The moment I remembered how I survived, the power inside me stopped behaving like something that could still be contained.
The shift was immediate and violent, because whatever had been sealed within me no longer reacted like a force slowly waking into awareness. It reacted like something ancient that had finally realized the restraints placed on it no longer mattered. The fractured space surrounding us trembled under the pressure as cracks spread wider through the failing system, each fracture deepening beneath the weight of what was rising inside me.
The figures surrounding us felt the change instantly. I saw it in the subtle tightening of their postures, in the way their focus sharpened with recognition severe enough to alter the atmosphere itself. Whatever certainty they had arrived
