A clear voice broke through. “This is not right,” the witch spoke. “Let them stay, and I will —”
Imbiad’s presence exploded.
The force hit like a shockwave. Yu’s body slammed back, but his spine was already pressed to the guild wall, leaving nowhere to go. The impact stole his breath.
Ice erupted from the ground in a sudden, violent burst, right within the circle of travellers. Jagged spears lanced upward, aiming to impale the witch from behind and below. The moment they touched her —
There was another pulse, a burst if discord, and the ice shattered.
Not with a simple break, not like ice cracking under pressure. No, the spears exploded into a storm of crystalline fragments, like thousands of mirrors bursting into millions of shards. They scattered in shimmering arcs, engulfing the air with prisms of moonlight. The sound was deafening, a high-pitched, splintering wail, as if the sky itself had fractured.
Imbiad staggered backward, hands clawing at the air as if trying to summon the ice back, but it was beyond him. Just a moments before, the wizard’s control had been overwhelming, the next, it was ripped away from him.
Yu stared at the tempest of shards. He could not process it. He stood rooted to the spot, battered and frozen, inside and out. He had seen, heard, and felt it all, but only in the barest physical sense of being there. His senses could not grasp more than a fraction of what was thrown at him, and his mind could handle even less. Everything blurred into a chaotic mass of sound and motion — distorted sensations and fractured impressions reduced to mere flickers of realisation:
Estingar drove his staff into the ground, shouting Imbiad’s name and more.
The white bird on the witch’s arm screamed, a layered discordant cry, as though a whole flock shrieked from a single beak.
Tirran and the beastkin clashed, and the ker intervened.
The beastkin was on the stone, sprawled several steps down.
The ker was in front of the witch, amidst the splintering ice fragments, shielding her from the guards.
The witch’s cage-lantern, its metal door hung open., Something was inside, not light, not fire, something alive, shifting, like liquid shadow, spilling through the gap.
Then
STILLNESS
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