through from inside, emerging in dense clusters, extending upward and outward, filling the room in every direction, a red-stained forest of bramble that moved with autonomous purpose and attacked without discrimination.
The children had been moved beforehand. Golana and Maria had not.
Shhhk.
Golana was cut in half at the waist before she had time to process what was happening.
The terror in her eyes was still there when the awareness left them.
Her body hit the floor and the thorns covered it immediately, the spines driving in from every angle, draining what remained of her until there was nothing left but a dried and hollow shape in the rough outline of a person.
The thorns turned toward Charva.
"I didn't come here for this."
She hissed through her teeth, fingertips already moving to tear a gap in the space in front of her, the escape route opening, but the thorns were faster, swinging in from the side before she could step through.
Thud.
A vine drove through her abdomen and kept going, leaving a hole the diameter of a fist. More thorns wrapped around her immediately, pulling her backward, trying to drag her in.
"Back."
One word, from deep in her chest.
Her pupils went vertical. The surface of her skin shifted, fine scales emerging in overlapping rows, the shimmer of them catching the light.
And from that sound, from that presence, a pressure radiated outward through the room that had nothing to do with arcane output. It was older than that. Heavier.
The thorns pressing against it went flat to the floor, every one of them, pinned down and held.
Dragon authority.
Charva pulled herself free from the vine through her stomach, the wound closing as she moved.
She stood among the flattened bramble and looked around at it with the chin-raised composure of something that has just reminded a room of its place in the world.
"Is that all? Little witch? You'll need considerably more than that to finish me."
The thorns stopped moving.
Then, all at once, they exploded back upward.
Whatever fear had been keeping them flat dissolved, overridden, overwhelmed, the will behind them stronger than the instinct pressing down on them.
They came at Charva from every direction simultaneously, the rage in them bypassing the dragon pressure entirely.
"What...what?!"