I awakened the END

Chapter 9: The thing that shouldn't break

The man was lying on the examination table and his breathing was regular, slow and shallow, his eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. His hands shook, his fingers opened and closed like they were in search of something that they had lost, and they couldn't recall what. He looked awake. Alive. Utterly, unremarkably ordinary.

Ryn stood at the foot of the table, not knowing how to process what Mira had just told him.

The small instrument had stopped glowing the instant she set it on the floor, she said, "His Core's intact. It doesn't seem like anything is wrong with the aether level, it's normal, textbook. No damage anywhere I can see in the body.” She stopped and a strange look appeared on her face. “His concept is just......GONE.”

“No way,” replied Ryn. “Concepts never go away.”

“No, they shouldn’t,” said Orr, arms folded, his attention focused on the man like he was trying to read something that was written under his skin. "A Concept is not an object in a person's chest waiting to be plucked out, it's a thread that runs from this person's Core down into something older, deeper than anything this person knows. Breaking that thread clean, without harming the person with it, should be nearly impossible.”

Ryn's mouth dried up. "Could END do it?"

After some time, no one responded immediately.

It was too long a silence, and no words could have made it heavier.

His mind pulled him back, unwilling, to the alley: that split second when the leader's power had simply stopped existing. He had told himself it was to be a short-term thing. Suppression, not removal. It's not a wall being demolished, it's a door closing.

Now, standing over a man who might never recover his powers, he wasn't entirely convinced of his own excuse anymore.

Real fear, not fear of death, not fear of the Vanguard's hunters closing in on every street, moved through him for the first time since the awakening.

Fearing that he might steal from somebody without intending to.

---

Mira placed a small crystal on the table between them, glowing with a gentle golden light, a controlled, harmless Concept effect, built specifically to be studied.

She said, "My advice is to try and put it out. Carefully.”

Ryn moved his hand toward the crystal and let END brush against it as lightly as he could. Inside, the light went out, and was devoured by darkness.

Mira picked up the crystal and slowly manipulated it in the light of the lantern, frowning at whatever she could see in it that Ryn couldn't. After a very long time, she said, "The Concept isn't destroyed. Its connection's just... interrupted. It was working fine and then suddenly the connection was pulled from it, like a hand from a switch”

“Not lost," Ryn said. "Just stopped."

"For now." Mira carefully placed the crystal down, for fear of it breaking. “I don't know if that's permanent or if it's different with people, than with something like this.” She lifted her gaze level to his, and was honest and steadfast in her eyes—something he began to believe in despite himself. “Well, there's a whole lot I don't know about what you can do, Ryn. I won't lie.”

---

He spent some time afterward sitting with Orr, who was patient, and he took more out of him than he was giving.

“Let's go back down by the alley," Orr said. “All the things – even the things that seem unimportant.”

Ryn said it slowly and reluctantly at first — beating, humiliation, anger that had been growing beyond what he'd ever allowed himself to experience before that night. Then the attack just ceased to be; it was as if the world had blinked.

Then, with a certain hesitation, he confessed something he hadn't disclosed to anyone. Not Mira. Not Veyr.

“The man did not seem like a threat to me for a second — just after he did it.” Ryn frowned and tried to remember, tried to find words for an emotion he had never known before. “He didn't feel real. He didn't feel like he existed anymore. He didn't feel like he was there.”

Orr grew very still, his eyes took on a new focus.

“That's more important than physical effect” he said quietly.

"Why?"

“It's not just about abilities, Ryn, it's about identity..." Orr held his gaze, unflinching. “If END can disrupt that connection, for just a moment, then you could, one day, affect more than someone's fighting abilities.”

Ryn felt a cold weight taking hold in his belly, sluggish, heavy.

He didn't inquire about the meaning of that. He didn't want to know, he was afraid of it.

---

An hour later, Veyr found him and brought him back to the training chamber without explanation, three objects already waiting on the stone table. A piece of wood burning. A small mechanical device with gears rotating slowly and steadily. Faintly glowing, a crystal, as identical as Mira's had been.

Veyr said the goal is to end one property of each. “Nothing in particular.”

There was just a flame, it was gone in a blink and the wood below unscavenged.

It required extra concentration, to isolate one moving gear without disturbing the mechanism around it, but Ryn was able to do it—watching as the gear that had been rotating came to a halt while the others continued to spin.

There was a crystal, but it was different.

As soon as his fingers touched it, he felt a sharp pain as if his chest was being ripped open. He closed his eyes and pushed through it, cold sweat running down his skin, until the crystal's light finally died.

After that his knees gave out on him.

His knees buckled, but Mira was already there, catching him before he hit the ground, checking him for damage. She clamped her hard jaw shut and said, “Another crack. It's there, small though it be.”

"But I can keep going," Ryn said, pushing himself up despite her steadying hand.

"No," Veyr said. “You're up to no good for today.”

“You're making me feel like I'm incapable of doing this.”

“You're handling yourself like a Core that was nearly cracked open an hour ago.” It took care to not raise Veyr's voice, it somehow landed harder than it would have shouted. “You're treating your life like you're disposable, Ryn, I don't want to look on and witness that.”

Ryn couldn't come up with an answer. It hit him somewhere he didn't expect, somewhere he hadn't known was still soft.

---

Later, Kerr went back to find him sitting alone in the corridor, but rather than giving him any advice, just sat down beside him without asking permission.

“Everyone in this group has hurt themselves learning their Concept," Kerr said, looking at the far wall, not Ryn, so he can just listen. “That's the difference, we didn't go too far because people were around us stopping us.”

“Ever consider quitting?" Ryn asked.

Kerr laughed with a low laugh, a true laugh. "Every week."

For the first time since arriving at the safehouse, Ryn was in a room with someone without a test to pass, no danger lurking, no ledger to balance before he could sit back and just exist.

Just the two of them, sitting and talking, as if it were no trouble at all.