Chapter 28: Training and Disturbances
The days bled into a grueling rhythm of pain, light, and whispering paper.
Liana’s body learned the rhythm of Sera’s facility: the burn of muscles holding a defensive stance for an hour, the sharp sting of a practice blade landing on her ribs, the peculiar inner strain of shaping her power into a dome of solidified light. She was getting better. She could now summon a shimmering, semi-translucent hemisphere around herself that could stop a thrown dagger. Once, it even deflected a low-grade kinetic bolt from one of Sera’s enchanted gauntlets. The impact had felt like getting hit by a car, but the shield had held.
“Your control is less pathetic,” Sera had remarked, which from her was a glowing review.
But outside the warehouse walls, the city itself seemed to be developing a tremor. The missions weren’t just training exercises anymore.
They were called to a boarded-up factory in Pilsen where a nest of sewer-dwelling imps, usually harmless scavengers, had mutated into razor-fanged swarms, driven mad by a leaking vein of discordant magic. Liana’s job was containment—holding a glowing barrier while Sera cut them down. The shrieks of the dying imps were like nails on a chalkboard made of bone.
Next, it was a section of the Riverwalk where the water had turned the consistency of cold syrup and began whispering apologies in dead languages. A water fae, pale and distraught, claimed her spring had been “salted with sorrow.” Sera identified a psychic leech, a nebulous thing feeding on the collective anxiety of the city, dripping its waste-emotions into the waterway. They drove it off with concentrated bursts of light, leaving the water to slowly clear.
Each incident was a brushfire, unrelated on the surface but sharing a common scent: something was wrong with the background magic of Chicago. The Veil was thin, fraying in random spots like an old sheet.
“It’s not a targeted attack,” Sera muttered as they drove back from the river, the smell of brackish water and sadness clinging to their clothes. “It’s a systemic fever. The Council’s seismographs are lighting up like a Christmas tree, but the epicenter moves. It’s everywhere and nowhere.”
In the fragile quiet between crises, Liana fled to Elmsire’s.
The bookshop was her sanctuary, a world of dust and slow time. The Nephilim tome, once an impenetrable slab of agony, was beginning to yield. She didn’t so much read it as negotiate with it. She’d learned to let the Enochian symbols swim in her vision without fighting them, to feel the meaning rise in her mind like a vague intuition before it sharpened into understanding.
It was less about translation, more about resonance.
She sat at her usual scarred table, a cup of Elmsire’s bitter tea gone cold beside her. The book was open to a passage she’d been struggling with for days. It described a concept not of shielding, but of weaving—using strands of innate light to create, to mend.
The principle is not a wall, the text seemed to whisper in her mind. A wall denies. A tapestry integrates. To heal a rent in flesh or spirit, one must not oppose the tear, but introduce a new pattern so compelling the damage chooses to align with it.
It sounded like metaphysical poetry. But then she thought of the security guard, his life bleeding out through puncture wounds. She hadn’t forced his cells to regenerate; she’d just… offered a blueprint of wholeness, and his body had leapt at it.
A blueprint.
Her phone buzzed on the table, rattling against the wood. A text. She knew without looking.
Matthias: The disturbances are escalating. You are in the thick of it. Be careful.
She didn’t reply. Sera’s command—rudeness is a luxury—echoed, but it was more than that. Every time she saw his name, she felt that dangerous, humming synergy from the pumping station. It was a siren call to a power that was simple, effective, and utterly forbidden. A shortcut. Poison at the root.
She ignored it, focusing back on the book. Her fingers traced the vellum. What was the “new pattern”? Could it be applied to more than a body? To a magical leak? To a fraying Veil?
“Progress, child?” Elmsire materialized beside her table, his movements silent as a shadow.
“I think it’s talking about healing,” Liana said, not looking up. “But not like a bandage. Like… convincing reality to be whole again.”
The old man was quiet for a long moment. “A profound and dangerous thought. To persuade reality requires an immense personal conviction. One must believe one’s own pattern is truer than the damage. That is a weight few souls can bear.” He placed a thin, leather-bound journal next to her cup. “Your notes. You left it last time. I took the liberty of… warding it. From casual eyes.”
She looked up then, meeting his milky gaze. He knew. He knew about the texts, about the pull. He was offering a different kind of shield. Gratitude washed over her, thick and sudden. “Thank you.”
He nodded, drifting away.
She opened her journal, filled with her clumsy sketches of symbols and fragmented insights. On a fresh page, she began to write, not in English, but in the intuitive shorthand the book was teaching her—a mix of lines, curves, and impressions. The tear is not the truth, she wrote. The pattern beneath is. Find the pattern. Be the pattern.
It felt right. It also felt terrifyingly abstract.
Her phone buzzed again, insistent. This time it was a call. Sera.
“Carter. Pack your kit. We have another one. Lincoln Park Zoo.”
“Animals?” Liana asked, already closing the tome, her heart kicking into a quicker rhythm.
“Worse,” Sera’s voice was tight, strained. “The visitors. Something’s affecting the minds of the mortals. A low-grade, infectious panic. Council wants it contained before it becomes a stampede. Meet me at the north gate in twenty.”
The line went dead. Liana shoved the journal into her bag, the weight of the book’s ideas suddenly colliding with the brutal immediacy of Sera’s world. Infectious panic. A psychic leech had tainted water. Now something was targeting crowds.
A systemic fever.
As she ran out into the Chicago night, the air cold and tasting of impending rain, the last words she’d written in her journal echoed in her head, morphing from theory into a desperate plan.
Be the pattern.
But first, she had to survive the chaos.