I awakened the END

Chapter 7: What Ends and what doesn't

The training chamber sat beneath the safehouse, built from raw stone that swallowed sound the moment the door closed. There were lanterns hanging from the ceiling, casting long shadows on the floor, and stillness filled the air, making Ryn's heartbeat seem louder than ever in his ears. On this occasion, there were no weapons waiting for him. No opponent. Only a few objects arranged with purpose: a metal weight hanging from a chain, a lamp burning low and steady, and a third shape he couldn't identify, wrapped in cloth.

In the heart of the room, Veyr stood, his hands behind his back, unmoving, like stone.

“End one thing” he said

Ryn looked about the room, and waited for further instructions, but none were forthcoming. "Which thing?"

“This is what we are trying to determine.”

Ryn took a deep breath and faced the hanging weight. He reached inward, past the flat, numb pain left over from the day before, and called END forward, not out of fear this time, but with intention. The movement of the weight just came to a halt, as though it had never been in motion.

His Core was throbbing, but weak. Manageable. Not a wound, but rather a bruise.

Encouraged, he then looked at the lamp, but he was only interested in the flame and not in the glass or the metal base. A thin curl of smoke rose from the now-blackened wick, the flame gone out as cleanly as if it had simply been snuffed.

Veyr looked at the outcome of this with more than a smile. “When you get attacked, END works to save your life, it's an instinct and not a choice.”

It was the first time since the alley that his power had felt less like a wound in his body and more like a weapon he was learning to wield.

Bold, maybe reckless, curiosity got the better of caution, and mid-sentence, he reached for Veyr's voice.

Veyr's mouth was moving without a sound for one bizarre, hanging breath — no sound was heard at all by Ryn — before it rushed back in, seamless as if nothing at all had happened.

"Interesting," Veyr said, seemingly unbothered by having his voice cut off mid-thought. "Now, the whole lamp.”

Ryn turned his focus toward the lamp and reached for all of it: the flame, the glass, the base, everything that made it what it was. He pushed and pushed and pushed—

Nothing happened.

He clenched his jaw, sweat was on his forehead, he pushed harder. It cut into his chest like a blade twisting deeper, stealing the breath from him, but the lamp stayed exactly as it was, taunting him with its ordinary, unchanged existence.

He took a step back, gasping for breath.

Veyr watched him, without sympathy or scorn – just observation – "END isn't a command to erase whatever you look at. "Unlike a flame, an object with structure, history, weight, that's a harder question for your Core to answer. You have to understand what you're trying to end before you can end it.”

Ryn rubbed his mouth with his hand and swallowed his saliva, which tasted of copper. “So, there is a limit.”

“There is always a limit,” Veyr said. “Those who manage to outlive their concepts are the ones who know where they are, before they discover the hard way.”

---

Before Ryn could breathe, the door to the chamber opened, and Sia walked in, already smiling like she'd been standing outside waiting for her turn.

“My turn,” she said, darting past Veyr without even taking her eyes off him.

She held up both hands and three weak threads appeared in the room, moving from the ceiling down to another target dummy situated at the far wall. One of them, taut and humming, held a blade suspended just over the dummy's head.

“Find the thread that the blade is attached to,” Sia said. "End that. Nothing else. If you end the wrong one, something in this room is going to hurt somebody.”

Under the low light, all three threads were almost the same, and they were humming softly with their energy tightly controlled, Ryn studied them. He chose the one that looked the tightest, and grabbed a hold of it.

Wrong instinct. Instead, he halted the blade just short of its downward arc.

Sia laughed, unabashed, and lithe. "Close. Try again."

Irritation boiled up under Ryn's ribs. To him, it was like everything else here: something the others made look effortless, muscle memory built over years, while he fumbled through it for the first time, unsure which end of the blade to hold.

“I don't think it is funny," he grumbled.

“It's a little funny," Sia said. “END is strong — that is, when it's working properly. When it doesn't, it hurts you, or the person standing too close.”

Ryn tried to calm his nerves, tried to stop glaring at the threads and instead really see them. He stopped watching the blade. Stopped noticing the amusement on Sia's face. He focused only on the threads, tracing each one back to its source, and found the one that felt thinner, somehow more deliberate, with a different tension from the others.

There. The thread on the left.

A sharp, precise, inflexible END rushed, and the thread just disappeared, like a flash, without a sound, without a connection there was no thread at all, it had vanished. The blade fell to the ground without harm, and rang on the stone floor.

When he summoned his power for the first time since the alley, a feeling other than fear passed through him.

Control. They are fragile like a thin thread, they are like the one he just cut — but real.

Then the room seemed to double, sudden and disorienting, two versions of the same space layered on top of each other, close enough to be a reflection, but not quite matching. Ryn wiped his eyes hard and it disappeared just as fast as it appeared, leaving only a slight unease.

He didn't say anything about it. Not to Sia. Not to Veyr.

There were things he'd learned that were better kept to himself, at least until he understood them well enough to know whether they were dangerous, or simply another part of himself he hadn't met yet.