Page 88 of Unveiled

And Irial remained in his mind, a soft presence urging him to use the stone.

Adrian took it out of his pocket and clung to it. Her sigil, scored with tiny cuts from a patient hand, pricked his palm. He focused on those edges, on their meaning, on the way intention could be shaped if given a boundary.

“Come on, Irial,” he whispered through chattering teeth. “Give me something. A thread. A breath. Anything to get me out of this fucking mess.”

The stone warmed. A pulse answered him through the mark, faint and frantic, as if from far, far away.

Adrian.

His head snapped up. The voice was dry wind across stone. Irial. He felt her the way he might feel an ache. Not outside him but as pressure in the bones.

They see me when you do. Do not look long. They hunger.

“How do I reach you?”

You don’t. You anchor. A tiny, bitter laugh echoed in his mind. Use it against them.

The pull surged. The mark flared, and cold ripped down his spine. Adrian swallowed bile and reached one arm out, his palm to the rend, as if pressing against the underside of river ice. Sigils skittered through his thoughts, half-remembered, badly learned. Things he’d mocked once as superstition. He seized what fragments he could, not as spell work but as structure. He drew a circle in the air with shaking fingers and pressed the charm to its centre.

The circle held for a heartbeat. Two. Then it trembled.

“Irial,” he rasped. “I can slow it.”

“Do it,” came the answer, blade bright, her voice brighter, cutting the space to reach him.

Adrian’s vision doubled. The circle steadied. The rend hissed. And the entity flowed out in a smear of shadow and reached for him.

***

Connor

Connor didn’t think. He moved fast. His knife flashed, silver carving a crescent through the night. The Soul Cleric’s reaching limb parted with a sound like wet paper tearing. Shadow spattered his coat and burned through to his skin. Adrian’s circle juddered but held. A second strike came in high, feint, and low. Connor took it on the shoulder rather than give ground.

“Come on,” he hissed into the thing’s face. “Come and try me.” His power was waning now, fluttering between streaks of light and slow-motion flares.

The being opened like smoke. A mouth, or the idea of one, gaped. Cold rolled over him in waves, numbing his fingers, slowing his calves, seizing his breath. It pressed. He pressed back. He stole one heartbeat to look past it.

Adrian stood with one hand lifted, his palm toward the wound in the world, his other hand clenched white around a stone that bled a thin, steady light between his fingers. Frost crawled over his boots and up his trousers like ivy moving too fast. His eyes, bright, too bright, flicked to Connor, and some of the otherness faltered.

The being lunged again. Connor slipped left. The second entity slid in from the flank—clever bastard—aiming for Adrian’s exposed side.

“Fraser, now,” Connor roared. Something told him the Soul Cleric was vulnerable not only to Connor’s magic but also to Adrian’s stone. Something about the physics of it all spoke to him. Time to die, you miserable fucker.

From the tree line, Fraser called, “Aye.”

A length of chain, its silver links blackened with oil, sang through the air. Connor snatched it one-handed, let the weight spin, and snapped it out. The chain kissed the being’s throat. Smoke sizzled, a scream lifting the hair on Connor’s arms.

“Max, your turn,” Connor shouted.

A flash. A crack. Max’s oil-jacketed chain tore a hole through the being’s shoulder blade. It staggered, screeching an unholy cry.

“Stay back,” Connor bellowed toward the tree line. “Don’t cross in.”

“Wouldnae dare,” Fraser called back, but Connor could hear the strain in his voice. The ground beyond the clearing had begun to glitter with frost in a pattern that made eyes water.

The rend’s light tightened. The Mouthpiece turned its head. When it spoke, everyone heard: Balance requires claim.

“Balance can eat fucking dirt,” Connor said through his teeth, and drove the chain like a whip into the Mouthpiece. The links burned lines through the shadow, which reeled back.