Boyan, the breathless storm

The clash had drawn its last chord—but the silence that followed was a lie.

Atty soared, his wings now slick with streaks of blood, a silver tempest roaring above the broken coliseum. He let loose one final shriek—a cry of triumph, of warning, of something deeper. It wasn't victory he proclaimed—it was urgency.

Below, slavers screamed as they were scattered like dry leaves. The beasts had fled or fallen. The thralls, those too wounded or stunned to move, sat stunned beneath crumbling arches. But one pair among them did not sit still.

71 and 98, dust in their throats and iron in their hands, were already moving.

"He's not winning," 98 muttered as they sprinted toward the arena, his scarred feet pounding against stone. "I can feel it."

"Then we help him win," 71 said, voice steady, eyes locked ahead.

In the pit, Boyan had managed to land a nasty blow to Benjamin who flew back and hit the arena's wall. He was swaying and something was distracting him. Malachros' mark was beginning to stir.

Atty landed hard, slamming into Boyan like a thunderbolt. The force sent tremors through the arena's foundations. A wet, visceral crunch echoed—bones, not stone. Boyan was hurled backwards, arms flailing, body twisting mid-air until he struck the sand with a brutal, grounded thud. His back carved a furrow as he skidded, ploughing through the arena's floor until his broken form lay still—limp, unmoving, facedown in blood-smeared dust.

Atty dropped into a crouch between Ben and his enemy, wings flared, eyes locked on Boyan's unmoving body. His feathers bristled with kinetic fury, and the air shimmered around him like heat mirages warped by raw will.

Benjamin tried to speak, but his lips barely parted. Something was indeed wrong. It wasn't the pain from being thrown. It wasn't the bruises or the slashed ribs or even the blood seeping down his face.

It was inside him.

He gasped.

"Not now… "

The black pressure he sensed was crawling through the seams of his soul—Malachros. Not fully present, not yet, but stirring. Benjamin could feel the mark writhing like a parasite, an echo of the cursed bond that the Itharim had warned him about. His limbs trembled. His vision doubled.

Keep him back… Benjamin's voice sounded in Atty's mind, thin and frayed.

The gryphon didn't answer with words. He planted a claw forward and growled low in his throat. A silent vow.

That's when Boyan moved.

It was grotesque, unnatural—his spine bowed in an impossible arc, bones bent like twigs as wind surged beneath him. It didn't lift him with grace. It puppeteered him.

He rose like a corpse caught in a storm, shoulders dangling, face shadowed by blood and grime, one eye open and unblinking, the other mangled and bloody. And the wind did not howl—it whispered, a thousand ancient breaths slipping across the ruins like secrets.

Ben's eyes widened.

"...He's burning his soul," he muttered.

This was something that Ben learnt at the academy. Stagecraft used soul to grasp laws. If the Sage was talented enough and a crisis required it, a Sage could decide to burn his Soul's talent and accelerate his understanding of Laws. The result? A shirt burst of powerful improvement followed eventually by death.

Atty snapped his beak.

Boyan's head rolled forward, and when it lifted again, something in him had changed. There was no rage. No grin. Just… clarity. A terrible stillness.

"You see it now, don't you?" Boyan croaked. His voice was hoarse, hollow. "I never needed a second chance. I needed a moment."

Benjamin struggled to rise, forcing himself upright. "You're unraveling."

"No," Boyan whispered. "I'm awakening."

His eyes closed. Blood trickled down his chin.

Wind is not a thing. It is motion—an effect, not a cause. A reflection of contrast, of heat and cold, of pressure and release. It is air moved by differences. It is a pattern. It is the evidence of forces invisible to the eye.

And in that instant—Boyan understood.

He didn't know the name of the Law he had touched. Maybe it had no name. Maybe it was a confluence of three, four, ten Laws. It didn't matter. For that fleeting breath of time, he had reached into the substructure of the world. He had touched the pattern beneath wind, and for a single heartbeat, he had known what it was to see the world as it truly was.

He wept. Tears and sweat from his right eye and blood from his mangled left eye.

"Is this... how enlightened Sages feel?" he murmured. "Or is this something else?"

Atty growled low.

Boyan stepped forward. His lost arm was still absent, but wind shaped its memory one more with flared intensity, flexing spectral fingers made of rushing currents. Every step he took left the sand behind him unnaturally flattened, not trampled. His sword trailed behind him like a pendulum. A storm was waking.

Benjamin closed his eyes. Malachros was screaming in the pit of his soul now, clawing upward, trying to turn clarity into madness. Atty's presence was the only tether holding him still.

"Ben!" 71 called out, nearly at the edge of the pit.

"Stay back!" he shouted, coughing blood. "He's not done."

Boyan turned his head, slowly. His eye fixed on 71 and 98. He smiled—gently.

"You gave him strength. That's beautiful," he said. "You should leave. I'd rather not kill you too."

"We're not leaving him," 98 growled.

Boyan turned back to Benjamin.

"No," he said, voice soft as silk, "you are. Because this isn't a fight anymore, boy. It's an answer to a question I've asked my whole life. What is wind? Today you'll discover that it is fear."

The wind twisted behind him, a great wall of pressure forming, a hurricane coiling in human shape.

Benjamin summoned his will, his Transference flaring through his skin. The glyphs around his form sparked and spun faster. Atty stepped forward.

And in that moment, there was no sound. No noise. Just motion.

Wind and light collided.

--

From the ruined sands of the arena, Boyan stood tall.

The man was grotesque in majesty—his black fatigues tattered, hanging in soot-rimmed ribbons from his war-sculpted frame. His right sleeve, absent. His right arm, gone. In its place, wind spun like a limb born of storms, crackling and flickering with every pulse of his ragged heart. His face was drawn, lips bloodied, yet a half-smile curled there like a blade beneath skin. The lines of age and fury etched into his cheeks were softened by a distant calm, the eye of something far worse than a storm.

But it wasn't Boyan who stood there anymore. Not truly. Boyan was enraptured by his epiphany of death. Boyan was wind.

The air groaned.

Then screamed.

From beyond the shattered walls of the arena, from cracks in stone and crevices in the deepest earth, winds surged, howling through the cavernous underbelly of the city above. A sound like keening, like the mourning of ancient spirits, echoed through the capital as currents howled through alleyways and shattered windows. The very soil of Khial shivered as gales wormed into every nook, every hole, every breathless chamber.

And far above, the city trembled.

From temples to slums, from towers to crumbling tenements, a wind pulled—not pushed, pulled, like some monstrous lung gasping its first titanic breath. The air was no longer air. It was hunger.

Atty's wings flared in terror. Benjamin gasped as he felt it—life itself being stolen. Everything was feeding into the vortex forming around the man who was no longer just a man. Around Boyan, now more than Boyan.

"The wind is going crazy, it's coming in from the outside as well!" 98 whispered from the edge of the arena, his voice cracking. "He's… he's calling it here."

"Yes," 71 said, staring into the heart of the gale. "From everywhere."

Benjamin didn't hesitate.

He burst forward, Transference flaring behind him like wings of branded fire, symbols glowing brighter than ever before. Atty launched beside him—no commands passed, no signal given. They were simply one in intent.

Left and right, the two thundered toward Boyan.

The ground turned to glass beneath Benjamin's feet, the heat and energy so intense that molten trails followed his path. Atty tore through the air like a silver comet, his claws glowing, wings slicing the wind. They were twin blades striking the same target.

They reached him in less than a breath.

But time did not agree.

Everything stopped.

Sound warped, stretching into a low, guttural hum. Color bled from the world. Even the wind paused, suspended like water frozen in mid-boil.

And then—a voice. Ironic. Calm. Mocking.

"Too late," it said.

Benjamin's eyes widened.

The voice was not Boyan's.

It slithered into his mind with the foul familiarity of a wound reopened. It didn't roar. It smiled inside him. It made space. It filled it.

Malachros.

"You called to the Source again," the voice purred. "And it echoes. It resonates. You mustn't do that, little vessel. You make the veil thin."

Benjamin's limbs twitched. His vision blurred. He couldn't hear Atty anymore.

"I see," the voice mused, amused, dark. "You've given me a gift."

Ben didn't understand.

Until he did.

Boyan's body—his soul—had reached peak resonance with a Law. He had been open, vulnerable. And Benjamin, beacon that he was, had acted like a signal fire across the cosmos. Malachros hadn't needed to force his way in. He had simply stepped through the open door.

The spark of genius, the enlightenment Boyan had just achieved—it was now poisoned. That moment of clarity had deepened, and now those depths swirled with rot. Boyan was still there, somewhere, but drowned beneath the maelstrom of a forgotten devil.

Wind was no longer wind.

It became devouring.

Air pressure dropped across the entire region. The gale shifted, accelerating. The atmosphere itself was collapsing into Boyan's form. Creatures screamed in silence. Thralls dropped to their knees, clutching at their throats. High above, in the streets of the capital, men fell where they stood, lungs crushed by emptiness. The world was choking.

Benjamin, through his curse-gift of Law Insight, saw it all—the pattern of the catastrophe.

He's going to explode. Damn him!

The winds weren't just feeding him—they were collapsing toward a singularity. Boyan wasn't siphoning power. He was becoming a wound in the world, a breach. A storm so vast it could obliterate the city and hollow out everything in reach.

Benjamin didn't hesitate.

He turned to Atty, still flying beside him, and their eyes locked.

I have to try something, Benjamin sent, his thoughts weak but resolute.

We're already beyond safety, Atty responded. You know what happens if we go further.

Yes. Ben's jaw clenched. I'll lose myself. We might both.

They didn't speak again. There was no time.

Benjamin reached—not physically, not mentally, but with the soul.

Transference, until now, had always been soul-adjacent. Proximity. Harmony. A shared thread. But Benjamin now reached into Atty—and Atty did not resist.

Their souls touched.

And then blurred.