I consider this. “Blood magic.”
“Healing, not harvesting. I can redirect the power flowing through your damaged channels, reroute it through pathways that are still intact. It won’t repair the damage, but it might stabilize you enough to?—”
“Might?”
Her jaw tightens. “It’s not a certainty. The working is delicate. If I make a mistake, I could make things worse. I could—” She stops. Breathes. “I could kill you.”
The silence stretches between us. Above, the sky continues to lighten. The hunters continue to approach.
“Do it.”
“Kharvek—”
“We don’t have another option.” I extend my damaged arm toward her. “The hunters get here, I have to be able to fight. If that means risking your magic, then we risk it.”
She stares at my offered arm. Her expression shifts through emotions I can’t quite read—fear, determination, something else.
“This is going to hurt.” She takes my arm in her hands. “A lot.”
“Pain I understand.”
“Not like this.” Her fingers find the edge of the bandages, start unwrapping. “When I work on your channels, you’ll feel everything. Every redirect, every reroute. It’s—” She pauses. “Intimate. In ways you might not be prepared for.”
Intimate. The word sits strangely in the air between us.
“Just do it.”
She nods. Finishes removing the bandages. And begins.
The first touchof her magic is like fire.
Not the clean burn of power flowing through properly carved channels—this is rawer. Deeper. Her awareness slides into my scarification like a blade, and I feel her inside me. Not physically, not the way I felt her lips against mine or her body pressed to my chest. This is different. This is her presence moving through pathways that were never meant to be touched by anyone but me.
I grit my teeth. Refuse to make a sound.
“I can feel the damage.” The words come from far away, muffled by the roaring in my ears. “The channels near your elbow are worst. The tissue has started to necrose—I need to redirect around it entirely.”
Redirect. Such a simple word for what she does next.
Pain. Real pain, not the dull ache I’ve been suppressing for days. This is sharp, bright, the sensation of magic being torn from one pathway and forced into another. My back arches against the ravine wall. My free hand claws at the stone, leaving furrows in the rock.
“Breathe.” Her voice anchors me. “I know it hurts. Keep breathing.”
I breathe. In. Out. In. Out. Focus on the rhythm, on the mechanics, on anything except the feeling of her hands reshaping the inside of my arm.
“The next part will be worse.”
Worse. I almost laugh. What could be worse than?—
She redirects another channel, and the world goes white.
Time loses meaning.
I exist in fragments. Pain and pressure and the constant, inexorable presence of Imara’s magic working through my flesh. She speaks sometimes—calm instructions, quiet reassurances—but I can’t make out the words. Can only endure.
She’s inside me. Not just physically, not just magically. She’s seeing parts of me that no one has ever seen. The channels that carry my power, the pathways the Matron carved into me during childhood, the modifications I made to myself in secret—all of it laid bare beneath her touch.
I should hate this. Should hate the vulnerability, the exposure, the complete loss of control.
