The contraption made no sense at first.

Kestovar stood a careful distance away as Severa crouched beside her door, muttering under her breath and fastening a series of copper clamps to the frame. Thin wires snaked out across the floor, connecting to a small crystal core the size of a clenched fist. She moved with sharp, decisive gestures, her braid bobbing with every turn of her head.

He thought he recognized part of it. The crystal's cut looked like an aethercache fragment, the same kind used in low-tier stabilizer circuits. He had seen some of these aethercaches in home devices, used to power small lamps or sigil locks. But the rest?

That was new.

"What are you doing?" he asked, voice low and genuinely curious.

"Stand there," Severa said without looking up. "Be quiet."

He paused. "I'm already standing."

"Then stay that way." She moved her wrist, tightening something with a click. Some of the wiring was unevenly tensioned; he could tell because one of the copper lengths had begun to resonate off-beat. A small part of him wanted to reach over and correct it purely for symmetry, but he suspected Severa would kill him.

She adjusted the final clamp and wiped her hands. "You stay out here and be prepared to hold the cat."

And with that, she slipped into her room.

So she can make contraptions too, which makes sense, given that her father is an inventor. Kestovar frowned. Is there anything she can't do, or was she born exceptionally good at everything?

Kestovar waited. One of the copper coils on the contraption twitched. He leaned forward slightly, trying to piece together the function.

It might be an impact snare—something designed to react to movement. The filament tension implied a trigger line, and the light pattern on the core looked like an oscillating containment field rather than an energy conduit. Possibly adhesive-based, he thought.

From inside came the muffled sound of Severa's voice. "Here, little one. Come now, it's perfectly safe." The tone was . . . unrecognizable. Syrupy, sing-song, and so painfully sweet it made his spine tighten out of secondhand discomfort. It was like hearing someone try to charm a demon by reciting a lullaby in reverse.

Then came a growl, "Are you daft or deaf, you smog-stained little—"

Now that's more like her.

The sound of paw came first. Then the door burst open and the cat-thing shot out. It vaulted over the trigger circle and landed cleanly in the hallway.

Kestovar blinked. Wait. Wasn't that the part that was supposed to catch it?

The contraption didn't so much as moved.

He stepped closer, peering at the device. The tension along the copper threads hadn't changed. The aethercache crystal still pulsed its lazy rhythm, unconcerned. Maybe it was tuned to something too specific, like only detecting a certain weight or vibration.

The cat-creature darted down the corridor and vanished around a corner.

Kestovar sighed. "Montreal," he called, raising his voice a little. "The cat-thing got away."

No response.

He leaned forward, meaning to repeat himself, then heard her muttering from inside. She was crouched right beside the contraption now, examining one of the rune plates. "That's impossible," she was saying. "The sensor should have—unless the polarity—"

She reached out, adjusting one of the clamps.

Kestovar tried again, stepping closer to the doorway. "Montreal. The cat-thing got away—"

She jolted at his sudden appearance. The contraption immediately decided that that counted as movement. It snapped shut with a deafening clang right around Severa's ankle.

For a second, Kestovar just stared. Then he exhaled through his nose, very slowly. "Ah. So it does work."

"Ow! Ow! My ballsack; it hurts!" She stumbled on the edge of the bed, robes tangling around her knee. Grinding out through her teeth, she tried to pry the latch loose. It refused to budge.

She was whining and cursing at the contraption at the same time, and he found himself recalculating: perhaps she wasn't infallible, merely determined. A useful trait, if properly directed to non-cat activities.

She turned to the culprit of her demise, who was peering in from outside the door. "Kestovar! Don't just stand there. Help me out of this!"

"How?" He asked.

"The latch! Lift it before the feedback loop starts again!"

He moved quickly, perhaps too quickly, and the whole contraption gave a disgruntled buzz.

Severa growled, "Why did you do that?"

"You told me you were going to catch it yourself and didn't mention this thing existed. I don't know how to work this." He raised a hand in front of him.

"Do you know what a latch is?"

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Yes."

"Then lift it!"

"Which one? There are two of them."

"The left one!" she all but roared.

He lifted the latch, and the device released her. She clutched her ankle, stifling a pitiful whimper.

"So you couldn't catch it as well," Fabrisse said flatly as he offered her a hand. Severa wobbled as she got to her feet, catching herself on his shoulder for balance.

"What idea do you have then, genius?" She glared at him, squeezing her swelling ankle. Maybe she'd just swallow her pride and ask Berrick for help.

Fabrisse, meanwhile, seemed completely unfazed by her glare. He had seen Severa's voice earlier. If she could keep that up, maybe they could finally catch the cat. "I have this idea," he said, tone so dry it could start a fire. "But both of us will have to get involved."

"Meow meow, meow meow," Severa sang again, her voice pitching upward in a cadence so unnaturally cheerful it almost made Kestovar wince.

He stood off to the side, half in shadow, half behind the safety of his own disbelief, watching what had to be the most uncomfortable thing he'd ever seen in a rich household's corridor.

Severa Montreal, the star student of the Synod, was now crouched in the middle of the hall, making coaxing sounds that could've summoned either a cat or a minor spirit of embarrassment. She waggled a treat between two fingers, smiling like she was trying to charm a small child and an auditor at the same time.

"Here, little one," she crooned, saccharine dripping from every syllable. "Come here, sweet cloudspawn. I'm your friend. Meow meow."

Kestovar had the distinct urge to look away, like he was intruding on something private, some ritual of personal humiliation that shouldn't be witnessed by another human being. It was hard to tell whether she was performing for the cat or punishing herself.

But he must see it through. He was the one suggesting the idea in the first place, and it was working. The cat, several feet away, stared back in wary silence, but it wasn't moving. Then, miraculously, the creature inched forward. Maybe Severa's sheer intensity was a kind of magic on its own.

Kestovar glanced down and saw a small rock lying by his foot: muted grey-black, flecked faintly with blue. He picked it up and turned it over in his palm, squinting at the fine frost-patterns veining the surface.

This is impossible. The rock might be a glacial imprint quartz. It holds a resonance until the right thermal threshold releases it. This rock should only exist inside glaciers that are hundreds of years old. Why is it here?

The rock nerd inside him screamed. Glacial rocks—real glacial rocks—were excellent for energy storage. He needed to take it to the nearest lab, chip off a fragment, run an aether retention test, map the resonance decay curve, and confirm exactly how rare it was.

But it would have to wait. Severa had managed to distract the cat-thing. Now, it was his turn.

Shoving the quartz inside his robe pocket, he activated three Stealth spells at once. He moved from the corner, warping the very space around him. Watching his own movement always felt strange, like seeing a reflection that decided to walk off without permission.

On his hands, a mesh of copper filaments glowed faintly. This was a webwork of Severa's earlier schematics, and she had adjusted it on a pair of gloves for 'grip power'. Adhesion mesh, compression rune, stabilizer shard were all cobbled together in the most precarious success imaginable.

He positioned himself by the corner, close enough to strike.

The cat's gaze twitched toward him. It sensed the distortion, just barely. Severa, to her credit, didn't falter.

"No, no, don't mind him," she chirped, pitching her voice another octave higher until it sounded like a particularly cheerful ghost trying to sell pastries. "Look at me, sweet little cloudspawn. Look at the treat. Yes, that's it. Good boy. Meow meow."

Then came the soft whumpf of release.

Kestovar lunged. The world stretched into a blur of light and motion. His hands closed around the cat-thing in a clean motion. Aether sparked as it made contact with fur, and the weave tightened like mercury cooling into shape.

The creature yowled and wrangled greatly, to no avail. It had been caught.

"Got it," Kestovar said simply, straightening with the struggling bundle in hand.

Severa exhaled a long, shaky breath. "By the Twelve, finally." Her voice cracked somewhere between exhaustion and victory. "And not a word about what came out of my mouth earlier."

He nodded solemnly.

"So, how are the gloves?" She asked.

"They're good." He squeezed it slightly tighter as the cat-thing tried to break free.

"My father's design," she muttered, stepping closer to examine the circuitry. "The adhesion mesh possessed a mini aethercache core. I replicated it with a few wires and a stabilizer shard. Now hand it over," Severa said, stepping forward with a grin that was all menace and no mirth. She reached out, and Kestovar eased the smoky creature into her hands like it was a ticking clock he wasn't sure he wanted to keep.

The cat-thing slunk, ears flat, eyes narrowed into furious slits. Its fur puffed where the glue-mesh had held, leaving faint sparks of aether in the air. Severa brought it back to her room and set it on the bed with precisely the expression one reserves for an object one plans to punish.

"Stupid cat," she muttered, more to herself than to the creature. "You will pay for what you put me through."

Kestovar raised an eyebrow as he stood by the door, trying not to peer inside. "You're going to . . . what, exactly?"

Her smile went small and very cold. "An eye for an eye." She dug into a drawer and produced a stack of thin sheets with plain parchment on the surface, but when she cracked one between her fingers it left a tacky residue.

What is that? Sticky paper?

Kestovar's mouth twitched. "You're really going to—"

"Shh." She set a single sheet out on the bed and, with the solemnity of a surgeon, folded one corner into a tiny square. The creature hissed. She soon stuck the tacky square to a pad, then another, until all four of the cat's paws were thoroughly tack-bound.

There was a flurry of motion as the cat-thing tried to paw the offending sheet free. Each swipe only dragged the paper tighter, tearing hairs and leaving little sticky threads clinging to its toes. It spun a panicked circle, four tiny feet skittering on the blanket like a macabre dance.

Severa clapped her hands once, delighted and vindictive. "Observe. The price to pay for those daring to cross me."

"That's . . . immature of you, Montreal." He knew Severa was petty, but he didn't know this pettiness extended to feline creatures too.

"Silence."

Kestovar cleared his throat. "Will you remove those later?"

She considered the question for a second. "Yes," she said at last. "But only after it's learned this lesson. And you will assist. No whining."

The cat-thing shot her a look that was pure smoke and contempt, then resumed its futile scrabbling.

Kestovar hesitated, still watching the cat's sticky-legged misery with something caught between pity and morbid fascination. Then, almost as an afterthought, he reached into the inner pocket of his robe and withdrew something. "Is this yours?" he asked, holding up a muted grey-black stone streaked with faint blue flecks. "I found it lying in the corridor."

"It is mine," she said, snatching it from his hand with proprietary speed. "That cat took it."

He tilted his head, studying the stone as she turned it over in her fingers. "Do you know what kind of rock it is?"

"No."

Fabrisse wanted nothing more than to keep the rock for himself, but that would be wrong. This was Severa's rock. Just because she took one from him didn't mean that he must take one back.

He paused for another heartbeat, then said, more quietly. "This rock . . . is exceedingly rare."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.