Chapter 20
RHAZEK
The yard outside the ruined house is cold enough to make the grass glitter silver under the moon, but the frost melts wherever my shadow falls.
Sable stands on the threshold behind me, wrapped in fury instead of a cloak, and I refuse to turn around because one look at her will make hesitation feel righteous.
Corin follows me down the steps, his boots crunching over gravel and frozen weeds, his irritation sharp enough to cut through the night air.
“For the official record,” he says, “this is a catastrophically stupid idea.”
“Noted.”
“I would like the record to include that I said catastrophically, not merely dramatically. There is a hierarchy of idiocy, and you have sprinted to the top wearing a crown.”
“Stand guard.”
“Ah, yes. Excellent. I do love being assigned perimeter duty at a suicide ritual.”
“It is not suicide.”
“No, of course not. It is self-mutilation with romantic branding.”
I stop in the center of the yard where the earth is bare, black, and hard beneath the frost. The house looms behind me with its cracked windows and exhausted chimney smoke, while beyond the yard the trees stand shoulder to shoulder in the dark, their bare branches clawing at a bruised purple sky.
The air smells of iron-rich soil, old rain, and the scorched residue of Maltherion’s remnants clinging to my skin like a curse too arrogant to die cleanly.
Sable’s footsteps halt at the edge of the porch. “Rhazek.”
My name in her mouth is a command, a plea, and a blade.
I kneel, and the ground hisses when my palm touches it.
Heat pours from my hand, sinking through frost, roots, stones, and the old bones of buried things that never learned to stay dead.
I draw the severance circle with fire first, then blood, carving a ring of molten red into the yard as runes flower along its edge in the old infernal script.
Each character arrives sharp enough to cut the eye.
The language resists the purpose, twisting beneath my will, offended by renunciation when it was bred for conquest, ownership, and permanence.
I force it into obedience.
Behind me, Sable comes off the porch. “Do not do this.”
Corin shifts at the circle’s perimeter, iron rod in one hand, his other hand extended toward her without quite touching. “Sable, stay back.”
“Do not tell me to stay back while he stands there preparing to rip eternity out of his chest.”
“I am not telling you because I approve. I am telling you because that circle will skin the magic off your bones if it decides you are an interruption.”
“It can get in line.”
Despite myself, my mouth nearly moves. The urge dies when the first strand of immortality stirs in my core.
Mortals imagine immortality as endless time, a road that refuses to stop, but mine is a structure built from infernal inheritance, conquest rites, volcanic blood oaths, and names taken from things older than language.
Wounds taught themselves to close because death grew weary of being refused.
Ancient vows braided themselves through my marrow until survival became less a gift than a commandment.
Those strands coil through me now like molten cables, each one anchored to a memory that should have ended me.
I place both hands inside the circle, and the runes ignite.
My body locks.
Corin curses softly. “Rhazek, you stubborn bastard.”
“Hold the perimeter,” I say, though my voice sounds dragged through stone.
Sable is closer now. I feel her through the bond more than I hear her footsteps, panic beating inside her like wings inside a cage.
Anger burns around it. Love presses against my ribs with violent, terrified force, and the circle flares in response as though it understands she is the one power here capable of unmaking my resolve.
“Look at me,” she demands.
I close my eyes because cowardice, in this precise circumstance, is the only discipline I have left.
I reach inward and seize the first immortal strand.
Pain opens inside me with a white, merciless brilliance, blank as a nerve exposed to winter.
The strand resists, fused deep into my core and braided through centuries of bloodshed and survival.
I pull anyway. It tears loose by a finger’s width, and the sound that comes out of me is raw, animal, wet with smoke.
Sable cries my name.
The bond screams under the strain, a soundless agony that rips through my chest and echoes in my teeth.
The merged current convulses between us as the circle’s barrier rises, a translucent wall of red fire and black-gold script.
Sable slams both palms against it from the outside.
Sparks scatter around her fingers, bright and furious.
“Stop!” she shouts. “Rhazek, stop right now.”
“I can fix it.”
“No, you can’t. You can only break yourself in a prettier direction.”
I drag another strand upward. The skin across my chest splits with infernal light, and cracks appear beneath my flesh, glowing red-gold at first, then white where the heat is too severe for color.
They branch from my sternum down my ribs, over my shoulders, along my throat.
I smell my own burning, ancient magic and infernal marrow exposed to air, sulfurous and sweet as a temple set aflame.
Corin’s voice snaps across the yard. “The circle is overloading.”
“Hold it,” I growl.
“I am holding it, you miserable royal furnace.”
Sable pounds the barrier again. “Corin, let me in.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Corin.”
His jaw flexes as he looks from her to me. For once, his mouth has nothing clever ready, and that silence frightens me more than the pain.
I pull harder. The strand tears another inch free, and my knees hit the ground before I register falling. The circle digs heat into my palms. The runes crawl up my wrists like brands. Through the bond, Sable staggers as if struck, and her cry ruins whatever remains of my control.
I look at her.
Her face is wet with tears, her hair whipping around her cheeks in the magic wind, her eyes blazing as though she could put the world on trial and win. She is terrified for me, not for herself, and the knowledge finds some hidden weakness no blade has ever discovered.
“Stay back,” I rasp.
“Go to hell.”
“I have been. It lacked charm.”
“Then stop trying to redecorate it with yourself.”
The laugh that leaves Corin is strangled and appalled. “Gods spare me, she is still arguing.”
The second immortal strand coils around my heart like a serpent refusing capture.
I seize it, and it bites back. My vision fractures into pieces of moonlight, Sable’s face, red script, and black sky.
When I yank, the crack down my chest widens.
Heat pours from me in punishing waves, blackening the grass inside the circle and filling my mouth with the taste of copper and lightning.
Sable presses both hands to the barrier again, and this time the barrier bends toward her.
Corin sees it. “Sable, no.”
“I am not standing here watching him die.”
“He is not dying yet.”
“That is not comforting, you ass.”
“I was reaching for accuracy, regrettably not comfort.”
The circle gives a warning pulse sharp enough to rattle the cracked windows in their frames. Sable steps closer instead of away, stubborn as sin and twice as dangerous.
I bare my teeth. “Do not enter.”
She stares at me through the burning wall. “Then stop me.”
I cannot. I can command armies, break curses, burn remnants of dead gods from the air, and tear immortality from my own core, yet I cannot command Sable when she has decided love is a battlefield and I am the idiot bleeding in the middle of it.
She drives her shoulder into the barrier.
The circle flares, rejecting her with a snap of power that throws sparks across her coat. She gasps, but she does not fall. Corin lunges toward her, then stops at the circle’s edge, torn between duty and the knowledge that restraining her would make him the next thing she destroys.
“Sable!” he shouts. “It will take skin if you force it.”
“Then it can have mine too.”
The words cut deeper than the severance.
“No,” I snarl.
She pushes again, and the barrier bows inward.
The runes scramble, confused by her blood in the bond, by her refusal, by the merger refusing to classify her as outsider.
The circle was designed to isolate the immortal body from its anchoring conditions; it has no answer for a mortal woman who has become part of the anchor by sheer, magnificent defiance.
Corin’s face changes as he realizes it. “Oh, hell.”
Sable slips through.
The barrier tears around her like burning silk. Sparks catch in her hair and die as she stumbles once, then runs straight for me.
I try to rise and fail. “Sable, get out.”
“Make me.”
“I will hurt you.”
“You already are.”
She crashes into me mid-severance, arms locking around my neck, body pressed to mine with no caution at all.
Her warmth hits the cracks in my flesh, and the bond roars.
Her magic floods the circle, furious and alive, smelling of rain on hot stone, ink, and the faint sweetness of her skin.
My immortal strands, half-torn from my core, lash in every direction like severed cables seeking a storm.
“Sable,” I choke, trying to hold myself away from her and failing because she is everywhere. “Let go.”
“No.”
“The circle—”
“Can choke.”
“It will collapse.”
“Good.”
Corin shouts from the perimeter, but the circle’s shriek swallows his words.
The runes spin out of alignment. The barrier fractures into jagged panes of red light.
The immortal strands in my core recoil from the severance and slam back toward their anchors with brutal force.
Pain crushes me flat, vast and absolute.
My arms close around Sable by instinct, shielding her head against my chest even as light splits me open.
The first strand snaps back into place, and I roar against the night.