The next morning, Elma sat on the stone bench, staring at the east wing. The jagged cracks, the sheared balconies, the exposed sinew of the manor's skeleton—it was all gone. The white stone stood pristine against the morning sky, smoothed over by the invisible hands of the Aether-benders as if the "titan" had never taken its bite.
Sable hadn't shown up last night. Elma had waited in the dark for hours, ready for the next lesson—how to touch the Aether—but the shadows remained empty.
Was she injured? Jorm had said the cat-masked woman and Christa drove the intruder away.
The sound of crunching gravel broke her focus.
Jorm came running from the direction of the rebuilt maid house, her face alight with a victory so simple it was almost pathetic. Four jagged chunks of granite circled her like miniature moons, orbiting her small frame.
The compression worked. By shrinking her domain to five meters, Jorm had found the leverage she lacked. She wasn't just trembling rocks anymore; she was governing their motion.
Jorm slowed as she approached the bench. "Look, my lady! I did it! I can keep them up even while I—"
The moment Jorm crossed the ten-meter threshold, the world went silent.
The four stones fell like corpses. They hit the damp earth with a series of dull thuds, half-burying themselves in the dirt.
Jorm stopped dead, her grin vanishing. She strained, her face turning deep crimson as she tried to seize the rocks again.
"I... I can't move them," Jorm whispered, her eyes wide with panic. "My lady, did I break it? Is my Aegis gone?"
Elma felt a sharp spark of curiosity. Is it because my Aegis is stronger? To her senses, Jorm's five-meter sphere had simply been swallowed by her own.
A light, predatory smirk curved her lips. It was a classic hierarchy of power—the greater weight always displaces the lesser.
"Stand still," Elma commanded.
She turned her gaze to the stones, her will a focused spear. She would snap them into the air, demonstrate the absolute difference between a pebble and the hurricane that consumed it.
She pushed.
Nothing. Not even a tremor.
Elma's eyes widened. She pushed harder. But the stones remained dead in the dirt. The air felt thick, stagnant—like water that had turned to tar.
She couldn't move them.
Elma's breathing turned heavy, the sound of her own heartbeat pulsing in her ears. Beside her, Jorm had her hands clutched to her head, her face pale.
"Both of our Aegis... they're broken," Jorm shouted. "My lady, what did we do?"
Elma didn't answer. Her mind was racing. If her one true weapon in this fragile body could be negated so easily, she was a dead girl walking.
She turned her head to the right, focusing on a small pebble three meters away, well outside of the space Jorm occupied.
She flicked her mind toward it. The pebble danced into the air, swirling with the sharp, violent grace Elma commanded.
It wasn't broken. It was interfered with.
She looked back at Jorm, who was startled by Elma's sudden, crushing silence. "My lady?"
This was a tactical nightmare.
Elma stood up, her body trembling not from fear, but from the sheer strain of calculating this new variable. She needed leverage. She needed to understand the "math" of this void.
Jorm's domain had been compressed from thirty meters down to five. Elma's had been crushed from an impossible 7.5 kilometers down to ten. The density was completely different.
"Stay there," Elma ordered.
She walked twenty meters away. "Lift the stones," she barked.
Jorm obeyed, her face lighting up with relief as the rocks rose around her again. Elma didn't wait. She expanded her Aegis, pushing the boundary from ten meters to twenty. The moment the edge of her invisible sphere passed Jorm, the stones dropped.
Her breathing slowed as the pattern emerged. She walked thirty meters away. Then forty. Fifty. Every time she expanded her domain to "swallow" Jorm, the girl's power vanished.
While Elma had a radius of dominance over the surrounding space, Jorm's five-meter sphere wasn't being "beaten"—it was being excluded.
Elma felt the space Jorm occupied as a hole in her own perception. It was a blind spot.
That's why I couldn't latch on to Nagin. That's why I couldn't move Sable. Because they were compressed, they existed as "voids" inside her domain.
She looked at Jorm, who stood defenseless within Elma's Aegis.
To prove the point, Elma reached for a bucket of water sitting near the garden bench. With a sharp flick of her Aegis, she sent the contents flying toward the girl.
"Stop it," Elma commanded, her voice flat.
Jorm let out a small scream. She flailed her arms, trying to stop it, but the water hit her full-force, soaking her apron and hair. She stood there, dripping and confused.
So the space where their domains overlapped became a dead zone for both users, Elma noted. But that only happened when the overlapping Aegis was compressed.
Fifty meters, and her own domain was still holding firm against interference. She wanted to know the maximum scale it could reach while keeping that property. For Jorm, the limit was five meters—but how far could hers extend?
The system was far more complicated than Elma had ever imagined. Her mind, desperate for control, began to map the permutations—density ratios, exclusion thresholds, recursive voids—faster than her four-year-old brain could withstand.
"Why did you do that?" Jorm asked, her voice trembling as water dripped from her hair. She looked down at her soaked apron with a look of genuine heartbreak. "I don't have another one..."
Elma didn't answer. She didn't even hear her.
Suddenly, a white-hot spike of agony drove through Elma's skull, as if her brain was trying to expand against the bone. The garden tilted. Her legs gave way, and she hit the dirt hard, her head pulsing with a metronomic, agonizing rhythm.
She curled into a ball on the grass, trembling violently. In her mind, the Aegis was no longer a tool; it was a labyrinth of geometry and void she had to solve.
I need to understand it... I need to be the best... so no one can ever touch me again. So Nagin can't reach me.
The "Iron" in her mind was spiraling out of control, grinding against itself in the dark.
Then, something cold and damp pressed against her.
Jorm had dropped to her knees and pulled Elma into a tight, frantic hug. The girl's wet apron was freezing against Elma's skin, and the smell of garden dirt and laundry soap filled her senses. It was a miserable, soggy embrace.
Yet, as the cold water soaked into Elma's clothes, the shivering began to subside.
The physical sensation acted like a lightning rod. It pulled the "Aether" and the "Aegis" and the "System" out of Elma's spiraling thoughts and tethered her back to the dirt, the garden, and the shivering girl holding her.
"Everything is okay," Jorm whispered as she pulled back just enough to look Elma in the eyes, her own welling with fresh tears that threatened to spill over. "No one is coming for us again. The guards... the Alloys... they'll protect us."
Jorm wiped her nose with her wet sleeve, a small, fragile smile flickering on her face. "And all the people who died... they're in heaven now. They're happy. They're watching over us."
Elma looked at her for a long moment, watching Jorm's face soften as she took comfort in her own statement. Jorm truly believed it. To her, the universe had a safety net—a place where the broken were mended and the dead found peace.
She searched her own memory, reaching back to the moment the Strategoi's strike had ended her first life. She remembered the feeling of her consciousness dissolving. She remembered the cold. But beyond that?
Nothing.
When Elma died, there was only a vast, swallowing darkness. where her consciousness had flickered like a dying ember before being shoved into this new body.
She didn't correct the girl. She simply let the cold water of the apron continue to anchor her to the present.
---
Elma, her own clothes damp from the embrace, led a shivering Jorm across the dew-strewn lawn and into the quiet sanctuary of the nursery, the morning sun filtering through the high windows and illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air.
Elma opened her wardrobe, pulling out a handful of silk and fine linen dresses. To her, they were just fabric; to Jorm, they were artifacts of a world she didn't belong to.
"I—I can't, my lady," Jorm stammered, her eyes wide as she looked at a pale blue dress with silver embroidery. "I don't deserve this. I'm just a maid... these are worth more than my life."
"Wear them," Elma said, her voice leaving no room for argument.
After Jorm changed, Elma slipped out to the kitchen, returning with a tray of bread, cold meats, and fruit. Jorm was hesitant at first, her stomach let out a loud, traitorous growl. Within minutes, the girl was eating with a desperate intensity, her cheeks puffed out like a squirrel's.
Elma watched her from the edge of the bed.
If Jorm fell ill, the next testing session would be delayed. She's a unique variable—the only other Aegis user I could experiment on at the moment.
As they left the nursery and headed back toward the garden, a flicker of movement caught the edge of Elma's perception.
A single, stray strand of silver hair fluttered for a moment before disappearing behind a marble pillar.
Christa.
The Lady of the House was following her.
Elma felt the weight of that gaze on her back, but she didn't slow down. She looked straight ahead, her face a mask of porcelain indifference as she guided Jorm through the halls.
A week passed in a state of suffocating stillness. Sable was still missing, while Christa's presence became a constant, silver shadow—always lingering just beyond the boundary where Elma's Aegis could no longer reach her.
It was a silent, mutual game of observation that Elma preferred to her locking herself back in the Solar.
Until, finally, the ghost spoke. Standing at the far end of the garden path, Christa's voice cut through the quiet, delivering the words that would finally bring the "Red Shore" to their doorstep:
"Your father arrives tomorrow."