Chapter 14 #3
The darkness swallows him. The cold is total, absolute, the death energy of the underworld closing around him, and he's falling. Not fast but continuously, a descent that has no bottom, that just keeps going down into green-black nothing.
A hand catches his wrist.
The pain is immediate.
White-hot. Blinding. A searing agony that shoots from his wrist up his arm and into his shoulder.
August cries out, a raw, animal sound torn from his throat, because this is not Vale's touch.
This is not warmth. This is not the impossible exception, the divine intervention, the healing that defies every law of magic.
This is holy magic meeting death-touched flesh the way it was always meant to.
This is what a Templar's touch actually feels like.
It burns.
August's vision whites out. For a terrible, suspended second, all he knows is the pain. Fire consuming his wrist, eating into his skin, the corruption and the holy energy tearing at each other, and the agony is so total that his fingers start to go slack.
He looks up.
Knox.
Knox is on his stomach at the edge of the void, one hand gripping a crack in the concrete, the other locked around August's wrist. His grey coat is pooled around him on the platform, streaked with bone dust and ichor from the fight, and his face is tight with effort.
Muscles straining, teeth gritted against the pull of the abyss, desperately trying to hold onto someone larger than him.
He doesn't let go.
Knox's holy energy radiates from his grip in waves that August feels as fire pressed against bare flesh.
Every nerve in August's arm is shrieking.
The corruption on his wrist is reacting, darkening, thickening, rising up in defense against the holy assault, and the resulting clash of energies is tearing August's skin apart at the molecular level.
The void pulls at him from below. Knox's burning grip is the only thing between him and an eternity of falling.
And August has a choice.
His free hand is hanging at his side, fingers curled against the pain, every instinct screaming at him to twist free of the grip that's hurting him.
Years of running from Templars, years of knowing their touch means pain and capture and death, every survival reflex he's ever developed is firing at once, telling him to let go, get free, escape the burning.
August reaches up with his free hand and grabs Knox's arm.
The pain doubles. Holy energy sears into both wrists, both hands, and August screams through his teeth.
A high, ragged sound that echoes off the tunnel walls and reverberates through the shrinking void.
His skin is blistering where Knox holds him, the corruption and the holy magic fighting each other at the point of contact in a way that Vale's touch has never produced, and the combined agony is worse than anything the corruption itself has ever done to him.
He holds on tighter.
Because Knox dove for him. Because Knox is lying on his stomach at the edge of an abyss, holding onto a necromancer whose skin is burning under his grip, and he hasn't flinched.
Hasn't hesitated. Hasn't let go. August is too depleted from the rift to hurt Knox back.
His death magic is guttered to almost nothing, wrung out by three anchors and the corruption reclaiming his body, and whatever Knox feels at the point of contact is his own holy energy rebounding against itself, not August's power fighting him.
Knox is burning himself to save someone who can't even put up a fight.
That makes it worse, somehow. And better. Both at the same time.
"I've got you," Knox says, and his voice is strained and certain and the kindest thing August has ever heard. "August. I've got you. Help me."
August grits his teeth so hard he thinks they might crack.
He kicks against the void's edge, finds a foothold in the crumbling concrete, and pushes.
Knox hauls backward with the strength of an eighty-year-old Templar who is, evidently, far stronger than his friendly demeanor suggests.
Between them, August fighting for purchase and Knox refusing to yield, they drag August up inch by agonizing inch.
His torso clears the edge. Then his hips.
Then his legs, and Knox pulls him onto the solid concrete of the platform and they both collapse, gasping and shaking and burned.
Knox releases him.
The absence of pain is almost as shocking as the pain itself.
A sudden vacuum where the burning had been, leaving August's wrist throbbing and raw and screaming in the aftermath.
He lies on the concrete breathing in ragged gulps, staring at the ceiling of the subway station, and feels the void behind him shudder and seal shut with a sound of a held breath finally released.
The rift is closed. The abyss is gone. The platform is whole again. Cracked and scorched and ruined, but solid. Real.
August lifts his hands in front of his face.
Knox's handprint is seared into the skin of his left wrist. Five distinct fingers, the palm, burned red and raw and blistering against the pale grey tracing of corruption.
His right hand, where he'd grabbed Knox's arm, is the same.
Blistered, angry, the shape of his own desperate grip branded into his skin.
The burns are vivid and precise and they hurt with a steady, pulsing fire that makes his eyes water.
This is what Templar touch does. This is what every Templar's touch would do to him.
Every Templar except one.
Then Vale is there.
He drops to his knees beside August with a force that August feels through the concrete.
His sword is already on the ground, abandoned, and his hands find August's shoulders first, then his face.
Cupping his jaw the way he always does, thumbs on his cheekbones, eyes scanning every inch of him with the desperate thoroughness of a man who just watched the most important thing in his world disappear into a void.
The expression on Vale's face is something August has never seen before and hopes to never see again.
It's beyond panic. Beyond fear. It's the face of a man who has lived three centuries and has just, for the first time, understood what it would mean to lose something he can't survive losing.
The seconds between August going over the edge and Knox pulling him back have left marks on Vale that aren't physical and won't heal quickly.
"August." His voice cracks on the name. Breaks in the middle.
August reaches for him. His burned hands find Vale's coat, fist in the fabric despite the pain, and Vale pulls him up and into his arms with a desperate strength that presses August against his chest hard enough to bruise.
August clings to him. Buries his face in Vale's neck.
Breathes him in, the warm-holy scent that has become the smell of safety, of home, of everything the world has tried to take from him, and feels the terror of the last sixty seconds catch up to him in a wave that makes his whole body shake.
"I'm okay," August manages against Vale's throat. His voice is wrecked. "I'm okay, I'm here, I'm—"
Vale pulls back just enough to look at him.
His hands frame August's face, careful, gentle, the healing warmth already flowing, and the contrast between this touch and Knox's is so stark that August's eyes sting.
Then Vale's gaze drops to August's hands, still fisted in his coat, and he sees his wrist.
He goes very still.
Vale takes August's left hand and turns it over with excruciating gentleness, exposing the inside of his wrist. Knox's handprint is seared into the skin.
Livid, blistered, unmistakable in its origin.
Five fingers. A palm. The precise shape of a Templar's grip, burned into a necromancer's flesh the way their magic is designed to burn.
The way Vale's magic should burn and doesn't, the impossible exception thrown into devastating relief by the proof of the rule.
Something shifts in Vale's face. Not fury.
Something worse. Something quieter, sitting behind his eyes.
The look of a man seeing, for the first time in the flesh, exactly what his kind does to the person he loves.
He's known it intellectually. He's understood the doctrine, the mechanics, the fundamental opposition of their magics.
But knowing it and seeing Knox's handprint blistered into August's skin are two very different things, and the distance between them is visible in the way Vale's jaw sets and his throat works and his hands, so careful on August's wrist, develop the faintest tremor.
His eyes move to Knox.
Knox is still sitting on the platform a few feet away.
He's watching them with the careful, rigid posture of a man who is waiting to find out if he's crossed a line he can't uncross.
He'd saved August's life. He'd burned August doing it.
And August can see the uncertainty written across his face, the question he isn't asking but that lives in every line of his body.
Did I do the right thing?
Vale looks at him for a long moment. The silence is heavy with something that isn't anger but could be mistaken for it. It's grief, August realizes. Vale is looking at his partner of forty years, the man who just saved the person Vale loves, and he is grieving the fact that saving him had to hurt.
August places his hand over Vale's.
His burned, blistered hand, the one Knox's grip saved, the one that hurts with every heartbeat, settles gently over Vale's fingers where they're wrapped around his wrist. The touch is deliberate.
Careful. He presses his palm against the back of Vale's hand and holds it there, and waits for Vale's eyes to come back to him.