A construct slips past my left side, too low for my first sweep. Corin catches it with the iron stake through the chest and slams it into the cobblestones with a strength that sends cracks through the street. The creature shrieks, its shadow-body writhing around the iron.
“Stay down,” he snarls, then drives his heel into the stake until it punches deeper.
The second wave forms before the first has finished dissolving.
These are faster.
They come from the broken windows, from the underside of an inverted roof, from a drain that opens into nothing. I extend my perception toward Sable and find her pulse deeper inside the realm, weak and irregular.
Too irregular.
The bond answers with a convulsive pulse that nearly drives me to my knees. It is not simply pain now. It is fear translated into structure. Her heart is under pressure.
Maltherion is beginning.
I stop conserving power.
The next flame I summon does not stay shaped like flame. It becomes judgment, raw and expansive, tearing through the street in a widening arc that obliterates every construct ittouches. The realm buckles. Floating stones crash downward. Violet glyphs flare and burst.
Corin ducks behind a broken wall as heat rolls past him. “Warning would be nice!”
“Move faster.”
“I am beginning to hate that advice.”
A keeper drops from above him, and he pivots with startling speed, catching its wrist before the blade-hand reaches his throat. Infernal strength surges through him in a controlled burst, not wild enough to consume him, not disciplined enough to be safe. He breaks the construct’s arm backward and drives iron into its face.
The creature collapses.
Corin breathes hard, staring at his own hand as black vapor coils off his knuckles. “That was new.”
“Do not indulge it.”
“I wasn’t planning to cuddle it.”
Sable’s pulse falters again.
The world narrows.
All sound recedes except that rhythm. Weak, stubborn, beloved beyond any language I am willing to grant aloud. I feel the places where the tether has frayed, where the ward net tore at it, where Maltherion’s mark is trying to find purchase. I feel her still resisting.
Still counting.
Still alive.
Something inside me breaks its leash.
I abandon caution entirely.
The form I wear expands, no longer constrained to the proportions that make mortals able to look at me without madness. Flame spills from my shoulders. Claws lengthen. The air around me bends under the density of my authority. Thepocket realm reacts, walls pulling away as if the space itself understands that containment has become a poor idea.
Corin looks at me, and for the first time since his restoration, some of the color drains from his face. “Rhazek.”
I barely hear him.
Another wave of ward keepers gathers at the far end of the broken street.
I move.
