The first anti-manifestation sigil ignites under my boot.
Red-black light erupts across the cobblestones in a net of jagged lines, spreading faster than fire through oil. The alley walls answer with hidden marks of their own, each carved line flaring awake in sequence. The air slams cold around me.
Rhazek vanishes mid-step.
Not retreats.
Not flickers.
Vanishes.
The tether jerks so violently that I cry out before I can stop myself. It feels as though a hook has caught beneath my breastbone and yanked backward with enough force to tear me open from the inside. I stagger, one hand flying to my chest.
Above me, Corin shouts, “Sable!”
He drops from the roof.
For an instant, relief surges hot and stupid through me because he is already moving, already coming down like a bladethrown from the sky. Then the barrier flares between us. Blue-white light slams upward from the alley stones, catching him mid-descent and hurling him sideways into the opposite wall. He hits hard, but he lands on his feet with an inhuman twist of balance that would have broken the old Corin.
“Corin!”
“I’m up,” he snarls, and he drives an iron stake into the barrier with both hands.
The impact rings like a bell struck underwater.
The barrier holds.
My breathing spikes.
The world narrows at once: the cold under my ribs, the missing heat of Rhazek’s presence, Corin’s iron ringing against magic, the rotten leather smell thickening in the alley, and my own heart trying to run wild inside the cage Maltherion built for it.
No.
I clamp down.
Inhale for four.
The sigils pulse under my feet.
Hold for six.
The tether strains, thin and screaming.
Exhale for eight.
The shadow on the tannery wall opens its eyes.
They are not eyes, not really, but hollows where darkness grows hungry enough to focus. Tendrils lash out from the wall, slick and black, cold enough that frost blooms along the edges of my sleeves where they touch me. One wraps around my wrist. Another seizes the other before I can cut free.
I twist, driving my knee toward the wall, but the tendrils pull with obscene strength.
Corin hammers the barrier again. “Let her go!”
His voice cracks with fury, not weakness, and the alley trembles around the sound. He drives the stake in harder, then another, iron biting into the flare, but the net feeds on the anti-manifestation sigils beneath me. It is not blocking him alone. It is isolating me.
I slash at the tendril with my knife.
The blade passes through shadow and comes back rimed with ice.
