It took three centuries for small miracles to calcify into a new human order. By then the odd and miraculous had lost its oddness: the strange became ordinary, ordinary split into categories, and the categories became politics.
Seventy percent of humanity bore some thread of the uncanny; thirty percent did not. That simple ratio rewrote how cities were defended, how economies functioned, how houses were built and laws were argued. It birthed pride, then fear, and from fear it birthed ideology.
Two names rose to catch the public's breath: Avalon and Saint.
Avalon proclaimed destiny as privilege. Why hide the sun behind the lowly when it could rule, Avalon pamphlets argued, unless the bright were the sort to be kept in lanterns and the rest made servants?
The Saint faction answered with other words: protection, stewardship, coexistence. They taught that power was a responsibility and that those without it were not mere collateral. Where Avalon sought crowns, the Saints built shelters.
When words failed, weapons were tested.
The war did not look like the wars of old. It tore at people the way tectonic plates tear at the surface: sudden, grinding, and with whole cities readjusting. Armies of gifted men and women were butchered not for territory but for principle. Alliances formed like ice on a river — fast, brittle, and capable of sweeping the unwary under.
Families were the fulcrum. Some gave their banners to Avalon — the Walkers and Mercers and Coopers, families of storm-callers, mimics, and shadow-walkers who liked the idea of order with themselves at the blunt end. Some planted their standards with the Saints: the Millers and Johnsons and Davises, sworn to frontline strength, barriers, and healing sanctuaries.
When the Kane sigil fell into the Avalon fold, the scales tilted like a ship listing to a heavy starboard.
The Kanes had always been anomalies. Where a gifted family bore one manifestation — a single signature ability — the Kane line had a law of multiplicity: their blood carried the shape of different gifts. A Kane child might wake with the ability to knit light into physical objects and another might be able to command flora and fauna. And it was not only breadth that defined them, but intensity: Kane manifestations sat higher on the scale. Three notches above the common standard, old soldiers would say. A telekinetic among the grateful could lift a man; a Kane could lift a column and set it spinning like a toy.
That difference meant leverage. That leverage meant danger. That danger meant generals took notes.
So Richard Kane — twenty-three, heir, and almost handsome in the way someone is handsome when they have never had to plead for mercy — found himself standing where history often kills men: on the ridge of a field the Avalon had named and the Saints had christened with curses.
Smoke crawled along the valley bottom like a living thing. Fires flared where houses had been; where the Saints had tried to shield a village with domes of light, Avalon storms had torn them apart. Between the two lines, men and women moved as if the battlefield were a new weather. Powers rose and died like lightning. The sky looked as if someone had taken a knife to it.
Alistair Kane stood with Richard on a slab of shattered earth, the elder's coat a dark banner. His hair had touched gray at the temples, but his shoulders carried the weight of a man who bent the weight of the world itself. When he raised his hands, the ground seemed to lean with him.
The hush came as natural as breathing. Soldiers fell silent. Shadows bent closer. Avalon eyes turned toward their patriarch.
Alistair's voice cut through the din like a hammer on steel:
"Look around you! Do you see gods? No. You see men clinging to scraps, praying to be spared! You see the weak pretending at equality. But you—" He lifted his arm, and rubble all across the ridge tore itself free of the ground, steel and stone hanging in the air like stars in orbit. "—you are not men. You are not sheep. You are power itself. And power does not beg. Power rules. Power conquers. Power endures."
The words struck like blows. The Avalon ranks roared back, slamming weapons against the earth, their voices carrying like thunder.
Alistair's tone dropped, cold and intimate:
"Tonight, we break them. Tonight, the Saints learn there is no coexistence. There is only submission… or extinction."
The cheer that followed shook the valley.
And then the clash began.
From the Saint side, the Miller family advanced first — hulking juggernauts with fists that shattered asphalt, skin dense as stone. The Johnsons raised translucent walls of kinetic force, shimmering domes that held back artillery. Behind them, the Davis healers readied themselves, sleeves rolled to elbows, prepared to sew flesh and restore bone. And from the rear came a scream that tore across the air — the Thompsons, weaponizing sound, their resonance cracking steel and bursting eardrums.
Avalon answered in kind. Walker lightning spears rained down, splitting barriers. Mercer mimics lunged into close quarters, stealing gifts mid-strike and turning Saints' own power against them. Cooper shadows slid across the mud, pulling men down into dark nothing. And always, at the center, the Kanes — the eye of the storm.
Richard moved quickly, deliberately. A Saint captain swung a hammer of condensed sound at his chest. Richard caught the man's wrist. His hand pressed skin.
The captain screamed. His body convulsed, his eyes clouding as if glass had been poured over them. He staggered forward and his hammer smashed through his own comrade's ribcage before he collapsed, clawing at his skull, blood streaking his temples. Richard let him drop, his face unreadable, his fingers still wet.
Across the line, Alistair drew enemies to him like gravity itself. A Miller juggernaut and a Johnson barrier-bearer rushed him together — one swinging fists like piledrivers, the other layering shields of force.
Alistair's hand rose, and the Miller stumbled as invisible weight pressed down, knees cracking under the burden of an unseen skyscraper. The Johnson's barriers bent inward, groaning, before collapsing like glass under a hydraulic press.
The Miller swung anyway, his fist colliding in a shockwave that staggered even Alistair — until the patriarch clenched his fist. Gravity snapped the Miller's spine like dry wood. The man collapsed with a howl.
The Johnson, desperate, raised one final shield. Alistair twitched his fingers. The barrier shrank to a marble-sized sphere, then imploded with a pop. The Saint screamed as his ribcage folded inward until silence swallowed him whole.
The battlefield went still around Alistair. Avalon surged forward, emboldened.
And Richard Kane stood in the smoke, blood dripping from his hand, his eyes cold, watching his father like a shadow studying the sun.