The vision ended all at once. The weight of it arrived complete and final where before there had been the small mercy of uncertainty.
He remembered everything.
The clearing. The seven of them walking behind him. Sera slightly behind the others, her crimson hair catching the light. His knee on the wet grass. His mouth against Vela's hand.
They are yours.
The memory had none of the qualities of something fabricated. The cold of the grass under his knee. The silence before it started. He had been there. He had said those words. He had meant them.
He stood in the middle of the clearing and looked up at the sky.
The barrier above was invisible, its presence known only by what it kept out. The city lights bled upward into a grey that was not quite dark, and somewhere beyond all of it the stars existed without caring about any of what had just happened in the garden below.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked back down.
Solandre : "What is your name?"
The cold arrived before she did.
Vela : "You already heard it."
Her voice came from directly behind him, close enough that he felt the temperature of it against the back of his neck.
Solandre : "Say it again."
A pause. Almost amused.
Vela : "Vela."
Solandre : "What do you represent."
She moved around him, trailing shadow, and came to stand in front of him.
Vela : "The Hypocrisy Devil. Though I imagine you will keep calling me Vela regardless."
His shirt was on the ground. White, soaked through, cold. He crouched to pick it up.
The cold came before he touched it.
It spread from his wrists up his forearms and across his chest, a dark mass moving across his skin with the patience of something that had already decided where it was going and was not in a hurry to get there. It was not painful. It was not warm. It existed at a temperature he had no reference for, and it moved the way shadows moved when light shifted, following the contours of his body without gaps, without hesitation.
He watched it.
He did not panic. He could not explain why. It did not feel like a threat. It felt like the opposite of a threat, which was somehow worse.
The mass shifted. The cold receded.
Thin black fabric lay against his skin where it had been, as though it had always been there and had simply chosen this moment to make itself known.
He stood.
Vela was looking at the sky, her back to him, her shadow-robe moving against the stillness of the garden air.
Solandre : "I don't trust you. I am still not certain of what I saw."
She turned slowly.
Vela : "How interesting." She tilted her head. "You are troubled. Frustrated. And yet you are the one who came here and made your offering." A pause. "Where exactly are you directing all of that?"
He had no answer.
He knew she was right. He refused her anyway, the way he refused things that were true but unbearable, with the particular stubbornness of someone who understood the cost of that refusal and paid it regardless.
Solandre : "We will discuss this later. Can you remove the evidence?"
Vela : "You have hands, don't you?"
Solandre : "I don't know how."
Vela : "You do. You just haven't tried yet."
He turned back to the clearing and reached for something he did not have a name for. He found it the way you found things in the dark, by moving toward where they should be and trusting that they were there.
Vela moved behind him. Her arms came around him, one hand at his abdomen, one at his forearm. He stayed still. She guided his hand forward until it pointed at the clearing and leaned close to his ear.
Vela : "Velvora."
He repeated it without deciding to.
Solandre : "Velvora."
The darkness came from the ground all at once.
A mass of black rising from the earth with the indifference of something that had always been underneath it, and from it came chains, black and silent and precise, moving through the air toward each body in turn. He watched them work. There was no sound. No resistance. Just the chains reaching and closing and pulling, one by one, until the clearing held nothing that it had held before.
The chains disappeared. The mass became mist, rising slowly and thinning until it was gone. The grass was clean. The stones were clean. The smell was gone, replaced by the ordinary cold of a garden at night.
Nothing remained. Twenty seconds, and nothing remained.
He looked at his own hand. The hand that had pointed. The hand that had done this without trembling.
I don't recognize this.
He turned away and walked.
Vela : "It must be irritating." Her voice came from the shadows to his left, moving with him without effort. "To be the one who causes your own suffering."
Solandre : "Be quiet."
She disappeared into the nearest shadow.
He could feel her anyway. Something at the edge of his perception that had not existed before tonight, a presence moving from darkness to darkness as he walked, patient and unbothered and entirely unimpressed by his instruction.
The lampposts cast their circles of light at regular intervals along the stone path. The music from the ball had stopped. The lights of the event building were dark. Students would be returning to their rooms by now, tired and slightly drunk and carrying the uncomplicated weight of a night that had gone well for them. They would walk these same paths and see nothing wrong and sleep without difficulty and wake tomorrow to a world that had not changed for them at all.
He walked through their light and back into the dark between them.
Solandre : "Can others see you?"
Vela : "You would have noticed by now if they could."
Solandre : "Other Devils?"
A longer pause.
Vela : "They look right through me. Always have."
He thought about the cells beneath the military installations. The catalogue of known Devils the three kingdoms had spent four years assembling. None of them had ever recorded her. She had been here tonight, inside the barrier, on secured grounds, and nothing had detected her presence.
Solandre : "Do all Devils have names?"
Vela : "Most of them never needed one."
A pause. Then quieter, almost to herself.
Vela : "I gave myself mine."
He did not ask her to elaborate.
He walked the rest of the path in silence and arrived at the dormitory building as the first grey of early morning began at the edges of the sky. He pushed open the door. He went inside.
He did not look back at the garden.