Gilded Ashes: When Shadows Reign

The tallest building around was a residential tower at the corner of the artery, twelve stories of reflective steel and reinforced glass. Kori reached its base in under thirty seconds. The Wardens around it were busy with their useless work - none of them noticed her crossing the street in a low, fast line and stopping at the wall.

She placed her left foot against the glass.

Eon flowed – she felt the cold stream through her body, the controlled release, the energy sinking through her boot into the contact patch where her foot met the building. The air around her foot changed - the molecules slowed, the vibration in the glass settled. The heat radiating from the building's surface in the night air froze in place, the thermal motion of every particle within a meter of her boot dropping below zero, locking the contact point in a perfect, motionless suspension. Small flowers of ice started forming on the glass's surface, extending as if in slow-motion.

She stepped up.

Her right foot found the wall higher than her left, and the same process repeated - Eon flow, cold air, ice patterns branching from the point where her leg met glass. Then she increased the speed, leaving only a trace of fading ice behind her, and a few rebel snowflakes drifting down.

Kori wasn't climbing.

She was running up the side of the building.

The technique cost Eon. Quite a lot of Eon, normally - channeling it through every leg at the exact right time, sustaining the icy hold, accelerating against gravity. But for Kori, it cost almost nothing. She had done thing hundreds of times, on much harsher surfaces – and adding all the experience and mastery to the cloud-glow phenomenon, the amplification she had felt, multiplying her Eon output by a factor she hadn't bothered to measure. The energy she usually had to ration was abundant tonight, in volumes that almost embarrassed her.

It felt good.

Kori had stopped feeling pleasure as a meaningful emotion years ago. The Chasmis had taken that - taken most things that registered as feelings, leaving her with the discipline and the precision and very little of everything else. But tonight, with the amplification running through her body and the night air cold against her face and her knives glowing softly at her hips, she felt something close to pleasure. The work was easy. The body was loose. The Eon was abundant.

Five seconds, she already reached the roof's lip. But Kori didn't stop – she didn't even slow down.

She launched off the parapet without slowing.

Her body cleared the building's edge in a single motion, both legs driving her upward at an almost-impossible angle, the trajectory carrying her over and past the rooftop with the height of a running start that had been built across twelve floors of vertical motion. At the apex of the arc - the brief moment before gravity reasserted itself - she was forty meters above the rooftop and falling toward the interconnected bridges on the other side.

Her Chasmis flared.

The eye shone with a strong pale blue light. From the climb's speed, a few strands of hair escaped her ponytail. She didn't move them aside - she didn't need to. The eye saw through them. It saw through everything, and the iris - paler than her other eye, the colour of moonlit ice - widened to receive the world.

Time slowed down. Literally.

For her. Only for her. The world's clock didn't change. Her ownperception of it did. The fall stretched outward, each second extending into something way longer, the rate of subjective time inside her head expanding past the rate at which the universe was happening. The air she was passing through went still. The clouds above stopped their imperceptible drift. The snowflake trail she left behind looked like it was now floating, barely descending anymore. The lights on the streets below froze in place - every emergency vehicle's cycling beacon caught at the colour it had been showing in the instant the Chasmis had activated, the reds and blues fixed mid-pulse like paint thrown at a wall.

The sound dropped out.

Not silence. The sounds were still there - sirens, voices, the deep mechanical hum of the petals closing - but they had been pulled to a distance her ears couldn't quite reach. Everything muffled. Everything distorted. Her own heartbeat was the loudest thing in her head.

She floated.

It looked, from her perspective, exactly like flight. Her body suspended in the slowed air, the arc of her jump turning into a hover, her trajectory continuing at a rate her own perception could observe in detail. She had time. She had as much time as she wanted, with the limit being only the cost in Eon and fatigue. But tonight, with the amplification, that cost meant almost nothing.

She looked around - the Chasmis didn't see the world only the way her other eye did. It saw the underlying signatures, too - Eon, in all its forms, traced across reality as faint brushstrokes of luminescent colour. Every person within her field of view glowed softly, their personal Eon output visible as a thin halo around their bodies. Every Luminite weapon hummed with a brighter, more concentrated light, from the gem outward. The Wardens below were a constellation of small, pale signatures – They weren't taught to handle Eon, like the Vanguards. The petals overhead were just plain grey, no Eon to be seen there, but glowing behind their edges was the sky, that looked almost like an explosive, colorful light show.

She looked across the eastern district for the figure with the curved blades.

For the trace it should have been leaving - the glow of a body in motion, the warmth of channels flowing, the brushstroke that every living, Eon-using person painted into the world simply by existing.

Nothing.

She looked at the rooftops where the figure had been. Nothing. She swept her gaze along the alleys. The streets. The lower districts. The petals. The empty air between the buildings. She let her Chasmis pull in everything within a couple-kilometre radius, every signature within her perceptual range, every glowing brushstroke that should have told her where the target had gone.

There was no human signature anywhere in the search zone that didn't belong to a Warden or a citizen.

The figure she had watched leap dozens of meters and run across her city was not visible to her Chasmis. Not as a person. Not as a residue. Not even as the faint thermal afterglow that Eon-users left behind in the air for several minutes after passing through it.

Either the figure was not using Eon. Or the figure did not have Eon to begin with.

Kori let the time-slow continue while she absorbed the implication. It cost her almost nothing tonight. She had the luxury of thinking through the situation while the world held its breath around her.

Then she landed. Smoothly, on the flat roof.

The Chasmis released its power, and the world's clock returned to normal. She slid a few meters, came up to her feet, and was already moving again - across the new roof, toward its far edge, knives in both her hands to set the next pivot.

She threw her right knife into the parapet's lip. Pivoted and swung herself up and over with the same hooking motion she had watched the figure use - same physics, executed by a body that knew them. Released the knife at the bottom of the swing, then smoothly caught it as her feet found the next building.

Kori kept running.

Roof to roof. The Chasmis activating in pulses now, just for the jumps - slowing time long enough for her to verify her landing zones, to scan for the figure's signature, to confirm that the brushstroke wasn't there. Every building she crossed, she searched. Every alley. Every angle.

Nothing.

Then -

A massive light entered her field of view.

She was mid-jump, scanning ahead toward the next rooftop, and the Eon signature appeared at the edge of her perceptual range with the brightness of a strong flare in a completely dark room. Bright. Thick. The deep, controlled glow of a highly-trained user channeling at absurdly high output.

It was pretty close, too.

And it was heading straight for her.

Kori's mouth pulled into the smallest possible smile.

"Found you."