I awakened the END

Chapter 5: The Black Lanterns

The chamber split apart.

The pressure behind his ribs didn't stop. It grew, like a hungry, searching animal, until the last of the restraints scattered, dulled metal clattering around his wrists. The walls groaned. Frostblooms spread across the ceiling like cracks.

The door burst open.

Restraining fields and binding light lit up the doorway, a dozen abilities firing simultaneously to suffocate him before he could move. Vanguard soldiers poured through the opening.

END responded independently.

When END reached them, one Concept after another simply went out, like candles in a gale. Ryn was no longer sure how his own body worked. He wasn't reaching for the power. It was moving through him on its own.

"Stay back!" Half of the room was already falling, support pillars were cracking, the ceiling was dusting in sheets and alarms were screaming above the noise of stone cracking.

Ryn pushed his way forward, hands up, in a desperate attempt. “I'm not trying to—” He couldn't go on any longer. “I don't want to hurt anyone at all!"

But what he wanted no longer mattered. Every effort to control it only made the damage worse, like grabbing a live wire and finding it grip back harder.

Then a soldier came running up to him, gun in hand.

Fear turned to something colder, faster.

END flew out and the man's Concept disappeared in mid-swing as his gun clattered to the ground. In one moment, two barriers collapsed behind him, with stone groaning as the suppression fields all failed.

Ryn tore through the gap and sprinted.

Guards came running down every corridor, and he fought back instinctively — he would never kill, not then, not ever — but each time he hit a guard, his angry, injured voice echoed, and he saw him crumble and be left helpless. Ryn knew his rage was feeding the thing inside him, knew it was a mistake, but he couldn't stop. The more his anger built, the more powerful the power grew, and the less it felt like his own.

He didn't know how not to feel angry. Not after the tribunal's verdict.

The corridor filled with people who weren't wearing Vanguard black.

But the men surrounding him were paralyzed.

Someone whispered, “Black lanterns,” and the relief was palpable.

A man strolled at the head of the group, unhurried, calm, his dark coat settling around him as if space itself made room for it. Then came six others: a woman with sharp eyes and something like an invisible thread woven through her fingers, a broad-shouldered man cracking his knuckles with excitement, a woman moving with quiet, focused purpose, a silent man surveying the wreckage as though reading it, a woman with hard, blunt features tracking every movement in the room, and a tall teenager bouncing on his heels, grinning despite the chaos.

“Stand down,” he barked at them, and his voice was hard.

Veyr kept walking. "If your people keep striking him," he said, "you're going to bring this whole building down with everyone still in it.”

“He's too hazardous to let go.”

“But I'm not saying you need to let him out on his own, I'm saying that you shouldn't.” Veyr's voice did not go up. “It didn't need to. I propose to take him with us," 

Dren issued the order anyway.

What followed was less than a minute and Ryn watched it unfold like a dream that he was not a part of.

The wide-shouldered one Kerr, took all this fire and it bounced off him like water off a brick wall. There came a moment when a quick-witted woman, Sia lifted her wrist and sent three weapons tumbling backward where they came back in toward their original throwers — with unerring accuracy, invisible threads directing the way. The composed woman knelt down and healed a wound on a fallen soldier without breaking her calm during the battle. The quiet one gave warnings a half-second in advance of attacks, as if he knew they were coming. The tracker was able to move as though he could see everyone at once. The teen mimicked whatever move the soldiers threw at him and sent it right back with a happy whoop. 

And Veyr stood still, hardly moving, as the whole battlefield around him seemed to grow slower, footsteps heavier, weapons twice as heavy, the air thick with a weight that was invisible and unstoppable.

Ryn had no idea power could be used like that. Not desperate. Not clawing for survival. Controlled.

Controlled.

Turning towards him, Veyr moved his head.

It was some last, frantic reflex that Ryn instinctively threw at him—END.

Nothing happened. But instead, gravity surrounded Ryn's arms and legs gently yet firmly, as if it were a wall of stone.

Veyr said “You aren't controlling your power, Your power is controlling you."

Ryn was pushing against the intangible, his chest rising in his fight. "What do you want?"

"We're taking you."

"And if I refuse?"

Something like patience passed over Veyr's face. "Then we'll carry you.”

The remaining Vanguard soldiers gave way around them. Dren's jaw tightened and he didn't move closer, but he watched as the Black Lanterns surrounded Ryn and moved toward the smoke-filled corridor outside.

---

Ryn came to slowly, as if it took him a while to register that the world was moving beneath him. He was inside some kind of vehicle, his wrists loosely bound in front of him.

Around the edges of the cabin were seated six strangers. The teen was open and curious. The tracker watched him closely like a puzzle. Veyr sat across from him, unreadable, with his hands folded together.

“Where are you going to take me?” Ryn inquired

Veyr said “Somewhere to learn what you've awakened.”

“Why bother?”

Veyr studied him for a long time, an old, heavy thing passing behind his eyes.

“There is a concept like yours in the past.”

Ryn's chest constricted. “So, what became of them?”

Veyr didn't answer.

Darkness pressed in around the vehicle as the Wilds closed in on every side, swallowing the last light from the windows. And Ryn knew, with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold, that the people who had stolen him from his own execution knew exactly what END was capable of becoming. 

But whatever it was, it didn't go well the last time.