I don’t push back. I narrow. I make a channel the width of my will and nothing more. Light threads my bones, shadow locks the gaps, death hums at the edges like a blade I haven’t swung yet. The Order lattice Tabitha gave me snaps into place around the seam and holds. The Crown bites down.
He tries to flood. The geometry captures the surge and reduces it to a single steady column. He shifts tactics. He skims thoughts. He throws images of Rynna, of the cottage, of quiet—cheap tricks for someone who hasn’t just told an entire tribunal to get stuffed.
“I said on my terms,” I tell him, voice low.
A lash slices off the seam toward Dastian. He shoves it sideways, neat and vicious. It rips a trench into the field rather than through my chest.
Voren’s tether thrums against my ribs. Souls brush past my mind as he lifts them—soft flashes of lives, quick as blinks. Eachone free makes the pressure hitch in a way that isn’t pain so much as frustration. He hates losing what he thinks belongs to him.
“Take more,” I say.
“I am,” Voren replies, calm as winter.
Dreven’s shadows pin the quartz the moment a stone thinks about shifting. His voice reaches me, quiet, lethal. “You are not welcome here.”
The column hits a different pressure in me and pauses. He’s found the Crown and realises it isn’t a jewel to steal; it’s a law it has to obey.
Good. Come closer.
I drop the last of my hesitation. I bring the three forces up clean and tight. Light defines. Shadow confines. Death waits.
“Name,” I command, voice steady. “Define what you are in my realm.”
It tries to ignore me. The Crown doesn’t. The command rolls down the column like a stamp, and the pressure answers with a shape rather than a smear. It isn’t a true name, but it’s a profile. A spine of will. A central thread that holds the rest together.
“There you are,” I say, and close the channel another fraction. The geometry grinds. The slit is now the width of two fingers. He has to compress to meet me. It makes him less spread and more singular. That costs him.
A lash spikes for my ribs. Dastian is already there, shoving it off the path so it cuts a straight furrow through the wet grass toward the field wall instead. “Sideways,” he mutters, and catches the next one too.
Voren pulls again, faster now that the core thread is in place. Souls slip free like beads off a string. I feel each release as a drop in pressure and a small click in the tether against my sternum. He threads the net deeper, along the profile I forced into view.
Dreven pins a quartz that quivers and tries to tilt. He forces it still. His voice stays low and even. “Stay where I put you.”
The column pushes against my bones. It tries my shoulder, my throat, the base of my skull. It hunts for a path along my spine. I lock it down with shadow, force light through the channel like a rod down the centre, and set death at the exit point with the patience of a guillotine I haven’t dropped yet.
“Stop searching,” I tell him, quietly. “Come here.”
The pressure tightens. The profile I forced shows me where the will concentrates. It isn’t a body. It’s a knot. That’s what he hides behind. I fix on that line and pull him into the narrow. He can’t spread. He can only deepen.
“Now,” I say to Voren.
His net threads straight through the knot. Souls peel away in a rush, not dozens now but hundreds, quick and clean. Each release knocks a sliver off the pressure, like weights lifted from a scale I control. He claws at them, tries to turn their edges into blades, but the Crown reduces the trick into nothing more than dull edges. They slip past me and on.
Dastian catches a hard shove and shunts it across the field, so it ploughs a trench into the far bank. The ground shivers. He grins without humour and sets for the next one, palms flaring in tight pulses.
Dreven pins two more stones that try to creep. His darkness crushes their wobble flat. “Stay,” he hisses, not at the rock but at the thing trying to move through it.
The knot in the column firms. He’s furious.
Anger has shape. Shape is control.
“Name,” I command again, harder. “Define.”
The Crown bites. The knot tightens into a core. It isn’t a word. It’s a binding. The geometry hums, hungry for the anchor I just forced.
“Take your seat,” I tell him. “And pay the price.”
He tries to split. He throws a second probe at my throat. I let shadow smother it and keep my focus on the core. I bring death forward a hair. Not a swing. A kiss against the outer skin of that knot.
