A Classroom That Should Not Exist
The lecture hall was folding inward when they arrived.
Not collapsing.
Converging.
Rows of desks bent at impossible angles, their legs elongating, merging, re-merging as if the room were trying to decide what shape it wanted to be. Sigil-lamps screamed in harmonic dissonance, their light stuttering between colors that had no names.
Students were trapped inside.
Frozen.
Not restrained by force—but by indecision.
Reality couldn't decide whether they were present or already gone.
"Hold the perimeter!" Kael roared as Combat Division instructors formed a half-circle around the warped entrance. "No forced entry! Anyone touches that threshold without my order, I'll personally—"
Caelum walked past him.
Kael stopped mid-sentence.
Didn't shout.
Didn't grab him.
Just watched, jaw tight, as Caelum crossed the line that separated response from resolution.
Lira followed.
This time, no one tried to stop her.
The Anomaly Is Listening
The moment Caelum stepped into the hall, the pressure changed.
Not increased.
Focused.
The room stilled just enough to notice him.
Threads unfurled from his perception—white, silver, translucent—mapping not space, but conflict. Where the anomaly pulled. Where it hesitated. Where it had been instructed to hold something that no longer existed.
Lira felt it too.
Not as sight.
As pull.
Like standing between two people arguing and realizing neither of them actually knew why.
"This isn't hostile," she whispered.
"No," Caelum replied. "It's confused."
The Dominion observers bristled.
Confused anomalies didn't exist in their manuals.
Only unstable ones.
Students Inside the Fold
A boy hung half-embedded in the ceiling, eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream. A girl knelt mid-step, one leg stretched impossibly long as space tried—and failed—to remember how far the floor was supposed to be.
Time was broken here.
Not stopped.
Looping.
Lira's chest tightened.
"They're alive," she said. "But if we pull them out—"
"They'll tear," Caelum finished.
He raised a hand.
The threads tightened.
Not outward.
Inward.
The anomaly responded instantly.
The walls relaxed a fraction.
The screaming lamps dimmed.
The observers outside gasped.
Halven's voice echoed from the far end of the corridor.
"What did he just do?"
Voss didn't answer.
She was watching too closely.
Caelum Explains Without Teaching
"I will not contain you," Caelum said aloud—not shouting, not chanting. Just… stating a fact.
The anomaly pulsed.
A pressure wave rippled through the room.
Lira staggered, then steadied.
"I will not suppress you," Caelum continued. "And I will not force you to close."
The walls creaked.
The desks shuddered.
The anomaly was reacting—not violently—but emotionally.
"Yes," Lira whispered. "That's it. It's reacting."
The Dominion observers exchanged alarmed looks.
Talking to anomalies was not allowed.
It was not sanctioned.
It was not safe.
Caelum lowered his hand.
"I will tell you why you're here," he said calmly.
The pressure stilled.
Threads converged.
"Your instruction was incomplete," he said. "You were designed to preserve a state that no longer exists."
The anomaly's pull slackened.
Space stopped stretching.
The room breathed.
The Anchor Steps Forward
Lira felt the opening.
Not instinctively.
Deliberately.
She stepped forward beside Caelum.
The bond flared—not hotter, not louder—clearer.
"You don't need to hold them," she said softly, voice echoing strangely in the warped space. "They're not what you were protecting."
The anomaly hesitated.
The air vibrated with indecision.
She continued.
"You were told to keep something from being lost," Lira said. "But it already is."
Her chest tightened.
"And that's okay."
Outside the hall, someone whispered:
"She's talking to it…"
Caelum glanced at her—not to stop her.
To confirm alignment.
She nodded once.
Resolution Without Force
The anomaly contracted.
Not violently.
Not explosively.
The stretched desks retracted. The ceiling released the boy gently, lowering him until his feet touched solid ground. The girl's leg shortened, reality remembering how bodies worked.
Time unknotted.
Students collapsed to the floor, coughing, crying, alive.
The lecture hall straightened.
Not perfectly.
But enough.
The anomaly condensed into a faint shimmer at the room's center.
A conceptual scar.
Residual.
Stable.
Caelum reached out—
and did not touch it.
He redirected the threads around it.
Guided it into dormancy.
The shimmer faded.
Gone.
The room was silent.
No alarms.
No backlash.
No containment flare.
Just breathing students and stunned instructors.
The Academy Watches
No one spoke for several heartbeats.
Then Kael let out a slow breath.
"…By the abyss."
A Dominion observer whispered:
"He didn't suppress it."
Another murmured:
"He didn't seal it."
Voss stepped forward slowly.
Her eyes never left Caelum.
"You didn't resolve the anomaly," she said.
Caelum met her gaze.
"No," he replied. "I resolved the contradiction."
The words hit harder than any explosion.
Halven swallowed.
"That… that can't scale."
Caelum didn't argue.
He didn't need to.
The room behind him—intact—did it for him.