I awakened the END

Chapter 6: The black lantern's house

A dull, painful sensation in his wrists woke Ryn up. He was pinned to a metal-framed bed in a room he didn't recognize. The ceiling was low stone and the air was cool and slightly medicinal.

The initial thing that came to his mind was to run away.

He stretched his arms in toward END, stretching his arms out against the restriction.

Nothing happened.

He felt more afraid than he expected to at being resisted. This time he pushed harder and when the pain came back, it wasn't the familiar pain — it was sharp, wrenching and the room swam sideways before he could catch himself.

“Repeat that," came the calm, unrushed reply, "or you may not use it again at all.”

Ryn looked around. A woman sat alone in the corner, gold and silver catching the light in her hair, watching him with quiet patience.

“I've fixed some of the problems in your Core pathways,” she said. “Not all of it...there's a part of you I don't know and I wasn't going to mess with something I don't know”

“You are saying that you don't know what's wrong with me.”

“I'm saying nobody does yet, it's that kind of thing.” She put her hand on the ground and the cut was healed. "I'm Mira."

Ryn paid her careful attention, guarding against her. “Why didn't you leave me there to die, anyway?”

"We don't hang people just for being dangerous," Mira said simply, as if the answer should have been obvious.

It wasn't obvious to Ryn. Nothing had gone his way in his life.

---

But they allowed him to walk to the safe house under the supervision of Nera a few hours later, and Ryn was surprised more than anything else in the escape by the broad common room he was taken to. It wasn't grand. The floor was scuffed, the furniture was all mismatched, and there were weapons scattered across a long table in various states of disrepair. It had a strong, oily and wood-smoky smell.

It felt lived-in. Real. Not built for him.

Kerr stood across from Sia, griping about a dented blade as if it had personally wronged him. "You said it'll keep”

Not looking up from the thread she was weaving between her fingers, Sia replied, “I told you it was going to hold up to a regular force. You smashed into a wall.”

The youngster— a tall teen— attempted to imitate one of Kerr's moves, and was flattened on his back, but he managed a smile up to the ceiling. There was a silent man sitting across the room from her, his eyes darting every few seconds as if he were trying to catch up on every conversation he could hear, and a woman with very sharp features, standing against the far wall, as if reading an arrant, but not quite fixed on Ryn.

Above all, near the stairs, Veyr stood watching the room, the way a mountain watches weather pass beneath it: present, immovable, not a word said, not even a gesture, not even a look.

Ryn knew something that made him feel even more uneasy than any threat.

No one here was scared of him.

Cautious, maybe. Take care not to be too far away. But not afraid.

He was gazing at her, and Kerr saw that and grinned dismissively, discarding the dented blade. “So you're the Null who escaped from an execution chamber?” He rolled his shoulders. "Then let's see it!”

Kerr swung— a loose, half-committed strike, not a hard one at all—before Ryn could reply.

Before thought could, instinct answered. Ryn raised his arm, and the blade simply stopped, frozen an inch from his shoulder.

At the same moment, something tore at his ribs, so sharp that it stole his breath.

Kerr's grin vanished. "Whoa—hey."

"Kerr." Mira's voice went like a whip, across the room. “What's the matter with you?”

But he looked distinctly uncomfortable now, as Ryn put his hand to his chest, and Kerr said, "I needed to know what he can do before I'd put him near everybody else.”

Veyr's voice cut through the room before anyone else's could rise further. "Enough.”

The room quieted.

Veyr walked across to Ryn, his expression inscrutable. “Now what do you think?”

Ryn braced. "Interrogation. A cell. Maybe you finish what the Vanguard started.”

"None of that." Veyr's voice remained unchanged. "You're either going to learn control, or you're going to leave. And if you can't, your own power will kill you before we ever do.”

“Why would you give me a choice?”

"Freedom, out there on your own, isn't really an option," Veyr said. "Not with the Vanguard hunting you. And not with your power this far out of control, not around people who don't deserve what follows”

Ryn didn't answer. He didn't know how.

---

At night, he discovered a plate of food outside the little room they had provided for him. He was looking at it for a long time, before reaching out to pick it up, his whole life teaching him ‘what it costs. How much do I have to pay for this amount?’

Tav made the turn and caught him with it in his hand as proof. “Ah, good, you found it; Nera's one specialty is making too much stew.”

“How much is it going to cost me?”

Tav blinked. "Cost?"

"For the food."

“There is no charge; it's free for everybody" It was so direct, so inextricated, so uncalculating, that Ryn didn't know what to do with it.

In silence, he carried the plate back to his room, turning Tav's words over in his mind like something foreign and unfamiliar.

---

Later he sat alone, listening to a pipe dripping in the dark, from somewhere behind the wall, a slow, steady rhythm.

This time, he turned inward, carefully, and concentrated all his senses on that one sound.

It dripped — but for a split second — it stopped.

Not because the leak had been stopped. The sound just stopped, swallowed up and a heartbeat later it was as if it had never been.

Ryn's breath froze as he looked at the wall.

Veyr said behind him, "You're learning.”

He was startled, and he spun, there was no sound from the door, no footsteps, nothing.

Veyr glanced into the pipe, then at Ryn, and for the first time his expression changed from a mistrustful one to one that wasn't caution.

It was recognition.

“Tomorrow,” Veyr whispered, “I want to see what happens when one tries to end something that shouldn't end.”

Ryn's stomach went as cold as ice.

Tomorrow wasn't going to be another lesson.

This was a test.