Chapter 196: To Break Control
Aveline’s screams for the thing to leave her alone seemed to vanish into the light without finding any ears.
Nothing answered her.
Nothing stopped.
Instead, she felt something far worse than fear begin to press against her mind, as if invisible fingers were reaching into the most private corners of her thoughts and trying to scatter them, to grind her memories apart until nothing remained but confusion.
It was a vile, intimate sensation, one that made her stomach turn and her breath catch hard in her throat.
She hated it immediately.
"Theron!"
Her voice tore out of her before she could stop it, raw with panic and rage.
If this was happening to her, then what was happening to him?
The thought struck with such force that for one dreadful moment she nearly lost her balance. She tried to move, but found herself unable to do so. Invisible threads had wound around her wrists, her waist, her ankles, pinning her in place with cruel patience.
The pressure in her head sharpened, unbearable now, like someone was trying to pry her open from the inside. She gasped and clenched her teeth.
"No," she whispered fiercely. Then louder, with all the fury she could summon, "Where is Theron? What have you done to him?"
She planted her feet against the trembling floor.
She needed to find Theron.
This was her dream.
If there was any place where she could still claim a little power, surely it was here.
She drew in one deep breath and forced herself to think, not of fear, but of the thing she understood best in this moment: motion, shape, cutting force. She imagined blades of air, bright and sharp, slicing through the threads that held her fast.
At first, nothing happened. The binding only tightened as though the dream itself were resisting her will.
But Aveline did not stop.
She kept her mind fixed on the image, steady and exact, until the air around her began to answer.
Slowly.
Reluctantly.
Then all at once.
The invisible cords snapped.
A sharp tremor seemed to ripple through the light above her, and for one stunned heartbeat she felt the massive hand hovering overhead flinch, as though it had actually been struck.
Pain, real and startled, flashed through the brightness.
Then the dream itself began to break.
The corridor trembled violently. The false walls fractured into streaks of light. The pillars groaned and split. The world around her buckled under the strain of her resistance, and in the distance she heard it then, faint at first but unmistakable.
"Theron!"
Aveline spun toward the sound and ran with all the speed her heart could carry.
At the edge of the collapsing wall, Theron finally heard her. The last of the barrier shattered under his force, and he surged through just as she was rushing toward him, her expression fierce and frightened and full of urgency. For one terrible moment, all he could feel was relief so sharp it hurt.
He looked up at once, his face hardening as soon as he saw the shape still lingering above them.
"He is trying to make you forget me," he shouted, the warning leaving him before he had time to think better of it. "Be careful!"
In the chaos of the moment, the truth had come out in the only form it could.
He might never have the courage to tell her that he had forgotten her, that the shape of her had been stolen from him. But he could at least warn her to not meet his fate, to not lose who she was.
Aveline turned sharply toward the hovering hand, her expression changing at once.
"Watch this," she said, and though her voice was still breathless, there was a spark of defiance in it now that made Theron’s chest tighten.
She lifted her hand and made a motion as though she were throwing a disc directly at the thing above them.
Theron watched in astonishment as fine cuts appeared across the luminous hand. Not deep, not yet, but enough to make it recoil, enough to show that the dream did not belong entirely to the one controlling it.
"This is my dreamland," Aveline said, turning back to him with a cheeky little smile that looked wildly out of place in the middle of all that danger. "If I can do it, you can do it too."
Theron stared at her.
For one breathless second, all he could think was that she was impossible.
Then something inside him shifted.
The hand above them was not just an enemy. It was his father’s will. His father’s cruelty. The same cold, invading force that had reached into his life and cut away pieces of it without mercy. The memory of that violation hardened his resolve.
Aveline saw it in his face and immediately stepped closer, her voice dropping into a calm, practical tone.
"Focus," she said. "Think of the air as a sword. Move it with your mind."
Theron did as she said, uncertain at first, then steadier. He reached for the air in the dream, not with a rune this time but with intent alone, with the raw shape of his will.
The first attempts were clumsy. The force slipped away from him. Then, little by little, he began to feel it. The air gathered, sharpened, answered.
It was not a technique he should have been able to use like this.
It was not something that should have come so easily, not even in a dream.
And yet it did.
Theron looked at Aveline, then at his own hand, still half-stunned by what was unfolding around them. This was air-bending. Neither of them should have been capable of wielding air like this.
Yet the dream answered them both as though it had always been waiting.
With both of them striking now, the hand above them trembled violently. The cuts deepened. The light around it began to fade. The brilliance that had once filled the dream and tried to swallow Aveline whole flickered, weakened, and then began to collapse into nothing.
Aveline pressed closer to Theron, breathing hard, her cheeks flushed with effort and triumph.
And when the final glow vanished, the darkness that remained felt clean for the first time.
The hand was gone.
The pressure in the air lifted.
The dream no longer felt like a prison.
Theron stood there for one stunned second, his heart still pounding, before he turned slowly toward Aveline, and looked at her as though he had been handed back his entire world.
She smiled back at him, exhausted and victorious.
And then she hugged him. "We did it!"
-----
The King took his hand away with a hiss. His hand shook with the small cuts on his skin, stinging and bleeding.
"What are you doing in my pupil’s room in the middle of the night?"
The voice broke the silence.
The King turned to see... the Archduke, with a ball of flame in his hand, ready to throw it on him.
