The silence inside the bubble of Heidi's Presence was not empty; it was pressurized. It felt like the air before a lightning strike, heavy with ozone and the static of a soul too burdened to keep its secrets any longer.
Heidi Dahl sat motionless.
Her fingers remained wrapped around the ceramic cup before her, though she no longer drank from it. Opposite her, Alaric watched his friend. She had turned pale, her hands having tremor she couldn't suppress.
"The dream," Alaric said quietly. "Tell me."
For several long moments she didn't answer.
When she finally spoke...
"...I was standing in the capital."
Her voice was soft.
Almost distant.
"As though I were watching everything from above."
"The streets were crowded. Thousands of voices, all weeping at once."
Her fingers tightened around the cup.
"Not loud screaming."
"The kind people make after they've already cried themselves empty."
She closed her eyes.
"The city...was dying."
Alaric felt himself straighten slightly. He knew Heidi. She never exaggerated. If anything...
She understated.
"The roads were broken. The market district was burning. The palace banners had fallen. and dark clouds began to spiral in the sky above. I saw knights..."
She paused.
"They weren't fighting invaders. They were fighting our own people."
Alaric frowned.
"Civilians?"
She nodded.
"Some wore ordinary clothes."
"Others..."
"...looked wrong."
She searched for the proper words.
"I don't know how to describe them.They were still human. But not. It was as if they had lost all hope and had been hollowed out."
Her breathing slowed.
"They staggered through the streets. Some cried. Some laughed. Some simply stood there staring into nothing. Refardless, all despaired."
"And then..."
She hesitated.
"...they began changing."
Alaric's expression hardened.
"I watched mothers clutch dead children, watched soldiers abandon formation, priests kneel...because they no longer had faith."
Her voice had become almost a whisper.
"Their shadows. They peeled away and rose from the ground."
" More despair added to the mass. And they just kept rising, piling on top of each other, until they became a star of misery floating above aethelberg."
She leaned in, her gaze locking onto his. "And then, I saw him."
"Who?"
"A man. I couldn't see his face because he wore a white mask. "A man. I couldn't see his face because he wore a white mask. His arms were outstrected as the star of ruin was under his control, he laughed meniacally as he unleashed its power upon the world. There was no big explosion. No flames. No collapse. Everything simply ceased."
She looked directly at Alaric.
"That's where the dream ended and where i woke up, screaming."
Neither of them spoke.
The lively sounds of the restaurant continued around them while they sat in this bubble of silence. Alaric though back to one sunny day when he and Elara sat on a hill overlooking the forest, he remembered the happiness he felt the peace of being with her and his unborn son. That was a simple time as compared to the encumbrance of responsibility. A time that felt impossibly distant now.
Alaric snapped out of it in a split second, his thoughts moving rapidly.
Not because of the vision itself but because of who had seen it.
Heidi.
Among all the Lords of Aerthos...there was a reason she unsettled even veteran Saints. Not because she was the strongest, though she very nearly was.
But because...
Heidi's Trait was The Emperor, it's authority over disorder and change themselves, a true weirder of the Trait unlike Jamie though more on Jamie's situation would be revealed later. Not that anyone knew about them.
Alaric knew better than anyone what that authority entailed, having witnessed Heidi use it first hand.
Several people across history had awakened beneath the same Trait but that never meant they possessed identical abilities. Traits determined authority, Individuality determined expression. Every Resonant was born from one's own interpretation so no two users of the same Trait could do the same things even though they exercised the same authority.
Her First Resonant was the ability to perceive instability. Not merely cracks in stone...but cracks in anything. A fortress, a government, a family, a promise. She could see pressure gathering long before collapse occurred.
During the Kemet Campaign...
She had once halted an entire advance because she claimed a mountain pass "felt wrong." Commanders argued. That time was being wasted, supplies were dwindling and so on
Yet she refused to move.
Hours later the cliffs collapsed. The enemy had prepared explosives beneath the rock. Thousands would have died.
She had never seen the explosives.
Even now...
She governed Kartsfall the same way. Trade routes that looked prosperous...she identified as future failures.
Officials who appeared loyal...she quietly replaced months before corruption surfaced.
Tax policies...infrastructure...noble alliances...
She didn't merely govern.
She stabilized.
Then there was her Second Resonant. hrough her actions, she could cause the change of a single system—physical, social, or conceptual—toward a desired path. A wall would crumble faster. A bureaucratic rule would become inexplicably ineffective. A belief system would begin to show contradictions that had previously been invisible.
An enemy fortress had stood untouched despite weeks of siege. She took a bow and fired an arrow that struck the beams of the fortress. Moments later, they inexplicably failed. Through her actions of killing or sparing seemingly random individuals, supply chains collapsed and the command structure of their enemies began to fracture.
She had simply allowed entropy to win. As for her Third Resonant...
He remembered the battle of the Crimson Fields. Heidi had been struck down by one of the Usurper Sultan's personal general—a brute of a man with a Trait that turned his flesh to iron. She had fallen into a coma. For three months, they thought she would die. But to survive the deathly blow to her channels, her Flow and Anti-Flow had continued to circulate, merging, forging, breaking through to the Saint level in a process that had never been documented before.
She was the first. The first of the Death three to ascend.
By the time she woke, she had changed. She had ascended without loosing control of her Trait. And when she faced the general who had put her in that state, she had not struck him down with force.
She could now temporarily suspend a single rule of reality, society, or logic within a localized area by causing it to change from activity to passivity. Gravity might fail for a moment. A law of physics might briefly cease to apply. A social hierarchy might invert, with the lowest suddenly commanding the highest.
During the Final battle while Genji held back the army, she confronted not only the general who nearly killed her...but every remaining commander defending the usurper while Alaric went on ahead to deal with the tyrant.
She had simply... unmade him. The iron that formed his flesh had ceased to be iron. He had become soft, mortal, fragile.
And then he had died.
Yet none of that frightened Alaric now.
No.
It was something else. A quiet detail hidden beneath her First Resonant. Something very few people knew.
Her dreams.
Whenever great disorder approached...
She dreamed.
Anytime a change was about to happen—any change at all—she would dream about it. It sounded like an inconvenience, a minor nuisance. She might dream about a child reaching puberty. A person about to get married. Even someone about to change clothes.
But here's the thing.
She only dreamed about bad change. Change directly linked with disorder.
If she had a dream about a child maturing, that child would suffer a tragedy. If she dreamed about a marriage, that marriage would end in disaster. If she dreamed about someone changing clothes, that person would be wounded, stripped of their armor in battle.
The dreams were never trivial. They were always omens.
He looked at Heidi.
"...Since the war..."
She nodded slowly.
"I haven't dreamed like this."
Alaric finished quietly.
"...Since Nostrad died."
She lowered her eyes.
"...Yes."
The name lingered heavily between them.
Nostrad.
Nostrad. The name tasted like ash. The man who had been a part of their team. He had a healing Type trait and so accompanied them on missions. He was a pacifist who could'nt stand te sight of blood but still gave his all to save lives even if they were the lives of the enemy
'I want to save millions.' he would say with a smile.
He died protecting thier camp froma surprise attack, the only instance where Heidi's dream didn't come true though that was the time she got seriously wounded and entered that coma.
"I don't know when it'll happen."
She finally whispered.
"It could be months. It could be years. It could..."
Her voice faltered.
"...be during the Hydrangea Festival."
Alaric's eyes narrowed.
"Two days."
She nodded.
"Exactly."
Alaric slowly looked down into his drink. Its surface reflected his face.
Calm and composed.
But behind those steady eyes his thoughts were anything but.
'If Heidi dreamed then... somewhere...someone has already made the first move.'