It took Shisan longer than he'd admit to realize he was close.
The outskirts of London fell away gradually—cobblestone turning to overgrown paths, iron railings giving way to crooked trees and half-buried stones. Moss crept over old ruins. The wind smelled not of smoke or soil, but of something older: dust mixed with faint mana, like candle wax melted in prayer.
There was no signpost. No guide. Only the faintest shimmer in the air.
A distortion.
Not obvious to the eye—but to the soul, it hummed like a tuning fork struck just beneath the skin.
He stood before it now.
The space where a shrine had once stood—a weathered plateau of stone half-swallowed by the forest. At its center, a circle had been etched. Not carved, but burned into the stone, ringed with delicate patterns and concentric runes, some of which throbbed faintly beneath layers of illusion.
He wasn't sure when the forest changed.
The trees didn't grow stranger. The ground didn't split open. But something in the air had shifted—like a prayer spoken backward, or a breath held too long. The silence felt intentional. Not empty, but expectant.
That was when he saw it.
A circle—burned into the stone at the center of the moss-choked clearing. It wasn't made by hands, at least not the kind he knew. No tools. No carvings. Just symbols etched into the world by heat and intention.
Lines arced in impossible geometry—concentric rings, spiraling glyphs, soft glimmers that flickered in and out of sight like dying fireflies.
Shisan took a step closer.
The hairs on his arms rose. Not from fear, but recognition without understanding. Like hearing a lullaby in a language you'd never learned.
He raised his hand. The edge of the space resisted him—not physically, but spiritually. As if the world beyond the circle had rules that didn't apply to the rest of reality.
"A barrier?" he thought. "No… a threshold."
He didn't know what it was.
But he felt it. Felt the presence of a place inside a place—like walking into a memory that had been sealed off from the flow of time.
And still, the circle beckoned.
A trap.
A test.
A gate.
He swallowed hard, tightening his coat.
"Whatever's in there… I'm not coming out the same."
Then he stepped through.
He stood at the edge of a crumbling battlefield.
Stone walls—shattered, smoldering—lined streets paved with cracked cobblestone and buried under ash that fell like slow, dead snow. The sky was colorless. Not gray, not black—just drained. Like someone had wrung the color out of it by hand.
And everywhere—people.
At least, they looked like people.
Children clinging to mothers. Bent-backed men dragging carts. Women curled against broken pillars, staring without blinking. Some moved with unnatural slowness. Others wept without sound. Their outlines shimmered—not brightly, not magically, but like heat-warped air on stone. Flickering at the edges. As if the world hadn't finished deciding whether they were real.
Shisan stared.
"Are they ghosts?" he wondered. "Or something worse?"
There was something wrong about them. Not visibly. But in the way they stood. The way they watched him. The stillness. The symmetry. The uncanny weight of their silence.
He took a step forward.
The ground didn't crack, but the air seemed to. It buzzed—not like insects, not like magic, but like pressure. A sound too high to hear, felt in the teeth and the bones. Like walking into a storm that hadn't started yet.
His breath hitched. The hair on his arms rose.
"This place doesn't want me here," he realized. "It's watching me."
He turned around—reflexively.
The path behind him was gone.
No forest. No shrine. No sky.
Just gray fog, thick as stone.
He was alone.
Only the battlefield remained.
And the eyes of things pretending to be people.
"A test," he muttered aloud, unsure if speaking would help keep him sane. "This is a test."
But of what?
Mercy?
Resolve?
Or how much of himself he was willing to lose before he started striking shadows?
The first scream came from the left.
High, piercing. Too real to ignore. Not shrill like fear—but guttural, like metal grinding against bone.
Shisan spun.
A figure was charging—wrongly.
It moved like a man but bent like a spider. Its limbs were plated in rusted armor, bolted together at angles that made his stomach twist. One of its hands—if it could be called that—ended in a jagged wedge of steel, shaped like a broken guillotine.
Its feet didn't pound the earth—they tore through it, leaving shallow craters in cracked stone. Sparks flew where its joints ground together.
And ahead of it, standing motionless, was a group of "civilians." Three of them. A mother with a child clinging to her leg. An old man who didn't even look up.
They didn't scream.
They didn't run.
"Move!" Shisan shouted.
But they didn't react.
The golem raised its arm.
He didn't think.
He moved.
His foot struck the ground and the stone cracked beneath the force. The pressure of the air rushed past him like a second skin being peeled away. In that instant, nothing else existed—just the angle of the golem's swing and the exact moment its weight would shift.
The blade came down with brutal force.
Shisan ducked low. The edge passed over him by mere inches—he felt it slice through the air like a guillotine cleaving silence itself.
He was already rising.
His elbow drove upward into the creature's midsection with a sharp clang that vibrated through his bones.
The golem barely flinched.
"Too solid," he thought. "Not soft like a man. Not hollow either."
He didn't let it recover.
He grabbed the thing's arm—cold, dense, unnaturally heavy—and twisted with the momentum of his entire body, feet skidding across the ruined stone. A pivot. A throw.
The golem crashed into a stone pillar behind it. The impact shook dust loose from the ceiling. Debris rained down. But still, it stirred.
Shisan stepped back, lowering into a guarded stance.
And then—he noticed something far worse.
The civilians hadn't moved.
Not a step. Not a flinch.
The mother still held her child. The old man still stared.
Not at the golem.
At him.
"Why aren't they running?"
"Why aren't they afraid?"
His breath caught. A chill ran down his spine—not from cold, but from wrongness.
They just watched. Faces blank. Eyes glassy. Like dolls waiting to be wound up again.
And then, out of the smoke, another figure stumbled forward.
Smaller. Hunched. Trembling.
Shisan's muscles tensed.
It looked like a child.
Too small. Barefoot. Arms limp at its sides.
Its steps were slow. Staggered. It clutched its stomach like it had been hurt.
"Help… me…" it whispered. Voice like glass cracking underwater.
Shisan hesitated.
It looked up.
The face was wrong. Too smooth. Too symmetrical. Skin without pores. A mouth that moved out of sync with the sound. Eyes that glistened—but didn't blink.
His instincts screamed at him to move.
But the child stepped closer.
And something inside him froze.
The wrongness was suffocating. The lines between human and imitation blurred to nothing. His breath came ragged, chest rising too fast.
"How am I supposed to tell them apart?" he whispered. "They all look the same."
There was no answer.
No rule.
No sign.
Only the battlefield—and the weight of his own mercy, cracking like a stone in his hand.
He clenched his fists. Hard.
One mistake—one moment of doubt—and the next innocent he tried to protect might carve out his throat.
More constructs came.
Some charged with the blind fury of beasts—howling in garbled, human-like voices, as if mocking the sounds of suffering they'd never felt.
Some approached slowly, deliberately—dragging their feet like wounded villagers, cloaked in rags that flapped with phantom weight, heads bowed in mimicry of shame. One clutched a doll with fingers too angular to be human.
Some wept.
Not with tears, but with sound—cracked sobs, choked wails, voices pitched like children in nightmares. The noises clung to the fog, echoing across the ruined battlefield like mourning prayers warped by static.
And Shisan had to decide—every time—whether to strike.
No signs. No guidelines. No safeties.
Just his eyes, his hands, his instinct. His heart.
"What if I'm wrong?"
That question became a drumbeat behind every movement.
One construct approached on all fours, mouth slack, eyes pleading. He hesitated—until it lunged with hooked claws.
He disarmed it with a pivoting strike that shattered both wrists, then drove his foot into its spine, feeling it crumple beneath him with the weight of a dying animal.
Another charged, this one in the guise of a limping civilian holding a broken cane. It shivered. It shook. It whimpered.
He darted forward, snatched it by the collar, and carried it bodily away from a cluster of civilians—before slamming it into a wall and twisting its neck with a dull crack.
Sparks burst from its joints. Its illusion crumbled.
It was always a golem.
He moved fast. Precise. He avoided collateral damage with movements honed from memory, not training. He struck high to disable. Low to disrupt. Never lethal unless forced.
But it wasn't enough.
His hands trembled now—not from fatigue, but from the weight of guessing.
Every hesitation echoed.
He paused when a woman in priest robes whispered for forgiveness—and a blade of ice erupted from her wrist, carving through his shoulder like a frozen fang. Blood sprayed. His coat tore. He screamed, pivoted, and elbowed her face in before the wound registered. The illusion shattered. The construct's skull caved in.
He staggered back.
Then another approached—an old man, hunched, dragging a twisted leg.
Shisan reached to shield him.
The explosion came instantly.
A sphere of concussive force detonated from the man's chest like a ruptured curse seal. It launched Shisan back into the stone, slamming him hard enough to crack the wall behind him. Dust fell from above. His ribs ached. Ears rang.
He coughed. Smoke. Blood.
And again—he tasted the same question.
"What if I had killed him?"
"What if I hadn't tried?"
The line between enemy and innocent wasn't blurred.
It was erased.
It had never been drawn at all.
And Shisan—still breathing, still shaking—was being forced to redraw it with every decision, every movement, every act of mercy that might lead to death.
By the midpoint, Shisan was no longer fighting with clarity—he was enduring.
His breath tore in and out of his lungs like a bellows pushed too hard. Sweat soaked the collar of his coat, mixing with the blood that ran down his left arm in slow, stubborn rivers. His knuckles were raw—skin split, bruised purple, tacky with dried gore from metal and memory alike.
And yet, it wasn't pain that slowed him.
It was the silence.
A silence that followed him like a second shadow. Not empty—but expectant.
He staggered back from the wreckage of his last opponent—its illusory shell still twitching like a puppet after the strings had snapped—and looked around.
Dozens of figures remained. Civilians.
Still.
Watching.
Breathing.
Maybe.
None had spoken since he arrived.
None had screamed when the golems attacked. None had wept for the ones he'd slain.
They just stared. Blank. Steady.
Their eyes gleamed faintly, not with life, but with… something else.
"What is this trial?" he growled aloud. His voice cracked. "What am I even supposed to do?!"
He expected an answer.
None came.
No voice. No hint of instruction. No arbiter to judge.
Just the battlefield.
And those faces.
Unchanging.
Unforgiving.
He stumbled backward, nearly tripping over a broken cart, and dropped to one knee. The stone was cold. Slick. His hand pressed against it instinctively, as if to ground himself. But there was no warmth, no comfort—only the hum of old magic beneath the surface, pulsing faintly like a second heartbeat.
His vision swam.
The air grew heavier. Time thickened.
His thoughts became static.
"Am I still me?"
He clenched his teeth.
He couldn't even be sure anymore if the figures were watching him—or if they were watching through him, as if something else looked out from behind their borrowed faces.
Then it happened.
One of them moved.
Not a golem.
Not a weapon.
A child.
No taller than his hip. Barefoot. Thin. Wrapped in a tunic too large for his frame.
He stepped forward from the crowd, trembling.
His eyes were wide and glassy. Tear-streaked. Mouth slack with grief.
"Please…" the boy whispered.
His voice cracked like porcelain.
"Please stop. You're hurting everyone…"
Shisan froze.
It wasn't a command.
Not a threat.
It was a plea.
Raw. Human. Impossible to ignore.
The boy took another step, arms outstretched like a child seeking shelter from a storm that hadn't stopped in days.
"I don't want to die," he whimpered. "I don't want them to die either…"
His knees buckled, but he didn't fall. He only trembled harder.
Shisan's legs refused to move.
A lifetime of motion locked in place.
He opened his mouth, but the words tangled on his tongue.
No sound came out.
Only feeling.
A weight in his chest.
Heavy. Familiar.
Not fear.
Not even guilt.
Something deeper.
"I've seen this before," he realized.
In ash.
In fire.
In the screams of a village he couldn't save.
In the hands of a dying woman who pressed a child into his arms before the flames devoured her face.
That pain—the one that had no name—returned like a bruise pressed too hard.
The child cried harder.
He reached for Shisan.
One hand, small and trembling.
The battlefield held its breath.
Shisan's did too.
Then—his eyes caught something.
Just beneath the boy's collarbone.
Faint. Delicate. Hidden under layers of illusion.
A glyph.
Burned into the skin.
A curse bomb.
No countdown.
No chant.
Just waiting.
Waiting for him to believe.
His heart jolted.
"It's a trap."
His instincts screamed.
So did something else.
"Don't hurt the innocent."
"But he's not innocent."
"But what if he was?"
"What if you hesitate again?"
"How many more will die?"
His thoughts swirled into a chaos of grief, mercy, and doubt.
He shut his eyes.
His hands trembled.
Then stilled.
He struck.
Not with fury.
Not with rage.
With sorrow.
His palm met the child's forehead in one clean motion—swift, deliberate, final.
For a single second—just one—flame answered him.
Not conjured. Not called.
Awakened.
A flicker of blue-gold light bloomed from his hand.
It did not roar. It did not consume.
It sang.
Softly. Purely. Like an echo of something divine.
The fire didn't burn the child.
It revealed him.
The illusion peeled away like old skin, the layers dissolving into shimmer and smoke.
The golem beneath contorted. Cursed glyphs flared in protest.
Then the entire construct exploded inward—pulled apart not by force, but by truth.
Ash scattered on the breeze.
The flame faded from his hand.
Gone.
Not extinguished.
Just... quiet.
Dormant.
Shisan stood alone.
His hand still outstretched.
Still trembling.
Still empty.
And the battlefield—once crawling with motion—was still.
One by one, the civilians turned to face him.
And vanished.
Not in a flash of magic.
Not in a puff of light.
They faded like ghosts finally given permission to leave.
The field collapsed.
Not with a bang. Not with magic tearing the sky.
It simply... folded.
The illusion unraveled like parchment burned from the edges inward—quiet, inevitable. Stone melted into ash, flame into silence, color into fog.
And then—
Shisan stood beneath gray sky once more.
The shrine had returned—crumbling and cold, half-swallowed by ivy and time. The leyline's thrum, once wild beneath his feet, had dulled to a buried heartbeat. Faint. Distant.
Like the last breath of a god long buried.
He stood unmoving in the center of the shattered circle, his shoulders rising and falling in shallow rhythm.
Not triumphant. Not victorious.
Just breathing.
He looked down at his hands.
Burned. Split at the knuckles. Palm trembling from the impact. Skin red from something that hadn't quite been flame.
A flicker.
Not of power.
Of memory.
The fire that bloomed from his hand hadn't answered his call. It hadn't risen from technique or training. It came because something inside him broke.
Because he was helpless.
Because he needed it.
It came without permission.
And left without farewell.
The light was gone now. Extinguished like a heartbeat lost mid-sentence. The warmth didn't linger. It left no scar. No proof that it had ever been real—only a whisper of heat that faded too fast, as if ashamed to have been seen.
Shisan stood there, staring at his own hand.
Trembling. Empty.
The same hand that had once buried the dead. Held friends as they bled out. Reached for warmth in a world that had none left to give.
He curled his fingers slowly.
As if afraid that the flame might return—and burn through what little of him remained.
But it didn't.
It didn't come back.
And that, more than anything, hurt.
He sank to his knees.
The stone below was cold, but it didn't register. The world around him was ash and wind and silence. A silence that felt personal. Not uncaring—but tired. Like something ancient was watching, and had turned its gaze away—not out of malice, but sorrow.
His chest ached in ways he didn't have words for.
He bowed his head.
His breath caught.
And before he could stop himself, a sound escaped—quiet, broken.
Not a cry.
Not a sob.
Just the sound of a soul fraying at the edges.
"Why now…?" he whispered.
Tears welled in his eyes, unbidden. He tried to blink them away, but they slid down anyway, tracing the grime and blood on his cheeks like they had every right to be there.
"Why show me a light I can't keep?"
His hand clenched again, nails biting into skin.
It wasn't fair.
It was never fair.
Far away, in the hush of a hidden chamber within the Clock Tower, the scrying crystal dimmed.
Its final light shimmered like dying embers, casting uneven shadows across the room's cold stone walls. The battlefield on the other side flickered one last time—just long enough to show Shisan crumpled to his knees, his shoulders trembling, his hand still outstretched as though trying to hold onto something that had already left him.
And then the image dissolved into quiet ash.
Claudius stood rigid. Still.
He hadn't moved for several minutes.
His expression—usually drawn with cold precision—had softened into something harder to define. Not pity. Not shock.
Something closer to... recognition.
The kind you don't want to admit you understand.
He swallowed once.
"He cried," Claudius said quietly.
His voice lacked judgment. It was just fact. Observed. Filed.
Rin stood beside him, arms folded. Her usual smirk was gone, replaced by a solemn, almost reverent stillness. The light from the crystal played across her face, but her eyes were elsewhere—still staring into the remnants of what they had just witnessed.
"Yes," she said.
Claudius glanced at her.
"You expected him to break."
"I wanted him to," Rin murmured. "Not to punish him. To see if he would."
Claudius was silent.
Rin let out a breath, just audible enough to be real. "Most mages are taught how to compartmentalize. To seal their hearts like vaults and operate through theory, not feeling. Shisan has no such shield. All he has is instinct... and pain."
Claudius frowned slightly. "That seems like a liability."
"That," Rin said, "is why I needed to see if the pain would break him—or move him."
She looked at him now, her voice steady.
"He hesitated. He doubted. He cried. And still... he chose. Not because someone told him what was right. Not because he knew how to win. But because he couldn't bear to get it wrong again."
Claudius's brow furrowed. "That flame... was it real?"
"It was," Rin said. "But fleeting. Reflexive. It came because he reached the bottom. Because something in him refused to let go—even when he did."
She stepped closer to the crystal, now cold and dormant.
"Fire doesn't just burn," she said. "Sometimes it weeps."
Claudius didn't respond.
The room fell silent again.
But in that silence, they both saw it:
Not triumph.
Not collapse.
But a boy kneeling in ashes, who had asked for no power…
And still been answered—if only for a moment.
Claudius's voice broke the stillness, quieter than usual. Measured, but not cold.
"…Can you help him grow it?"
Rin turned slightly, surprised—not by the question, but by the tone.
Claudius wasn't asking as a strategist.
He was asking as someone who had just watched a boy nearly shatter, only to stand again through nothing but raw will and pain.
Rin's eyes returned to the crystal.
"I can try," she said. "But I can't guarantee that kind of magic doesn't grow the way ours does. If it won't obey lessons. If it won't follow form. If It's not about circuits, or flow, or incantation."
She tapped her chin lightly.
"But I'll still try."
Claudius nodded—slow, almost reluctant. His gaze lingered on the place where the image had last shimmered, where a boy had knelt not in defeat, but in something far lonelier.
Rin turned to leave, her boots soft on the stone.
She didn't offer comfort. She didn't offer certainty.
Just presence.
Claudius remained behind in the hushed chamber, surrounded by silence and afterimages.
He stared at the ashes that no longer glowed.
At the spot where the boy had knelt.
Not in victory. Not in despair.
But in something far more dangerous.
Hope.
Shisan didn't remember standing up.
One moment he was kneeling—ashes clinging to his sleeves, grief still heavy in his chest—and the next, he was walking.
Not quickly.
Not with purpose.
Just... forward.
The path back to the Clock Tower was no clearer than the one that had brought him here. The forest, quiet and gray, stretched in all directions like the inside of a half-remembered dream. Fog lingered in the underbrush. The wind no longer whispered in prayers—it simply was, empty and distant.
Every step ached.
Not from injury—though those were many—but from something deeper. A hollowness in the limbs. A tiredness that made thought feel like wading through water.
The adrenaline had long faded. The sorrow had cooled.
And now only the weight remained.
He passed beneath twisted branches. His hand occasionally brushed the bark of old trees, as if to steady himself, though he no longer stumbled.
Then the trail vanished.
He didn't notice when it did—just that the moss grew thicker, and the air heavier. He leaned against the base of a tree, breath shallow.
"I'll just rest... for a moment," he murmured.
His knees bent.
He sat down slowly, his back pressing against the trunk. The world blurred slightly around the edges—washed in gray and green.
He didn't mean to close his eyes.
But he did.
The forest watched in silence as Shisan fell asleep beneath its ancient limbs.