The veil resists.
I rip it open anyway.
Reality does not tear cleanly. It screams in layers, first as pressure, then as sound, then as a taste of blood and extinguished stars. Black flame pours between my fingers as I force the gap wider, using brute infernal authority where precision would take too long. The alley stones crack beneath me. The walls sweat frost.
Corin steps closer.
“Back,” I order.
He grips his iron stake. “No.”
“You will be killed.”
“Then move faster.”
“You are not trained for this.”
“No, but I’m angry, strong, and already here.”
“This is not courage.”
“Good,” he says, eyes bright with fury. “I’m fresh out of polite virtues.”
I should force him back.
I do not.
Sable’s pulse stutters.
I step through the rupture, and Corin follows close enough that the closing edge nearly takes his shoulder.
We emerge into a fractured pocket realm layered beneath the city.
The space is not underground in any physical sense, though it carries the suffocating pressure of buried places. Broken versions of streets overlap at impossible angles, cobblestones climbing walls, doorways opening into black air, rooflines hanging upside down above canals of shadow. The air smells of wet stone, old blood, rotted violets, and the bitter ash of used rituals. Light exists here only as a sickly violet seep from glyphs carved into floating fragments of masonry.
Corin steadies himself beside me. “This place is awful.”
“It is a transitional holding realm.”
“It’s awful with a title, then.”
A sound moves through the broken street ahead, soft at first, then multiplying. Shadows detach from walls and assemble into bodies. Ward keepers. Constructs, not demons, made from shadow, bone memory, and stolen threshold law. Their faces are blank except for vertical slits of pale light where mouths should be.
They turn toward us.
Corin raises the stake. “Friends of yours?”
“No.”
“Good.”
The first wave comes fast.
I meet them without hesitation.
There is no strategy in the first strike beyond annihilation. My arm sweeps outward, and black-red flame cuts through three constructs at once, unmaking the law that holds them together. They collapse into ash and wet darkness before reaching the ground. The next two leap from opposite walls, their limbs extending into hooked blades. I seize one by the throat and drive it through the other, then burn both from the inside until their shapes forget how to exist.
Corin moves behind me.
