Chapter 5 #3
Vale watches as several of the undead that had broken past him simply stop.
Their hollow eye sockets turn toward August with something that could be confusion, or recognition of a voice that speaks to them as something other than weapons.
Then they turn and shuffle back toward the rift, returning to the underworld of their own volition.
August isn't commanding them. He's reasoning with them. With empathy. With understanding. With the same gentle certainty he'd used with the ghost in the cemetery, the same voice that said rest now and meant it.
Not all of them listen. The ones too far gone, too corrupted, too deeply bound to whatever force Voss used to summon them, those keep coming. But August turns back enough to matter, enough to thin the wave, and Vale throws himself back into the melee with renewed ferocity.
His sword blazes. A skeleton warrior loses its head.
His fist, glowing with blessing, shatters another's ribcage into powder.
A wraith screams and dissolves against the edge of his blade.
He is efficient and brutal and very, very good at this, three centuries of practice distilled into controlled violence, and if some part of him is aware that he's fighting harder than usual, pushing faster, covering more ground because there's someone behind him worth protecting, he doesn't examine that thought too closely.
But there are so many, and the rift is still growing.
"The rift!" Vale shouts over the din. "Can you close it?"
"Not with this many undead around it!" August sends a wave of shadow crashing into a cluster of advancing skeletons, scattering them. "We have to thin them first!"
Vale can see August flagging. His gestures are slower, less precise.
The effort of reasoning with the dead while simultaneously fighting the ones who won't listen is draining him visibly, the veins darkening, his breathing going ragged.
He's worked his way further up the platform, closer to the rift, and a skeleton warrior slips around Vale's guard, ancient sword swinging for August's unprotected side.
Vale moves on instinct. He doesn't think about it, doesn't calculate distance or angle or risk.
He just moves, muscle memory compressing into a single explosive burst, and throws himself between them.
He catches the rusted blade on his own with a shower of sparks and kicks the skeleton back hard enough to send it skidding across the platform in a clatter of ancient armor.
A brutal follow-through strike takes its head off.
"Stay behind me," Vale orders.
"Little busy for that," August grits out, his shadows lashing out to bind a wraith that's gotten too close. But Vale can hear the strain fracturing his voice, the exhaustion cracking through the determination.
They find a rhythm despite the chaos. Vale handles the physical threats with his blade, the warriors that need to be cut down, the wraiths that need to be shattered, while August controls and redirects whatever responds to death magic.
It's devastatingly effective. August works at range, picking off threats in Vale's blind spots before they can close, turning the tide of undead back on itself with words and will where force alone would fail.
He sends the ones who can still hear him back through the rift, and breaks the ones who can't, and does both with a precision that speaks to fourteen years of practice even as his body betrays him.
Vale has fought alongside other warriors for centuries.
He's never fought alongside a necromancer, and he's never experienced anything quite like this, the strange, seamless way their opposing magics complement rather than cancel each other.
Holy light and living shadow, working in tandem, covering each other's weaknesses as though they'd trained for this instead of meeting two nights ago over drawn weapons.
Everything Vale knows about the fundamental opposition of their powers says it shouldn't work.
It works beautifully.
A skeletal mage materializes in the rift's mouth, wreathed in sickly green fire, one of Voss's heavier summons, something pulled from deep in the underworld with real power behind it. Vale recognizes the threat immediately.
"Caster! August—"
"I see it."
August throws both hands forward and shadow detonates from him, a concussive blast of darkness that hits the skeletal mage full force.
The green fire sputters and dies. The skeleton shrieks as August's power wraps around it and crushes inward, bones collapsing with a sound that echoes through the tunnel.
The cost is immediate and visible. The black veins surge across August's throat, his jaw, his cheeks, creeping toward his eyes.
He staggers. Catches himself. His jaw clenches with a determination that makes something in Vale's chest tighten, because the man is killing himself and he knows it and he did it anyway, without hesitation, because the alternative was letting the threat through.
"Fall back!" Vale calls, cutting down two more warriors in quick succession. The numbers are thinning, the flow from the rift is slowing. He has enough time to get a blessing circle down if August can cover him from range. "Get clear of the rift!"
He waits until August has moved, not far enough to be out of the fight but far enough to be outside the circle's boundary, and then he drops to one knee. He presses his silver-ringed hand flat against the subway platform and channels.
The blessing starts in his chest. Radiates outward through his arm, his hand, his fingers, into the stone.
He feels the circle growing, a ring of holy light expanding from his palm, racing across the platform in a widening arc that encircles the rift in blazing symbols and sacred geometry.
The light is warm and fierce and absolute.
Around him, he can hear August's voice, hoarse and unwavering, turning back the remaining undead as they emerge.
"Leave this place," August tells them. Not commands. Tells, the way you tell someone the truth because they deserve to hear it. "Return to death. This world is not for you."
The blessing circle solidifies with a sound that rings through the tunnel and silences everything else, a single crystalline note.
The undead caught within its boundary turn on August's command, shuffling back through the rift with dazed compliance.
The rift still pulses, still breathes, but nothing else comes through.
Anything that tries will hit the blessing circle and burn.
Silence.
Real silence. The kind that rushes in to fill a space that was, moments ago, full of screaming and steel and the grinding of dead bone. The kind that feels less like an absence of sound and more like the world exhaling.
Vale's steady breathing. August's ragged gasps. The distant drip of water somewhere in the tunnels. Nothing else.
Vale climbs to his feet and turns to check on August.
His stomach drops.
The necromancer is standing, but only technically.
The black veins are so thick and dark there's no visible skin left on his arms, and his tattoos have vanished entirely beneath the corruption.
His eyes are glassy and unfocused, and he sways with the boneless looseness of a man who's already falling and just hasn't hit the ground yet.
"August—"
August's legs buckle.
Vale lunges. He drops his sword, lets it clatter to the platform, the blade's light dying as it leaves his hand, and catches August before he hits the concrete.
He withdraws the active blessing from his palms on instinct, knowing that holy energy against death-touched skin should be agony, and wraps his arms around the necromancer's too-light frame to keep him upright.
The moment his bare hands close around August's arms, something happens.
Not pain. Not the searing rejection of opposing magics that three centuries of experience tell him to expect.
Something else, something that moves through both of them with a certainty that takes none of Vale's intentions into consideration and instead chooses to draw upon something deeper and older than either of them.
Power surges between them. Warm, bright, undeniable.
The holy magic that lives in Vale's blood, that has been part of him for three hundred years, flows outward with a will of its own.
He tries to hold it back, tries to control it, and finds that he can't. It moves without his permission, pouring from his hands into August's skin with a certainty that bypasses everything Vale knows about how magic works.
And where they touch, the black fades.
Not completely. Not all at once. But visibly, dramatically, the corruption recedes. The veins lighten, thin, retreat.
August gasps. His entire body goes rigid with shock, then shudders, a full-body tremor that runs through him from his shoulders to his hands. His unfocused eyes snap clear, grey and vivid, and fix on Vale's face with an expression that is equal parts wonder and terror.
"What—" His voice cracks. His own hands come up to grip Vale's forearms, not pushing away but holding on. "What are you doing?"
Vale stares at where his hands meet August's skin, at the corruption steadily retreating under his touch.
His holy magic is flowing into a necromancer, and instead of destroying him, instead of burning through death-touched flesh the way it should, the way it always has, the way every piece of Templar doctrine says it must, it is healing him.
He can feel the moment August registers that the pain is receding.
The necromancer's breath hitches, a small, involuntary sound, startled and raw, and when Vale's hands tighten instinctively, August shudders again.
Something hot coils tight and low in Vale's stomach, and he forces himself to ignore it.
This is not the time. Not the place.