Chapter 52 Leo
The air in the Realm never felt like air. It was more like a pulse beneath skin, a hum in every breath — dim, unnatural light bleeding through everything and casting long shadows against stone that should not have held light at all. I stepped off the threshold and into that strange glow, boots finding purchase on ground that felt like memory turned solid.
Edward was already there.
He stood in the central chambers where light and shadow tangled together, a stack of documents and runic projections floating like restless spirits behind him. The air smelled faintly of iron and burnt ozone, like the place was trying to remind me I was far from home.
He barely looked up when I arrived, eyes still trained on the data drifting around him.
“I’ve been reviewing your report,” he said without greeting. His voice was quiet, methodical, like he was reporting a weather forecast instead of something that had her name written across the bones of it. “And the remains.”
I crossed my arms. The muscles in my shoulders tensed without my permission. “You said you found something,” I said.
Edward swiped one hand through a floating rune‑sealed diagram. The whole chamber shifted as the diagram rearranged itself into a skeletal figure — jagged and fluid at the same time, like it was trying to exist in two realms at once. I recognized the angles immediately, even without context.
“Look at this,” Edward said. “The way the limbs were detached — it didn’t resemble telekinetic force. No pressure fractures. No lift signature. There’s nothing that lines up with powers like we know them.”
I frowned, leaning closer despite myself. “So she doesn’t have that power? The Rift can’t be telekinesis.”
“No,” Edward said, tapping at another diagram that widened the view. “She has something worse.”
Worse.
The word thudded against the walls of my mind like an alarm.
Edward pulled up another layer of visuals — internal scans of the remains. The details were unmistakable and uncomfortable in their clarity. Wings that should have folded gracefully were rendered in angles that looked torn from the inside out; skeletal structures that had no clean breaks, only fractures that radiated outward like shattered light.
“Notice here,” Edward said, gesturing to highlighted areas in the torso, skull, and wing joints, “massive internal blood pooling. The vascular system was compressed from the inside.”
I blinked. That wasn’t usual. That wasn’t orderly. That was… something else.
He continued, his voice steady but edged with awe I couldn’t ignore.
“It’s not telekinesis. She didn’t move his body — she moved his blood.”
I stood there like I had been struck by something heavier than any blade.
My mind jerked back to her eyes — glowing, distant, empty of understanding. I remembered the way the gargoyle’s form had twisted in midair, suspended like a puppet with invisible strings, and then the quiet finality when that force had released.
I pictured her face in that moment. Blank. Expressionless like she was not even present in her own body. Something inside her was doing the work — something she didn’t even know she possessed.
Edward’s next words came slowly, like he was explaining an equation centuries in the making.
“It’s something closer to hemomancy — a form of blood manipulation, but not like the old texts describe. Not like anything we’ve seen in centuries. She didn’t just grapple with his body. She was shutting him down from the inside out. Closing vessels, disrupting flow, collapsing connective tissue.”
I saw it then. Every motion he described matched the way the creature had fallen — not broken like rope cut, but unmade from inside. Not telekinetic force — internal collapse.
My heart felt like a hammer against bone.
“That’s… horrifying,” I said, voice low.
Edward let the diagrams dissolve behind us with a gesture, the fragments dissolving into motes of light that drifted into the shadows.
“It’s not just a power,” he said. “Whatever she did is a fundamental rewriting of another being’s biological structure. That isn’t casual. That isn’t accidental. That is total control of the internal essence of life itself.”
I stepped back, trying to wrap my head around it. Hemomancy — the word would have sounded mythic a week ago. It would have sounded ancient and impossible. Now it had her name attached to it, and the meaning of it sat in my bones like a warning.
She didn’t know. She really didn’t understand what she had done or what she was capable of. She wasn’t conscious when it happened. She wasn’t even present in the moment the blood magic flared through her like fire.
Something inside her was.
And that scared me more than the fact she had nearly slaughtered a creature that wasn’t even wholly corporeal.
I rubbed my jaw, tension coiling in muscles I didn’t even realize were tight. Guilt rose like bile in my throat, heavy and unwelcome.
“She has no idea,” I said finally, voice rough.
Edward turned to me slowly, his expression unreadable in the dim light.
“No,” he said. “She has no idea.”
Silence stretched, thick and electric. I pictured her glowing eyes, the way her body had moved without her control, the way the entire space had shifted in the wake of her power.
She had been a vessel — not a wielder, not a craftsman of it, just a conduit. A doorway for something raw and terrible to manifest.
I swallowed hard. That realization collided with every gut instinct I had ever had about her.
She wasn’t a threat by intention.
But she was a threat by force.
And she had no comprehension of either.
I paced once, twice, the grooves of thought carving themselves sharper with every breath.
“Edward,” I said, not sure where I was going with it, “if she can do that without understanding it, imagine what she could do with control.”
His eyes met mine. “I don’t think she has control yet,” he said. “But she’s capable of effects that most bloodbinders in history could only dream of.”
That was not reassuring.
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to claw back some semblance of logic from the chaos of it all. This wasn’t just another anomaly. This was unprecedented. It was dangerous on a scale that made every tactic I had ever used seem trivial.
And worse — I was the one who brought her into this world. I was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to be her guardian, her anchor, her guide.
Instead I’d given her fragments of truth and half explanations that left her blind to the magnitude of what she really was.
“She doesn’t know,” I repeated quietly, more to myself than to Edward.
“No,” Edward echoed. “And she shouldn’t. Not yet. Power like that without understanding is unpredictable.”
His words should have comforted me, but the only real thought in my head was a single, terrible question:
If she doesn’t know what she is… then who is she?
I paced slower, each step measured, deliberate. The dust of the Realm under my boots felt like ash from a world that should have already burned.
Finally I looked at Edward, jaw tight.
“And there’s no precedent for this, right?” I asked.
Edward hesitated. “Not in living memory. Not in any codified history that we have access to. This strain of blood magic was last documented in the War of the Shards — and only in legend.”
Legends were never trustworthy, and yet here we were.
I rubbed my face with both hands, feeling the weight of every secret I’d been keeping — from her aunt, from Patricia, from the dean, and most of all from herself.
“That means,” I said slowly, “whatever she is… she’s unique.”
Edward nodded. “That would be the simplest conclusion.”
I closed my eyes and pictured her again — the blankness of her expression, the power she had unleashed without understanding it. That image stayed with me long after the diagrams faded, long after the visions of bones and ruptured vessels dissolved into the shadows of the Realm.
“Then the question becomes,” I said finally, voice low but steady, “what happens when she does understand?”
Edward didn’t answer right away. Instead he gestured to another projection that flickered into existence — a map, a series of arcane symbols, and a single pulsating point that seemed to draw every other line toward it.
“That,” he said, “is the locus of her power signature. And it’s shifting.”
My gaze hardened. “Shifting how?”
“Toward instability,” Edward replied. “Whatever her essence is doing, it’s unsettled. It’s reacting to its own discovery.”
That meant one thing I couldn’t shake:
Her power wasn’t just dangerous to others — it was dangerous to her.
And the only person in the world who could control that — who could guide it, teach it, contain it — was someone who already knew too much, and still wasn’t telling her.
I rubbed my jaw again, brows knit tight.
“She could destroy herself without knowing it,” I said.
Edward didn’t flinch. “That is one possibility.”
A chill crawled down my spine, not because of fear, but because the simple truth of it settled like ice in my veins:
She was more than an Ares. She was something ancient, unclassified, and capable of violence that existed outside normal understanding.
And I was the one who had to keep her safe.
I stood still for a moment, letting it all settle — the fear, the guilt, the rising wind of responsibility that felt like a blade against my spine.
Then Edward said quietly, almost reverent.
“Leo… who is this girl?”
I swallowed, unable to come up with an answer