Nausea.
That was all Silas felt.
A creeping wrongness pooling at the bottom of his stomach, as though something rotten had found its way into his food.
The mana wasn't the same.
What had once felt like sunlight flooding into dry skin now felt like something else entirely.
The training hall, which had always blazed like a sun in his darkness, had gone dim. And in its place, he saw only what he hadn't wanted to see, threads. The threads of children who were still here. Still breathing. Still present.
He wanted to be sick.
The thought surfaced before he could stop it, and he swallowed hard against it, pressing his lips together, gripping the floor beneath him with both hands...
"What are you doing? Focus!"
Eirka's sharp voice cut through the air like a blade, and Silas locked his jaw and obeyed.
He pulled the mana inward again, steady and deliberate, forcing the rhythm to continue even as the unease piled higher in his gut.
The familiar thread in his chest, that internal compass he had slowly learned to trust, felt sluggish. Wrong. And with each breath, the old ember behind his sternum began to stir.
Not dim.
Expanding.
His breathing grew heavier. Then heavier still. The red threads at the edge of his awareness began to blur and pull apart, dissolving into the dark like smoke. And Eirka's voice, still sharp, still calling his name, sounded further and further away..
"Silas—"
He fell.
On the ground.
Fire.
Everything was burning. Every surface, every wall, every beam of wood crashing down in slow-motion cascades of ember and ash.
The world was soaked in deep crimson, painted from floor to sky in the color of something that refused to go out.
Silas stood in the middle of it.
He didn't feel the heat. He didn't feel anything, in fact, not the ground beneath his feet, not the air in his lungs. He simply stood and watched the world burn around him with the detached clarity of someone who knows, on some level, that they are dreaming.
The image began to slow.
Frame by frame, the falling debris stilled. The roar of the fire softened to a low, distant hum. And in that strange suspended quiet, he heard voices, screaming, somewhere behind the flames. Familiar and unfamiliar at once, like words in a language he had almost forgotten.
Then he saw it.
A face.
He didn't know how he knew it. He couldn't explain why, the moment his eyes found it, something deep in his chest recognized it before his mind could catch up. Every detail was there, preserved and precise, carved into some part of him that existed below memory.
And yet his mind refused to let him see it clearly.
The face was burned.
Completely, utterly burned. The skin was gone in places, the muscle beneath it dark and split, and along the jaw the bone itself had begun to show through. It was a face that should not have been able to hold an expression.
And yet it did.
"Run."
The voice was soft. Gentle, even. Completely at odds with everything around it. the fire, the falling world, the ruin.
"Run."
Softer still, the second time. As though it wasn't asking him to move his feet, but asking him to understand something he wasn't ready to understand yet.
"Run—"
The third time wasn't soft at all.
It tore out of the burning face like something that had been held back by force, a scream that didn't sound human anymore, that didn't sound like one voice but like many, layered over each other, all saying the same thing...
The fire collapsed inward.
And everything went dark.
A desk.
Old wood, worn smooth at the edges by years of use. A single oil lamp casting a circle of pale yellow light across the surface. Stacks of documents, some open, some folded, some held together with faded ribbon. A half-empty cup of tea that had long gone cold.
And at the desk, a young woman who had not gone home.
Eleanor Stellney pressed two fingers to her temple and stared at the page in front of her without reading it. The words had stopped making sense an hour ago. Possibly two. She had lost track of when, exactly, the letters had started blurring together into something that looked less like a report and more like a problem she didn't know how to solve.
Which, she supposed, was exactly what it was.
She reached for the cup. Remembered it was cold. Set it back down.
Outside the window of her office in the lower wing of the Imperial garrison, Nebula had gone quiet. Not silent — the city was never silent — but the particular hum of five million people going about their lives had settled into the low, indistinct murmur of late night, of people who had made it home and closed their doors and let the lamps go dark.
Eleanor's lamp was still burning.
She turned back to the documents.
Forty-three children.
That was the number written at the top of the page she had drafted three weeks ago and revised eleven times since.
Forty-three children reported missing in the capital over the past three years. An average of fourteen per year. Barely a footnote in a city this size, the garrison processed more missing persons reports than that in a single month, and most of them resolved themselves within a week. A runaway. A debtor in hiding. A merchant who had moved districts without updating their registration.
Children were different. But even children disappeared for ordinary reasons in a city like Nebula. A fall into the river. A sickness that moved too fast. A family that packed up and left in the night.
The garrison had filed thirty-one of these cases as resolved or inconclusive. Eleanor had reopened nine of them.
She pulled the nearest folder toward her and smoothed it open.
The first thing she always looked for was the pattern. Investigators lived and died by pattern — it was the difference between a coincidence and a case. And for a long time, she hadn't found one. The children had nothing in common. Different ages, different districts, different backgrounds.
Most of them were street children, orphans, beggars, the children of day laborers who wouldn't be missed by anyone with the means to make noise about it. A handful were indentured. One or two came from families that simply hadn't been able to hold on.
No common location. No common method. No witnesses.
But three months ago, she had found something.
It wasn't much. A notation in an old case file — a notation she almost hadn't noticed, buried in the margin of a report written by a garrison officer who had since retired. A single line, written in the cramped hand of someone who had thought better of including it in the official summary.
Residual mana traces inconsistent with standard dissipation. Pattern suggests ritual use. See attached reference — pre-Imperial cult methodology.
She had seen the attached reference.
She had read it four times.
Pre-Imperial cult methodology. The old orders, the ones that had existed before the Empire had consolidated the continent and decided, among other things, that certain categories of worship were not to be tolerated. They were history now. Cautionary tales and children's stories — the kind of thing parents invoked when they wanted their children to come inside before dark.
The shadow men will take you. The old priests are still watching.
Nobody believed that anymore. Nobody serious, anyway.
Eleanor was beginning to wonder if she should.
She set the folder aside and picked up the one beneath it. This one was newer. The paper hadn't yellowed yet at the edges, and the ink was still sharp. She had written most of it herself.
Her hand stilled on the page.
She didn't need to read it. She had memorized it weeks ago. Every word of it, every detail, every careful and clinical sentence she had made herself write because she was an investigator and investigators wrote things down and did not allow themselves to become the kind of people who couldn't look at documents.
Subject: Male. Estimated age: six to seven years. Hair: dark brown. Eyes: green. Last seen in the Outer Ring market district, the 14th of Harren. No confirmed witnesses. No body recovered. Case status: open.
Relationship to investigator: brother.
Eleanor closed the folder.
She sat for a moment with both hands flat on the desk, looking at nothing.
Then she reached for the lamp, turned up the wick, and pulled the next file from the stack.
She wasn't going home tonight.