The phantom bite came for his face.
It opened past the collapsing curtain of sand, already sliding through the groove it had carved, translucent teeth snapping shut on the space where his skull was supposed to stay attached.
Aydin did not move.
Not because he was brave. Because his hands were up and empty, and his body had reached that ugly stillness where panic runs out of new ideas.
Heat slammed into the jaw from the side.
A fireball hit it like a thrown sun.
The projection did not burn the way wood burned. It buckled. The edges fuzzed hard, like smoke getting slapped, and the cold it carried shattered into a scatter of needle-air that stung Aydin's cheek.
The bite snapped early with a crack like wet cloth ripped too fast, and the space in front of Aydin's face went suddenly, violently normal again.
Sand hissed where the heat kissed it. A few grains flashed into glass and popped.
Aydin dropped anyway, instinct finally catching up, knees hitting grit, shoulder twisting so he would not fall flat.
A booted step skidded into his peripheral.
A man moved through the street like he owned the chaos. Not tall in a storybook way, not broad in a tavern way, just built to stay on his feet when the world shoved.
His coat flared when he turned, and a thin thread of orange light pulsed under his sleeve for half a heartbeat, as if his veins were lit from inside.
Two fingers flicked, quick and practiced, like he was snapping ash off a cigar that did not exist.
He did not look at Aydin.
He looked at the air, at the empty space where the jaw had been.
Another flicker by the Riftbasilisk demon's mouth, a ripple like heat haze going the wrong direction.
The man's hand snapped out on the flick. Fire popped again, smaller, tighter, aimed at the ripple before it became teeth.
The ripple tore and vanished.
"Clear the lane!" he barked, voice sharp enough to cut the street clean. "Down. Stay down."
Of course.
Aydin sucked air like it was a trick. "Yes, sir. Big fan of living," he muttered, already folding down like his knees had opinions about survival.
He swallowed. Spit turned to paste.
His jaw buzzed with the ward-ring's strain like he had been chewing on a live wire.
The Riftbasilisk demon slid forward, coils rolling heavy as ship rope.
It did not lunge. It did not thrash. It moved with the patience of something that had all the time in the world to kill you and wanted you to notice that.
Its crystals climbed again, yellow then blue, yellow then blue, laddering up its face.
Aydin tried to lift a wall.
He did it before he chose to. Hands up, palms forward, the same motion that had made sand rise like it was on strings.
Nothing.
A few grains trembled near his boots like they had heard his name and decided to ignore it.
Every wall had felt like lifting wet stone with his bones, and now whatever meter he had been spending hit empty.
Not good enough.
He pinched his thumb and forefinger together.
He felt nothing.
Borrowed hands. Dead palms. Wires cut.
Okay.
So it is not "try harder." It is "out."
"Got it," he breathed. "Next time, I don't spend it all at once."
The demon's tail rose, segmented rings catching torchlight, stinger hovering like a thought made sharp.
Aydin flinched toward it, shoulders hunching, bracing for the puncture.
The stinger did not strike.
The demon's head tilted instead, just a fraction, and its crystals flared brighter.
A ripple formed in the air by its mouth, quick as a blink.
That was the tell.
The jaw did not appear at random. It formed where the demon angled its head, where those crystals "looked," like the magic needed a line to bite along.
The phantom jaw snapped into being not at Aydin, but at the knot of bodies funneling toward the Veil.
Toward the barrier.
Toward the place where people thought safety lived.
A child's sob cut off mid-breath.
Aydin started forward without thinking, useless hands raised like a joke. "Hey. Over here. I'm the easy meal," he hissed at the air.
A line sang through the street.
A hookline, taut and whining, snapped around the waist of a panicked man about to sprint into open sand.
The man yelped as he got yanked backward, feet leaving the ground. He hit grit hard and kept scrambling, eyes wide, but he was alive.
A woman in dark leathers planted herself between the moving crowd and the open street, braced like she was holding back a flood with her ribs.
One hand held a weapon that looked wrong in the torchlight, long and compact, like a cross between a musket and an archer's nightmare.
The other hand slapped a charm against a post.
The charm flared once.
The wood near it took on a thin sheen, as if it had remembered it was supposed to be part of a ward.
Someone else, hood up, face smeared with soot, grabbed a kid by the back of the shirt and hauled them behind a fallen door without slowing.
The kid kicked and screamed until a hand clamped over their mouth, hard, not cruel, survival-ugly.
The phantom jaw hit the makeshift ward-sheet and stuttered.
It dragged through anyway, shaving it, chewing a pale groove, edges fuzzing, teeth losing clarity for the fraction.
That fraction was everything.
The kid's head missed the bite by a handspan.
Heat blasted over them.
The fire man snapped his wrist again, and the projection tore apart like smoke caught in a storm.
The demon's tail stayed high, motionless, as if it enjoyed watching them react.
It was not a beast in a rage.
It was an engine.
Aydin lifted his hands again because he did not know what else to do.
Nothing.
He stared at his fingers. He curled them.
They looked like fingers. They did not feel like his.
"Come on," he whispered to them, quieter now, like pleading would not embarrass him if nobody heard. "One more. Ugly is fine. Just… one."
The sand answered with a pathetic twitch.
The fire man finally spared him a glance.
Not a warm one. Not a cruel one.
A measurement.
"You," he snapped, and the word was not a name. "Out of the lane. Now."
Aydin got halfway upright and wobbled.
"Yeah. Right. I'll go be useless somewhere safer," he said, breathless, and stumbled sideways before the man could decide to throw him.
The demon slid another coil forward.
Its head angled toward the Veil.
It did not slam it.
It pressed its crystal-studded jaw to it like it was listening.
The Veil answered with a strained whine, high and glass-thin.
Dust along the boundary jumped and hung higher.
Then the sound dipped.
Not gradual.
Not natural.
It dipped like a throat trying to make a different noise.
A low growl vibrated through the street, deep enough to make the grit under Aydin's boots dance in place.
The wardstone on the temple steps flashed pale-blue, then dimmed, then flashed again.
Stuttering.
A coin-sized gap flickered in the Veil, a hole no bigger than a mouth.
For that half-beat, everything went wrong.
No whine. No dust halo.
A brief, clean hole of silence, like the world forgot sound existed.
That is the sound of dying.
Then it snapped shut and the screaming rushed back in, louder, like it had been held underwater and released.
Aydin did not have words for wards, but he had words for holes in walls when something hungry was on the other side.
One breath of failure.
That was all it needed.
"It's stuttering!" someone shouted, not panicked, procedural.
"Hold the edge!" another voice answered. "Do not let it press!"
The demon's tail dipped slightly.
A feint.
Every eye went to it.
Aydin's included, because he was apparently still human enough to be fooled by the obvious threat.
The demon punished that flinch.
Its crystals laddered yellow then blue and the phantom jaw formed again, lower this time, aimed not at the Veil, not at the wardstone, but at the bodies packed behind the barrier.
Not to break the ring.
To harvest the breath the instant it flickered.
The fire man moved like he had been waiting for that exact mistake.
His palm came up, fingers half-curled, and a tight fireburst snapped at the forming projection.
The jaw fuzzed at the edges, but it did not vanish.
It dragged forward anyway, teeth half-there, chewing through air and fear.
Aydin heard it, that wet-cloth rip sound that did not match anything on Earth.
A crew member, the one with the hookline, dove.
Not away.
Toward.
He tackled a stranger's hips and yanked them sideways, hard enough to bruise ribs, just to clear the bite line.
The phantom teeth snapped shut where their heads had been.
Cold brushed hair and stole breath and left nothing but empty space.
The bite ripped apart in fire a heartbeat later.
The man on the ground coughed once, then started laughing like he was about to vomit.
"Up!" the hookline man rasped, already pulling the stranger to their feet. "Move. Move."
Good guys.
No speeches.
Just hands.
Aydin grabbed the arm of an older man who had frozen, eyes locked on the Veil as if staring would keep it from failing.
"Hey," Aydin panted, voice doing the too-loud thing again. "I'm going to pull. You're going to walk. Deal?"
He hauled.
The man stumbled, then moved when Aydin shoved him behind a barrel.
Aydin's shoulder screamed.
His hands did not.
That wrongness crawled up his spine.
The demon slid forward another coil, silent, heavy.
Its tail lifted again.
The stinger's shadow crossed the street and, for a split second, crossed Aydin's throat.
His skin went tight.
The stinger did not strike.
It hovered.
It watched.
It waited for the next stutter.