“The horns?”
He grimaces. “Deeply inconvenient. I have an excellent forehead for hats, not horns.”
A laugh escapes her, wet and startled, and Corin’s shoulders loosen beneath her hand as if that one broken sound has spared him a sentence he did not know he was awaiting.
I watch them together and feel the truth settle with a gravity no ritual can soften.
This was the true cost.
Not my severance. Not Sable’s extended life. Not the destruction of Maltherion’s last shard. The price had already been paid in the moment Corin’s dying body accepted a channel never meant for mortal blood. The contract did not merely save him. It rewrote the inheritance he carried.
Ardyn blood.
Old, stubborn, human, mortal.
No longer untouched.
Sable turns to me. “Can it be undone?”
Corin’s head lifts sharply, but he does not speak.
I taste ash at the back of my throat. “I do not know.”
“Could trying kill him?”
“Yes.”
Her hand tightens on Corin’s shoulder. He covers it with his own, gentler than his usual theatrics would ever admit.
“Then no one is trying anything yet,” she says.
Corin blinks. “That was alarmingly sensible.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“I taught you that phrase.”
“You regret it constantly.”
“Correct.”
She keeps looking at me. “We study it. Carefully. No secret tests. No heroic fixes. No infernal back-room nonsense where the two of you decide what I can handle.”
“I agree.”
Her eyes narrow. “Immediately?”
“Yes.”
“That is suspicious.”
“I am learning.”
“Gods help us.”
Corin lifts his free hand. “I would like it recorded that I object to being studied but understand the necessity, provided no one says specimen.”
“I already told him you are not a specimen,” I say.
