Chapter 23: The Nullifier Box

The sound didn't just stop; it was devoured.

It wasn't the silence of a library or a winter morning. It was a predatory absence, a psychic vacuum that tore the ring of metal on stone and the ragged breath of the guards right out of the air. In a heartbeat, the vibrant courtyard of the Starfall Academy—usually redolent with the scent of ozone and Mira’s crackling embers—became a tomb of grey light and absolute stillness.

Dorian felt the frost in his soul stutter. The intricate lattice of his ice magic, the cold geometry he kept tucked behind his ribs like a diamond heart, didn't just melt. It shattered. The shards didn't fall; they vanished.

Across the cobblestones, General Kael stood with his hand hovering over the lead-lined box. The artifact pulsed with a light that wasn't a color, but a hole in the world. 

Dorian’s first thought was of the oxygen. The Nullifier didn't just consume mana; it displaced the physical properties of the atmosphere, creating a hollow pocket where life was an anatomical impossibility. 

His gaze snapped to Mira.

She was already on her knees. The fierce, golden-red halo that usually defined her silhouette had been snuffed like a candle in a gale. Her hands were clawed into her chest, her fingers dragging through the fine silk of her tunic as she tried to pull in air that no longer existed. Her eyes, those incandescent amber pools that had challenged him for a decade, were wide, panicked, and staring directly into his.

He tried to shout her name. His throat moved, his vocal cords strained, but no vibration emerged. The void ate the sound before it could pass his lips. 

Dorian reached for his magic. He reached for the bitter, biting chill of the arctic winds, the crystalline structure of the glaciers, the defensive spikes that were his second nature. There was nothing. The inner sanctum where his power resided was a dry well. He felt the tether of his soul fraying, the very essence of his identity being bled out into Kael’s box.

The cold he felt now wasn't the familiar, comforting bite of his own element. It was the absolute zero of the grave—the absence of motion, the absence of existence.

He watched Mira slump further. Her forehead hit the stones. 

*Move.*

His muscles were leaden, deprived of the energy that magic provided and the oxygen the blood demanded. Every step was a negotiation with gravity. He saw Kael laughing—a silent, hideous pantomime of triumph—as the General backed away from the expanding radius of the null-field, protected by some unseen ward on his armor.

Dorian reached into his inner pocket. His fingers, numb and clumsy, brushed against the silver-wrapped bundle he had confiscated during the high-council raid. The Ember Core shard.

It was a piece of pure, primordial fire. To a mage of his constitution, touching it was akin to grabbing a white-hot coal with a bare hand. Under normal circumstances, the mere proximity of the shard would have sent his internal temperature into a lethal spike, clashing with the ice in his veins until his heart gave out.

He gripped it.

The pain was a vertical line of agony that bisected his world. It was a scream he couldn't release, a roar of heat that tore through the frost-slicked canals of his nervous system. Because the Nullifier was eating the magic in the air, the shard reacted like a pressurized boiler in a vacuum. It wanted to expand; it wanted to burn.

He used his own body as the conductor. 

Dorian forced his freezing blood to act as a heat sink, channeling the shard’s violent, unstable energy through his arms. His skin smoked. The frost on his eyelashes vaporized into a thin mist that the void instantly claimed. He began to move, not as a man, but as a bridge for a power that hated him.

Each footfall was a crack of bone against stone. He ignored the smell of his own scorched palms. He ignored the dizziness that threatened to plunge him into the grey. There was only the girl on the stones. There was only Mira, whose lungs were collapsing in on themselves.

He breached the center of the null-field. 

Mira’s skin was the color of ash. Her pulse point in her neck was a frantic, dying bird, fluttering beneath skin that had lost its warmth. Dorian collapsed beside her, his knees hitting the cobblestones with a jar that he felt in his teeth. 

He didn't touch her with his hands—they were too dangerous, currently emitting a jagged, distorted heat from the shard. Instead, he leaned over her, his shadow shielding her from Kael’s sight. 

The tactile contrast was a physical blow. His skin was screaming with the shard’s heat, yet his core was plummeting into a sub-zero stasis to keep the energy from detonating. He pressed the shard into the very center of the grey space, right between the stones where the void seemed deepest.

*Break,* he commanded. He didn't use words; he used the raw, agonizing pressure of his will.

The Ember Core shard hissed. The Nullifier field resisted, a wall of nothingness trying to swallow a sun. Dorian felt the energy backwash into him, searing the linings of his lungs, blackening the vessels in his arms. He saw Mira’s hand twitch. Her fingers grazed his boot.

That was the only catalyst he needed.

He shoved the shard’s remaining power outward. He didn't aim for the box; he aimed for the logic of the spell itself. He forced the fire to mimic the ice—to become a singular, piercing point of absolute pressure. 

The world fractured. 

A sound like a thousand mirrors breaking at once tore through the courtyard. The silver latch on Kael’s box shattered. The lead lining warped, turning white-hot before melting into a puddle of useless slag. 

The air rushed back in.

It was a violent, screaming gale, the atmosphere demanding its rightful place. The sudden return of pressure nearly burst Dorian’s eardrums. He fell forward, his hands finally releasing the shard—now a dull, blackened husk—and catching Mira as she gasped.

It was a raw, primal sound. She sucked in the air as if she were drinking life itself, her chest heaving with such violence that her whole body shook. She clung to his forearms, her nails digging into the scorched leather of his bracers.

General Kael was gone, fled into the shadows of the western gate as his weapon failed, but Dorian didn't care. He didn't look at the retreating soldiers or the smoke rising from the ruined box. He didn't even look at his own hands, where the skin was blistered and weeping from the shard’s price.

He only saw the way Mira’s pulse franticly stuttered against his thumb, a heartbeat he had nearly traded his soul to hear again.