Prologue: The Mist Tragedy

He could feel it working, in the last moment he still believed that was a true sentence.

Power moved into him on the four-count and then past it, the rhythm no longer asking so much as being met. He tried to stop it. There was nothing left in the shape of stop.

He tried to steer it instead, in for four, hold for four, and for one held breath something older than any rhythm he had built agreed to move where he pushed it. It was not control. It only resembled control closely enough that he could almost go on believing the difference didn’t matter.

This was despair: not the loud kind, only the particular quiet of watching his own hands fail at the one thing he was ever good at.

The gray had already begun creeping into the pale of the mist, unhurried and total. Shapes cohered at its edges out of appetite.

He heard boots on the ridge path above the basin, moving too fast for anyone who still thought they had time. He knew, even through everything the four-count was costing him, exactly whose voice reached the crest first.

Natsume never ran anywhere in the two years he’d known her. She was running now.

He could not turn to watch her close the distance. He could only listen to it, and dread how much ground she still had left to cover.

He reached further than four should have let him, aimed for once at something instead of nothing. The mist went out from him in one long unraveling blast, straight at the shape crawling toward the ridge, and took it apart before it ever closed the distance to her.

He had not earned that. I want that said plainly, since I am done pretending otherwise even to myself. For the first time since he had walked into that basin certain of his own success, he had reached for someone to save instead of something to prove.

The cost landed on him, not on the shape he had unmade. An actual fire with no flame closed over his face, moving up through his hair strand by strand, leaving a mark there and turning every strand white as it went.

Above him, Natsume made a sound he no longer had breath left to answer.

Nobody sent for a hero. I sent for myself, certain I could be enough of one anyway.

One push left in him, small, aimed at the gray itself, bent gently away from where her voice had come from. Whether it held, or was only the last thing his failing breath wanted to believe of itself, he never got to learn.

In my final conscious moment I asked myself who caused this… was it me or was I just a part of it?

Somewhere past the count’s first beat, there was no one left awake behind his eyes to notice the four had never finished.