They didn't cuff him. Serah just walked beside Kael with her hands in her coat pockets and an invisible pressure around them that made the crowd part like tired water. The blue-sashed dead were already being gathered by shaking hands; neighbors stared at Kael as if he'd grown antlers.
"Smile," he told a staring butcher as they passed. "It confuses fate."
Serah didn't laugh. "You like provoking people," she said, eyes scanning roofs and windows. "Is that a coping mechanism or a hobby?"
"Why not both?" Kael said. "What's the sheathed-weapon feel you're doing? Radiant shield? Thermal bleed? I can smell hot metal."
She didn't answer. The alley they took sloped down then skewed sideways, because Gloomstep forgot how to be a city halfway through being built. Serah hopped a slick of pickled cabbage juice without looking down.
Kael's pulse had finally settled into a stop–go lurch. The hiccuped second hadn't faded from his nerves. Every echoing footfall sounded like it might come twice.
"You saw it," he said quietly.
Serah's jaw ticked. "I saw you rerun an instant. That should require Crown-tier focus, three linked casters, and a field node. You did it between jokes."
"Thank you," Kael said. "I work very hard at not working very hard."
They reached a door that looked like it belonged to a failed bakery: cracked paint, a drawn shutter, a chalk RUNE FOR BREAD HELP? scrawled with the desperation of someone who had never learned runes. Serah knocked four times, pause, once. The door opened on a narrow man with a scar like a map of broken roads across his face and one sleeve pinned neatly at the shoulder.
"Package?" the man asked.
"Idiot," Serah said.
"Confirmed," the man said, stepping aside.
Inside was not a bakery. It was a Crown annex that had eaten a row of houses from the inside: whitewashed walls, tables bolted to floors, metal cabinets with little hazard sigils, the faint sweet stink of antiseptic over spilled lives. A Radiant lamp hummed in the ceiling, making Kael's teeth feel fuzzy.
"Hi," Kael told the lamp. "I hate you."
The one-armed man shut the door and locked three different locks. "Jorn Keth," he said, sticking out a callused hand with his remaining arm. "Don't break anything I can't put back."
Kael shook. "Kael Varren. I don't do that kind of breaking."
"Liar," Jorn said without heat. He eyed Serah. "Street's contained. Your mess drew flies already—two Choir spotters on the ridge, maybe a cult barker with paint on his hands. We need to move fast if we're keeping him."
"Keeping is optimistic," Serah said. "Assess first."
Jorn gave Kael a professional once-over that stripped him down to bones and bad ideas. "You look like trouble," he said.
Kael spread his hands. "I'm more of a hobby."
Serah guided him into a room with a table and some precise, unfriendly instruments. A bowl of water, a pendulum rig, a set of tuned strings, a little glass orb etched with tight spirals. Crown assessment kit, the kind you only brought out when you wanted to prove something that terrified you.
"Sit," Serah said.
"I feel objectified," Kael said, sitting. The chair was bolted down; it wobbled anyway, because Gloomstep took that personally.
Serah set the bowl of water in front of him. "You know Anchor-Path-Release," she said. "Good. We're going to do it without jokes. Take a thread of motion from the pendulum and put it into the water clockwise. Then counter. Then out of the water into your hand."
Kael glanced at the pendulum. It was barely a tremor, a whisper of swing. He reached—felt the little rhythm—and breathed with it. Anchor. Path. Release.
The bowl's surface skated. A ring rippled clockwise, then reversed. Then a clean, small jet leapt into his palm and splashed there.
Serah watched his hand, not the trick. Kael realized she was looking for burns, for frost, for the little scars that marked where entropy chose to bite you.
"Again," she said. "From the lamp hum to the strings."
Kael pulled the lamp's tremor, a fine Radiant vibration that made his head ache. He fed it to the strings. They sang a thin, pure note that went through Kael's spine and made him want to laugh or scream or both.
The glass orb next: "bend light," she said. He cupped it in both palms, tugged at the way the room's brightness puddled on its etched spirals, and trickled it along the lines until the orb glowed from its cuts, dark along the smooth.
Serah's face did something complicated and then flattened again. "Neural," she said. "Make your hand numb without stopping your heart."
Kael frowned, focused, and fuzzed his own fingers. They tingled, went heavy, felt very far away. The rest of him stayed pleasantly attached.
"Good," Serah said softly. Too soft. "Now… don't do the next thing."
"What next thing?" Kael asked, alarmed.
"The one where you get clever," she said. "Stay simple."
He opened his mouth to protest—and felt a tremor in the hallway. Not feet. A tap, three-beat pause, tap. A rhythm like a prayer.
The door opened without a knock. A man in ash-grey robes walked in, bald as a river stone, eyes mild behind wire spectacles. His robe's hem was dusty, as if he'd run here and then politely pretended he hadn't.
Jorn stepped into his path. "We're closed."
"I am," the man said, "tragically stubborn." He held up both hands to show nothing but liver spots. "Brother Maeron, formerly of the Grey Choir, presently acting under an agreement with the Crown to not be irritating for the next twelve hours."
"You already broke it," Serah said. "Get out."
Maeron peered at Kael like a man looking at a comet and trying to decide if it was beautiful or a rock that would end his town. "So it's true," he murmured. "He laughs."
Kael blinked. "I like you," he told Serah. "Can we not invite monks?"
Maeron ignored him and addressed the bowl of water. "May I?" He didn't wait for permission. He tapped the bowl's rim twice. The ripples moved in two directions at once, met, canceled, and left the surface perfectly still.
"Parlor trick," Jorn said.
"Principle," Maeron said. "Interference. The universe does this at every scale. We are just… noisier at it." He finally looked at Kael directly. "Young man, when you pulled the moment—how did it feel?"
Kael stared. The sensible answer was silence. The part of him that stayed alive by confessing the wrong things opened his mouth.
"Like… like catching a falling plate and realizing you already dropped it," he said. "Like I felt the break and my hands remembered being slower a second ago."
Maeron's eyes brightened with a scholar's joy and a priest's terror. "He's not moving time," he said to Serah without looking away from Kael. "He's reassigning energy histories along preferential paths. He's… whistling to the dead universe and it's whistling back in harmony." He smiled, a terrible, thrilled thing. "Oh, you lovely, awful boy."
"Please don't call me that," Kael said.
Serah put a hand on Maeron's chest and gently pushed him backward. "Out," she said. "This is assessment, not a sermon."
"Two minutes," Maeron bargained. "You can collar me after if it makes you feel safe."
"I already feel safe," Serah said. "He doesn't."
Kael almost said he didn't either, then decided too much honesty was just asking for a padded room.
The lamp hummed. The strings quivered. The water sat, stubbornly a liquid. Kael's nerves hummed with all of it.
Serah slid a metal disk onto the table. Its surface was etched with a nest of tight, clean runes—even Kael recognized the geometry of a Vector Load ring. "Hand," she said.
He pressed his palm to it. The disk warmed under his skin. Lines in its face lit one by one. Three lit quickly. The fourth glowed, dimmed, thought about it, and then lit. Serah's brows climbed a fraction. The fifth guttered and refused.
"Tier Two with a fat ceiling," Jorn said, leaning over her shoulder. "Or a liar pretending to be smaller."
"Don't encourage him," Serah said.
Maeron drifted closer as if tugged by gravity. "You're not measuring the right thing," he said, almost kindly. "He doesn't have a larger bucket. He has a leak to somewhere bigger."
"Out," Serah said again.
"Fine," Maeron sighed. "But you won't keep him if you keep him here. The ward will eat him or the Concord will panic and kill him. If he must be trained, take him to Aerialis before the Choir takes him to a ditch."
Jorn snorted. "Choir won't try a public kill with a Crown Sovereign present."
"Won't they?" Maeron asked.
The building chose that moment to answer.
Something hit the annex. Not a battering ram—a pressure front, a shudder that made the Radiant lamp flicker and everyone's muscles twitch at once. Kael felt it the way birds feel storms. He was already moving when the glass orb on the table cracked with a dry pop and the lamp blew, raining hot shards.
Anchor—the lamp's death twitch. Path—away from eyes. Release.
Light bent. Heat split around them in a gentle curve, spent itself on the walls instead of skin. Shards hit the floor around their feet like metallic rain.
"Choir," Jorn said, voice flat as he slid a knife from his belt. "Reactive pulse. They want the Sovereign blind and the asset dead."
"Back room," Serah snapped. She didn't raise her voice. The air around her tightened, heat drawing into her coat's seams like lines on a map. "Jorn, cover our six."
Kael had never been called an "asset" before. He didn't like how it fit.
Another pulse came, this one narrow, tuned. It crawled along the floor like a low fog. Where it touched table legs, bolts hissed and went soft. The bowl of water whitened with sudden bubbles, then cracked and fell in on itself.
Reactive Aspect, accelerated corrosion and boil. Nice. Choir liked to preach about sin and then used chemistry like a cudgel.
Kael grinned despite himself. "Oh good," he said, and then ducked as a bolt sang through the doorway and chewed a groove out of the wall where his head had been.
Serah didn't duck. She stepped into the bolt's line like a dancer and flicked two fingers. The air blazed white for an instant. The bolt hit it mid-flight and went to steam and a dirty glow. The glow hit the wall and left a black kiss.
"Stay behind me," she told Kael.
"You say that like it's possible," Kael said, and then did the exact opposite.
The hallway outside the assessment room was a narrow throat with three doors, all shut. The fourth door—the front—was splintering inward as if an invisible battering ram kept kissing it. Through the cracks Kael saw grey-robed figures with hoods up and faces calm. One of them carried a low bowl on a chain, from which fumes curled like lazy snakes. Another held a staff capped with a copper cage rattling with little seeds.
"Choir," Jorn muttered again, moving to the angle of the door with the ease of practice. He looked at Kael. "You like being bait?"
"Professionally," Kael said.
"Then be bait over there," Jorn said, jerking his chin toward the stairwell that went up and then sideways and then wherever Gloomstep decided. "When they push, you pull. Serah toasts. I cut whoever gets clever."
"And me?" Maeron asked. He'd produced nothing but a small notebook and the air of a man trying very hard not to look delighted.
"You pray we survive your friends," Jorn said.
The door went. Choir spilled in, smooth and quiet. No battle cries. No theatrics. Just moving shapes and the soft hiss of their chemistries. The copper cage shook and seeds burst in little puffs; the hall filled with a fine, sparkling dust that tried to chew oxygen out of lungs.
Kael grabbed it. Not the dust itself—too small, too many—but the way air moved around the sudden particulate load, the tremor of breath being stolen. Anchor. Path. Release.
He shoved that motion sideways, set up a thin wall of stillness that didn't let air mix right. The dust curled around it like a stream hitting a rock, and the Choir came into the annex and found their breath went funny.
Serah breathed in and became a line.
It wasn't visible, not really, but Kael felt it. She drew every stray heat leak in the corridor along a path she'd just decided existed. The air brightened, not to flame but to white-hot intention. The first two Choir at the door staggered, robes smoking. A third raised his bowl and sang a little counter-rune and the heat slid off him like oil off water.
Jorn stepped out of that wash of light and put his knife in the third man's thigh. The man folded without ceremony. Jorn stepped back as if he'd merely corrected a crooked picture.
The copper cage rattled again. Kael felt the tiny pops like hail on a tin roof. The dust glittered brighter—and then the dropped seeds went off.
Not explosion. Consumption. The dust ate heat. The corridor temperature plunged in a breath. Serah's line of heat snapped like a string, her skin going pale in the sudden cold.
"Cute," Kael said, because when he was afraid he got chatty. He stole the kinetic energy of that sudden temperature shift—air contracting, wood creaking, metal complaining—and jammed it into the floor directly under the lead Choir. The patch of stone bucked. The lead monk sat down without dignity.
Someone behind them hissed a phrase that made Kael's teeth ache. The dust whirled, condensed, became a rope of glittering grey that snapped toward Kael's head like a lasso.
Kael threw himself backward. He grabbed the swing of the rope at the same time, changed its Path, and these were not things a sane man did at once but he was not a sane man. The lasso swung past his ear and looped a support post instead. The post shrieked. The rope ate the heat out of it and the post went brittle and shattered.
"Less clever," Serah said tightly.
"Can't," Kael said. "Born this way."
The fight wasn't long; good fights aren't. Serah learned the cadence of the dust, found a frequency it hated, and sang it with her staff—thin Radiant hum that made the particles clump and fall like dirty snow. Jorn knifed ankles and wrists and one throat, each motion economical. Kael pinned bodies with stumbling air and tugged crossbow strings to misfire and threw people into people.
When it was done, four grey robes lay still. Two breathed shallowly. One had fled, leaving a smear of ash and cold.
Maeron hadn't moved except to scribble in his notebook like a ghoul.
Serah stood with her head lowered a fraction, breath fogging in the still-cool air. The edges of her coat steamed gently.
"We're done," Jorn said, flicking blood off his knife. "Three minutes before the neighborhood decides which way it's falling."
Kael leaned a shoulder against the wall and tried to pretend his hands weren't shaking. They were shaking. His nerves hummed with the fight's gone energy, wanting somewhere to put itself. He looked down and only then realized there were bits of Radiant lamp glass stuck in his hair.
"Stylish," he told the nearest shard, and plucked it free.
Serah looked at him. Not through him. At him. "We leave now," she said. "Pack nothing. Bring everything you can't live without in your head."
"That's very poetic," Kael said.
"It's also literal," Jorn said. "If we stay in Gloomstep, he dies."
"Not helpful," Kael said.
Maeron closed his notebook with a decisive snap. "Aerialis," he said. "You'll hate it. You'll survive it. With luck."
Kael stared at him. "Are you coming?"
Maeron smiled like a man who had just been told breakfast would be provided. "I was going anyway. Someone needs to record the end of the world properly."
Jorn rolled his eyes. "And someone needs to keep you from pushing him toward it."
"Try," Maeron said pleasantly.
They moved.
Jorn had a back way out of the annex: up a corridor that kinked twice, through a narrow pantry with hooks for bread that had never seen bread, into a courtyard that belonged to a woman who swore at them in impressive, inventive terms until Serah flashed her Concord badge and then apologized with a little purse of coin. Gloomstep swallowed them, alleys leading into alleys, staircases that forgot whether they were stairs or roofs.
Kael didn't look back until it would have hurt too much to do anything if someone followed.
He did, anyway.
The annex door was a black mouth now. Smoke licked it. In the crowd, faces watched—fearful, angry, calculating. The city watch were arriving finally, too late and under-armed, and everyone would be very brave about pretending the Crown had everything under control.
A small hand slipped into Kael's. He looked down and found the shaved-headed boy from the street trotting beside him, jaw set, eyes determined and wet.
Kael blinked. "Hey."
"Are you leaving?" the boy asked.
"Apparently," Kael said. "Adult supervision is insisting."
The boy nodded like this was the sort of thing adults did, and then, without warning, threw his arms around Kael's waist, squeezed hard, and let go before Kael could decide whether to hug back or run.
"Don't die," the boy said, and vanished into Gloomstep with the efficiency of someone who had learned how to vanish.
Kael stood very still for a heartbeat, then jogged to catch up with the others. Serah pretended not to have seen. Jorn did not bother to pretend.
"Cute," Jorn said.
"Shut up," Kael said.
They reached the Rust stairs—Gloomstep's name for a staircase that led to a back street that led to a caravan road that led to anywhere that wasn't here. A cart waited, a low profile thing with a canvas top and a team of patient, mismatched horses. Jorn swung up onto the driver's bench. Serah took the back, lifted the canvas, and gestured. Maeron climbed in with the caution of a man who's learned to distrust vehicles. Kael hesitated.
He looked back, one last time, at the ward that had bent him wrong and somehow kept him anyway.
The light in the alley mouth shifted.
For a heartbeat, there he was again: older, colder, leaning in the shadow. No mirth now. No salute. Just the weight of inevitability wearing his face.
"Don't," Kael told his own ghost. He didn't know whether he meant don't watch or don't be me or don't choose for me.
The echo smiled. It was not kind. It was not cruel. It was acceptance, like a man who had walked too long and sat down where he was because there was no more road.
The alley was empty again.
"Kael," Serah called quietly. "In or out."
He climbed in.
Jorn clicked his tongue. The horses leaned into their harnesses. The cart jolted. Gloomstep became a noise behind them, then a shape, then a bad dream as the road took them through districts that remembered how to be squares and streets instead of scars.
"Congratulations," Maeron said, bracing his notebook against his knee as the cart rattled. "You've passed assessment."
"What's my grade?" Kael asked.
"Catastrophe," Maeron said, almost fond. "With extra credit."
"Do I get a certificate?" Kael asked. "Something with gold leaf?"
Serah's mouth did that almost-smile again. "If you survive Aerialis," she said, "I'll buy you a certificate that says 'Did Not End the World (Yet).'"
Kael leaned back against the canvas, closed his eyes, and listened to the horses' hooves hammer the road into the future. He felt the world sliding under them like a skin that didn't quite fit.
Somewhere behind his eyelids, the dead universe whispered in a voice that sounded very much like his, trying out the laugh he hadn't learned yet.
He laughed first, just to be petty, and the cart turned toward the cliff city where people rewrote laws and called it good governance.