"You owe me an answer," Caelum said. His voice had dropped to a tone that made heads turn; it was small moth-quiet compared to the shouting, but what it promised filled the ring with ice. "You promised me you'd protect me."
"I did!" Elias spat — but the lie split like glass under his own tongue. "We did protect you. Cael — we were the ones who kept the Patriarch off you. We were the ones who—"
"You signed me," Caelum said. The words were again simple. "You signed me to their will." He moved like a coiling storm: branch and thorn, whip and net. Elias's next charge bit into nothing; vines wreathed his arms and crunched like ropes. Where his fists had been confident moments before, now they were tangled.
Seren jumped in — not to attack, but to plead. "Caelum—" he started, and the sound was full of that old, soft loyalty that used to make children. "We told you we'd be there. We were ordered—"
Orders and the soft, terrible arithmetic of survival — Caelum knew both. He had been the child who believed in names and faces and had been burned. Now he had the taste of blood and the knowledge of what it did to muscle and mind. The old tie felt like rope around a throat.
He moved too quickly to be simply a child. He moved like a stormbreaker: Branch Whip lashing out to disarm, then Thorn Burst to pin, then the sudden, silent reach of Verdant Maw — not the domain he'd learned to summon later, but a close, close thing: living vines that closed like hands. Elias toppled to his knees, gasping. The plaza sounded far away; his pulse thundered in his ears, loud and unwavering.
Elias's face was a map of betrayal and exhaustion. He looked up at Caelum, eyes wet with something that might have been fear, might have been guilt. "We had no choice," he said, so quietly that only Caelum heard it. "We lied because you would have become a puppet of the world. We lied to make the world forget you and thus protect what you would become."
The explanation hung and died. It had the shape of excuse, and where it touched Caelum it turned to ash.
You are a shield, Caelum thought — I do not want to erase the shield. He had said it before, a childish plea. The shield had been his illusion, and now he pressed that illusion until it cracked.
He stood above Elias with vines woven like a crown at his feet. Sweat trickled down his temple; a soft foam of blood glistened on his knuckles from a strike that had cut him earlier. His breath came steady and monstrous.
The plaza's roar was a muted drum. There were those who shouted for mercy, those who wanted spectacle. V's gaze from the balcony was a flat coin — interested despite himself. Seren's mouth moved uselessly.
Caelum's hand hovered, not to strike, but to end. He saw all the faces he had loved — the herb-sellers, his mother's smile, the patriarch's emptiness, Elias's foolish grin when they were boys — and that lightning of betrayal seared through. He could end this with a single motion. The thought was clean. The hunger at his gut answered in an animal shiver.
He lowered his hand.
Elias's throat spasmed, air rushed in, sound building into a sob. He coughed and then, with ragged breath, managed to say, "We— we loved you. I laughed with you. I meant it."
Caelum's jaw flexed. The vines loosened until they fell away like forgotten ropes. Elias collapsed sideways, chest heaving, face a bruise of color. He did not die. He lived, shuddering, to stare up with hollowed eyes.
"Don't say it," Caelum whispered. "Not to me."
He turned away. The crowd exhaled as one — a sound like wind through dead leaves. Seren rushed forward and helped Elias sit, fingers trembling. Around them, whispers swelled into a tide of questions.
V's voice cut the air almost conversationally from the balcony. "Enough." It was not gentle. "This was unsanctioned. Both of you — away from the ring."
They obeyed, moved like children in a tableau that reeked of too many truths. Caelum's steps were steady, but his shoulders shook ever so slightly. He felt the tide inside him, the feral current, ebb for now — but there was the knowledge of it: how close he had come to letting it take the rest.
At the edge of the crowd, Seren's hand found his sleeve. The touch was light and full of history.
"Caelum," he said, voice small. "Please."
Caelum looked at him. For a flash — a second — he could see the boy who had once played on the bridges, who'd laughed at bad jokes, who'd put his shoulder to the world and asked it to be lighter. Caelum know Elias is more stronger than this but he's very guilty now and it's limiting him.
Then the look slid away like a petal in the wind. He had learned to survive by becoming harsher than the world around him. He had learned to take because no one else offered it.
"Next time," he said. It was not cruel. It was a promise and a threat at once. "killing you guys here would be such an hassle and I won't even enjoy it that much."
He walked out of the ring and left them — Elias coughing, Seren silent and broken, the crowd a hurricane of reaction — to the taste of a world newly shifted. The night felt colder, the moon hard and indifferent overhead.
He clasped his hands behind his back as he walked, feeling the green thrum under his skin: regeneration knitting where he had torn, a root of life binding a bruise already. He would not, could not, unlearn what he had seen. But neither would he lose the shield entirely, not yet. Shields, he had discovered, could be remade out of sharper things.