He could not look away.
A pulse, like a muscle contracting, ran through the sword's fragment. For a moment, its outline sharpened, a line of blue, searing and absolute, snapped through the air. It sought, or called, or perhaps just remembered the shape of its own edge.
He heard, distantly, the gasp from one of the initiates behind him. Most eyes would have seen only the blade. Soren saw the memory of violence, the echo in the glass made visible.
He stood, nodded to Dane.
"That's enough," Veyra said, voice flat. "You see why we contain."
Cassian stepped forward without being prompted. He tried bravado but stopped, arrested by the thing's presence. Cassian's voice, stripped of its usual lacquer, was barely more than a whisper: "It's not dead."
Veyra gestured to the group. "This was Aetherion's first student, and it remembers failure."
The silence that followed was perfect, true absence, not just the lack of sound.
