Next to Yu, she stepped onto the platform. All around him snapped still.

The air, moments ago suffocated with tension, clashing rage and wild magic, turned hollow. Yet, it was not emptiness he felt, but a void with structure; the echo of something vast retreating until all that remained was the shape of its absence — as though the last reverberation of a colossal bell had just faded, when the sound itself was gone but its tremor still hummed through the marrow of stone and bone.

Yu gasped and pushed himself upright. He stared at the shaman.

With her shimmering petals and cloak, she looked like a drifting veil of ice flowers. No — that was not it, not anymore. That quiet grace belonged to another setting, to the safe confines of the guild’s common room. Beneath the smoke-thick rafters and the soft lie of orblight, she had seemed composed and adorned in frost-blossoms. Out here, beneath black dome of the Albweiss sky, that illusion collapsed. The silvery shimmer was still there, but it was the shimmer of blades. What cloaked her was no floral mantle but interlocking scales; the sharp-edged armour of a predator. And though Yu had no name for what she was, or had once been before turning shaman, he could feel it now, coiled in the hush that followed her.

He had not seen it before, or had not been ready to see, but he had heard it — faint, buried in her speech; a first trace of something much grander; that splintering edge in her voice, not sound but substance. But where he had heard all but the faintest traces of ice, he now recognised something strong and ancient in her. It was not in her appearance, nor in her presence alone, but in the negative space around her — he heard the quiet that contoured around her. She was terrifying in the way glaciers are terrifying, still and silent, hauntingly beautiful yet powerful beyond understanding.

What did she do? Did she — Did she stop the magic? Yu’s gaze broke free, flickering desperately across the others. Or was it Estingar with the staff? The bird? The witch with the lantern — When had it closed? That black smoke, is it back inside? What even was that? His mind thrashed, useless. Everything he recognised or remembered forked into more questions.

The shaman spoke, and her voice cut through the chaos he felt within, and through the eerie emptiness around: “I am the shaman of this guild, and I have heard your plea. Travelling witch, would you submit yourself to a Transcender wizard’s reading to ascertain your intentions?”

The travelling party stared.

So did Yu. His thoughts lagged behind his breath. He was breathing, yes, shallow and fast, but it felt like something he was doing from very far away, while the shaman’s words unspooled through his mind. They began to take form, to gain weight and shape, until —

Wait, what?

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