The guards advanced, their movements cautious but determined. The Earth element around their hands wasn't for building; it was for crushing, forming crude, rocky gauntlets over their fists. They saw not a frightened boy, but a manifestation of heresy, a thing to be contained.
My heart was a wild drum against my ribs. Panic, cold and sharp, threatened to freeze me in place. This wasn't a daydream. This was the smell of rot in the air, the grey ash staining my new shoes, the terror on the faces of people I'd known my whole life.
Run. The thought was primal, a survival instinct that screamed louder than the priest's accusations. It was the same instinct that had made me fight for my first breath in this world.
I didn't know how to use this power. I didn't want it. But as the first guard lunged, his stone-clad hand reaching for my arm, I threw my own hands up in a desperate warding gesture.
The cold emptiness inside me surged forward, not as a controlled stream, but as a desperate burst. A wave of that profound stillness shot from my palms.
It didn't hit the guard with force. It simply… touched him.
The earthy glow around his hand snuffed out instantly. The crude rock gauntlet didn't shatter; it crumbled, dissolving into a stream of fine, dry sand that hissed to the ground. But it didn't stop there. The leather of his vambrace beneath aged a hundred years in a second, cracking and flaking away. A gasp of pain and shock escaped his lips as the skin on his forearm, where my power had grazed it, lost its vitality, becoming pale, thin, and wrinkled like ancient parchment.
He stumbled back, clutching his arm, his eyes wide with a pain that was more than physical—it was a violation.
The second guard hesitated, his confidence shattered. The crowd's fear curdled into a mob-like anger. "Abomination!" someone shouted. "He's cursed!"
This was my chance. I turned and ran.
I didn't look back. I heard the shouts, the cries for more guards, the priest's voice rising in a prayer of purification. But I just ran, my legs pumping, fueled by pure adrenaline. I ducked into a narrow alley between two brick buildings, the sounds of the square fading behind me.
I slumped against the cold brick wall, my chest heaving. I looked at my hands. They looked normal. They didn't feel like instruments of decay. They just felt like my hands. But I could still feel it—that cold, silent pool of nothingness sitting where my soul should be. The soul that didn't belong here.
Heretical Element: Decay. The words echoed in my mind. The Church taught that these elements were fragments of the "Other," the demonic entity that had fought THE GOD. They were a corruption, a sickness in the world. And I was a carrier.
A memory, sharp and unwelcome, flashed from my past life: sitting in a sterile waiting room, a doctor explaining a terminal diagnosis to another patient. The slow, inevitable, unstoppable failure of the body. Was that what my power was? Not a weapon, but a sickness?
The sound of booted feet on cobblestones jolted me from my thoughts. They were organizing. They were coming.
I had nowhere to go. The orphanage would be the first place they looked. I had no money, no friends who would harbor me now. I was completely alone.
As I pressed myself deeper into the shadows of the alley, my hand brushed against the brick wall. I felt a strange pull, a resonance. The cold void within me stirred, not aggressively, but curiously. I focused on it, and I felt… the wall. Not its surface, but its history. The pressure of centuries, the slow, patient fatigue of the mortar holding it together. I could feel the tiny, inevitable cracks, the weaknesses.
It was an invitation. A whisper from the void. I could encourage it. I could give that fatigue a push.
Trembling, I placed my palm flat against the wall. I didn't force the power out. I just… let a trickle of that stillness flow into the brick and mortar.
It was silent. No flash, no roar. But where my hand touched, the vibrant red brick bleached to a pale grey. A web of cracks spread out from the point of contact, and a section of the wall, about the size of my head, silently disintegrated, collapsing inward into a pile of inert, ancient-looking dust, creating a small hole into the storage room of a bakery.
I stared, horrified and fascinated. This was my power. Destruction. Not the glorious, explosive destruction of Fire, but the quiet, insidious, patient end of all things.
It was the only tool I had.
As the voices of the search party grew closer, I made a decision. Leo had died. Kaelen the orphan was dead. I had to become someone else. Someone who could survive.
I slipped through the hole I'd made into the dark bakery, ignoring the sweet smell of bread that now seemed like a memory from another life. I moved through the silent shop, my senses heightened, listening for the pursuit outside.
I found a storeroom with a spare set of rough-spun worker's clothes and a discarded hooded cloak, probably used for deliveries. I shed my fine Awakening-day tunic, the symbol of a hope that had curdled into ash, and put on the common clothes. I pulled the hood low over my face.
Peering out a crack in the shutters, I saw a squad of city guards, their elements now manifest—a flicker of Fire, a shimmer of Water—lighting up the twilight as they searched the streets.
I was a ghost in a new world. An invasive species. A soul of death in a world of life.
But I was alive. And I had a power they feared. I didn't know what to do, or where to go. But I knew one thing with a certainty that chilled me to the bone.
The Church would not stop looking for me. I was living heresy. And my Awakening had just declared a war I never asked for.