Tongue like lead, Lykor swallowed thickly, Jassyn’s voice the only thing mooring him to breath and bone. “Like I’ve been turned to stone,” he slurred, the words dragging slow. His gaze slid to where Fenn had vanished from the tree. “Can’t fathom why that lot bites each other to feel this way on purpose.”
Jassyn’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t comment. “Once I begin,” he said as shadows laced between his fingers, twisting with strands of crimson mending light, “I can’t stop until it’s finished. If you need it, I’ll have Fenn send you the rest of the way under.”
Lykor managed a nod, though it felt more like the thought of one than true motion.
“I’ll be with you through every breath,” Jassyn said. “If anything surfaces—whether it’s pain or the past pressing in—tell me.” His voice caught, barely, but steadied again as his eyes held Lykor’s. “I won’t let you vanish in the dark.”
Heat stung behind Lykor’s eyes, and he dragged in air through his nose, fighting the urge to look away. It sounded like a promise, and worse, like one he almost wanted to believe. Pride snapped its fangs, begging him to snarl, but his chest betrayed him, burning with how deep the vow struck.
“When I’m finished,” Jassyn continued, “your spine will bear your wings. Without pain or lingering scars. I’ll rebuild strength where you need it to fly.”
Fly. The word snagged in his thoughts. Flight meant more than wings. It meant tearing loose from the king’s chains, hammered cruel and permanent into his bones.
“And if you do this wrong?” The question slipped out before Lykor could stop it, hoarse and vulnerable.
Jassyn didn’t flinch. “I won’t.”
Lykor exhaled something that tasted too much like surrender. He could carry agony. Every pain had shaped him,scar by scar. What threatened him now rose from the ache of wanting, a wound he had no armor for.
Jassyn didn’t know it, but he wasn’t only rebuilding a spine. He was risking something far more ruinous in giving Lykor the shape of hope.
“I’m ready,” he said at last, the words raw and yielding.
“I’ll turn you over with the plants now,” Jassyn murmured, lowering his palms to the living platform.
Lykor closed his eyes. “If I say anything stupid…”
“I’ll purge it from my mind.”
He tried to scowl, but it faltered, lost beneath the quiet unraveling. He’d been flayed by magic. Broken. Tortured. But never undone like this. This was exposure without violence, tenderness he had no shield against.
And somehow, it unmade him in ways pain never could.
CHAPTER 15
JASSYN
The vines obeyed Jassyn’s will, folding around Lykor’s prone form like a cradle meant for ruin. Face down, he lay still as Jassyn gathered his hair and tied it aside, baring the length of his spine.
Jassyn slipped raw Essence beneath skin, assessing without tearing, mapping the fractures time had buried—calcified pain, old injuries sealed wrong, nerves twisted by strain. Every scar whispered a story of endurance, but Jassyn didn’t intend to heal them. He meant to undo them.
He drew in a slow breath and reached into Vesryn’s side of their Well. Shadows spilled from his fingers, curling above Lykor’s back, held at the ready. He’d never wielded rending before, but he shaped it as precisely as he did mending—convinced the difference lay only in the ability itself. Stitching or severing.
But when Jassyn steered the first wisps of shadows into the flesh of Lykor’s shoulders, he nearly flinched. Rending sliced deep with surgical sharpness, blood surging in a dark rush.
Hauling on Vesryn’s force talent without thought, Jassyn funneled Essence into a siphon of blue light. The garnet-black spill lifted from Lykor’s back, held aloft before it could sink intothe moss. The sphere swelled above them, rippling as it fed along the thread of power he kept taut.
Jassyn worked shadows like scalpels, peeling back layers of skin and muscle. Each tendon parted with a wet snap, and ligaments followed, severed one by one with rending’s strike.
His eyes darted to the side of Lykor’s face, watching for a flinch, a twitch, any sign of pain, but Lykor lay utterly still while Jassyn’s fingers shook.
Now exposed, the vertebrae lay warped and misaligned. Between the shoulder blades, the faint indent of the king’s golden stakes still scarred the ridge of spine. For a moment, Jassyn’s breath caught. Then he braced himself and cracked the first bone.
It crumbled beneath his shadows. Jassyn exhaled through his teeth as he summoned each fragment upward, holding them aloft in a beam of illumination. He turned them, examined the ruin, and began weaving lattices into the cavity left behind—rebuilding the spine bone by bone into the shape it was meant to hold.
And then he began again.
Fragment by fragment, he reforged the marrow, weaving the lattice from the center outward. Nerves knit next, filaments spinning into fragile webs. The bones followed slowly as Jassyn fractured and reset them, restoring what the king had mutilated, one vertebra at a time.
