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It was horror. It was death.

The shards reacted before she could. Their pulsing escalated into a violent staccato of gold and silver light, skittering wildly across the tables. Maia tried to scream but nothing came out.

Each fragment brightened in sequence as the creature moved, dimming again the moment it stilled, like something charting a shape in the dark that her eyes couldn’t follow on their own. Maia had noticed this before, faintly, whenever Caelith entered a room. This was that same instinct, magnified into something closer to alarm.

She backed away, palms sweaty, legs trembling. She had nothing. No weapon. No training. Only the shards, humming wildly, vibrating against the wooden tables as if trying to leap into her hands.

Without deciding to, she found herself moving toward the ones burning brightest, as though they were pulling her toward whatever they could sense that she couldn’t.

She followed their tug, weaving between tables, every breath sharp. She kept her eyes on the creature, though each glance sent a twist of nausea through her.

Then a metallic clatter sounded from the doorway.

Julen.

He stumbled in, breathless, eyes widening at the sight before him. “Maia!”

He reached for anything. A scroll tube, a metal rod, something he could swing, but he barely had time to raise it. The room seemed to fold inward.

The creature moved first. Then it vanished.

Less than a second later, Julen’s body jerked upward. He slammed into the table hard enough to splinter the wood. Before he could draw breath, a claw raked down his torso.

Julen’s scream tore through the chamber.

“Julen!” Maia gasped, the shards flaring behind her.

She lifted the nearest fragment on instinct. The glow burst outward, pushing the creature backward by inches. But it was enough. The creature inhaled slowly, as if smelling her, its too-wide mouth twisting unnervingly.

Then the shadows at the doorway shifted again. Someone stepped through them.

Caelith.

He didn’t speak. His eyes swept the room once - the creature, the scattered shards, Julen on the floor - and something in his expression sharpened into a focus she’d never seen from him, not even against the glasshounds or in the ruins.

As he moved, Maia heard it: a faint, unmistakable rattle beneath the shards’ hum. Metal, tightening.

Light from the shards fractured across the dark folds of his coat, outlining the precise, controlled movements he made as he drew power from the fragments’ hum.

The creature lunged.

Its claw came down fast enough to split stone. Caelith barely turned it aside - a glancing deflection, not a strike, his blade angled to redirect rather than to cut. Maia realised with a jolt that he wasn’t fighting to kill it. Every movement he made seemed to hold something back, a strength he wasn’t using, as though unleashing it fully would cost more than the wraith itself was worth.

He dodged the second blow. The third connected, claws slicing across his ribs. The sound was sickening, a screeching scrape against bone. Caelith staggered, but his posture snapped back into place instantly.

Julen struggled to sit up, blood soaking his shirt in thick, spreading patches. He tried to push to his feet, but failed. “Caelith—behind you—!”

The creature struck again.

Caelith blocked the blow with his forearm, earning a deep, bleeding gouge. He hissed but did not falter. “Maia,” he said sharply. “Now.”

She didn’t understand the word so much as feel it - the shards in her hands surged hot against her palms in the same instant. Her body moved on the memory of it: she’d seen him draw on their light before, in his chamber, the night the memory stone glowed beside his hand.

She didn’t know what she was doing. She only knew the shards wanted to be pointed, and so she pointed them.

Her grip tightened. The cluster thrummed in response, and light surged outward in a blinding pulse.

The creature reeled, limbs twisting like vines caught in a storm.