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I take one step forward.
Isolde’s hand catches my sleeve.
I stop.
She does not hold me back with force. She does not need to. Her eyes remind me of terms, public, beside, no spectacle. I let out a slow breath and continue walking only after my hands open at my sides.
Calmly.
Deliberately.
The crowd watches.
Vaerith watches too, and I can see the flicker of irritation cross his face when I do not charge.
Good.
Let him stand there with his careful words and his forbidden ritual, waiting for a monster who refuses to arrive on cue.
I stop just outside the estate courtyard boundary, close enough to feel the heat rising from the summoning lines beneath the stones. The ground thrums under my boots. The hunger strains toward the center of the circle, focused so tightly that the rest of the district fades into edges and movement.
“You called it,” I say.
Vaerith’s expression remains smooth. “Your presence made it necessary.”
“My presence cracked your staged ritual open in front of witnesses.”
“Your presence fed on a bound infernal entity in public.”
“Your entity lunged at Isolde’s throat.”
His pale eyes flick toward her, then back to me. “Attachment has made you predictable.”
“Your arrogance did the same for you.”
A ripple passes through the watching crowd.
Syrenya’s voice drifts from behind me, light and cutting. “That one was rather good.”
Vaerith ignores her.
The ground splits across the courtyard.
The fracture begins near the base of the dais and races outward in branching red lines, tearing through repaired runes, decorative stonework, and the scorched place where yesterday’s pedestal shattered. Hot wind blasts from the cracks, thick with the stink of old blood and deep earth. Several guards stagger back. One drops his spear and runs. Vaerith does not turn to watch him flee.
The summoning circle beneath the courtyard shines through the broken stone.
Layer after layer of red sigils rotate under the surface, forming a vast spiral centered below the estate entrance. At its heart, the veil dents upward. Not tearing yet. Bulging. Pressing. The air above it warps, bending rain into spirals and dragging loose stones upward to hover before they shatter into dust.
The thing beneath pushes harder.
A shape appears in the distortion.
A suggestion of antlers too wide for the space, a throat made of shadow, hands with too many joints, and a mouth opening somewhere inside the pressure rather than on a face. My hunger reacts so violently I nearly step toward it without thinking. Heat erupts through my arms. The power under my skin recognizes the thing as devourer, rival, threat to territory, threat to mate, threat to every pulse behind me.
Rhazek’s voice cuts through from behind. “Do not engage the forming body. Anchor first.”
“I know,” I call back, though the words scrape on the way out.
