The courtyard no longer felt like stone.
It felt like a threshold.
The Porcelain Stag stood fractured but intact, its ceramic hide webbed with glowing fault lines from prior containment attempts. Its hollow eyes reflected everything and committed to nothing. It was searching for its next stable narrative.
Opposite it stood the Phase Adjudicator.
He was younger than most patrol officers, but there was no hesitation in him. His movements were deliberate in the way of someone trained not merely to suppress thought—but to weaponize structure.
In his hands rested the Dualis Lance.
Unlike containment rods, which disrupted from the outside, the Dualis Lance was built for internal correction. Its segmented shaft housed two phase-channel conduits, each calibrated to direct a specific law in controlled measure. The twin prongs at its head were not blades but anchors—designed to latch onto instability and impose ordered phase structure.
Gravemarch was only one of its configurations which coupled Red compression and Blue inversion.
There were others—Verdantlock, Tidebind, Auric Refrain—each named for the law they manipulated and the philosophy behind it. But Gravemarch was the most commonly deployed against Echo Fractures.
Because shame was weight.
The Adjudicator lifted the lance.
"Gravemarch," he said quietly.
The prongs rotated, aligning along a vertical axis.
Red Mode engaged.
This was not the crude compression of thrown dampeners. Gravemarch Red Mode applied layered gravitational increments in rhythmic pulses, synchronized to the wielder's step. Each advance deepened the space beneath the target rather than crushing indiscriminately.
He stepped forward.
The ground beneath the Stag compressed in a tight ring.
Ceramic hooves sank fractionally.
The Stag reacted instantly, angling its body to fracture distance and escape the compression wave. It lunged sideways—but the Adjudicator adjusted mid-step, redirecting the pulse with a sharp pivot of the lance shaft.
Red surged again.
Not wider.
Denser.
The Stag staggered.
Its glaze shifted, reflecting the Adjudicator's own history now—near failures, borderline calls, moments where a civilian's survival had depended on a fraction of timing.
It attempted to anchor to his doubt.
The Adjudicator did not look at the reflection.
He switched.
Blue Mode engaged.
The lance emitted no flash, no spectacle. Instead, the air around the Stag bent subtly, as if gravity itself hesitated.
Blue law inverted internal orientation.
Not enough to dismember.
Enough to misalign.
The Stag's limbs struck the ground a half-second before its perception registered impact. Its forward momentum desynchronized from its balance. Each movement fed contradictory signals into its structure. For the onlooker, it looked like the stag almost forgot to walk.
From where Caelum stood, it did not look like gravity or inversion or law. It looked like inevitability bending. Each time the Adjudicator stepped, the world seemed to grow heavier in that direction, as though the air itself had decided the Stag did not belong there. And when the lance shifted, the creature's movements went wrong—not slower, not weaker, but misaligned, like a reflection that moved half a heartbeat out of sync with its body. The Adjudicator did not overpower the Stag. He disagreed with it. He walked forward as if rewriting the space beneath his boots, and the Stag was forced to argue with every step.
The Adjudicator advanced through the distortion and drove one prong into the fracture seam along the Stag's rib lattice.
He did not thrust violently.
He anchored.
Red returned instantly, focused through the embedded prong.
Compression tunneled inward along crack lines.
The Stag shrieked in resonance.
Its glaze flickered wildly, cycling through reflections—Toren's correction, patrol doubt, scaffolds, kitchens.
The kitchen lingered.
The dying breath.
If that memory locked—
The Adjudicator sensed it too. He drove the second prong in.
Blue surged.
The Stag twisted violently and tore free before full anchoring could complete. Ceramic splintered from its flank. It landed heavily, cracks blazing brighter than before.
It had nearly stabilized at a higher coherence.
Caelum saw the danger.
The Stag's reflective surface sharpened around the kitchen memory. Not humiliation. Structure. Completion.
Echo Fractures needed finality.
He did not step forward.
He did not raise a hand.
He altered the pattern quietly.
In the forming reflection, where his father's final breath crystallized into an ending, Caelum refused the ending.
He held the memory at the breath before.
Alive.
Unfinished.
He did not erase death.
He removed inevitability.
The Stag's glaze faltered.
The memory stuttered.
The conclusion failed to land.
That instability rippled through its lattice.
The Adjudicator moved immediately.
Red Mode surged in concentrated force through one prong as he drove the lance fully into the creature's core seam. Blue followed in a tightening inversion spiral, destabilizing cohesion from within rather than forcing it from without.
The Stag convulsed.
Cracks raced across its porcelain hide in branching networks.
Without stable reflection to anchor to, repetition lost precision.
The Adjudicator twisted the lance and drove one final compression pulse through the embedded seam.
The Porcelain Stag collapsed inward.
Not explosively.
Its structure imploded along its own fracture lines, ceramic folding into itself before dissolving into fine particulate that evaporated into Violet haze.
Silence reclaimed the courtyard.
The Adjudicator withdrew the lance and allowed Gravemarch to disengage.
Residual weight normalized.
Containment patrol moved swiftly, establishing a perimeter. Scavengers were directed back in measured lines. No one protested.
Two officers approached Toren.
"Cognitive Equilibrium Directive," one informed him.
The formal term.
In common speech, it was called Rebalancing.
A mandated period of supervised suppression recalibration, guided memory integration, and emotional redistribution. Weeks in controlled environment. Sometimes months.
Punishment in procedure.
Necessity in practice.
Toren nodded once.
No one blamed him.
Under endless Violet, stray thoughts were not moral failings.
They were phase liabilities.
And liabilities required adaptation.
As the courtyard cleared, the Adjudicator turned.
His gaze found Caelum.
There was no accusation there.
Only assessment.
And the faintest inclination of acknowledgment.
He had felt the fluctuation but he had not seen its source.
But he had felt it.
Then he secured the Dualis Lance along his back and walked toward the perimeter vehicles as patrol cordoned off the block for residual density sweep.
Above them, the unmoving sun remained suspended in diluted bruise-light.
The Stag was gone.
But something else had shifted.
Caelum had not suppressed.
He had shaped.
And someone who understood law had noticed.