Yorika
The teleportation drops me in the courtyard.
I hit stone hard enough to crack my knees, bile rising as my stomach tries to remember which way is up. The forced transport wasn't gentle. Nezavek threw me across dimensions to save me.
When my vision clears, I wish it hadn't.
The realm is dying.
Not metaphorically. Actually dying. The wall to my left flickers between solid stone and empty void.
Gravity pulls in three different directions at once.
A staircase winds upward into nothing, its top half existing somewhere else entirely.
Through tears in reality, I glimpse other worlds: a desert of glass, an ocean hanging in the sky, a city that burns without smoke.
I push to my feet, and the ground tilts forty-five degrees. Only my training keeps me from sliding into a crack that opens onto stars.
The bond pulses in my chest, weak and stuttering. Through it, I feel Nezavek fragmenting, his consciousness scattering like ash in wind. He's dissolving. Actually dissolving. And I'm here in the courtyard while he dies in his chambers.
I run.
The path I memorized is useless now. Hallways exist in segments, forcing me to jump across sections of nothing. A door opens onto the same room I just left. Another leads to a memory, my sister painting, her hands covered in oils that will never dry. I slam it shut before the grief drowns me.
The bond guides me more than architecture. I follow that failing pulse through passages that shouldn't connect, up stairs that go down, through a garden where the flowers scream in colors that make my teeth ache.
I'm halfway through what used to be the dining hall when gravity reverses.
I fall upward, catching a chandelier that's somehow still attached to what's now the floor above me. My shoulders scream as my weight yanks them. Below, or maybe above, a hole opens onto void. Not darkness. Void. The absence of existence itself.
I swing, release, grab a floating table. It holds long enough for me to push off toward a doorway that's sideways but leads somewhere real. I land hard, roll, keep running.
The bond flickers again. Weaker. If it fails completely, I'll never find him in this collapsing maze.
Three more reality tears. Two gravity shifts. One moment where I exist in four places simultaneously before snapping back together. Then I'm at his chambers, or what's left of them.
The door is gone. The wall is gone. Half the room crystallized when the Collector touched it, frozen in impossible patterns that hurt to perceive. The other half is shadow and stone and dried blood.
Mikaere slumps against the far wall, three arms trying to hold his severed fourth. The crystalline spear still juts from his shoulder, its edges refracting light that doesn't exist. Golden liquid, not blood but something more fundamental, pools beneath him.
P?ivi is everywhere and nowhere. Pages scattered across the floor, some burning with cold fire, others frozen mid-flight. I see fragments of her form trying to coalesce: an arm made of index cards, eyes formed from marginalia, a mouth of curved text speaking in dead languages.
And Nezavek.
He's not even a he anymore. Just shadow pooled on stone, occasionally trying to rise into shape before collapsing back into darkness. Like smoke trying to remember how to be solid.
"No." I drop to my knees beside the shadow pool, plunge my hands into it. They pass through, finding nothing. "No, you don't get to do this."
The shadow doesn't respond. Can't respond. There's barely enough consciousness left to maintain this much form.
I try again, scooping at darkness that won't be held. My hands come away empty, cold, useless.
Think. Think, soldier.
The bond. The marks.
I tear off my shirt, not caring that Mikaere can see, that P?ivi's scattered pages might be watching. The silver-black marks from our encounter trace patterns across my skin: beautiful, delicate, claiming. They pulse faintly, responding to his proximity even as he dissolves.
I press my marked skin against the shadow pool.
The cold burns worse than fire, worse than acid, worse than the time I caught a plasma blade with my bare hand. But the shadows respond. They cling to the marks, finding purchase on my skin.
I spread myself flat against the darkness, every inch of marked skin a lifeline. "You don't get to leave me. Not after everything. I haven't given you permission to die."
The shadows shiver. A flutter of consciousness, confused, fading, but aware.
I push harder, not with my body but with everything else. My will. My rage. My need. The marks heat up, burning silver trails across my skin as I pour myself into them.
"I know you can hear me," I tell the darkness. "I know you're in there. Stop being dramatic and pull yourself together."
A tendril of shadow wraps weakly around my wrist. Progress.
I drag more of the darkness against me, willing it solid. It resists, tries to disperse, but the marks won't let it. They hold the shadows like anchors hold ships, keeping them from drifting into nothing.
He's trying to form. I can feel it, the monumental effort of consciousness trying to remember shape. But there's not enough energy. He spent everything sending me away, protecting me from a fight I should have shared.
I make a decision that might kill us both.
The bond has been one-sided, him feeling me but not the reverse. A door I've kept locked because opening it means admitting things I'm not ready to face. But he's dying, and my pride isn't worth his existence.
I open the bond completely.
The drain is immediate and brutal. My life force floods through the connection, pulled into the vacuum of his dissolution. My vision goes gray at the edges. My heart stutters, forgetting its rhythm.
But the shadows solidify.
They rise around me, forming into something almost human. Arms first, wrapping around me with desperate strength. Then a torso, pressing against mine. A face, features sharp and beautiful and terrible, eyes still closed but there.
"You came back." His voice is wind through empty halls, barely sound at all.
"Of course I did, you idiot." I'm shaking from the drain, but I hold him tighter, marks burning as they maintain his form. "Now stop dissolving and help me save everyone."
His eyes open, not the burning gold I remember but dim amber, like embers about to die. He tries to speak again, fails, just holds on.
We stay like that, me kneeling in the ruins of his chamber, him clinging to existence through my marked skin and stubborn will. The realm continues collapsing around us, but for this moment, we're solid.
"Master..."
Mikaere's voice is gravel grinding to dust. I look up, see him trying to rise on three arms. My chest tightens, not sympathy, but practical concern. We need every fighter we can get.
"Stay down," I order. "You'll make the bleeding worse."
"The bleeding... doesn't matter... if the realm collapses."
He's right. I can feel it through the floor, the fundamental structure failing, reality coming apart at its seams.
"Can you maintain him?" I ask Mikaere, nodding at Nezavek.
"Not... like you can. The marks... they're anchor points."
Of course they are. His claiming of me became my ability to claim him back, to hold him in existence through sheer will and silver-marked skin.
"Then we do this together."
Still holding Nezavek with one arm, I reach for Mikaere with the other. The crystalline spear has to come out. I grip it, feel its wrongness, ice that burns, solidity that shifts, existence that shouldn't be.
"This will hurt."
"Pain is... educational."
I pull. The spear comes free with a sound like reality tearing. More golden liquid pours out, but also something else, light, pure and simple. Mikaere's essence leaking through the wound.
I press my free hand to the hole, will it closed the way I willed Nezavek solid. I don't know if it works the same way, but Mikaere gasps, and the leaking slows.
"P?ivi," I call to the scattered pages. "Can you hear me?"
The pages rustle, try to form words. Some burst into flame. Others freeze solid. But slowly, painfully, they begin gathering into something like a shape.
"I'm... here... mostly..."
Nezavek stirs against me, his form solidifying marginally. "The Collector... did something... to the realm's anchor..."
"Later," I tell him. "First we fix everyone. Then we plan. Then we hunt."
"Practical," he murmurs against my throat. "I should have... expected that."
The next hour is triage and reconstruction.
I gather P?ivi's scattered pages, sorting them by touch.
Some sear my fingers with heat, others leave frost burns, still others whisper forbidden knowledge in tongues that predate civilization.
She reforms slowly, her consciousness full of holes where pages crumbled beyond recovery.
Mikaere's arm is gone, not severed but erased. The Collector's ice didn't just cut, it deleted that part of him from existence. But three arms are better than none, and once I bind his shoulder wound with strips from my ruined shirt, he can stand.
Nezavek is the hardest. He can't maintain form without contact with my marks.
The moment I step away, he begins dispersing.
So we adapt. He leans against me, one arm around my shoulders, my marked back pressed to his chest. It's intimate in ways that have nothing to do with desire and everything to do with survival.
"The broker network," he says as I help him to what remains of a chair. "The Collector has been using it for decades."
"To send hunters after you."
"To send them to their deaths. Every bounty, every lead, every piece of information that led someone to me, he orchestrated it all."
P?ivi, now mostly formed though missing her left ear and several fingers, brings documents from the ruined chamber. Some are crystallized at the edges, others burned, but enough remains to see the pattern.