The blue velvet book felt like lead in Elias's hands. It wasn't the weight of the paper, but the density of the ideas contained within. The pages were covered not with words, but with intricate, beautiful, and utterly dizzying geometric calculations—equations of control. Lena watched him from her cluttered workbench, stirring something that resembled melted tar in a cast-iron pot. The air, already heavy with the scent of beeswax and old paper, now gained an acrid, smoky undertone. "The goal is simple, Elias," she said, without looking up. "You need to create a perfect sphere of non-existence around your mind. If you can calculate that geometry and hold it, you go quiet. No radiant energy, no psychic static, no subtle hum for the Inquisitors to track." "A perfect sphere requires a constant radius and a central point," Elias muttered, staring at a complex knot of intersecting vectors on the page. "The central point must be my consciousness, but my consciousness is not static. It is a constantly shifting variable." Lena paused her stirring and fixed him with a sharp look. "That's the angel in you talking. Too rigid. You're an Ophanim, right? You dealt in wheels and orbits. Think of it less as a perfect geometric shape and more as a localized field of indifference." She walked over and tapped the page with a long, elegant finger. "This equation describes the Folding Vector. To silence yourself, you don't crush the sound; you fold the space around it, making it irrelevant to the larger reality. You are creating a controlled, personal void. The math is just a framework for the intent." Elias closed his eyes and forced himself to ignore the background noise of the witch and her potions. He had to think as a mortal now, a boy with a mind, not as a celestial calculation engine. He remembered the chaos of the high school hallway: the thousands of intersecting thoughts and energies. He had been a beacon, a lighthouse in the fog, broadcasting his presence at maximum volume. Fold it, he commanded himself. Not brute force, but calculated geometry. He focused on the mathematical structure of a sphere—the simplest, most contained shape. He pictured the surface of this sphere expanding from his core consciousness, pushing the chaotic noise away. He reached out with the nascent power in his mind, drawing on that reservoir of unstable energy that had infected the school. Instead of a flicker of violet light, a cold, dry sensation spread through the room. Lena gasped and stumbled back, knocking a small copper pot to the floor. Elias opened his eyes, startled. The noise of her pot clattering against the wooden floor was loud, but every other sound had vanished. The bubbling of her tar-like concoction, the gentle hiss of the candles, the distant thrum of the city—all were gone. The air around his head looked faintly warped, like heat rising from asphalt, and he could see the vibrations of the room attempting to enter his sphere, only to hit an invisible barrier and slide away. "You idiot!" Lena hissed, scrambling away from him. She was holding her hands over her ears, her eyes wide with pain. "You didn't silence yourself, you silenced the local atmosphere! You created a vacuum of sensation!" Elias instantly retracted the power, appalled. The sounds rushed back in a deafening torrent, and his head throbbed. "What did I do?" he rasped. "You overdid it," Lena said, rubbing her temples. "The equation for the sphere of non-existence requires you to balance the inward fold with the outward pull of reality. You just violently shoved everything away. If you had held that for ten more seconds, the silence would have spread outside the house and we'd have a localized sonic null in Blackwood. That's a five-star alert, Angel." He felt a wave of nausea. He hadn't realized the sheer, unbridled destructive potential of his new abilities. "I need a focus," Elias said, running a hand through his damp hair. "A physical anchor to limit the projection." Lena calmed herself, picked up the copper pot, and sighed. "Okay. You're right. You can't just throw raw Intent at this. You need a tether." She walked over to her workbench and rummaged through a box full of strange items—petrified wood, smooth river stones, and bits of old clockwork. She finally selected a small, flat piece of dark, polished ironstone that looked like a smooth worry stone. "Here," she said, tossing it to him. "Place this in the center of your consciousness. It's inert, but it has mass. It's a true, physical zero point. When you execute the Folding Vector, calculate the sphere's surface around this point, not around the chaotic edges of your mind. If the projection starts to get too wide, focus on the weight of the stone. Let the physics of this world tether you." Elias took the stone. It was cool and heavy, and felt profoundly dead in his hand. A perfect anchor. He closed his eyes again, placing the ironstone flat in his palm. He drew upon the power, but this time, he used the complex geometry of the blue velvet book as a restraint. He used the stone's physical coordinates—x, y, z—as the unmoving center of his sphere. Inward fold. Outward balance. Contain the self. The change was instantaneous but subtle. There was no noise, no shimmer, no vacuum. Instead, there was a profound quietness in his head. The mental static—the faint thoughts and anxieties of the people outside, which had been a constant buzz since the Fall—simply ceased to register. He opened his eyes. The room looked normal. Lena was still at her bench, now reading from a scroll. The candles flickered naturally. But when he reached out with his psychic senses, he felt nothing. He wasn't blind; he just wasn't loud. He was a silent shadow in the electromagnetic field of reality. He was quiet. Lena looked up, her green eyes narrowing, then widening in approval. She tilted her head, listening intently to the air around him. "Wow," she breathed. "You're completely silent. Not a ripple. Not a single thought leaking out. You've gone entirely off-spectrum." A strange, unfamiliar feeling of competence, almost pride, warmed Elias's chest. "The ironstone worked. It held the center." "It's a start," Lena agreed, but her tone had shifted, becoming wary. She walked slowly toward him, her gaze sharp. "But you're still a reactor, Elias. You might be quiet now, but the power you contained is still there. And it's still learning." She pointed to the ironstone in his hand. It was no longer a dull, dark gray. Along the edges, a faint, metallic sheen of violet was blooming, pushing against the stone's surface. The geometry of the sphere had held, but the power was already attempting to co-opt its anchor. "When you contain a nuclear reaction," Lena murmured, "the core heats up. You need to learn how to vent that pressure, or you're going to blow a hole right through this house."
