It was panic itself, wearing my skin, that struck him.

  Up here, crouched in the high branches of the Chronoak, hood drawn tight and my rabbit ears moved by the wind, like they truly belonged to me, I could hear Adrian crystal clear below.

  [Funny much?] Anansi’s voice pulsed through the link with equal parts amusement and reproach.

  I exhaled a quiet laugh. Not now, I thought back to her, eyes scanning through shadowlight and leaves.

  “Four people around me, rifles up. It has to be a mage,” Adrian barked into his comms. His voice was sharp and brittle. A man who’d been caught off guard, angry about it. The others replied in clipped affirmatives, boots moving fast over dirt and debris. I stayed still, a smear of darkness painted into the bark.

  “Get drones on thermal vision. Find me the culprit.”

  That was my cue. Fortunately I wasn’t alone up here.

  It’s time, Anansi. Get Liora to work.

  The answer came not as words, but as a ripple of intent, a pulse shared across our link. I shifted my attention, and through the eye painted on Liora’s forehead, I saw.

  He cut through the sky like a needle through silk, the world below framed in silent motion. Wind, soft and heavy with heat, whistled past his body. The six drones hovering around the compound looked small from this height.

  Until Liora descended.

  He dropped fast and silent through darkness. The first drone never even saw him coming. Its rotors, nearly soundless from the ground, screamed up close, until Lio’s claws met its frame. Shadowlight crawled up his talons, coating them in fiery-colored mist, and then—impact. The drone came apart in two clean halves, tumbling through the air like falling stars.

  Liora didn’t stop. He twisted, caught the air, and launched himself off the debris, bounding through the currents like a weasel born for the sky. He picked up speed, coiling tighter, until he reached the second drone. This one he struck like a ram. Horns first, the collision lighting the sky with a sharp burst of white shadowlight.

  I flinched. The closeness of the strike made me feel it, as if I were the one colliding.

  But the vision gave me something else, a glimpse of motion near the trunk. A drone, smaller, creeping through the dark, scanning the branches where I hid.

  I drew a card from my holder, whispering a fragment of Authority into it until it hardened, shimmering like steel. Then, with one smooth motion, I threw it.

  It cut through the air, silent and merciless.

  Through the drone’s carbon shell and out the other side.

  The machine split apart mid-flight, its rotors dying one after another, as it fell in two neat halves toward the blazing earth below.

  The forest of fire swallowed the drone whole, but I’d been spotted.

  Adrian’s voice cracked through the chaos like a whip, barking orders as his hand shot upward, pointing straight at the Chronoak. White shadowlight flared around the heads of his soldiers, a halo of control and coordination, and they began to move, advancing toward the tree where I hid.

  Liora kept hunting above, a predator threading through smoke, his shadowlight carving invisible scars into the sky. I listened to their footsteps, the splashes of boots over frozen ground half-melted by flame, and weighed my options.

  “Three drones down,” Adrian shouted into the comms. “But the mage’s on the tree. Be careful not to destroy it.”

  He dropped to one knee then, pressing his hands flat against the ground. White shadowlight rippled outward like veins of frost. I didn’t like it. That kind of power infusing the terrain itself. Every instinct screamed at me to stay off the dirt, to cling to the branches. Whatever he was doing down there, it was meant to trap.

  Meanwhile, the firefighting effort pressed on. The great hose they’d dragged out hissed and roared, cutting through my earlier work. The handheld extinguishers were almost all spent. But I still had ten paintings left untouched, ten sleeping flames waiting for my call.

  My advantage was still clear, they didn’t know what hit them, or who. And once Liora finished with the remaining drones, they wouldn’t see me either.

  I just needed more chaos.

  And that—that I was very good at.

  I let a few of my sound cards fall from my perch, spinning lazily through the smoke before embedding themselves in the dirt below. Then, I picked one of the remaining fire-grafitti on the western wall and sent my Authority pulsing through it.

  The painting flared awake with a burst of warmth, light, and hungry energy and before the soldiers could blink, I vanished, reappearing beside the new fire as the inferno roared to life.

  I left another sound card behind, then scattered more. Thrown wide and fast, each one infused with steel to give them flight. They sang faintly as they cut through the air.

  “He teleported, sir,” one of the soldiers shouted.

  Of course it was he. Always was. Why would anyone assume a woman could tear a fortress apart?

  “I know that,” Adrian snapped. “I hear the comms too.”

  He turned his head toward the fresh blaze and toward me. For a heartbeat, our eyes met through the smoke.

  The fire painted me in motionless reds and blacks. A silhouette carved out of heat and shadow. My hood drawn low, my ears catching the glow like devil’s horns, scarf trailing behind like a flickering tail. For that instant, I saw him flinch.

  Then I was gone. Teleporting out, back to the first mark I made, the one far beyond the fort’s edge.

  In front of me, the inferno rose higher.

  And above, the night trembled with gunfire, rifles cracking like thunder as Liora danced between bullets and clouds, his scales catching the moonlight, a phantom in the storm.

  In his wild dance across the burning sky, I learned something about Liora and about his kind as a whole. Despite their small, almost delicate frames, they were born predators of the heavens. True cloud-snakes, living up to the name in full. He weaved through smoke and wind like it was nothing. Like an artist painting motion itself, each flicker of his body a brushstroke on the canvas of chaos.

  Sometimes he turned solid, cutting through the air with weight and precision. Other times, his form dissolved into shadowlight. He became fluid and intangible, bullets passing through him as if he were a ghost made of wind. Yet through it all, his forehead remained solid, carefully anchored to keep the painted eye intact, the one through which I watched his hunt unfold.

  He searched with senses that weren’t mine to understand, vanishing into the smoke where even my vision failed, only to reappear in flashes of violent grace. He’d erupt from the clouds like a thunderbolt, grabbing a drone mid-flight, crushing its metal spine between paws that existed only long enough to kill.

  And I realized something else, too: I hadn’t been using him right. Not nearly. He was more than a scout, more than a guardian. He was my blade in the wind and from now on, I would let him cut.

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  While he drew the guards’ eyes upward toward his chaotic ballet against the moons, I ran for the fort, my feet carrying me low and silent along the outer edge. The half-burned walls loomed before me, blackened and jagged, like the fangs of some ancient dragon sleeping beneath the embers.

  As my aura reached inward, I felt the pull of the cards I’d left behind. One by one, their faint links thrummed to life in my mind like strings waiting for a touch. I called to them, let my will slip down the connection, and they became what they were meant to be—sound.

  The first screamed. The second howled. Another roared like a siren, while yet another shrieked. Each had its own voice, its own madness. Together, they rose into a cacophony, an orchestra with no conductor, a music of chaos that filled the night until even the fire seemed to move to its rhythm.

  The guards shouted, their formation fracturing. The sky burned and sang.

  As Liora brought down the last of the mechanical sentinels, the night was filled with discord. I slipped back into the fray, teleporting to the position of one of my earlier-thrown cards. Its screeching resonance clawed at my senses, warping balance and thought alike, but I forced my focus through the noise and reoriented myself. My expanded sight proved essential once again. An unbroken circle of vision painting the world around me.

  Two soldiers were sprinting toward the barracks tent behind me, their boots thudding in panicked rhythm. I let them go. They weren’t my concern. The real movement was ahead. Adrian’s group, a dozen strong, advancing slowly toward the research tent where Victor was still working.

  I turned my attention to the card I’d embedded at the base of the great tree and jumped, the world folding and unfolding in the same breath. The strain hit me then along the spine of my soul, inducing a sharp and uncomfortably familiar pain.

  How much do I have left? I asked Anansi.

  [Around six more quick jumps like that, maybe more if you pace them out, maybe less if you keep throwing power around.]

  Six. Maybe. It wasn’t much, but it could be enough. Barely. I needed to keep at least two in reserve: one to reach Victor, one to get us both out. The jump back into my Domain would demand less of me, but I couldn’t rely on assumptions now. I needed precision, not faith.

  And then there was Adrian. I still didn’t know what his Domain was. All I had were fragments, glimpses and guesses. A “cleaning” Domain was absurd at first glance, but it fit him disturbingly well. His shadowlight had that kind of sterile sharpness, the rare moments we shared together also pointed toward that direction. Maybe it wasn’t cleaning in the literal sense, but order.

  He used it on his soldiers, either to stabilize their minds or to impose control. He used it on the fire too, ordering its chaos, binding the wild tongues of flame to his will. And when he pressed his hands to the earth earlier… he must had done something as well.

  I didn’t want to fight him, amidst the flame and uncertainties.

  I just needed to buy us more time and move him away from victor. Victor should be almost ready, just two more minutes.

  I reached through the web of my paintings. Those sleeping embers still clinging to the walls and whispered to them the truth of what they were meant to be. Be the fire. The command flowed from me and the flames obeyed, blooming over the blackened wood with a hungry elegance. The fort exhaled smoke and light, the paint surrendering itself to the purity of heat.

  Then, with the same thought, I cut the sound cards.

  Silence fell so suddenly it felt like the world had forgotten how to speak.

  Even the fire seemed to pause in its crackling. The wind hesitated. The night listened.

  And then they stopped. Every guard, every soldier, even Adrian himself. Their momentum died mid-step, their minds caught in the invisible pause between beats. It was the silence before the orchestra screams again, the stillness before thunder finds its voice.

  Adrian turned first, scanning the smoke-choked yard as if trying to read the pattern behind the destruction. His shadowlight pulsed white and silver, too clean for this world. Then his eyes found me, standing before the vast, scarred trunk of the Chronoak, my mask gleaming faintly through the haze.

  “You!” he barked, voice raw with disbelief and fury. “Why!?” His steps cracked the ground between us as he advanced. “So much time, so much order undone. So much risk and for what?”

  His soldiers formed a loose ring around me, rifles half-raised but trembling, unsure. They wanted to shoot, but none of them dared. Maybe they thought I’d vanish again.

  Adrian stopped only a few feet away, his shadowlight growing brighter, pressing outward until it painted the smoke around him in gleaming white veins.

  “Who sent you here?” he demanded, his voice sharpening into command. “Is this a message from the Guild?”

  Interesting. His first instinct wasn’t vengeance it was meaning. He was looking for logic in the chaos, a pattern to the ruin. But there was none to give him.

  I said nothing.

  Silence was my weapon now, as potent as fire or light. Every heartbeat that passed was a second closer to Victor’s escape. Every unanswered question another thread pulled from Adrian’s composure.

  So I stood there still as the tree behind me, watching, listening as the order he had so carefully built began to crumble under its own weight.

  “Speak!” Adrian roared, the light around him flaring brighter, his voice cracking through the smoke. “Speak or we fight!”

  The threat echoed, but his feet didn’t move. None of theirs did. And that made me pause.

  Why wait? Why warn?

  If he truly meant it, he’d have ordered the volley already.

  He was bluffing.

  Posturing, the same as any predator unsure of the thing before it.

  And in that moment, I realized that we were both afraid.

  I feared him for the unknown he carried.

  He feared me for the same.

  So I moved.

  Just a single, sharp step forward. Sudden enough to test the tension.

  The line broke instantly.

  Rifles jerked. One soldier stumbled back so fast he tripped, landing hard in the mud. Even Adrian flinched, instinct dragging his body half a step behind his pride.

  Fear.

  It was thicker here than the smoke.

  And far more useful.

  They could barely see me. A dark, horned silhouette framed by firelight, a demon painted in orange and shadow. The mask grinned where my mouth didn’t. My scarf coiled in the wind like a tail.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Adrian warned, voice tight now. He snatched a wakizashi from one of his soldiers, and white shadowlight spilled along its blade, pure and unnatural. For a moment, I almost admired the sight. In that chaos, he looked like the last hero left standing. And me, the monster he was meant to strike down.

  So I took another step.

  The line wavered.

  One of them twitched. Fear flaring through his muscles faster than thought. I saw it before he acted, the pulse of violence blooming in him like a spark before the fire.

  I vanished.

  The world folded in a blink, and I stood at another sound card’s position, behind them now.

  Bullets tore through the air I’d just occupied, splintering the trunk of the Chronoak with metallic fury. I let the rest of my cards scream to life. Discordant, chaotic, an orchestra of panic. The air itself seemed to break apart from the noise.

  Through the smoke, through Liora’s distant eye, I saw them scatter.

  Some fought the fire, desperate. Some begun evacuating out of this fiery mess.

  And in the midst of it, Adrian spun, searching again, the glow of his sword cutting streaks in the air.

  “Stop shooting at the tree!” he barked, his voice half-choked by heat. Then he found me again. Standing where I shouldn’t be, my painted teeth glinting in the flicker of shadowlight and flame.

  I saw his composure crack.

  Wide eyes.

  Tremor at the edge of every move.

  Then, with a snarl, he pressed both palms to the ground.

  Shadowlight poured from him white, terrible, and alive. Flowing into the earth like roots searching for something to entangle.

  He struck me then, through the earth, or through the aura.

  I felt it, deep within my soul.

  His Authority wasn’t a blow in the physical sense, it was intrusion. A creeping order that slid like cold water into my veins, seeking the core of me, to rearrange it. To smooth what was jagged, to polish what was wild.

  He felt me unclean.

  A stain on the pattern.

  And he tried to set me right.

  I resisted.

  I opposed him with every thread of what I was. There was chaos in me, yes. But creation was chaos and order both, and art was its mirror. And my soulmark of identity—bright and defiant as it was—rejected his touch.

  He realized it the same moment I did. Our souls clashed, sparks of thought and will breaking through the unseen, and then the world followed.

  “Fire!” he shouted.

  The word itself was command and desperation at once. The rifles answered before the men did.

  I was already moving through the chaos, through the smoke, slipping between the disarray of their ranks. The world fractured in flashes of muzzle light. Adrian followed, a beacon of blinding white shadowlight tearing through the haze. Wherever he went, the smoke obeyed, parting in symmetrical swirls, aligning itself neatly around him. Even the chaos bent to his desire for order.

  I was the flaw in his pattern, and he wanted me erased.

  He was close now. Too close.

  So I tore the scarf from my neck mid-run and let it flutter behind me—innocuous and weightless—until I willed it otherwise. The fabric hardened midair, a gleaming snare of steel. Adrian slammed into it full force. The metallic ring of impact echoed like a bell through the smoke.

  He stumbled, broke his rhythm, fell.

  I yanked the scarf back into my Domain, dissolving it into shadowlight, and kept moving. Another soldier appeared from the haze. Too slow and too uncertain. I kicked him aside, sending him sprawling, and reached for my next escape.

  Then—

  A flicker in my link. One of Victor’s cards was gone.

  My heart lurched. I pivoted, barely dodging the collapse of a burning tower that crashed where I had stood. Through instinct and will alone, I reached for the other card—the one I had left with Victor—and bent the world to the shape of my intent.

  The air folded.

  In an instant, I was inside the tent again.

  Victor stood there, clutching a large box against his chest, sealed and heavy. His nervous eyes met mine.

  “Ready?” I asked, one hand already on his shoulder.

  “Yes.”

  That was all I needed.

  Space rippled and the chaos of the forest, the smoke, the fire, Adrian’s white glow, all fell away.

  We reappeared in the quiet of the apartment near the Solitary Twin, the world snapping back into stillness as if none of it had ever happened.