He’s looking at me the way I imagine he looks at prey.
I don’t look away.
“The poison.” My free hand lifts toward the wounds still visible across his arm. “Your healing is struggling.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You shouldn’t have to manage.” My fingers hover over a particularly vicious gash—the edges blackened, the flesh refusing to close properly. “Sit down. Let me look.”
“Soreia—”
“Sit. Down.”
For a moment, I think he’ll refuse. That lethal instinct doesn’t take orders. It dominates or destroys, doesn’t bend or yield.
He sits.
The altar servesas an examination table.
I guide him to the central stone—cracked and stained with residue older than my grandmother—and position him against its surface. He moves stiffly. The wounds are worse than I first thought. Divine poison runs through at least six separate injuries, each one fighting his regeneration to a standstill.
“This will hurt.”
I don’t wait for acknowledgment. My magic reaches toward his wounds, searching for the poison’s signature, that wrongness that doesn’t belong in living flesh.
My power isn’t healing. It can’t repair damage or knit flesh. What it can do is anchor—make things permanent, make endings stick. Including, it turns out, the ending of divine corruption.
The poison resists. Divine power fights my bloodline’s authority. For a long moment, it’s a standoff—my power pushing, the poison pushing back, neither giving ground.
Then I push harder.
My hands shake with the effort. My vision narrows to a single point of focus: the wound beneath my fingers, the poison trying to spread, the determination to make it stop.
The poison yields.
I anchor its death the same way I anchor a monster’s—with finality, with authority, with the absolute certainty that this ends now.
It works.
The blackened edges of his wound begin to lighten. His flesh finally starts to knit. The healing that was stalled resumes, accelerated now that the interference is gone.
“Again.” I move to the next wound. “Hold still.”
He holds still.
I clear fivewounds before my body betrays me.
The sixth one—a deep gash across his shoulder—pushes past my limits. The Anchor reaches, finds the poison, begins to work... and my knees buckle.
Kaster catches me before I hit the ground.
His arms wrap around me with speed that shouldn’t be possible for someone so recently injured. He pulls me against him, my back to his uninjured side, supporting my weight when my own muscles refuse.
“Enough.” His voice carries warning. Command. “You’re burning yourself.”
“One more.” My vision swims. “The shoulder wound is the worst. If the poison spreads?—”
“I’ll heal.”
