Incubus Living In A World Of Superpower Users

Elowen's tree bowed once as if acknowledging a rival ceremony. Then it struck. Not with spear roots or wave roots.

With a heartbeat. The trunk thumped and the entire structure of branches, leaves, and veins beat with it.

The arena shook on the second beat. On the third, the standards trembled. On the fourth, half of them fell.

The army broke formation and ran and found itself trapped in circles that were not on the ground but in the rhythm.

Running against a heartbeat is hard. Running against the world's heartbeat is almost impossible.

Lilith did not let them slow down. She reached into her robe and drew out a pin the size of a fingertip, a plain pin with a head that showed no symbol.

She pushed it into the platform. The sound it made was small, but the effect was not. The space flinched like a person whose old scar had been pressed.

The pin carried the memory of a seal older than the academy, older than the Director's first order, older even than the first roar of the god stirring in his bone throne.

The pin told the arena to behave for her.

"Now," she said, and the army hurled itself forward with fresh order.

Elowen's eyes flicked to the pin. "Clever." She set her palm on the trunk. The bark rose to meet it, an old greeting between kin.

"But that belongs to a bargain I did not sign." She pulled power through her wrist, not as a flood but as a steady draw, and the light in the pin dimmed as if it had been set in a shadow.

The arena remembered what it was before that seal. It remembered roots.

Lilith looked down at the dimming pin and laughed. "Of course."

Next came the visions that cut deeper. Ethan again, but not a boy standing silent at the edge of a battlefield.

Ethan is sitting at a table with the twins, his head tipped back, laughing at something simple, something small you only laugh at when a day has been good.

Ethan is asleep on a sofa with both girls draped over him, his hand around one wrist like a habit.

Ethan was annoyed at a spar, but his smile tugged anyway when Evelyn bumped his shoulder.

The images moved as if caught in a cup of water being stirred. Peace inside them was not perfect, but it was close enough to hurt.

"Do you think I will break like this," Elowen asked, "when I have lived longer than half the mountains he walks past?"

"No," Lilith said. "But I think you will blink. I only need a blink."

Elowen did blink. She let herself look again, then she put the images behind her tree as if placing a photo on a shelf and closing the door.

"You cannot have him," she said. "And you will not ruin their mornings to prove a point."

"Never planned to," Lilith answered. "But I had to see where your guard is soft."

"Not there," Elowen said.

"Good," Lilith said, and smiled like a knife laid gently on a table. "I would have been disappointed."

The fight tightened. There were no more slow waves and no more legions summoned just to be shattered.

Every piece they called cost something old. Lilith's illusions began to feel like places, not tricks.

You could step into them and come away with sand on your shoes. Elowen's growth began to feel older than the arena.

Some of her branches carried the smell of rain falling in a season that no longer existed. The void rang; the rivers flashed.

They met in the middle, not as women standing but as forces. Lilith's mirrored armies came from the angles of an impossible cube that had been unfolded.

Elowen's roots came as coils, nets, meshes, patient hands, and sudden fists. When the two reached the same space, the platform cracked.

The crack did not stop. It ran along the bones of the arena, dove, and came up the other side.

The sky fell in ribbons. The rivers looped and tied themselves into knots then snapped free.

The first collision tore the ground open in a clean line, and the second took a chunk out of the platform the size of a city square.

The third pressed into empty space and did not break, but folded it like fabric. That fold flipped inside out and came back as a wall that cut the arena in two.

Roots drilled through the wall, and illusions poured around it like smoke through a window. The wall held for five breaths and then blew apart into glitter.

"Again," Lilith said.

"Again," Elowen said.

They pressed harder. The space between their feet began to glow from strain. Stones that were not stones—grown from the root itself—melted and reformed as the lattice fought to keep its shape.

Ripples rolled outward and left dents in the void like fingerprints in clay. Somewhere very far below, one of the mountain-thick roots shifted, and the entire arena slid an inch.

Lilith drew her army tight, shoulder to shoulder around her until the crowd looked like a single cloak.

She lifted her face and let the mirror-sky fall into it. When it hit, it did not cut. It draped over her like a veil.

Every step she took left a trail of reflections that did not fade. She had wrapped herself in a world and made it obey.

Elowen lifted both hands, and the life-tree breathed. A single breath, by a thing too big for any breath to matter, and yet the result came like a tide.

Roots rose around her in rings, three layers, five, then seven, each a circle set inside the next.

At her nod, they spun in opposite directions. Illusions that entered the rings slid sideways, lost their grip on edges, and drifted to the outermost circle where they were unmade by patience.

Lilith's veil flared. She snapped her fingers left and right, and two veils split off and ran like banners on the wind.

They slid through the rings, dodged, came in low, and cut upward. The fourth ring faltered for a breath.

A soldier slipped through the gap and reached Elowen's shoulder before a vine closed on her wrist and turned her hand into smoke.