The silence in the street was heavier than the oak door I'd helped hang. It was the silence of a fundamental truth being broken, and no one knowing what to put in its place.
The Regulator found his voice first. It was no longer a nasal drone, but a sharp, incredulous squawk. "You! What did you do?"
His name was Elrin, I remembered. A minor official who enjoyed the small power his grey robes granted him in a backwater like Oakhaven. He wasn't a threat. But he was a symptom. And symptoms could report back to the disease.
"I… I just touched it," I stammered, the perfect picture of a bewildered youth. It wasn't hard to fake. The part of me that was the old Alex was screaming internally. "It felt… wrong. So I pushed on it, and it just… broke."
It was a pathetic excuse, but it was all I had. I had to sell confusion, not defiance.
Elrin strode forward, his face pale. He ignored me completely, circling the loom, running his hands over the wood. He muttered another incantation, trying to re-apply the Law of Stasis. The shimmering grey field started to form, flickered violently, and dissolved again before it could solidify. The place where I had nullified his law seemed to have developed an allergy to it.
"Impossible," he whispered, his confidence visibly crumbling. He looked at me, truly looked at me, for the first time. There was no intelligence in his gaze, only a kind of superstitious fear. "What are you?"
"He's my son, and that's what he is," Kael's voice cut through the tension like a saw through soft pine. He stepped beside me, his solid presence a wall between me and the Regulator. "And it seems he's got a knack for fixing what you break. Maybe your magic isn't as strong as you think."
The crowd, emboldened by my father's tone and the sheer novelty of seeing a Regulator flustered, began to murmur. Mallory had tentatively reached out and was stroking her loom, a fragile hope on her face.
Elrin's eyes darted from my father's stony expression to the restless crowd. He was out of his depth. This wasn't in the procedural manuals. A law couldn't just break.
"This… this is a matter for a senior Lexicon," he declared, trying to reclaim his authority. He pointed a trembling finger at me. "You. You will present yourself for questioning tomorrow at the magistrate's hall. Do not leave Oakhaven."
He didn't wait for a reply. Turning on his heel, he shoved his way through the crowd and hurried away, his grey robes flapping like the wings of a startled bird.
The spell broke. The crowd erupted into a buzz of excited conversation, people looking at me with a mixture of awe, curiosity, and fear. Mallory rushed over and seized my hands, her words a torrent of gratitude.
But my father didn't say a word. He just looked at me, his earlier confusion hardening into something unreadable. He placed a firm hand on my shoulder. "Home. Now."
The walk back was silent. The comfortable sounds of the evening, the clang from the smithy, the chatter of neighbors, the bleating of sheep in a pen felt distant, muffled by the roaring in my ears. I had been here less than a day, and I had already painted a target on my back.
We entered our small, sturdy house. The smell of stew from the kitchen, usually a comfort, now felt cloying. My mother, Lira, looked up from the hearth, her smile fading as she took in our expressions.
"Kael? Alex? What's wrong?"
"Our son," Kael said, his voice low and even, "just unraveled a Regulator's binding spell with his bare hands."
Lira's hand flew to her mouth. Her eyes, wide with fear, locked onto mine. "Alex? Is this true?"
I could only nod, the weight of it all pressing down on me. "I don't know how I did it, Ma. I just… saw it was wrong, and I fixed it."
"You didn't fix it, boy," Kael said, sinking into his chair by the fire. He looked suddenly tired, all the vigor from the confrontation drained away. "You broke a Law of the Realm. You think that junior fool is the problem? He's going to run to his superiors, and they will send someone who doesn't get flustered by a crowd. They will send a Quillord. Or worse."
"What are we going to do?" Lira whispered, her voice trembling.
"There's nothing to do," Kael said, running a hand through his greying hair. "He has to go to the magistrate tomorrow. We'll say it was a fluke. A strange interaction of Aether. He's just a boy. They might believe it. They might just censure him and let it go."
He was trying to convince himself. We all knew it.
That night, I lay in my narrow bed, the memories of two lives churning inside me. I thought of the simplicity of my old life, its own set of problems and rules. And I thought of the intricate, glowing locks I could now see on the world. The Law of Sealing. The Law of Stasis. They were just the first two.
As I stared at the moonlit ceiling, a faint, shimmering grid became visible to my new sight. It was the Law of Sturdy Construction that held our house together. I could see its pattern woven into the beams and mortar. With a thought, I knew I could find its flaw, its keyhole, and whisper it away.
The power wasn't just in my mind. It was in my blood, in my bones. It was who I was now.
Kael was wrong. I hadn't just broken a law today.
I had created the first crack in the foundation of their entire world. And I was the only one who could see it. Tomorrow, I would have to stand before the men who upheld that foundation and pretend I was just a clumsy boy who'd tripped into a miracle.
But as I finally drifted into a fitful sleep, one thought was crystal clear.
Pretending wouldn't be enough.