Chapter 20: The First Strike
The courtyard held its breath. Joric knelt like an altar; Lian stood small and trembling at its center. For a heartbeat the academy seemed frozen on that impossible image — and then the stillness shattered.
Solas Thorne stepped from the shadows like a verdict. She carried no sword; she carried authority. Her presence drew every eye and bent the air. This would be the moment she carved a choice into the world: pick a side, or be consumed by one.
She extended her hand. A golden filament leapt from her fingertips and sang through the air — not a rope, not a cord, but a hymn of power. It wrapped a small stone on the plaza: an ordinary rock, soon dressed in legend. The thread breathed light into it; the rock glowed, trembled, then stilled. Where there had been stone, there now stood a myth made manifest — a tiny god birthed at Solas's will.
Instructors scrambled, orders tearing at panic. Students pressed forward, part worship, part terror. The campus had been given a miracle, and miracles rearranged certainties.
Kairo felt the surge like a blade across his chest. From the ventilation shaft he watched the golden pillar rise, and a cold calculus tightened in him. He had not wanted a spectacle. He had not wanted a visible altar. But the world was rarely kind to plans; it offered choices instead, and a ghost who could not choose would die.
He acted. Not with fire, but with a thread of his own — subtler, older work: a voice threaded into the myth-layer and aimed at the new leader.
"Use his power," he sent into Lian's mind.
The scholar, still raw from the earlier theft of memory, felt the command like a key turning. Something in him answered — an instinct older than fear, a line pulled taut. He looked at Joric, and the compulsion sharpened into action.
Joric rose. Light pooled beneath his skin and flowed outward along the golden filaments etched into his flesh. He was no longer merely a symbol; he had become an instrument.
Without drama, Lian extended his hand. The motion was small, but it carried Kairo's intent and the academy's weight. Joric's glow flared in response. The living rumor bent toward the planted myth like a tide toward moonlight.
Then the unmaking began.
The stone did not shatter. It did not crumble to dust. Instead the world around it folded inward as if a sentence had been struck from a book. The glow dimmed, threads of legend unspooled, and the rock emptied itself of myth until it stood again — only stone, only stone, its borrowed godhood gone as if someone had erased a line from history.
Solas's expression snapped from command to incredulity. She had expected defiance, or battle, or the ritual slaughter of a rival. She had not expected precision: a puppeteer who could turn devotion into erasure. For a long beat she looked as if she might smile — respect, ice-cold and quick, glinting at the edges of fury. He was not brute; he was patient. He was not unseen; he was a strategist. She had been outplayed.
She did not collapse into despair. Predators do not give up at surprise. She turned away from the plaza, severing the golden thread mid-breath. The public spectacle had failed to secure the victory she'd intended. But retreat was not surrender. It was a pivot.
As she walked, a single word flowed through the myth-layer — soft, terrible, and final. It could have been hers. It could have been a command sent into the dark. It hung in the air like a blade waiting to fall.
"Unleash."