Sleep was a distant country Kael could not reach. He lay on his thin reed pallet, staring up at the opaque crystal ceiling of his small room. The world outside was hushed, the village's ambient hum lowered to a deep, sonorous thrum, like a sleeping giant's breath. But there was no peace for him. His arm throbbed with a dull, rhythmic pain, a constant, physical reminder of the explosion. Each pulse of pain was an echo of the power he had unleashed.
Through the thin, imperfectly grown wall, he could hear Elara. Her breaths were shallow, punctuated by a faint, dry rattle that seemed to catch in her chest. It was the sound of the Crystalblight, the slow, inexorable grind of her life-crystal turning to dust. The sound was a hook in his heart, pulling him away from the shores of sleep, back to the raging sea of his thoughts.
The idea, the one that had sparked in the Boneyard, returned now with the full, insistent force of desperation. He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the pallet, hissing as his injured arm protested the movement.
Crystalblight. The healers called it a disease of imbalance, a dissonance within the body's core harmony. They treated it with more harmony—soothing tonics, gentle songs, resonant poultices. They were trying to smooth over the cracks, to sing the flawed crystal back into a state of perfection.
But what if they were wrong? What if you couldn't smooth over something that was fundamentally broken? What if the blight made a part of the life-crystal inert, dead, like the grey rock in the Boneyard? Harmony would have no effect on it. It would be like singing to a stone. But his power… his power worked on dead stone.
The hypothesis was both elegant and horrifying. The blight made a life-crystal brittle and prone to cracking. Cracking. What if the cure wasn't to heal the flawed parts, but to destroy them? To shatter the inert, blighted crystal within her so the healthy, living crystal had room to grow back? It was like lancing a boil or cutting out a tumor, but the scalpel would be a sound. His sound.
The thought made him feel sick with a mixture of terror and hope. He couldn't just assume it would work. He couldn't risk testing it on her. One mistake, one moment of uncontrolled power, and he could shatter her entirely. The image was so vivid, so horrific, that he had to bite his lip to keep from crying out.
He needed to be sure. He needed control.
Quiet as a shadow, he rose and padded across the cool crystal floor. From the pocket of his dirt-stained tunic, he retrieved his prize: a small, palm-sized piece of dead, grey crystal he'd picked up from the crater's edge before he fled. It was worthless, inert, silent. It was the perfect test subject.
He sat on the floor, crossing his legs, the shard resting in the palm of his uninjured hand. He took a deep breath, mimicking the meditative poses of the Resonators he'd watched his whole life. But he wasn't searching for the inner quiet they spoke of. He was searching for the opposite. He was looking for the storm.
He closed his eyes and pushed past the familiar, frustrating silence. He reached deeper, seeking the feeling he'd had in the Boneyard. Not the raw, screaming rage, but the focused, humming core of it. He found it, a grating vibration deep in his sternum, an ugly, dissonant thrum that felt uniquely his.
He let it build, carefully. He didn't want volume; he wanted intensity. He imagined it not as a shout, but as a needle-thin drill of pure, concentrated wrongness. He directed all of his focus, all of his will, down his arm and into the small piece of crystal resting in his palm.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Doubt began to creep in. Maybe the explosion was a fluke, a one-time convergence of rage and grief that he could never replicate. Maybe he was just a broken boy with a broken arm, fooling himself in the dark.
Then, a cough from the next room—a dry, rattling sound that tore through the quiet of the house. Elara.
The sound was like a key turning a lock inside him. His resolve hardened into steel. He wasn't just fooling himself; he was fighting. He pushed his dissonance harder, focusing it with a burning intensity.
The crystal in his hand began to feel warm. The warmth grew to a distinct heat, as if he were holding a coal plucked from a fire. It began to vibrate, a high-frequency shudder that buzzed against his skin, a sensation only he could feel. In the silence of his mind, he could hear it: a faint, internal whine, the ghost of the shriek from the Boneyard, but reduced to a whisper, contained, controlled.
His focus was absolute now. The world outside his closed eyelids ceased to exist. There was only him, the shard, and the dissonant thread of power connecting them. He visualized the inside of the stone. He didn't want an explosion. He wanted a single, clean line. A surgical cut. He pictured it in his mind, a hair-thin crack running directly through the center of the shard.
He pushed his dissonance into that imaginary line, concentrating it into an infinitesimally small point. The whining in his head grew sharper. The heat in his hand became almost painful. The shard shuddered violently, resisting the unnatural frequency. He held on, his muscles taut, sweat beading on his forehead.
Then he felt it. Not a bang, not a crack, but a tiny, satisfying snap that vibrated up his arm, a feeling of something giving way, of tension released.
He stopped. The hum inside him ceased. The heat in his palm faded, and the whining in his head went silent. He opened his eyes, his heart pounding.
He looked down at his hand. The shard was still in one piece, resting in his palm. But there, running perfectly through its center, was a single, hairline fracture. It was flawless, as fine and straight as if inscribed by a master artisan with a diamond-tipped stylus.
He had done it.
He stared at the cracked shard, turning it over and over in his hand. It wasn't an explosion. It was a scalpel. He had controlled it. A dizzying wave of possibilities washed over him, so potent it left him light-headed. If he could do this to a dead stone… what could he do to the dead parts of a living one? If he could become more precise, more practiced… could he trace the spiderweb fissures in Elara's blight and shatter them into dust without harming the healthy, vibrant crystal around them?
The hope was no longer a vague, desperate dream. It was a plan. A tangible, achievable, and utterly terrifying plan. He looked at the cracked stone in his hand, a symbol of his terrible new gift. This was his path. There was no turning back now.