The maintenance shaft was a vertical throat of darkness, punctuated by the sickly, arrhythmic pulse of emergency runes. Lyra climbed, her breaths sawing in her lungs, the taste of rust and ozone thick on her tongue. The city's groans were louder here, transmitted through the metal rungs she gripped—a language of strain and impending collapse.
She could feel the wrongness in the air. The ritual had begun. A torrent of polished, orderly magic streamed upwards from the Sanctum below, a desperate funnel of power aimed at the Stellar Spire to force a connection with the ley-lines. But woven into it was a new, jagged thread: panic. It made the energy brittle.
She burst out onto a narrow service gantry, high in the Spire's needle-like apex. The Ritual Chamber spread out below her, a breathtaking dome of crystal and silver. In its center, on a raised dais, six Novices stood in a perfect hexagon, their hands raised towards a floating, brilliant Stellar Shard—a fragment of condensed celestial light. The air crackled with their combined will. Master Arcturus and two other Arch-Mages stood at anchor points, faces grim, channeling the city's faltering power into the ritual matrix.
The seventh position in the hexagon was empty. A gaping wound in the geometry.
Lyra's heart clenched. They were proceeding without her. The symmetry was incomplete, the load distributed unevenly. She saw it before they did: a hairline fracture of angry crimson light snaking up the side of the floating Stellar Shard.
"The nexus is rejecting the forced alignment!" one of the Arch-Mages cried out, his voice strained.
"Hold the pattern!" Arcturus commanded, his own power flaring. "We must stabilize the Heart!"
But the fracture spread. With a sound like shattering glass magnified a thousandfold, the Stellar Shard exploded.
It wasn't a physical blast, but a psychic and magical one. A silent wave of concussive force and discordant energy threw the Novices from their feet. The Arch-Mages staggered, their control shattered. And the carefully channeled torrent of magic from the Heart of Aethel, now with no ritual to receive it, recoiled.
The backlash hit the Spire itself.
The crystal dome above Lyra screamed. A web of cracks erupted across its surface. Shards, sharp as destiny, began to rain down on the chamber below. The Novices screamed, scrambling for cover.
Lyra acted without thought. She wasn't part of their ritual, but her magic was already raw, reactive, buzzing with the city's distress. She slammed her hands onto the iron railing of the gantry. Instead of trying to channel pure energy, she pushed her will into the metal—not to preserve it, but to command its decay in a specific, instantaneous way.
A section of the railing directly below a falling, spear-like shard of crystal rusted into powder in a blink. The shard hit the now-empty space and clattered harmlessly to the gantry floor instead of impaling a cowering Novice.
Another shard aimed for Master Arcturus's back. Lyra focused on a silver inlay in the floor near his feet. She poured her frustration, her fear, her unwanted affinity into it. The polished silver blackened and bloomed into a brittle, porous shield of corroded metal that erupted from the floor, deflecting the crystal shard.
For three heartbeats, chaos was punctuated by these small, precise acts of dissolution. She was not building. She was un-making with savage intent to save.
Then, silence, broken by moans of pain. The immediate cascade had stopped. The Spire was grievously wounded, but standing. The Arch-Mages were already moving, erecting barriers of pure force, shouting orders for healers.
Arcturus turned. His eyes found Lyra on the gantry, her hands still gripping the rust-eaten railing, her chest heaving. He didn't see the Novices she'd shielded, or the deflected shard. He saw only the proof of her nature: the rust, the decay, her presence in the forbidden place of the ritual she had contaminated.
His voice, cold and final, cut through the stunned quiet. "Lyra Thorne. You were forbidden. Your aberrant magic has violated the Ritual Sanctum. By the authority of the Convocation, you are hereby… Expunged."
The word hung in the acid-tinged air.
Expunged. Not exiled. Not demoted. Erased. Stripped of name, rank, and right to be part of Skyreach's magical society.
The gathered mages, wounded and terrified, looked at her not with gratitude, but with horror and blame. She was the Rust-touch. The omen of failure made flesh.
Lyra didn't wait for the guards. She turned and fled back down the dark, trembling throat of the shaft, the taste in her mouth no longer just rust, but the bitter ashes of everything she had ever known