Date: Unspecified
Ti: Unspecified
Location: Kingdom of Scotland, Lothian, Edinburgh, Palace of Holyroodhouse
"Conjoined? Hahaha." Martha threw her head back in laughter. "The world truly couldn’t have played a crueler joke on you two."
The tall, naked woman standing before her—bearing the calm, unified presence of both Coryn and Reven—did not bristle at the mockery. She rely smiled.
"Higher power?" they said evenly. "I hate to disappoint you Martha, but there is no such thing. There is only cause and effect. The pattern is far larger than our minds can grasp, so people shrink it into sothing convenient and call it fate."
Martha’s eyes hardened. "Ignorant children." Her voice lost all trace of amusent. "I will pray he grants you peace in the afterlife."
Her hands moved in a blur.
A volley of knives shot toward them once more, each blade already thrumming with stored energy, poised to detonate the instant they entered her ntal field.
They moved with effortless precision, slipping between the incoming blades as though gliding on air. Each step was asured, each shift of weight perfectly balanced. Martha’s lips curled and uttered in disdain, "Overconfident idiots."
With a snap of her fingers, she ignited the knives mid-flight. The explosions erupted around them at the exact mont they were suspended between movents, intending to trap them in the heart of the blast radius.
But through the smoke and shockwave, sothing blurred forward. Before Martha could process what she was seeing, they were already in front of her. A fist drove into her abdon with crushing force. The impact lifted her clean off the ground, the air leaving her lungs in a violent gasp as blood sprayed from her mouth.
She barely had ti to register the pain before a second strike connected—this ti to her face.
The blow snapped her head sideways and hurled her across the hall. Her body hit the stone floor, bounced once, then again, before skidding to a stop several ters away.
With her cheek pressed against the cold stone tiles and her vision swimming, Martha forced her eyes to focus. Through the blur, she saw them advancing.
They were no longer rely radiating a ntal field as a distant barrier. It clung to them like a second skin, translucent yet dense, flowing over their form in smooth currents.
They rendered her immobile with a single punch. The force behind that punch was unlike anything she had experienced. A chilling thought crept into her mind. ’Are they stronger than King Jas? No. Impossible.’
They approached at an unhurried pace, and for a strange mont, even the echo of their footsteps seed muted.
"Ignorant?" they said calmly. "No, Martha. We simply see more clearly now."
Their gaze swept across the hall, eyes gleaming with faint radiance, before continuing, "The shades we once told you about—the layered colors in the world—have changed. They are no longer faint distortions. They are energy signatures. They highlight pairs. Twins. Things born of the sa source and conjoin them with our chivalry. That is how we were able to do this."
A subtle pulse rippled outward from their skin. Their ntal field tightened slightly, becoming almost imperceptible as they extended their right hand to the side, palm open. The air above it trembled, twisted, and bended. At first, it was nothing more than a distortion—like heat rising from stone. Then a speck of light ignited in the center of their palm. It was no larger than a grain of sand, yet it burned with a density that made the surrounding space bend slightly inward, bleeding intense heat and light into the hall.
"You see, Martha, the air around has these particles that are similar, there are a lot of them, and our chivalry allows us to conjoin them," they said evenly, watching the mote of brilliance stabilize.
The grain of light grew steadily, feeding on sothing unseen. It swelled from the size of sand to that of a marble, then to a sphere the size of a golf ball. The temperature in the training yard rose sharply, the air rippling with distorted currents.
"We can guide those similarities," they continued, their voice unhurried. "We bring like to like, and combine them, just like us."
The sphere expanded further, now approaching the size of a baseball. Its glow intensified into a searing white-gold radiance, shadows retreating violently from its light. The stone tiles beneath their feet began to crack from the heat. It looked like a miniature star.
Martha shielded her face instinctively, dread creeping into her expression for the first ti. The unified princesses lifted their gaze and t hers.
"Higher power? Let us open your eyes today," they said softly. They drew their arm back and hurled the blazing sphere upward with all their strength, chanting, "Let there be light."
It pierced the ceiling effortlessly, burning through stone and timber in a column of incandescent light before vanishing into the night sky. For a fleeting second, it resembled an ascending firework, then it exploded.
The detonation did not roar with destruction but blossod outward in overwhelming radiance. Darkness dissolved. The night sky was flooded with searing white-gold brilliance, as though dawn had been violently dragged forward hours ahead of its ti.
Light poured through the shattered opening in the ceiling and stread in through the palace windows, flooding the training hall in blazing clarity. From where she lay, Martha stared upward through the ruined roof. Above her was not the velvet cloak of night. It was a clear, sunlit sky.
The sight hollowed her expression. The foundations of her belief and reality fractured in that instant.
Seeing that Martha no longer made any attempt to rise or retaliate, they approached her slowly. The fury that had burned monts ago was gone, replaced with sothing far quieter. They squatted beside her, their expression calm.
Before Martha could react, her wounds began to seal. With their chivalry they conjoined what had been torn apart. Cells knitted together. Bruised tissue realigned. Fractured capillaries sealed. Even the swelling along her jaw receded visibly.
Martha stared up at them, disbelief hollowing her features. "Why?" she asked hoarsely.
They did not look at her with resentnt or triumph, focused on repairing the damage, with a simple smile touching their lips they replied, "We always considered you our mother."
"We want you in our life. That is if you will have us."
...
[AN]: I wanted to go into detail about how she was conjoining hydrogen atoms from the air into helium, using her ntal field to contain the reaction and compress it into sothing resembling a miniature star. But given the tiline, I decided it was better to leave it implied and let readers piece it together.
If you understood what was happening, you were right.
If you didn’t... that’s on . I’ll write it better next ti.
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