Chapter 41 The Splinter Effect (Continued)

The power has rules

Caelith wasn't sure what happened again.

There was no sudden snap this time, no violent tear in her perception of reality. The sterile white room simply softened, the harsh artificial glare bleeding out of the walls like wet paint. The sharp edges of the molded plastic chair dissolved beneath her, reshaping into a heavy, plush fabric.

She looked around, her heart thumping a slow, heavy rhythm against her ribs. The door was gone. The room now had a bizarre, suffocatingly homely feeling. It was no longer a cold, industrial box; it was a fully furnished living room, complete with deep-set armchairs, a polished wooden coffee table, and soft, warm lamplight casting long shadows across a patterned rug.

But there were no windows.

Instead, oil paintings of pristine window frames hung precisely where the glass should have been, depicting a bright, mocking blue sky. Beside her, on the far wall, hung another painting: a hyper-realistic depiction of a heavy wooden door, a brass knob standing out in stark, painted relief.

Caelith stood up.

She crossed to the painted window and pressed her palm flat against the canvas. It was canvas. Paint and stretched fabric and a wooden frame. She pressed harder. It didn't give. She stepped back and looked at the painted door handle and didn't bother touching it.

She turned around

He was sitting in the armchair across the coffee table. Julian's dark hoodie. Julian's posture. But the face had settled into something more consistent than the fractured image from before. The left side had won, or perhaps the two halves had simply stopped fighting. Either way the face looking back at her was not Julian's and made no further attempt to pretend otherwise.

Realizing there wasn't much she could do, Caelith forced her voice to remain steady. She looked across the coffee table. "Where's Julian?"

The entity sitting across from her still wearing Julian’s dark hoodie, still shifting along that jagged, glitching facial line tilted its head. "I'm right here."

Caelith frowned, her eyes scanning the artificial warmth of the room, looking for a seam, a crack, anything real.

The entity hesitated, his posture shifting into something casually resigned. "I don't think there's a way out of here," he murmured, his voice a perfect, unsettling duet of Julian’s warmth and a flat, mechanical tone. "You trapped us both here.”

"That's one way to describe it." He uncrossed and recrossed his legs, settling into the armchair with the ease of someone who had been in this room before. "The space is a byproduct. Not entirely intentional. You have a tendency to complicate things without meaning to." A pause.

Caelith looked at him steadily. "I don't know exactly how," he admitted, leaning back into the cushions. "But, since we're both stuck here... why don't I tell you what's going on?"

He paused, a faint, mocking smile pulling at the right side of his lips. "I didn't want to be the villain who rambles before doing their job, you know? The type where the hero comes to save the day at the last second and kills the villain. I'm only talking because I need something to pass the time. I'm not a villain, though. But... I guess I am in your story."

He stopped, gesturing with an open palm toward the space between them. "So, go ahead and ask me. I'll answer.” Caelith was silent. "I find the alternative of sitting in silence with you considerably less interesting than this."

"That's a very specific reason," she said.

"I'm a very specific person.”Caelith leaned forward, her fingers digging into the plush fabric of her chair.

"What exactly is going on? What do you want with me?"

He smiled, a dark, symmetrical expression that sent a chill through her. "I'll explain from the beginning. Simply put... I want you dead. Me, and a handful of others, I guess."

"Were you behind the assassination attempts?"

The man sucked in air through his teeth, a sharp, whistling sound. "Not exactly. You see, some thought it best to nip you in the bud before you awakened. But, then again, it wasn't successful. The first guy hired a shadow... and she failed. From her description, he was able to gather you had already awakened, thanks to those idiotic fellas that worship the book."

A memory flashed in Caelith’s mind the damp, suffocating darkness of the hidden room. "The ones that chanted in the cellar."

"Ding ding. Ten points to you," he purred, his eyes crinkling. "You're quick to catch on. I don't know what went on between you two, but she became your friend, apparently. Fascinating. I will admit nobody predicted."

Something in Caelith's chest shifted at that. She didn't let it show.

“So, we began perfecting what we were working on. A way to suppress your light. And we found it."

The image of the shattered windshield and the smell of burning rubber flooded her senses. "The road attack."

"Wow, you're killing it."

"They failed," Caelith snapped, her voice hardening.

"I wouldn't say that, dear. Minus ten points." He leaned closer, his gray eye locking onto hers with terrifying intensity. "They got the information we needed. Ever wondered why they didn't just go after you to finish the job, even though you were already weakened? Before you say your little friend Zara was there... it wasn't because of her. We realized that you have zero control over your powers. In fact, you don't understand it yet. You don't even know what your powers are.” He shook his head. “That aside, they would have died have they gone after you again”.

Caelith braced herself for the wave of panic that should have followed those words, but it didn't come. Instead, she felt weirdly relaxed. Her muscles felt loose, her mind heavy and strangely peaceful, as if she were sinking into a warm bath.

"You see," he continued, watching her eyelids flutter with a predatory satisfaction, "your powers react based on pure instinct entirely. It's strange, yeah? Since you can't control it yet, it only surfaces when your life is in absolute danger. And now... you're wondering why the power isn't surfacing right now."

He kept quiet, letting the heavy silence of the living room settle over her.

Caelith wanted to question him. Deep down, she knew she wanted to scream at him to continue, but a growing, primal fear told her she wouldn't like the answers she found.

"You know it. You do," he whispered, his voice a soothing, rhythmic drone. "Because you don't feel endangered. You see, we worked on the gas mist used in the ventilation. We made it colorless, odorless... yet deadly. Most especially for you. And right now, you feel relaxed instead of threatened, right? So your power won't react at all. Last time, it surfaced because you were actively being strangled. Survival took over. So, getting physical this time was out of the equation."

Caelith felt a weird, spreading numbness inside her chest. Her instincts were entirely offline, tricked by the very air she was breathing. She fought through the heavy lethargy, clinging to the one question that had been burning in the back of her mind since the restroom door jammed.

"Was Julian ever real?" she asked, her voice dropping to a fragile whisper. "Did he ever actually come back... or was it just you the whole time?”

"Well, his coming in was a variable that just arrived at the perfect time." The entity stood up, Julian's tall frame moving with a fluid, uncanny grace. He walked over to the painted window, placing a hand on the frame and looking ahead into the canvas as if he were genuinely gazing at a beautiful evening sky. "It's pretty."

Caelith sat paralyzed, eagerly waiting for him to continue talking, hanging onto every syllable just to keep her mind tethered to reality.

"Actually, the trigger was meant to be Mira," he said, not turning back to face her. "I knew that guy Davan had approached you, so I went to her as him. She was wary, of course. It would have been bad if she wasn't. I needed her suspicious. I flagged her student account through the administrative audit, made sure she dug deeper into those uncataloged ledgers, and left enough breadcrumbs to send her into a panic. I needed her to run to you. I needed her to bring everyone into the epicenter. I was still trying to move the pieces in place. I needed you to feel safe"

He turned his head slightly, the jagged line on his face flickering wildly in the lamplight. "Julian was a complete coincidence. He just happened to come into the picture at the right moment. So, I simply channeled him. I took the mask that was handed to me."

"Is he..." Caelith swallowed hard, the numbness reaching her throat. "Is Julian okay?"

The entity smiled through his fractured face, the hazel eye and the gray eye blinking out of sync. "He might be. He might not be."

The warmth of the room felt cold now, a suffocating shroud pressing in from all sides.Caelith looked at him.

The lamp cast its steady amber light. The clock didn't move. The painted evening sky outside the painted window stayed exactly as it was, frozen in a moment that had no intention of becoming the next one.

“Why did you add De-Vaelith to my name?”

“Did I?” He feigned puzzled. “I don't think I did”. Caelith realised she wasn't going to get an answer from him.

"How do I get out of here," she said.

He looked at her.

The room was very quiet.

He didn't answer.