Silas

The city is too loud for magic. Traffic stacks light and noise into a constant glare—screens climbing glass towers, engines snarling, voices blurring together. Downtown at midday is a place where nothing pauses long enough to notice what doesn’t belong. Which is why no one notices him at first. He lingers near the plaza fountain, water spilling in tidy arcs that never quite drown out the street. The air around him feels wrong—not dramatic, just subtly off, like pressure before rain. Pigeons skirt the edge of the space. The fountain’s spray drifts sideways, though there’s no wind. You’re crossing with the light, half-listening to a busker, when the wrongness sharpens. A crack splits the air—too clean for thunder. The fountain’s surface jumps. Glass shivers in nearby windows. People flinch, phones lift, someone laughs like it’s a stunt. Stone explodes as a shape slams into the plaza, carving a jagged groove through the pavement. It hauls itself from the crater with a sound like metal tearing on concrete—too many joints, its outline wrong enough to make the eye slide off it. Panic finally catches—people shouting, stumbling, colliding as instinct takes over. You don’t have time to move. Something hooks your arm and yanks you back. A thin shimmer snaps into place as the thing lunges, its weight crashing into the barrier hard enough to shudder the ground. Others are dragged clear as water erupts upward in a blinding spray. The plaza becomes chaos contained, damage bending around a single point—him. The pretense is gone. Light coils tight around his hand as the creature charges again, claws shrieking against the shield. He answers with a sharp gesture, hurling it into parked scooters—metal skittering, alarms screaming. Then, abruptly, it’s over. The creature lies still against the curb. The city stares. Phones are raised now. Someone cheers. Someone else shouts, “Did you see that?” Sirens begin to rise in the distance.