The words rippled through the absolute silence of the chamber.
If those words had been said to Evelyn before, she would have dismissed them as superstition. Science had been the only law she trusted. Yet she had seen, before death, phenomena on a scale that science could not explain. She did not understand how she had survived. She only knew that something had been special inside her—something he had tried to seize. When he could not, he enslaved her.
She expected what came next. She had catalogued human minds for centuries; their patterns were predictable.
She closed her eyes and braced—not with sorrow, for she did not know sorrow, but with the cool readiness of a mind preparing to observe. When pain came, it was as she had predicted: a ritual more than agony. Her mother's fingers bent, and Evelyn found herself suspended by an invisible force, lifted, the cradle of her body made meaningless.
"You parasite. You are a stain in the name of Ignis," her mother hissed—Stella—voice threaded with disgust as heat licked at Evelyn's throat.
Magic bit into flesh. The skin along her neck sizzled and blackened. She began to gasp, the reflex of lungs newly learning to pull air. Her limbs flailed.
The priest stared, eyes wide, horrified that a child could be treated thus. The king watched, impassive.
Pain registered as data. The force holding her was not mechanical; it was a field—an energetic pinning that left no contact points, no fingerprints. It moved like a pattern of pressure in the air. Unknown. Interesting.
Curiosity sparked even as choking threatened. She mapped the sensation: temperature gradient, tissue damage, the rate of oxygen loss. Hypothesis: death by asphyxiation within minutes if unrelieved. Observation: a secondary, stabilizing field was already forming around her torso, softening the flail of small limbs.
The king's voice cut through: "Enough, Stella." Command, not plea.
Stella's expression shifted only a degree; she lowered her hands and let the magic fall away. The burn on Evelyn's neck was deep, cratered—evidence left on an instrument. Evelyn drew breath back in shallow, measured gulps and gauged the king. His face offered no tenderness, only calculation.
Probably to kill me in some way, she thought. Not an emotion. A prediction.
The king slammed a staff to the floor. A maid entered, head bowed. The king looked at the priest. "You did not see anything," he said flatly.
The priest swallowed and nodded.
The king turned to the maid. "Put her to sea."
The maid bowed and left without question.
Down corridors and through a maze of cold stone the maid carried Evelyn, cradling the still-smoking wound as if it were an inconvenient object. At the cliff a raft waited—rudimentary, unadorned. The maid set Evelyn upon it, touched the staff to the planks, and the sea rose as if summoned. A soft surge slid the raft away from shore; the current would carry it, and the world would consider the problem solved.
Evelyn watched the tide take her. She did not weep. She catalogued the ocean's rhythm, the salt's abrasiveness on charred skin, the probability of rescue versus the probability of drowning. Each possibility folded into another. Every system has flaws. Seeing the rules was always the first step to breaking them.