For two days, James didn't return to the western hall.
Not out of fear.
He simply needed time to understand the change within himself.
The subtle fold he'd forced into the air had done more than bend space—it had left a residue. Not on the world. On him.
His balance was off, not enough to stumble, but enough that his steps adjusted unconsciously. When he closed his eyes, he could feel the outline of where the distortion had held. As if his mind had memorized the structure of absence.
The servants noticed nothing.
To them, a quiet child slipping through the estate was hardly worth a moment's thought. They were too busy scrubbing kitchens, polishing cracked silver, and whispering about the baron's meeting behind sealed doors.
James listened.
He didn't care about politics—but pressure, he'd learned, shaped everything.
Two nobles had visited with guards at dawn. There were raised voices. The baron's heir, Adrian Reed—his half-brother—stormed from the council hall with fury staining his face.
James passed him in the corridor.
Adrian didn't recognize him—or pretended not to.
But the moment their eyes met, something twisted in James's perception.
Not rage.
Not attention.
Just a pull—as if the air around Adrian bent differently from other people's. A flaw in symmetry.
He filed that away.
By afternoon, he slipped into the disused storage cellar beneath the old south wing. Cobwebs draped the beams, and the air tasted like damp stone and dust.
It was quiet.
Perfect.
He sat cross-legged on the uneven floor and inhaled slowly.
The fold he'd created days ago still echoed faintly in his mind. A bruise in thought, not flesh.
He pressed against it — internally, not magically.
The sensation sharpened.
Space could bend.
But attention could too.
He focused on a wooden crate across the room. Not its shape or color—its presence. Then he tried to make the world forget it for a moment.
Nothing moved. Nothing glowed. There was no flash of power.
But something dimmed.
Not the crate itself—his sense of it.
As though the object slid to the side of knowing.
The effort nicked his thoughts like a blade. He winced as a thin line of red bled from his right nostril this time.
Still, he held.
The world bent differently when he combined focus and intent, not reaching outward, but folding perception inward.
He did not ask the AI for structure.
Not yet.
He needed instinct first.
Only when the strain began to distort his breathing did he release the fold.
The crate came sharply back into awareness, as if someone snapped their fingers in front of his face.
His pulse steadied again.
Observation: No system voice. No interference.
He preferred it that way.
He stood, wiping the blood with his sleeve. The cellar air shifted as he left, carrying the faintest tremor of something changed.
That evening, as torches flickered along the stone corridors, two maids whispered over stale bread and cold stew.
"You hear Baron Reed is sending his bastard boy to the outer ranks soon?"
"The quiet one?"
"Aye. Some say the old priest warned him. Bad luck, children born in silence."
"Better gone than haunting the halls."
James passed by just as one of them glanced over her shoulder.
She flinched.
Though he made no sound.
He didn't stop walking.
In the western hall, dust gathered on old banners and cracked beams.
The air there still remembered the fold.
And James was ready to try again.