It sounds like law.
I tear the shadow bindings from her wrists and ankles, then lift her from the slab. Her body folds against me without resistance. Too light. Too cold. Too silent. I press one hand over her sternum, exactly where Maltherion marked her, exactly where her heart has gone still.
Corin stumbles closer, bleeding from his temple, iron stake still clenched in one fist. “Do something.”
“I am.”
My essence is immortal.
It is not healing magic. It is not mortal vitality. It is the structural fire that allows an infernal entity to persist through destruction, reform through rupture, and remain itself across realms that would grind lesser beings into ash. It is not meant to be given directly to a human heart.
I give it anyway.
Power pours from my core into my hand and from my hand into Sable’s chest. The transfer is agony, not because it weakens me, though it does, but because her body does not know how to receive eternity without being burned by it. I force the essence into the shape of a heartbeat. I compress flame into rhythm. I make immortality knock.
Once.
Nothing.
Again.
Her chest remains still.
Corin’s breath breaks. “Come on, Sable.”
Golden light floods her veins.
It moves beneath her skin in branching lines, overtaking the black corruption at her collarbone, burning through Maltherion’s mark, threading down her arms and up her throat. The chamber brightens until every shadow recoils. Corin lifts a hand against the glare, his eyes wide and wet and furious.
“Sable,” he says. “You stubborn ass, breathe.”
The bond explodes outward.
Blinding force rips through the chamber, red-gold and white-hot, no longer a tether but a storm. It strikes the walls, cracks the remaining columns, and blows the broken siphon channels into fragments. The pocket realm screams around us as the bond reconstitutes itself with Sable’s body in my arms and my essence inside her heart.
The first beat returns.
It is not mortal.
It is not infernal.
It is both.
Maltherion’s remaining essence slithers from the wreckage, thin and violet-black, seeking the merging energy like a parasite scenting an open wound. It lunges toward the bond, trying to latch onto the moment before the new rhythm stabilizes.
I turn my head.
“No.”
I pull it into myself.
The fragment fights, all teeth, hunger, and ancient spite. It tries to burrow through the transfer channel, tries to reach the golden veins still lighting Sable’s skin, tries to use my own essence as passage. I close every path but one and drag it inward through fire.
Maltherion’s remnant screams inside my core.
I crush it.
Sable gasps.
