“I am not telling you because I approve. I am telling you because that circle will skin the magic off your bones if it decides you are an interruption.”
“It can get in line.”
Despite myself, my mouth nearly moves. The urge dies when the first strand of immortality stirs in my core.
Mortals imagine immortality as endless time, a road that refuses to stop, but mine is a structure built from infernal inheritance, conquest rites, volcanic blood oaths, and names taken from things older than language. Wounds taught themselves to close because death grew weary of being refused. Ancient vows braided themselves through my marrow until survival became less a gift than a commandment. Those strands coil through me now like molten cables, each one anchored to a memory that should have ended me.
I place both hands inside the circle, and the runes ignite.
My body locks.
Corin curses softly. “Rhazek, you stubborn bastard.”
“Hold the perimeter,” I say, though my voice sounds dragged through stone.
Sable is closer now. I feel her through the bond more than I hear her footsteps, panic beating inside her like wings inside a cage. Anger burns around it. Love presses against my ribs with violent, terrified force, and the circle flares in response as though it understands she is the one power here capable of unmaking my resolve.
“Look at me,” she demands.
I close my eyes because cowardice, in this precise circumstance, is the only discipline I have left.
I reach inward and seize the first immortal strand. Pain opens inside me with a white, merciless brilliance, blank as a nerve exposed to winter. The strand resists, fused deep into my core and braided through centuries of bloodshed and survival. I pull anyway. It tears loose by a finger’s width, and the sound that comes out of me is raw, animal, wet with smoke.
Sable cries my name.
The bond screams under the strain, a soundless agony that rips through my chest and echoes in my teeth. The merged current convulses between us as the circle’s barrier rises, atranslucent wall of red fire and black-gold script. Sable slams both palms against it from the outside. Sparks scatter around her fingers, bright and furious.
“Stop!” she shouts. “Rhazek, stop right now.”
“I can fix it.”
“No, you can’t. You can only break yourself in a prettier direction.”
I drag another strand upward. The skin across my chest splits with infernal light, and cracks appear beneath my flesh, glowing red-gold at first, then white where the heat is too severe for color. They branch from my sternum down my ribs, over my shoulders, along my throat. I smell my own burning, ancient magic and infernal marrow exposed to air, sulfurous and sweet as a temple set aflame.
Corin’s voice snaps across the yard. “The circle is overloading.”
“Hold it,” I growl.
“I am holding it, you miserable royal furnace.”
Sable pounds the barrier again. “Corin, let me in.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Corin.”
His jaw flexes as he looks from her to me. For once, his mouth has nothing clever ready, and that silence frightens me more than the pain.
I pull harder. The strand tears another inch free, and my knees hit the ground before I register falling. The circle digs heat into my palms. The runes crawl up my wrists like brands. Through the bond, Sable staggers as if struck, and her cry ruins whatever remains of my control.
I look at her.
Her face is wet with tears, her hair whipping around her cheeks in the magic wind, her eyes blazing as though she could put the world on trial and win. She is terrified for me, notfor herself, and the knowledge finds some hidden weakness no blade has ever discovered.
“Stay back,” I rasp.
“Go to hell.”
