Merideth lowered the lamp, the shadows stretching and deepening around her.

  “They say,” she began, her voice dropping into a practiced hush, “that a hundred years ago, the world began to dream the same dream. Lords in their manors, beggars in the gutters, children in their cradles. Even the dying.”

  “A void,” she whispered. “Darker than any night. And within it, a figure with eyes like burning emeralds.”

  Her fingers tightened.

  “He spoke. Always the same voice. The same language. Yet to those who heard it, the voice was nothing but static. Muffled. Distorted. They couldn't understand the words, and they couldn't remember the sound once they woke."

  Elma remained perfectly still. She didn't need to imagine the static. She could still hear the grit of it in the back of her mind.

  “Not long after,” Merideth continued, “the first rifts opened. Worlds we never knew existed tore themselves into ours. The survivors came first—burned, starving, and carrying the exhaustion of centuries of resistance. And then…"

  She hesitated. “The calamity followed them. The Tide.”

  “Millions died. And millions more were claimed. The survivors all told the same story. In their homes, it had begun the same way. First, the dreams. Then, the green-eyed entity. Then, the end.”

  She turned her gaze toward Elma, the firelight reflecting in her spectacles.

  “Some believe he led the calamity here. That he walks ahead of it, and the Tide follows where his shadow falls. Others believe he was a warning—a herald trying to tell us to run, using a language we were too deaf to hear… no one truly knows.”

  A faint, bitter smile touched her lips before she reached out and turned the light back up, the sudden brightness stinging Elma’s eyes.

  “Well,” Merideth said, her voice returning to its normal, weary tone. “I hope you enjoyed the story.”

  Elma kept her eyes on the painting. The static, the void, the emerald gaze—it was all an exact match. But the mystery of the Shepherd’s goal was now eclipsed by a cold realization.

  The world saw him as a harbinger of the end. A thing that arrived before ruin.

  And Elma had shaken his hand.

  A sharp scrape of metal on wood cut through the silence left by the Shepherd’s tale.

  Jorm returned, her face set in a mask of grim determination. She was hauling a monstrosity—a giant, rusty slab of iron that was easily the size of a grown man. Her bag now hung limp and empty at her side.

  “What are you doing with that?” Merideth asked, her voice trembling.

  “I want it to be my schema,” Jorm said, her voice strained as she fought the gravity of the steel.

  “Absolutely not,” Merideth snapped, the storyteller’s mystery replaced by a mother’s terror. “You are not using weapons. Not now, and that is final.”

  “Please… Mama.”

  “No.” Merideth left no room for debate.

  Elma watched the exchange from her stool. She looked at the sword—pitted with age, the edge jagged and orange with oxidation. “It’s not in good shape,” Elma said, her voice flat. “You don’t want to save it like that. A flawed schema creates a flawed construct.”

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  “She will not be saving it in any shape, any time soon!” Merideth’s gaze snapped to Elma, her composure fracturing.

  The sight of the blade seemed to have invited an unwelcome ghost into the room.

  A man’s sword left to rot under a bed, a widow in a wheeled chair, a daughter desperate for power.

  What happened to Jorm’s father?

  “That’s true…” Jorm murmured, looking down at the rust. “Then we should clean it.”

  “Jorm!” Merideth shouted.

  “She has to learn, Merideth,” Elma interjected. “Weaker is never better. The world doesn't care if she's 'too young'."

  Merideth’s gaze snapped back to Elma. For a moment, the two stared at each other.

  Elma’s unmoving gaze seemed to act as a cold splash of water, forcing Merideth to see the unreasonable reality of their world.

  Merideth lowered her head, the fight draining out of her.

  Jorm lowered the sword with a heavy thud. She moved to her mother's side and took her hand. “I’ll be careful, I promise.”

  Merideth patted Jorm’s head, a single tear escaping her spectacles. “Jorry, my sweet child… you don’t have anything to prove. You are still so young…”

  Jorm’s face tensed, her jaw locking as her fist tightened around her mother’s fingers. “Of course,” she said, raising her head with a sharp, forced clarity. “I just want to be able to protect you.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  Jorm pulled away. The tenderness was gone, replaced by a cold, desperate hunger. She reached for the hilt of the massive sword.

  “You can’t even carry it,” Merideth whispered.

  Jorm spread her legs in a wide stance. Her face reddened, the veins in her neck bulging as she tried to heave the iron upward.

  It didn't budge.

  “You can’t do it,” Merideth repeated.

  Elma simply watched.

  Then, her eyes widened.

  Elma felt it—the atmospheric shift. Jorm’s Aegis was retreating. It was being sucked inward, coating her bones and weaving into the fibers of her muscles.

  Jorm grunted, a low, guttural sound of pure effort. The floorboards beneath her small feet began to groan and crack.

  The sword started to rise.

  Elma blinked. Internal Reinforcement.

  Jorm was doing it by sheer, stubborn instinct.

  With a final, explosive heave, Jorm raised the sword. She held it upright, the tip pointing toward the ceiling. She was gasping for air, her eyes burning.

  Slowly, she lowered one hand. She swung the massive slab of iron effortlessly with the other, the weight of the metal cutting a violent arc through the air.

  Merideth went silent. The protest died in her throat.

  “Let’s go,” Jorm said, the sword resting on her shoulder as if it weighed nothing at all.

  Elma looked at Merideth. The woman looked away, her face a mask of quiet mourning.

  As Elma crossed the threshold, Merideth’s voice followed her.

  "Please... take care of her."

  Elma paused. She stood for a moment in the cool night air before continuing into the shadows.

  Jorm walked ahead, the massive slab of iron swinging in her hand. Elma watched her with a narrow, calculating gaze. She had judged Jorm’s intellect poorly, perhaps, but she had underestimated her.

  The sword had moved before Jorm absorbed her entire Aegis.

  Elma’s eyes narrowed.

  That meant Internal Reinforcement didn’t require total compression. Only a fraction of the Aegis needed to be drawn inward. The strength gained would scale with the percentage absorbed.

  A quiet relief settled in her chest.

  She wouldn’t have to collapse her field past the ten-meter radius to use it. She could expand it, and siphon only what she needed into her body.

  If she ever managed to learn how to do it.

  "How can we clean it?" Jorm asked, interrupting Elma’s internal calculations. She held up the sword, the rust flaking off in orange scabs.

  Elma didn’t answer with words. She stopped in the center of the darkened alley and spread her arms. Behind her, the air rippled as four spheres of translucent water manifested. With a flick of her fingers, she elongated them, stretching the spheres into shimmering Auxiliaries.

  She took the sword from Jorm’s hands. The auxiliaries coiled around the blade, constricting with violent force.

  Elma induced high-frequency micro-currents within the water, scrubbing the rust off. She narrowed the currents at the edge of the blade, moving fast enough to shave the molecular surface of the steel.

  The water turned a muddy, sickly brown. When Elma was finished, the water splashed onto the cobblestones, leaving behind a blade that gleamed with a cold, predatory silver.

  She lowered the weapon back into Jorm’s hands with her Aegis.

  Jorm caught the hilt, her eyes wide, reflecting the moonlight off the now-polished steel. The excitement on her face was almost blinding.

  "Are you sure you want to save that?" Elma asked, watching her student silently admire the weapon.

  Jorm ran a thumb along the flat of the blade, her expression shifting from excitement to something deeper.

  "Gund," Jorm whispered. "Its name is Gund."