Loss And Gain
He didn't know how long he stood there.
Maybe a second. Maybe a year.
Maren sat perfectly still at the table. The smile on her lips was soft, but wrong now. Detached. Stuck. Like something had frozen her mid-thought. Mid-life.
Kaien took a step forward. His feet felt far away.
He knelt slowly beside her, fingers brushing the edge of her sleeve.
Cold.
Not room temperature. Not mildly chilled.
Cold.
He reached for her wrist. Pressed two fingers to the spot she'd taught him when he was little — "Feel for the river under the skin," she'd said.
There was no river.
No pulse.
No current.
Only stillness.
Kaien didn't speak. He couldn't. His mind wasn't empty — it was overcrowded. Thousands of calculations slammed into each other inside him like glass shattering in reverse.
Posture: Perfect. Object Placement: Cup still half full. Muscles: relaxed. No clenching. No spasms. No struggle. Expression: Peaceful, smiling.
There are no clear indications of a fight. It's like... like she was put away. Folded into the space. Like there had never been a soul inside her body at all.
His breath caught — not from panic. From something deeper. Some part of him trying to make room for what didn't fit.
This doesn't make sense.
Then something inside him… cracked.
No pain. No light. No words. Just—pressure.
It started in his chest and spread like liquid heat, pouring through his arms, into his spine, behind his eyes. He staggered back from the table, hand pressed to his ribs like he was going to be sick.
The air warped.
The curtain shifted.
The room — breathed.
Kaien fell to his knees, gasping now, not from emotion, but from some foreign presence inside him. Something he'd never touched, but had always felt watching from the edges of the world.
Then—
The candle lit itself.
A thin, dancing flame. No match. No friction. Just will.
Kaien stared at it, trembling. The hairs on his arms stood up. His vision blurred, not with tears — but with pressure. Like the air around him had become thick and aware.
He saw something.
A shimmer.
Near the door frame, a faint disturbance in the air. Like the ghost of a heatwave. It pulsed once, and the candle flickered in response.
Kaien turned his head slowly toward it.
Residual energy. Presence. Something was here.
Someone.
His vision narrowed.
He didn't know what this was. He didn't have the vocabulary.
But deep in his bones, Kaien understood:
"This is power. And someone used it to erase her."
The room was alive now — his own aura, wild and untamed, pushed against the walls. He felt it brushing the corners of the house, ricocheting off wood, crawling over the floorboards.
And at the center of it all, Maren sat still, smiling faintly, like she knew.
Like she'd always known.
Kaien's voice finally broke through the silence, hoarse and low.
"…Who did this?"
No answer.
Just the candle flickering.
Kaien's breath came in shallow bursts, chest heaving. But the air didn't help. It filled his lungs and did nothing. His arms trembled beneath him.
He couldn't stand.
His aura was leaking — wild, uncontrolled, clinging to every object in the room. He felt it brushing the walls, pressing outward in waves, searching for something to grip. It wasn't violent, but it was relentless. Like a river that had never been told it needed a dam.
He staggered once, the world spinning—
—and collapsed.
But consciousness didn't leave him.
Not really.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He fell into a space made of silence and gold.
Threads surrounded him in every direction. Some shimmered. Some pulsed. Some simply floated, lifeless and frayed. They weren't physical, but they mattered. And they all converged toward a single point:
A sealed door.
Wooden, ancient, floating in the dark, with a glowing symbol carved into its center. The same sigil that flickered behind his eyes when he dreamed. The same one he'd never had a name for—until now.
The Archive.
The realization wasn't spoken. It simply arrived. Like memory returning after forgetting it was ever lost.
"You've remembered pain. That's enough."
A voice—calm, bodiless, threaded directly into his thoughts. Not from above or within. Just… there.
The door didn't open. Not fully. But it creaked.
And something leaked through.
Kaien's body tensed as fragments surged past him — like images breaking through static:
A dim apartment, books stacked so high they formed walls. Scribbled notes on philosophy, biology, history. Strings pinned across a wall like a crime board. The obsession was loud.
A young man — twenty, maybe — his face gaunt, his hands twitching. Eyes glassy, rimmed with tears, pupils huge from sleepless nights.
"If I can just see the whole structure... it'll stop hurting."
Pages. Pages. Pages. None of them perfect. None of them enough.
A bathtub. Water still.
A blade.
Kaien's breath caught. He turned away from the memory, and the Archive responded.
The images recoiled — not disappearing, but pulling back into threads. As if to say: You can come back when you're ready.
He drifted for what felt like minutes. Maybe more.
The Archive remained quiet. But it worked — silently and constantly — pulling pieces from his soul like fibers. Sorting them. Storing them.
He could see faint clusters of light forming near the door — labels written in glowing characters he didn't recognize, but somehow knew.
His own past life was beginning to reorganize itself — not with clarity, but with suggestion. Shapes. Impressions. Like something fogged over was slowly taking form.
A framework was building itself, just out of reach.
And then—A presence. A feeling. A word surfaced:
Nen.
Kaien tensed.
He didn't know how he knew the word. It arrived like a name half-remembered from a dream — not understood, just… there. Familiar in the way fiction sometimes feels more real than memory.
Maybe I read it once, he thought. Somewhere I forgot.
Another flicker — not a full memory, but an echo:
A hand, trembling slightly, sketching neural diagrams across notebook paper. Loops of chemical cycles. Arrows pointing toward words like "neurodegeneration," "dysregulation," "serotonin disruption." Pages torn out. Pinned up. Rewritten. Over and over.
Not magic. Not Nen. Just desperation dressed in science.
But beneath all that theory — beneath the logic and the ink — was the same question pulsing now through his body:
How do I control what's breaking me?
His chest tightened. Not in fear. In recognition.
If I don't learn how to manage this… I'll burn out again.
His aura swirled wildly around him, unshaped, volatile. It felt exactly like that old feeling — being too awake, too fast, too alive.
The Archive pulsed softly.
Kaien turned toward it again. His heart pounded — not with panic, but focus.
"I want to remember," he said.
The Archive didn't answer.
But somewhere inside its shifting design, a single door unlocked — a sliver of light escaping before it sealed again.
That was enough.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kaien woke with a gasp, back in Maren's home. The candle off to the side had almost fully melted, but still flickered softly.
His body ached. Cold sweat clung to his shirt. His muscles felt hollow — like something vital had been drawn through him and hadn't returned. His aura had eased, but not vanished. It no longer roared against the walls, but it clung to him still, flickering at the edges of his skin like static. Unstable. Leaking.
His aura still bled from him in faint pulses — too wild, too raw.
He narrowed his breathing.
Focused.
Not on the power, but on his boundaries. On the shape of his skin, the space his body occupied, the sensation of pressure against it. He imagined pulling everything inward, like reeling in a frayed thread.
And something shifted.
The shimmer around him began to draw closer. Slower. Thicker. His heartbeat eased. His breath steadied.
He hadn't done anything complex. He hadn't thought it through.
But something in him — something old, or maybe just logical — had reached for containment.
For defense.
And it answered.
He sat up slowly, breathing in shallow, deliberate rhythms.
The room had changed.
Not emotionally — structurally.
The angles felt too precise. The space too still. He could sense the shape of the air. The seams between objects. The tension lines in the floorboards. It was as if something had peeled back the surface of reality, just slightly, and he was seeing what lived underneath.
His eyes drifted toward Maren's chair.
She hadn't moved.
And yet, the room was different without her. Not in grief — in presence. Like something massive had been removed, and the space hadn't filled back in. Her absence hung in the air like an echo. Still ringing.
But it wasn't just the void she left behind.
There was something else.
A heat in the memory of a touch that didn't belong. A subtle friction in the flow of the room. Something faint, clinging to the wall near the door frame — barely noticeable until his awareness latched onto it.
And once he noticed it, it was unmistakable.
A trace of something. A foreign thread of presence. Faint, patient, intentional.
Kaien pressed a palm to his chest.
Nen.
The word arrived like a pin dropped in silence.
He didn't flinch at it. He accepted it — not as truth, but as hypothesis. A piece of terminology attached to a sensation he could no longer deny.
It made sense now.
The concept fit — will shaped into force, emotion into structure. A system built on presence. On disruption. On potential.
He didn't fully grasp it. But he didn't need to. The sensation in his chest was evidence enough.
His fingers still tingled with something unseen — a soft heat that hadn't faded.
This is power.
And if I don't learn how to contain it… it'll consume me.
His breath steadied.
Whatever this is, wherever I am… I'm not allowed to fall apart.
Not again.
He stood, legs shaking, but his spine straightened all the same.
Not this time.