The wind rushed above and below Ulla’s wings. Silently, both she and Luin hurtled through the sky at a speed that would leave anyone down below completely unaware if they were to so much as blink–not that they’d be able to tell what it was they saw anyhow. If Luin had a true body at this moment instead of just a borrowed body of a bird made of mana that he could control, his heart would have been pounding and his skin would have gone clammy all over. But as it was, he could only push that anxiety into speed.

:–ster! Master!: Belatedly, he realized that Ulla’s small mental voice had been trying to get his attention for a while. The owl sensed that his attention had finally focused on her and continued, :Master, where is the danger? Are we not flying towards danger right now? Ulla wants to understand what’s wrong. Ulla will help.:

Luin slowed his mind but not the speed at which they flew, as he tried to put his feelings into words or images that the avatar would understand. :Something…something bad has happened to Thea’s home…to our home.:

:Was that large building we just left not her home?:

:It was–is–but…: His understanding of his feelings were all jumbled and he had nothing in his short, worldly experience to compare with. :The small home she’d made for herself, the one she said I could stay with her and call home too…it’s been attacked.: Even though that wasn’t what Thea’s brother had said, Luin knew it to be true. This was no accident. It was then that he realized that the knowledge causing him pain, despite not being in his physical body at the moment, was that he knew it was his fault.

:Those beasts…: Ulla muttered. Luin could feel the desire to grab something by the talons and rip it to shreds in the owl’s emotions, and he silently agreed.

It wasn’t long before they reached the East District and Thea’s apartment. The three-story, thin, section of a building lay before them. The front was blocked off by the City Knights. They carried lanterns and kept any curious neighbors at a distance. But it was well into the evening, so those few who were curious or concerned didn’t stay long to gawk. Not to mention, there wasn’t much to see from the front.

Luin circled around the back of the building, and he got his first look at the damage. On the third floor, the window for the master bedroom, where they had slept the night before, was completely ripped out of the wall. Brick and dusted mortar littered the back alleyway and had even chipped away at the building across from it where debris had pitted the other wall. A huge crack also ran down the back of the apartment. A pointed attack was clear from the fact that neither apartment that shared a wall with Thea had been touched, and Luin’s anger bubbled within him.

Those beasts coming after me is one thing, but they dare…! But what could he do in his current state? He barely had the energy to maintain the form of a weak boy, let alone think about gaining his rightful form. And even now, was stuck as an observer, sharing the consciousness of a slightly-more-powerful-than-normal owl.

He flew closer, landing on the roof of the building behind the apartment and honed Ulla’s superior sight on the damage in the bedroom itself.

Huge gash marks matching the claws he had seen before when they tore open his resting place had ripped apart the mattress of the bed and the wardrobe and stripped both paint and chunks of brick from the walls.

What can I do indeed? Helplessness ate at him, only worse now than when he’d become conscious and embodied in the alleyway. Ulla was unusually quiet as well, but their anger echoed off each other’s.

Ulla’s head swiveled, noting, :More people and the sound of horse hooves in the front.:

Within a few moments, Luin saw Commander Hollendale and Timetheo arrive on the third floor. They stood in the doorway. Luin felt a bit sick as he watched their reactions. The commander’s whole body went tense, but it looked like he didn’t seem surprised. Timetheo, on the other hand, went pale and wide-eyed.

“It’s just like in the clocktower…,” Timetheo mumbled before putting his hand over his mouth.

The commander turned to Timetheo and stood in front of him so he could no longer see his little sister’s bedroom torn violently to pieces. “Tim, go downstairs and interview anyone the City Knights have detained or get information from them about what they’ve found out. We need to focus, right?”

Luin couldn’t see Timetheo due to the commander blocking his view, but he heard Timetheo say, “R-right, Commander. I’ll go downstairs and do that.”

That left the commander alone in the ruined bedroom. He rubbed a hand over his face before sitting on a corner of the bed that hadn’t been ripped up. He let out a long sigh. “I know what I’m going to see, but I need to confirm.” His voice was so low that had Luin not been using Ulla’s ears to listen with, he wouldn’t have heard the commander speak at all.

Luin was about to fly off, anger and a lack of ideas making him want to be on the move now that he’d seen the extent of the damage, but when the commander reached out and touched the edge of the gash in the mattress and closed his eyes, Luin’s consciousness was pulled from Ulla and thrown into darkness.

Slowly, he realized it wasn’t truly darkness and could make out the shape of Thea’s master bedroom through a faint light coming in the window. But that didn’t explain why he could see a see-through image of the commander sitting on the corner of the bed, and why the commander was staring straight at him.

***

Cyris gritted his teeth through the wave of dizziness that slammed into him when he thought, Activate Prequel. Using it in succession the way he was lately was putting more strain on him than he’d had in a long time. Even his long sessions of sword training–with mana usage even–didn’t feel like this. But thankfully, he didn’t have to rewind events but maybe a half bell this time.

He did it quickly, with his eyes closed to mitigate the nausea and to also delay when he would see the creatures he knew would appear. He found the room intact again when he opened his mind’s eyes, but what he hadn’t expected was to see a boy with night-blue hair standing in a white robe by the window.

At first, confusion stalled his thoughts; then, impossibility made him think that there was no way the boy was in this bedroom half a bell ago when Cyris had been eating dinner across the table from Luin at that time. Then, he registered the look of shock on the boy’s face, the fact that the clothing was so odd, and that the boy’s body was see-through like mist. But Luin clearly saw Cyris, which shouldn’t be happening in a prequel vision.

The boy seemed to recover from the shock first, looking around the room. :Are you going to play it, Commander?:

Cyris felt a chill run down his neck. How did the boy know?

Luin sighed without sound. :We’re wasting time. If you won’t, I will.: He sounded much more mature than Cyris remembered, and something about the way the boy was now made his presence seem to fill the space around them.

Luin waved a hand at the vision of the room, and the held image began to play forward in time without Cyris’s command. Cyris still felt it draining him, but he had lost control of it. Shocked, he could only watch as the image of those dark creatures with large claws and hellish eyes reached in on all sides of the window and tore it out the wall with one pull of their arms. They sniffed like hounds around the room as the dust and flying shards of glass settled, until they came to the bed. Upon finding nothing there, the one who had approached the bed first roared–a deafening roar that was less a sound that could be heard with the ears and more felt in the bones.

In a rage, the creatures tore up the room before bounding out into the night once more.

Luin raised his hand and the flow of images stopped rather than let the prelude vision release. The look on the boy’s face looked pained and angry. It was more emotion than Cyris had ever seen on his face in real life, so it left him questioning whether this was real or not.

Luin met Cyris’s gaze. :I think we should talk, Commander. Don’t you?:

Cyris finally unfroze. The boy was speaking to him without sound, the words flowing into Cyris’s mind. Having never even thought he’d need to speak to anyone in his prelude visions, he tried speaking his thoughts as well, but the oddness of it kept him on edge.

He thought awkwardly, :Yes, I think we have a lot to talk about.: When Luin nodded, Cyris knew his attempt at communication was successful.

:Tomorrow. Until then, find those whose skill is in making strong barriers.: He continued quickly, not letting Cyris even ask who Luin might know that people with those skills existed within his reach. :One person’s skill might not hold on its own, but several layered over each other might–for a time.: Luin smiled sadly and clenched his fists. :Protect Thea for me, won’t you, Commander?:

Luin gestured before Cyris could reply and the prequel vision turned into the black of the back of his eyelids.

Cyris opened his eyes to the destroyed room once more. There was no boy standing before the broken wall. A skeptical thought ran through his mind, and he wondered if he’d really seen the boy in his vision, but then, beyond the room on the roof of the next building, he saw the owl staring at him. Once they locked eyes, it launched itself back up silently and flew with alarming speed back in the direction of the Central District.

Certainty settled in Cyris’s bones, and his instincts screamed at him to get a move on. He stood and took the stairs two at a time to reach the knights down below. “Tim, ask the City Knights to let me use their Comstone. I need to put in a call to the Royal Knights. Now.”

“The Royal Knights?” Timetheo asked, his eyes flitting back to the superior officer of the City Knights who now wore a disgruntled expression.

Cyris knew this was a breach of protocol. Normally, anything outside the Central District unless it concerned property of the imperial family was left to the discretion of the City Knights, but he was asking to break that long-standing rule over a damaged apartment building. It didn’t make sense to anyone who hadn’t seen what he’d seen, so he said the only thing he could to get them moving and avoid an argument.

“This wasn’t an accident or a simple act of vandalism. This is tied to the incident at the clock tower.” That statement had the officer closing his mouth just as he was about to complain. Cyris turned to Tim, “I’m going to do all I can to make sure she’s safe, but I need the Comstone, and we need to move quickly.”

Tim’s face hardened, burying the anxiety and questions that had shown in his expression until now. “Let’s go then, Commander.”

The City Knight officer could only fall in step behind them. Cyris’s mind was already swirling with questions he had for a certain unusual boy for when tomorrow came, but for now, he’d do as suggested and get ahold of Dame Treya and Sir Meris of the Royal Knights, both users of barrier skills. And he’d ask if there were others with such skills whom he might not know.

Cyris gave orders to some of the City Knights out in front of the apartment to go to the East District Library and stand guard until morning. They gave him strange looks, but after a pause to realize he was serious, they mobilized.

This trail of destruction seems to follow in their wake. It’s better safe than full of regret later. It seemed to him there was a pattern of nighttime and an element of hiding to the creatures’ movements. He just hoped the knights would be enough of a deterrent to keep those monsters at bay, at least until he could put some countermeasures in place.