“He hates that,” Dastian murmurs.
“Good,” Nyssa says. She sets her palm to the geometry, and the sigil flares. “You want a door? Use this one.”
The weight shifts. It tests her as she slides along the edges of the frame. It will not commit. Not yet.
Dreven’s voice is quiet. “He will try a proxy.”
He does. The grass to the right ripples, and a shape stands up out of it like a man remembering he has a spine. He isn’t wet. He isn’t anything. He is a smear of absence pressed into the outline of a villager. Eyes too dark. Mouth too neutral. He takes a step, and the grass doesn’t bend.
“Proxy,” I say, because calling it a puppet flatters it.
Nyssa shifts her weight and angles her body between us and the seam. The gold in the carved spirals reflects along the edge of her blade. “Talk if you can. Otherwise, don’t waste my time.”
The mouth moves. Sound comes a beat later, flattened and wrong. “Queen.”
Dreven’s shadows tense, ready to slice. I flick two fingers without taking my eyes off the thing. “Wait.” If he cuts this shell, the Devourer will simply wear something worse.
“We were going to devour,” the proxy says. No inflexion. It isn’t bothering with pretending to care. “Then you changed the equation.”
“Equations bore me,” Nyssa replies, steady. “Pick a door.”
It looks at the geometry and then at her. “You invite us in.”
She nods. “On my terms.”
The skin of the world around the proxy distorts by a hair. It is testing distance. Range. How far it can reach without committing. It lifts a hand. The air hardens around my ribs. Dastian’s sparks skate brighter over the wet grass.
“Try it,” he says.
The proxy tilts its head, then shifts its hand towards the ring of quartz. Not the seam. Clever. It is looking for a weak stone to prise up.
“Don’t,” I say.
It ignores me.
I push a thread of will through the ring. My wraiths surge up as a single wall, not to fight but to occupy, making the quartz feel crowded. The proxy’s fingers brush the white and stop. It can’t get purchase on a stone full of watching.
Nyssa steps once to the left, catching its attention back. “Here. Me.” She taps the geometry with two fingers. The sigil tightens again with a clean tick. “You want a vessel that can hold you? You want a throne you can sit in? This is the seat. Not the field. Not a mortal. Me.”
The mouth splits into a shape that might be a smile if someone drew it from memory. “I learn you.”
“Good for you,” she says. “Choose.”
He hates being told to choose. He prefers inevitability. It holds, poised between appetite and caution.
I reach again. I can’t grab him. I can pry loose more pieces of what he thinks belong to him. I tug light, then softer, sliding under his attention. I go gentle, targeting the seams where hisgrip is sloppy. It’s like unpicking a knot that thinks it’s clever. One thread, then another. A child with a lopsided fringe, a king with a laugh line cut deep, a woman who worked the same field every season until her hands were rope. They slip free. They go. Each soul I steal takes a little weight out of him and a little sting out of the pressure on my ribs.
He notices. The proxy’s head jerks, and the seam flares with a hard pulse that makes the quartz ring flicker.
“Again,” Nyssa says, steady.
I hook a cluster this time. He fights for them, trying to drive me out by collapsing the gap I’m using, but he can’t close a door she holds. Five tumble through at once. An old priest. A small boy. Two fishermen. A girl with a braid too tight. They blink at the sky, and then they’re gone.
The proxy’s mouth moves. “Waste.”
“Release isn’t waste,” I say. I don’t raise my voice. He can hear me wherever he has stolen space.
The pressure shifts. He tries the ground under our feet. Typical. He wants to turn the path into him, so we fall through.
