The sound tears through me worse than the pain.
Her body arches in my arms as air floods her lungs in a sharp, desperate inhale. Her eyes fly open, unfocused and bright with impossible light, and her hand clutches weakly at my coat.
“Rhazek,” she rasps.
“I have you.”
Corin laughs once, broken and breathless. “Gods rot you both, don’t ever do that again.”
The floor drops beneath my knees.
The transfer has cost more than I calculated, and Maltherion’s remnant burns like poison where I absorbed it. I collapse with Sable in my arms, turning as we fall so she lands against me instead of stone. The chamber tilts. Cracks race up the walls. The pocket realm begins to fold inward now that its master’s physical form and ritual core are destroyed.
Corin reaches us before the next rupture opens.
“Up,” he snarls, grabbing the back of my coat. “Both of you. We are not dying in this rancid hole.”
“My manifestation is compromised,” I say, though the words drag through my teeth.
“Lovely. Be compromised while moving.”
Sable tries to lift her head. “Corin?”
“I’m here,” he says, voice shaking despite the grip he has on us. “You are not allowed to scare me until I’m old and boring, remember?”
She makes a faint sound that might be a laugh if the world were kinder.
The ceiling collapses further.
Corin hooks one arm under Sable and the other into my coat, then hauls with strength no mortal body should contain. He drags us across the cracking floor as the chamber comes apart behind us. Shadow constructs dissolve into ash. Violet glyphs burst overhead. The air rips open ahead, showing the broken street of the pocket realm beyond.
I hold Sable against me with what strength remains.
Her heart beats under my hand.
Golden.
Unsteady.
Alive.
Corin drags us through the breach as the ritual chamber collapses into darkness behind us.
17
SABLE
Iwake to the sound of Rhazek breathing downstairs.
That is impossible for several reasons, the first being that he does not need to breathe and the second being that a closed door, a floor, and half a house should stand between my ears and whatever habit he has adopted in the kitchen. Yet I hear him with brutal clarity. His breath moves in controlled intervals, slower than human lungs would choose, each inhale edged with faint strain and each exhale carrying heat through the bond like banked coals beneath my sternum.
The room is dim, washed in the bruised blue of early morning or late evening; I cannot tell which at first. The air smells of linen, iron, smoke, salt, and the bitter residue of healing tinctures someone has spilled near the bedside. Beneath all of it is Rhazek, not as scent alone but as presence, as pressure, as a dark-gold warmth threaded through the center of my chest. His emotions are not thoughts. They strike me as physical sensations: anger like iron bands around my ribs, exhaustion like ash settling behind my eyes, and fear so tightly controlled that it feels colder than Maltherion’s fingers ever did.
I open my eyes.
Corin is sitting beside the bed with his elbows on his knees and a cup forgotten between his hands. He looks like hell warmed over and then left outside in the rain. There is soot in his hair, a cut along his temple, and dried blood around one cuff, but his eyes sharpen the instant mine open.
“Don’t move too fast,” he says.
