As expected, an independent warning array ringed the courtyard, finer than the outer barrier. Linked to key nodes inside, it would not only scream an alarm but likely strike back or lock down any intruder.
Jared held his breath, eyes brushing over faint sigils scorched into the threshold stones and the low wall. It was a layered Groundbinding Spirit Net Array—sensing, snaring, and stabbing in one spiteful weave. The heart of it had to be buried beneath the courtyard’s center. Force it or crack it loud, and Miles would hear; the whole quarter might wake.
So, Jared let the depth of his array craft unfold again. He lifted his right hand, index finger forward; at the tip, a fleck of grey chaos gathered, tiny enough to hide in dust. He aimed a fingertip at open air. Gray light sharpened into threads finer than hair and sank, without a sound, into the earth’s key runes.
Chaotic force, origin of every art, solvent of every art, hummed along those threads, eager to remake whatever it touched. Each filament slipped into the formation’s meridians, not tearing but numbing, coaxing the flow to forget its own shape. Where a current should report intruders, he pinched it into blind alleyways, tiny loops that talked only to themselves.
The silence felt surgical, the kind that belongs to a master physician holding his breath over a nerve. Three heartbeats later, the ward still glimmered at the gate, harmless as ever, yet under his touch it was now both blind and deaf. Jared’s figure blurred, sliding over the courtyard wall like a curl of smoke, landing without a whisper.
The yard was modest: three black-stone rooms in line, a training plinth to the left, a weapon rack to the right where cleavers and chains dripped a stinging, iron scent. From the middle house, a yellowish lamp leaked through the window; inside, a hulking shape sat cross-legged on a mat, breath uneven, brow knotted.
Miles, the butcher of Soulfall Slope—his face echoed Garth’s but darker, a jagged scar raking his left cheek, carving malice into every angle. Even at rest, his chest lifted too fast, and a bead of sweat collected at his temple, signs of a mind that could not settle. A moment earlier he had flinched, hand jerking to his heart as though something cold and unseen had threaded his spine. The tremor passed, but the unease stayed, circling him like a silent hound.
Jared remembered the rumors: Miles and Garth were twins who could taste each other’s trouble. If that bond had just gone slack, the butcher would feel the void in his bones.
“What in blazes… Did that brat Garth stir up trouble again, or…” Miles snapped his eyes open, a feral glint sharpening the question. His stare drifted, snagging on ghosts Jared could not see—perhaps the condemned man and woman from Soulfall Slope, the nightmares the rumors mentioned.
Miles shook himself, snarling, “Dead is dead. Their souls were boiled clean. They can’t claw their way back; must be my training wearing thin.”
He still pushed to his feet, intent on a round through the quarters to taste the night air and his own nerves. He moved toward the door, shoulders rolling, hand lifting for the latch. Just as his fingers grazed the wood, a jolt split the moment. Behind him the air rippled, faint as a sigh, as if an invisible stone had kissed a still pond.
Later, he would realize that in that instant the air three feet behind him had folded open, as if someone had stepped straight out of nothing. No warning reached him, no scent of steel, no rustle of fabric, not even the chill that usually rode on hostile intent. Only when a hand settled against the center of his back, so gentle it could have been a lover’s caress, did Miles’ nerves detonate.
Cold recognition punched through the calm he’d been holding. “Who…”
Terror ripped through every muscle; they locked into iron at once. The protective aura he’d spent decades mastering surged outward on reflex, a blazing shell of power. He threw himself toward the hallway’s mouth, lungs straining for the shout that would bring his guards running.
Unfortunately, he was too slow. The thought hit just as the world tilted. From that placid palm, a pull erupted—vast, hungry, impossible. It felt like the universe had chosen his spine as a drain and begun to empty itself through him. This was no ordinary spirit power, no icy ghost breath, no blistering inner flame. It was a raw, directionless hunger—chaotic force that intended to swallow, dissolve, erase.
The shining barrier around him met that hunger and evaporated like frost under sunlight. The pull bored inward. Every channel that once ferried energy through his limbs snapped, one after another, sharp as dry twigs. Deep in his core, the reservoir he had tended for centuries popped like a punctured lung. Power flooded out, but the force drank every drop before it could even taste the air. Then it shot upward, straight for the sanctuary behind his brow.
His very consciousness rallied, desperate to detonate, to scream a warning, but the thing clasped it tight, fingers around a throat. Pressure mounted, slow, inexorable, like massive stones grinding grain until nothing but dust remained.
“Ugh! Ugh…”
Miles’ eyes bulged, webbed with red. His jaw fell open, yet only a broken hiss slipped out—no word, no cry. Awareness slid backward, as though a tide were pulling him off a cliff. Light, sound, even weight abandoned him at terrifying speed. He tried to turn, to claim a single glimpse of his killer. His neck might as well have been carved from stone.
In the blurred edges of sight, one hand hovered, long-fingered, unwavering, as though it held the rules of the world inside its palm. A voice spoke inside his skull, so calm it chilled the marrow. “Go keep your brother company below.”
“Brother… Garth?”
A final spike of horror and disbelief flashed through Miles’ eyes. Then the light inside them went out. Somewhere far away, a dull, heavy pop echoed, like a sack of wet sand splitting open. Jared watched Miles’ broad torso buckle inward, as though the man had swallowed acid.
Flesh blistered, cracked, and then, like sun-baked clay, collapsed into dry charcoal flakes that sifted to the floor. Even the robe, the storage ring on the man’s thumb, everything the chaotic force had touched, frayed into soot and drifted away, leaving the air smelling of hot metal.
